By Kirk Bannerman



It's all about location, location, location!

In the past...back in the days when Google was IT when it came to
natural search results...everyone was very focused (or shall we
say obsessed?) on Google page rank.

Now that Google is a public company and the search business has
become competitive (most notably due to the serious search
capabilities now being offered by Yahoo and Microsoft, via MSN),
Google has become much more "private" or secretive about things
like page rank, backlinks, etc.

As a matter of fact, many are of the opinion that Google is now
intentionally displaying outdated page rank and backlink
information on the Google Toolbar in an effort to mask the true
workings of Google and to frustrate the Search Engine
Optimization (SEO) community, which had become fairly skillful at
"playing the Google game". If this is the case, then Google page
rank fixation is now pure folly.

Another factor that is closely watched by webmasters is the Alexa
traffic rank. This traffic rank is based on three months of
aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar
users.

However, the Alexa user base is only a sample of the Internet
population, and sites with relatively low traffic will not be
accurately ranked by Alexa due to the statistical limitations of
the sample.

Alexa's data come from a large sample of several million Alexa
Toolbar users; however, this is not large enough to accurately
determine the rankings of sites with fewer than roughly 1,000
total monthly visitors.

Generally speaking, traffic rankings of over 100,000 should be
regarded as not reliable because the amount of data that Alexa
has available is not statistically significant.

Who said the emperor is wearing no clothes?

With the questionable current accuracy of two of the hallowed
benchmarks of search popularity, where does that leave us? It
leaves us exactly where we should have been in the first place,
not obsessing over Google Page Rank or Alexa Traffic Rank, but
instead focusing on the most important thing of all...and that
is, what is your position in the listings when a person searches
for your key words.

For both search engines and real estate, it's all about location,
location, location!



About the author:

Kirk Bannerman operates a successful home based business and
coaches others seeking to start their own home based business.
Visit his website at http://www.business-at-home.us
for more details.