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.