Wordpress is by leaps and bounds the strongest blogging platform out there — Wordpress is intuitive and easy to use, robust, regularly updated, infinitely expandable, and best of all Wordpress is entirely free. There are, however, two different ways to start a Wordpress blog: you can host it yourself, which requires you to have web hosting somewhere, or you can let Wordpress.com host it for you.
Google’s Panda algorithm change hit about a month ago with major changes to search results. Now they are making another significant change by including data from the Google Chrome browser about blocked sites as a ranking signal. Now if enough users block a site through Chrome, that site could rank lower for all searches.
When a brand new site on a brand new domain launches, it gets put in what SEO professionals call the Google Sandbox. In effect, Google lowers the search engine rankings for new sites for several months after launch.
If you want something done right — do it yourself. This is the lesson we learned when we tried to find a good Wordpress plugin to provide those social media icons at the bottom of posts. After a lot of searching, the existing ones often didn’t offer tracking options, and nearly always shared all your user’s information with a 3rd party company.
In 2006, AOL leaked search data of over 35 million search queries, including exactly how many people clicked on search results based on the ranking. This data has become the most commonly quoted statistics for Google click distribution — even though it did not come from Google results. Today we take a look at this AOL data, and the areas in which Google click distribution is probably different from this 5 years old AOL data.
