Architecting Web sites - Design from the SEO perspective

In March 2008 I wrote “You need to think in terms of sculpting Web sites, not PageRank”. Shari Thurow suggested to me that it might be better to say, “You need to think in terms of architecting Web sites, not PageRank”. Before I discuss architecting versus sculpting, let me recap PageRank and the Supplemental Results Index to provide a little context. 1998 - Larry Page and Sergey Brin introduce PageRank, a Web document citation ranking methodology based on link relationships 2000 - SEOs operating link farms and automated link exchange programs discover that Google’s search results are easily manipulated. 2002 - Google launches Google News, which uses the Hilltop algorithm devised by Krishna Bharat and George A. Mih?il?. 2003 - Bloggers coin the expression “Google bombing” and launch the widespread practice of pointing... [read full story]