I'm noticing very, very odd things about Google page ranks lately.  There has always been some minor differences about the way Google ranked pages based on keywords and their order within the search query, but lately, the differences are huge.

Take, for example, my political blog, DragonFlyEye.Net.  If you search for the term "rochester liberal politics," you get my site as the number one ranked page.  However, switch the terms around to "rochester politics liberal," and I rank 28th; switch them to "liberal politics rochester," and I rank 39th!  What gives?

This makes no sense to me at all, in terms of the user experience.  You mean to tell me that simply by rearranging the words in the query, a user implicitly wants different things?  If anything, this proves that whatever Google changed about it's ranking lately is profoundly flawed.  Now, if I want to rely on Google to find the information I'm looking for, I have to not only put in the exact words I want, but do so in the exact order that will provide me the usable results I want.

Whoa.  That's bad.  And it's even worse for those of us who want our page rank, because it means a three-word search term will give you three separate page ranks. . . . for the exact same page!  By splitting those searches up, it ruins your page's rank overall and means that some people will miss you altogether.

Wake up and smell the inconsistencies, Google!  You're not doing anyone any favours with your new search!

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Recently, Ryan Caldwell posted to this page to ask the community an important question: do link titles really matter? It's a very good question, especially since bloggers that use WordPress and other software see this option and - as far as I can tell - rarely grab it.

Yes, yes, yes! Absolutely make sure you title your links, even though it is a bit of a pain. If you read this blog, you will find that a recent study proved that link titles do in fact get factored into Google's PR. And in fact, if you bother to label ALT tags, I can't imagine why you wouldn't take this opportunity to provide bots with even more keyword-rich text.

And then there is the real reason for link titles: for the benefit of disabled persons, specifically the blind, so that they have some idea where they're clicking to. Just for that reason alone, it's worth the relatively minor trouble.

And moreover on that issue, there has been a trend with Google's search algorithms towards a "human experience"-centered crawl. What that means is, the bots crawl your site in ways that are expected to approximate a human reader's perspective. In other words, rather than reading all words on a page from left to right, they follow the margins of your columning like a reader would when reading an article.

In part, the idea is to weed out crap on the margins and in your blogroll, for example, from relevant words in the body of your articles to more closely match searches to usable articles. And in part, the idea is to weed out sites playing games with keywords and not providing human-usable content; ad-revenue link-traps, in other words.

It stands to reason that Google would regard link titles that make sense and aren't keyword stacks to be for the benefit of readers and of the disabled, specifically. There's good reason to believe that providing for a variety of human readers will likely improve your stack ranking, as indeed the above-linked study suggests in just about it's every conclusion.

Those of us who are primarily political bloggers tend to find that we get buried in blog feeds from time to time. We try to keep up on the latest topics, find blogs that are watching those topics, add their feeds to our readers and promptly forget why they're there. In fact, before long our feed readers become a prison rather than the tools they're supposed to be.

But if you want to keep up with things, you're going to need to use feeds to do it. Does this necessarily mean getting crushed with too much information? No, it doesn't, and I'd like to use this post to suggest some time-saving ways of getting your information.

Those of you who use Bloglines may have encountered their new "Playlists" feature. This is hugely beneficial for quick sweeps of information. By creating new playlists, you can see all the most recent headlines for all the feeds in that list at a glance, thereby eliminating the need to click through every single feed looking for what you need.

But of course, relying on other people's blogs to be informed isn't always a good option. After all, even if they're informed on your topic, they may not always talk about things you need to know. No sense wading through someone's reality when you don't have to. As a solution to this, there is the little-discussed set of tools from Google, their news and blog search feeds. If you search for a topic on either of these two sections of Google and look to the left, you will see links to get the RSS or Atom feed. That's not just any old feed, that's basically a custom feed of your search terms! Any new blog posts or news items (respectively) that fit the criteria of your search will immediately become available to your new feed. Of course, you may need to fiddle with your search terms to get what you want, but with patience you can get a laser-sharp search going and be straight on top of the whole issue!

How about Yahoo!Pipes? Ever heard of them? Well, here's a great way to mash up a bunch of individual feeds into one, thereby eliminating the need for feed after feed of information. With a bit of practice and creativity, you could potentially search all the major news or blog search services at once and have all that information plugged into a new feed for your reader!

These are just a few creative suggestions to boost your productivity and hone your research to make you a more on-point blogger. What other ways have you found to make managing all that blogosphere more manageable?