The question is… When a series of pages gets into these loops, do they continue to pass on points to the pages until the decay factors it out? If it is smart, it will remember what pages link to an external page and factor it out, but remember the scale at which google is doing this. It would take a lot of memory and disk space to keep a continuous log of all the incoming links for every page during indexing. That means that most likely, it is NOT keeping such a log.

The difficulty with testing this is that Google updates Pageranks VERY infrequently (on the order of 1-2 times a year). Further testing is warranted, but in the end, the question that comes up is … does pagerank matter? The truth is that pagerank does not matter unless you are selling paid links or advertising. It is the only public indication besides your weblogs of how trustworthy your site is in Google’s eyes.

The next question is… does it matter for your SERPS? In our experience, no. It is possible to rank well for competitive keywords without high pagerank and there are many examples of it. A couple of interesting points is that when we tested the nofollow attributes, we did notice that in spite of the fact that Google specifically said that nofollow had no effect on SERPS, that in fact it did. Matt explains it as bugs in the initial indexing, but as an SEO, with so much misinformation on the internet, we are trained to not believe everything that is said, but to do empirical tests to see if that is actually what is going on.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/

After a few more queries, it became clear that there are a lot of facts which the system does not yet know about. However, we believe that it will quickly change.

Stephen Wolfram, the mastermind behind Mathematica and A New Kind of Science which proved to big a huge success and brought world recognition to the author, is now challenging the concept of search engine. Wolfram Alpha is targeted to put the rules of mathematical data and linguistics together to compile the worlds first computational knowledge engine. At the base of this quite ambitious project, is the belief in the power of mathematical knowledge in generating effective solutions to a wide range of problems.

For years search engines have been trying to improve the relevance of the search results. When Google first appeared, it became an online sensation by providing the closest match to all search queries. In relatively short time, Yahoo, MSN and others were left behind as Google established its reputation of the industry leader with the market share close to 70%.

Wolfram Alpha offers a refreshing approach to improving the search results. It eliminates the guesswork and the hassle of going through a variety of webpages to find the best answer to your question. Wolfram Alpha uses a special algorithm to pull the information from different sources and combine them into a complete logical answer.
People tend to be righteously skeptical about the release of new search engines. We have seen the appearance and quick decay of many of them which failed to deliver their far-going promises. Is Wolfram Alpha one of the many destined to be buried under Google dominance or if incredibly successful, is it going to become the next “Googlekiller”?

We lean towards the opinion that Google and Wolfram Alpha are not necessarily fierce rivals since people will go to each of them for different reasons. Google is very effective when you need to find various information sources and go actual webpages, whereas Wolfram Alpha will be most useful when you look for simple factual answers to your questions. The latter can definitely divert some of Google’s traffic yet it won’t be sufficient to change the entire search engine hierarchy.

An interesting note is that fact oriented processing engines like WolframAlpha effectively eliminate the previous search engine optimization rules.

Truth to be said, at this early stage we can only make up theories and now that we’ve had time to play with it, Google has nothing to worry about in the near future. History has proven multiple times that a true success is rarely about having a great idea but more so about its execution.

However, if Wolfram Alpha meets even a portion of its high expectations in the future, it could be a new intriguing web destination. In any case, building a huge computational cluster, with billions of factoids, and mathematical logic seems like the perfect precursor for the future Skynet.

Earlier last week Google released a statement announcing that effective April, 6th local search results will be included by default on all queries. How does this change anything? Here is why we believe it will have a huge impact on the way many SEO companies build their strategies.
Let’s start with the benefits for the immediate consumer. Before this change occurred, users had to request local search results by typing their geographic location in the search box. With the new technology they won’t have to do it any more. Google will identify where users are by using their IP-address thus people can get to the most useful and relevant results a lot faster. This is also great news for mobile phone holders whose devices have a trackable GPS module. No more tedious I-phone typing in the cold! Mobile search is about to get a lot easier.

Now, what this means to small and medium local businesses is they will be able to compete more effectively on Google. Local search is growing very fast. Instead of going after a big highly-competitive nation-wide market, it allows to target a more specific audience for a fraction of a cost. Targeting translates into better conversions and increased ROI. Also keep in mind that local search results are ranked more prominently on mobile devices which contributes to the growing importance of mobile marketing.
With local search being mixed with general search results, SEO can get you to the first page in search results faster and cheaper.  With so much valuable traffic coming in from Local search results, things are going to get a lot more competitive.  Now, is the time to establish a strong foothold on your local online search presence.  By being the first to take advantage of this, you’ll have the opportunity to secure your spot on the first page of Google for highly competitive keywords targeted to your geography.

WebPosition Gold and Google- The SAGA:

Penalize you for using web position gold: (April 2003) http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/12118.htm
Google and position checking software: (Jan 2003) http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/8573.htm
Whats the status of Google vs WPG Users? (July 2002) http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum5/1231.htm
What exactly gets banned using WebPositionGold; (June 2004) http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum5/4799.htm
Web Position Gold & Google IP bans (May 2009) http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum39/3337.htm

By the way, it isn’t just web position gold.  It seems that every rank checking tool out there has been affected by this.  There’s a number of people who think it’s silly for Google to be blocking access to rank checkers.  But I’m pretty sure I know why they are doing it now.  Rank Checkers have a huge impact on “impressions” and skew the search data significantly.  As Google uses this data more and more, they have a strong motivation to make sure their impression data is more accurate for search results.

Now I didn’t realize the extent to how serious Google was about this until I started coding up a tool to do better rank checking and was very confused because code I wrote a few months ago started to break.  I thought Google changed the web page and they changed the web page.  But it wasn’t for everyone.  They changed it ONLY for wget.  Specifically, they removed the rank data from the link just for my wget requests.  EVIL.  I mimiced a real request and sure enough, the rank data came back in.  Pretty crazy stuff.

It’s not until you’re in a situation where someone is attacking your honor where you realize that Google has a lot of power over what others think of you and your company.  Here is an example one company, absolutepoker.com which literally got devastated by other a few people who were very mad at them.  They decided to advertise under their name to get top placement for their absolutepokercheats.com site and the following is what happened.

This was quickly becoming a public relations nightmare.  So what can you do when something like this happens?  Well, in the world of SEO, there are a few things you can do to mitigate the damage immediately.  It comes down to pulling down the value of the page or bringing up the value of your pages so that the listing gets pushed off of the first page.

But this is only part of the solution.  In an ideal situation, you will have proactively spent resources in making sure that anything listed under your name or company are high ranking pages that YOU control. That means that it becomes very difficult for someone to get themselves associated with your company that you don’t want, but more importantly, you can respond to threats to your reputation because you have a number of strategically placed pages where you can do damage control.  Online reputation management is quickly becoming a new essential tool for public relations and media management.