In this interview with WebProNews, Tan Tran explained how FreshDrop offers domain names that are already indexed with the search engines and have PageRank, backlinks, and many other important factors.

FreshDrop has compiled all the popular domain auction sites under its one centralized platform. It allows users to search for domains by keyword, vertical, or analytics. The analytics portion is interesting since users can search backlinks, traffic, and whether or not the domain is listed in directories such as DMOZ, Yahoo, or Google.

Tran said their solution saves money and time. FreshDrop also continuously works to maintain the most current and accurate data.

To learn more about these domains, visit their site.

She tells WebProNews that Caffeine consists of how Google crawls, indexes, and stores content online. Once the search giant crawls a page, it instantly takes that page and runs it through every part of the indexing pipeline and pushes it live. This means that a page could be live within a minute after it was crawled.

Another important note about Caffeine is the fact that it allows Google to associate more information about pages. Google now has the capacity to store any type of data in the future. This element is important since the Web is continuing to grow. In the future, Google could simply add signals if it needed to, as opposed to building a new infrastructure.

“This lays the groundwork for potentially changing the ranking algorithms in the future,” says Fox.

Speed is another factor of Caffeine that is natural since the Web is growing. Fox points out that the old index would have gotten overwhelmed and would, therefore, not be fresh.

Fox also addresses the MayDay update, which was an algorithm update, and what its implications are. This update received a bit of resistance due to its impact on content farms, forums, and product sites. Many of these sites dropped in ranking partially because they do not have a lot of links or content on them, which are prominent signals Google uses for ranking.

For more insights from Vanessa Fox, check out her book, Marketing in the Age of Google.

Google Squared is a new tool that puts search results into a spreadsheet-like list. It essentially organizes the results into facts, so users don’t have to click on multiples sites to find what they need. Cutts refers to it as a “sideways query” and points out that it could provide new information for users that they would not have previously found using traditional search.

When we spoke with Cutts earlier this year, he mentioned the growing obsession that SEOs and webmasters have with PageRank. We asked him about it in the above video, and while he did say it was important, he was quick to point out that it was only one of the more than 200 signals Google takes into consideration. He says content, title, url, and proximity are a few of the factors that have additional influence.

Users have also probably noticed the new redesign to the search results page. Cutts says the left-handed navigation was present for a while before the company decided to surface it for all search results.

Interestingly enough, the options are different based on each query. A search for Tom Cruise, for example, would probably return image results in the navigation. On the other hand, a search for President Obama would return real-time results and updates. Cutts says it creates more opportunities for webmasters and SEOs.

Lastly, Cutts did say that Caffeine was coming along nicely and indicated that there would be some announcements regarding it coming soon. Keep watching WebProNews for all the latest details on it.

Norvig also discusses the search engine’s famous PageRank and how it is often misinterpreted. As he explains to WebProNews, PageRank is a technical formula that is a way to evaluate links between pages. However, he quickly points out, “That’s just one component of how we rank the pages…”

In addition, Google wants to understand what the pages, images, and video across the Web are talking about. It wants to connect people, places, and companies not only in a hyperlink way, but also in a way that connects these items with objects in the real world.

Mike McDonald of WPN also asks Norvig about Google’s stance on consolidating formats. Since users can distribute content through Email, Twitter, Blogs, Google Buzz, and many other outlets, will these distribution channels ever consolidate?

Norvig says the Web is structured in a way that gives users multiple options. He goes on to say that we are starting to see “bridges” such as a retweet, which allows users to take media off of one page and publish it on another media outlet. From this model, he believes the best aspects will evolve and form into new formats.

What are your thoughts on these trends and how they affect users?

On the subject of Caffeine, Cutts says it is a very slow process because the search engine wants to make sure it has “high quality results.” Caffeine is live at one data center and will be rolled out at other data centers in the coming weeks and months. The software engineer speculates that the next data center will hit Europe.

After the news of Caffeine surfaced, many people within the industry believed site speed would play a large role in it for SEOs. However, Cutts points out that while site speed is an important signal for search engines, the Caffeine Update is completely independent of that fact. He specifically says, “We’re always going to care first and foremost about quality.”

He goes on to say, “If a site is twice as fast, it’s not going to rank twice as high.” Only in cases when there is primarily the same content on two pages will the one that is faster receive the higher ranking. Also, in regards to PageRank, Cutts told us that there are over 200 signals that Google uses and PR is not the only one that matters. He advises SEOs to pay attention to the other factors as well.

Google has also recently introduced the idea of pushing content to users as opposed to people having to pull to find it. This concept has been called Pubsubhubub, also known as PuSH. The basic gist is that it sends a ping to the “hub” once new content on a website is published. That “hub” will then notify all the subscribers to that site in real-time. Although developed by Google, PuSH is an open source platform.

When asked about Google Buzz, Cutts says he likes it very much but will not abandon Twitter as a result.

Lastly, the head of Google’s Webspam team told us that spam is always present. Although there are many new ways to spam, which ultimately makes his team work harder, Cutts considers it a win if it means the quality is better for users.

Rand prefaces the discussion by boldly stating that they are “a few months away from reversing Google’s algorithm.” If that does happen, just know that WebProNews broke the story. As we all wait on that to occur, Rand tells of a different approach that SEOs can implement.

Traditionally, SEOs look at PageRank to determine how well they rank and how and why someone ranks above or below them. Rand says this methodology is not much better than random guessing. The actual correlation that SEOmoz found is that basing actions on PageRank is only about 3 percent better than guessing.

He instead suggests acting upon data driven metrics. Take advantage of third-party data to estimate traffic competitively. For this, Rand recommends sites such as Compete, Alexa, and Quantcast. There are also tools that Rand recommends for predicting search engine rankings. They are Yahoo Site Explorer, PageRank, and Linkscape.

Rand strongly advocates this idea of bringing mathematics and statistics into SEO. He does however, believe that not one single metric should be held as the key. Link popularity is still the most prominent factor by nearly 75 percent and is followed by keywords and content.

According to Google Blogoscoped, Akky Akimoto wrote on the Asiajin blog that Google Japan was paying bloggers to evaluate a new Google widget through a pay-per-post service called CyberBuzz.

Asiajin says, “These articles, which look almost the same as regular ones, have ‘ad’ tags which are very subtle, and will no doubt not be noticed by many readers.” The post also said, “So they are now link-building using monetary incentives to try to crook their own search results in a malicious way.” (Correction: I misinterpreted Akky Akimoto. The ‘ad’ tags are actually referring to article-type advertisements on the news website Gigazine.)

Google issued an apology that reads:

“Google Japan is running several promotional activities to let people know more about our products.

It turns out that using blogs on the part of the promotional activities violates Google’s search guidelines, so we have ended the promotion. We would like to apologize to the people concerned and to our users, and are making an effort to make our communications more transparent in order to prevent the recurrence of such an incident.”

Matt Cutts twittered “Google.co.jp PageRank is now ~5 instead of ~9. I expect that to remain for a while.” He expresses Google’s deep remorse and apologizes on the company’s behalf in this video.

Speaking on his own feelings, Matt says he was “mortified” when he heard about the incident. He goes on to say that Google’s position on paid links has not changed.

To correct the issue, Google is asking the bloggers to remove their paid posts. Matt also says Google realizes its need to continue to communicate and explain its position on paid links.

“This is something that we should have done better and I hope we will do better in the future.”

Keep watching WebProNews for the full interview with Matt Cutts including top security issues of this year and the latest on Google’s personalized search efforts.

Does a duplicate content filter induce duplicate content penalties? What about format preference? Is XML king or can a simple text file suffice? What the hell is OAI-PMH? Given some recent dialog on sitemaps versus other SEO methods, Vanessa reiterates the intent of a sitemap: it should be merely one part of the strategy.

“[Google] Sitemaps doesn’t impact your ranking at all… it helps with the very first obstacle of learning about all of your pages.” It’s about crawling, thus it doesn’t preclude code optimization, site organization or other sensible methods in SEO. It may indirectly allow for better ranking but won’t provide it.

Fox also addresses common concerns such as code to text ratio, priority settings and Google Toolbar’s pagerank reports versus Google Webmaster Tool’s.

“[Webmaster Tools] is a little more accurate, a little more up-to-date… the Toolbar pageranking doesn’t get updated quite as often, of course it’s only one factor. I feel like people get really hung-up on the Toolbar pagerank. People probably spend a little more energy on it than they need to.”

Andy talks about his past experiences with the PageRank feature and the discrepancies that have occurred in Google Webmaster Tools in regards to finding the highest PR value page on his site. Bearing this in mind, he stresses that PageRank in and of itself is not a tool for boosting search engine rankings. It is, however, a good barometer to gauge how Google perceives the “quality” of your pages, an issue that is becoming increasingly important as Google tweaks its algorithm for calculating quality score, and consequently adjusting minimum bid values based on the findings.

One of the major PageRank killers is duplicate content. If your site’s content is mirrored in a good number of other online sources, your PR will drop faster than Kevin Federline’s net worth. Therefore, it is vital that webmasters pay as much attention to the originality of their content as possible. If you have other users that submit content to your site, encourage them to put their own spin on things instead of simply scraping text from one site and pasting it on yours.

Above all, however, don’t invest the majority of your time obsessing over PageRank as the end-all, be-all of tools for achieving high search rankings. PR is only an indicator of quality, and therefore is just one cog in the wheel that drives the machine of search engine optimization.