As part of the UK’s ongoing partnership with Sony Pictures, Yahoo! UK was named the exclusive online media partner for Men in Black 3 which opens May 25th.

The morning after Yahoo! covered the red carpet premiere in London, Will Smith and Josh Brolin descended on the office. The atmosphere was electric as the stars swept through the office en route to the interview staging area.  As part of the deal, Yahoo! Movies also ran a user competition for 10 Men in Black fans to win a chance to meet Will and Josh and be in the live interview audience.

James Wildman, Managing Director UK said “Team UK welcomed Will and Josh in style. The energy in the building was fantastic and the exclusive interview was enthralling. With this deal, Yahoo! UK has once again proved we can drive engagement and bring movie clients closer to real film fans.”

As well as the competition, Yahoo! also offered fans a chance to pose their own questions to the stars via Yahoo! Answers. The exclusive Men in Black 3 partnership furthers Yahoo!’s drive, as the premier digital media company, to offer users premium and unique digital content. It is part of a wider deal between Yahoo! and Sony Pictures which will see all of its 2012 releases promoted through the majority of 2012.

The interview will air exclusively on Yahoo! Movies UK and you can see more pictures of the day on Flickr.

Working here at Internet Marketing Ninjas, I know the importance of having a clear understanding of clients’ overall business objectives and the metrics by which they measure SEO success as well as their measure of link quality. One of the things I often hear about is toolbar Pagerank as being a primary link value indicator for many website owners.

One of the problems with toolbar Pagerank is that it is often between 3 and 6 months out of date, and tells only a tiny fraction of the story behind a given link. There is actually a multiplicity of factors that go into Google’s calculations of link value, and so when I hear that someone is looking only for PR 4 sites to link into their site, my common response, which I admit I stole from a colleague here at IMN, is “Would you like a high PageRank or a high rankings?” In a word, toolbar Pagerank does not equal to higher rankings or more revenue.

So why does toolbar PageRank remain such an important factor in determining the quality of a link when the fact is, excluding a possibly faster indexing in Google, toolbar PageRank hasn’t been vitally important for more than a decade? Why does the myth of that green bar being the sole determining metric of quality remain?  Part of the reason is that SEO is difficult to get a grasp on because of its ever-changing nature, and so it is not uncommon for certain concepts to be undeniable truths one second and outdated myths the next.  If there’s one thing I have learned about SEO, it’s that the second I turn my back to check my email, make a phone call, or feed the dog, a bunch of the rules of the game will change while certain principles still remain constant.  It’s what makes SEO infinitely interesting to me and infinitely frustrating to others.

Here are a couple other factors to consider when you’re measuring link value:

• How many backlinks are going to it?  Are they mostly organic or are they paid?  How is the content?
• How old is the domain?
• Do you want this site associating itself with you? Otherwise stated, do you want this site in the same ‘link neighborhood’ as yours?

Anyone who has had a prolonged interest in SEO knows I’m not saying anything new here, and I won’t pretend to know more about SEO than some of the most knowledgeable people in the industry, such as Todd Malicoat, Aaron Wall, and of course, our CEO Jim Boykin . So here are some of the more memorable discussions on toolbar Pagerank by these experts and others:

Jim Boykin – 2007 (CEO at Internet Marketing Ninjas)

“Pagerank updates about every 3-6 months…and are based on a score calculated 3-6 months prior to the updating day….saying that Pagerank is Stale is an understatement….also saying that pagerank effects rankings is a lie.” (read more here)

Todd Malicoat – 2008 (Stuntdubl.com)

“You can be a TBPR [Toolbar PageRank] 7 and not actually pass authority to others or rank for things of much importance. I’ll take rankings over pretty green pixels any day of the week.” (read more here)

Rand Fishkin – 2008 (SEOMoz.com)

“While the underlying concept of PageRank is still very much alive (links as votes, metrics for establishing more important vs. less important pages, etc.), the green pixels in the Google toolbar are a very rough estimation that’s often massively out of date (since it’s only updated once every 3-6 months) and occasionally deliberately misleading.” (read more here)

Aaron Wall (SEOBook.com)

When I first got in SEO it was crucially important, but over the years other pieces of the relevancy algorithms (like domain age, domain name, domain trust, domain extension, link anchor text, searcher location, search query chains, word relationships, search personalization, other user data, result re-ranking based on local inter-connectivity, input from 10,000+ remote quality raters, and even a wide array of penalties & filters) have been layered over the top of the core relevancy algorithm. (read more here)

Matt Cutts – April 23^rd, 2012 (Google)

Check out how Matt says Google uses PageRank.  (Hint: it is 1 of 200 factors they look at)

At the end of the day, if you want to think about numbers 1-4, think about how to get your site ranking there.  The rest will take care of itself.
cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by Magnus the Great

“The Knowledge Graph enables you to search for things, people or places that Google knows about—landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art and more—and instantly get information that’s relevant to your query. This is a critical first step towards building the next generation of search, which taps into the collective intelligence of the web and understands the world a bit more like people do,” explains Google.

For now, you’ll only notice a new info pane in the right sidebar that shows more information about your query. Google’s graph has 500 million objects and 3.5 billion facts, so you’ll see the new section quite often. Google shows a small thumbnail, a snippet from a Wikipedia article, a few relevant facts and some related queries. It’s just like a Wikipedia infobox automatically generated using data from the Web and that’s smart enough to only show important facts and hide the things people won’t need.

The new info panes will also help users disambiguate queries just like Wikipedia’s disambiguation pages help users find the right articles.

Wikipedia’s internal links help you find other interesting articles. Google also adds links to all the other objects from the graph.

Some may say that Google borrowed too many ideas from Wikipedia, but that’s one step that could help search engines evolve. Understanding the relation between entities and learning their attributes allows Google to answer more complicated questions and get better search results. As Mashable says, “the transition from a word-based index to this knowledge graph is a fundamental shift that will radically increase power and complexity.”

Google “begun to gradually roll out this view of the Knowledge Graph to U.S. English users. It’s also going to be available on smartphones and tablets”. If you don’t see the new features yet, check back later.

{ Thanks, David. }

I spend a lot of quality time in Private Q&A here on SEOmoz, and I recently passed a milestone – 1,000 private questions answered since we re-launched the system (just over a year ago). Not surprisingly, we see a lot of the same questions and concerns pop up over time, and I’d like to think I’ve learned a few things along the way (please tell me my suffering wasn’t in vain). This post is an attempt to distill the biggest lessons from those 1,000 questions…

1. Dogma Will Get You Killed

You finally got your head around SEO best practices, and then you tackled your first e-commerce site, only to find that nothing worked the way the blogs told you. Search is algorithmic, so we assume it follows the same rules for everyone. In theory, it usually does, but those rules are incredibly complex and situational. Google claims over 200 ranking factors, many of those factors are probably multi-part, the algorithm is changing more than once per day, and there’s occasionally a manual intervention to really screw things up.

It’s good to know the basics (and there are some best practices), but you have to learn to roll with the punches. Even something as “simple” as de-indexing a few dozen pages rarely goes as planned, and can take weeks or months. Measure, evaluate, and adapt. If one tag or tactic isn’t working, consider your options.

2. One-trick Ponies Make Good Glue

I wrote an entire post recently on this topic, specifically link-building vs. on-page SEO. People naturally get comfortable with one aspect of search marketing (link-building, on-page, social, etc.) and then want to “perfect” it, but at best they hit diminishing returns fast. At worst, they’re putting band-aids on URLs while they bleed to death from a huge link wound. I’ve seen sites with spotless on-page SEO that have been stuck for months suddenly leap through the rankings because they’ve acquired a few good links. On the flipside, I’ve seen sites that were a total mess but had solid link profiles miraculously improve when their on-page problems were fixed.

3. A Link, by Any Other Name…

…might still stink. In the rush to build links, too many people, especially people with brand new (read that “highly vulnerable”) sites, make the mistake of thinking that all links are equally good. It’s no mistake that my most linked to blog post in Q&A is Rand’s 2010 post “All Links are Not Created Equal”. It’s not just a question of spam and penalties – link value varies tremendously with the page, placement, density of links, and on and on.

Case in point: I can’t tell you how many people I’ve seen spend months on a DMOZ link only to have it buried on a page that has little or no internal PR or isn’t even indexed. Link-building is not just a numbers game. I’m not making a white-hat argument – it’s just SEO fact. Some links are better than others. Don’t waste your time on junk.

4. You’re Not a Black-hat Genius

Sorry to break it to you, but better to hear it from me than Google. First of all, if I can spot your paid links and gratuitous spam in 5 minutes of looking at Open Site Explorer data, how hard do you think it is for Google, who can essentially see the entire link-graph at a glance? Obviously, they don’t always get it right, and plenty of spam slips through the cracks, but the algorithm isn’t stupid, either. Ethics aside, the practical problem with black-hat SEO isn’t that it doesn’t work – the problem is that 98.7% of people do it badly.

At the risk of kicking you while you’re down, I also have to add that your link circle/wheel/tetrahedron isn’t brilliant, no matter what your mom says. Just because you’ve cross-linked 157 Squidoo lenses doesn’t mean that you’ve built an impenetrable web of black-hattery. If your link wheel were a Disney movie, the theme song would be “The Circle of Crap.”

5. On-page Is Getting Messier

I keep wanting to write a post on Google’s recent advice about pagination (and rel=prev/next), but then I get so angry I’m afraid I might turn green and start fighting alongside Iron Man – not that that wouldn’t be awesome. The problem isn’t that they’re wrong (although I think the advice is horribly over-generalized and often ineffective), but that they’ve put a tremendous burden on webmasters. Implementing a proper canonicalization + pagination scheme on a dynamic site with hundreds of thousands of pages is incredibly complicated, and requires not only substantial development resources but stellar communications between the SEO and dev teams (if you’re lucky enough to actually have teams of both). Add in HTML5, schemas, and the whole mess of other new options, and it’s only going to get more complicated.

6. Check Your Headers

Sorry, that wasn’t particularly helpful, so here’s an easy tip. When something isn’t going right and you don’t know why, check your page headers. Job #1 is to make sure that crawlers see what you see (or think you see). It’s unbelievable how often a problem comes down to a bad redirect, status code, or other crawler accessibility issue. There are tons of header checkers, from web-based to bookmarklets – I still use this header checker over at SEOBook.

7. Use Basic Tools Well

There are some great SEO tools out there, but I see the same issue in SEO that I do in writing, time management, and basically every single 21st-century human endeavor. We’re so busy chasing shiny new tools and the perfect app that we don’t bother to learn how to use any of those tools effectively. You can go a long way with a solid header checker, Google’s “site:” operator, a link analyzer (like our own Open Site Explorer) and a desktop crawler (I highly recommend Screaming Frog, but Xenu is still great, too). Master the “site:” operator and learn how to use it with “inurl:” and “intitle:”, and it’s amazing how many on-page problems you can diagnose. Stop chasing every new tool and learn how to use a handful really well. You’ll save a lot of time, money, and holes in your drywall.

8. Learn When to Be Patient

Patience may be the toughest skill any good SEO eventually has to learn. There are times when you’ll need to react quickly to a problem, especially a technical problem (like a bad redirect or site outage). There’s a fine line between reacting and over-reacting, though. One of the most common mistakes I see in technical SEO is when someone makes a change, it doesn’t immediately improve their rankings 24 hours later, and so they revert it or make another change on top of it. Even if it doesn’t make the problem worse (and it usually does), you’ll never be able to measure which change worked. Make sure your changes went live, that Google has acknowledged them (i.e. crawled and cached), and that you can measure the impact or lack of impact. Don’t change your strategy overnight based on bad information (or no information).

9. Stop Scheming & Get to Work

This post was originally “8 Lessons…”, but when I wrote #4 I got so annoyed that I had to follow it up with maybe the most important SEO lesson I can teach you. Are you ready? Here it is (warning: this may be inappropriate for younger readers)…

DO THE FUCKING WORK.

The most frequent excuse I hear in Q&A is “I don’t have time to…” Let me ask you something. Isn’t this your business we’re talking about? Isn’t it your livelihood? Isn’t it the thing that puts food on your table and clothes on the backs of your children? You’d better damned well find the time. If 80% of your traffic is coming from Google, and you don’t “have the time” to do the hard work of improving your product, creating unique content, and participating in your industry, then here’s the simple truth: no blog post is going to save you.

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h1 {color: red;}
h1 {color: green;}

…results in green h1 text, but this:

h1 {background:
	url(red-wave.gif) repeat,
	url(green-wave.gif) repeat;}

…results in a red wavy h1 background does my head in every single time. And it’s the same with text and box shadows, too! In cases where backgrounds or shadows overlap, the first one you write “wins”, by virtue of being “in front of” the background images that are listed after it.

I know that font stacks are also done in order of most-to-least preferred, but I don’t see them as being equivalent. The reason is that a font stack is a list of fallbacks—use this face unless it can’t render the glyph or doesn’t exist, in which case try the next one in the list, etc., etc. Multiple background images and multiple shadows, on the other hand, are not a series of fallbacks. I expect to see them all, unless I made a mistake of some kind; and I do, constantly, because of this disconnect. Sure, one could use the multiple background image syntax to create a series of fallbacks—first an SVG file, second a PNG, third a GIF—but that’s not its primary purpose, and I certainly wouldn’t teach multiple background images that way. That’s not what they’re designed to do.

Maybe writing the problem down here will purge this daemon, but in all honesty, my hopes are not terribly high.