Merry Christmas =)

Hi Everyone,

Just wanted to say merry Christmas and happy new year to everyone=)

I'm slightly drunk and it's 1 o'clock in the morning in London, why on earth am I blogging?? Put the keyboard down...

I should really go to bed. Have a cup of tea and a cigarette though so bed is not really tempting yet. The Christmas tree is up the gifts are bought and wrapped, I just need to sit down and relax.

God Jul!

Google PageRank question

One of my clients, Powwownow, have recently launched their new designs for all their websites (UK, Germany, French and Dutch versions). Now the sites they had previously had received very good Google PageRank throughout. The UK website had a PageRank of 7, the German and French versions had a PageRank of 6.

We incorporated a 301-redirect when launching their new sites, which brought with it most of the "google juice". Unfortuantely some of their pages were brand new and didn't exsist in on the previous site. These pages currently have a Google PageRank of 0/10. Their sites is content managed and all pages have doc ids, some of the doc ids were transferred from the old site but some of them have new doc IDs, these pages also have a PageRank of 0/10 now. The client is understandably worried that this will affect their rankings. And they think it will take a long time before their new pages will receive the same PageRank as the old site. I personally don't think it will affect their rankings and consequently site traffic alot, the homepage still has a PageRank of 7/10. What do you think?

I would love to have some opinions about this, has anyone had any experience similar? How often is it believe that Google updates the PageRank?

Also, has anyone experienced that the Google toolbar gives different Google PageRank result depending on when you downloaded the toolbar? When i check PageRank on my home computer it gives a totally different result than on my computer at work? Has this something to do with the different data centers?

5 things you didn't know about Lisa Ditlefsen

Sorvoja tagged me on the blog tag meme (it's a blog tag game, just a bit of fun!) So here are 5 things you didn't know about me:

1. I have a red belt in "kick boxing".
2. My spoken English hasn't always been this good. I once went to a shop and asked for: "a bottle I could screw!" (I actually meant a bottle with a screw cap..ooops!!)
3. I'm a hopeless romantic, and although a "tough girl" at work I am a bit of a softy at heart, don't tell anyone ;0)
4. I'm addicted to music, I have a little pocket radio that I bring with me everywhere in the house. I love music so much that you rarely see me without massive headphones on at work (to be honest sometimes I just put the headphones on just so peopel won't disturb me!)
5. I am a single mum, my beautiful daughter Lily is 2 1/2 and is the greatest thing that ever happend to me. She is truly the apple of my eye.

And here are my five people to tag:

1. Darren Moloney, On SEO Pond Blog

2. Robert Kerrey, Evilgreenmonkey

3. David Temple

4. Punit

5. Kichus - SEO Kid

Women of SEO

SEO Fan Guy has opened a blog about Women of SEO where you get to nominate your favourite SEO lady. I just wanted to say thanks to "surewannabe" for nominating me.

Very flattered =)

Specifying the lang attribute for SEO purposes

Ok this might be all obvious to some of you but came as a surprise to me, but this little atttribute can have a big impact on your rankings!!

I do SEO for a few pan-european websites that are obviously in different languages. We have been struggling to get the same ranking results on the German and French version of a site although the competition for the keywords we are targetting is less than the ones we are targetting for the English site. SO why is this? I'm stunned that I missed this (it was actually a client that pointed it out to me, albeit a very SEO savvy client, thanks Paul!).

Ok you are thinking get to the point you rambling Norwegian. Basically, the lang attribute is a language code that among other things tells the search engines what language a website is in. I dont' know why I thought this would happen automatically. So if you have a german site you need to specify in the lang attribute that the content is in German if you want to rank for german keywords. Obviously if the lang attribute says "lang=en" the search engines thinks the site is in English. Doh!

For more information on the lang attribute

Feel free to comment!

SEOblog UK mentioned on 14th Colony Scout

A big thanks to Randall McCarley at 14th Colony for mentioning my blog on his blogpost about 11 SEO blogs you probably missed - that are worth reading.

I'm very flattered that Randall is actually following my blog, he is a well respected SEO, this guy knows his stuff. He is also a moderator on SEO Refugee Forums

BIG THANK YOU, I really hope I live up to the expetations now =)

Base One Search

I've been away from the blogosphere for a week and a bit as I have been working on my company's website and adding pages relative to Search Marketing. Ideally I would have loved to have a seperate site for Base One Search instead of having pages within Base One Interactive, but I have to hang on until my team has grown enough to justify a seperate entity such as Base One Search.

I would love to get your comments on content, it's pretty basic stuff to start with, here is the url for Base One Search pages.

I have also been working on a SEO Evaluator to incrase new business, it's not an automatic tool but it's a form where companies can submit their website details and where I personally analyse their search visibility and how they can improve.