A post was brought up at WebmasterWorld asking if Google is intentionally trying to kill of the site: command. The site command basically let’s you filter the Google search results to a single site, and is often used by SEOs and Webmasters to see how many pages Google has in their index. It is a pretty helpful tool.

One reason for doubting Google’s need for keeping the command is that they have told us to ignore the site command on many occasions. It is a fact that SEOs now use Google Webmaster Tools to check the number of pages Google has indexed of their site, but for convenience and habit many people still use the site command.

The distortion seems to be intensifying from the results. Perhaps the changes to the results is a result of Caffeine? I am not sure and I can’t really see Google killing the site command. If they did we would have to find other ways to find specifics through filter searching.

Recently the breakdown of Twitter searches were announced at the Chirp Conference. Apparently they have about 19 billion searches per month. If we are comparing this to major search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo – it passes Bing and Yahoo combined. This is an unbelievable statistic and shows the volume of people that use Twitter these days.

* Google: 88 billion per month
* Twitter: 19 billion per month
* Yahoo: 9.4 billion per month
* Bing: 4.1 billion per month

Here are some other interesting Twitter metrics:

* 105,779,710 registered users.
* 300,000 new users per day.
* 180,000,000 unique visitors to Twitter.com
* 60 per cent of new accounts are outside the US.
* 75 per cent of traffic is not on Twitter.com.
* 100,000 registered apps

With 19 billion queries per month, if they can combine that with their advertising system, they will be making a lot of money.

When you are analysing rankings for key phrases it is important to understnad how your website compares to your main rivals– namely the websites that are ranking on the first page of Google and other search engines ahead of you. In SEO there is a large emphasis on the value of links and their strength. There are a variety of tools that can help you analyse the value of the domains and URLs that are being displayed at the top of the rankings.

SEO Moz have a tool where you can analyse the value of the domain and page linking to your site. If the competitors you are facing have a better spread of links, in terms of page authority, page trust, domain authority or even domain trust then you are likely to rank behind them in the listings. There are many variables that determine where each site ranks on Google but by using these tools you can easily see where your strengths and weaknesses are, in direct comparison with your competition.

A case in point for this analysis was when I was looking at a site with more links than a competitor, but they were ranking below them. The tool allowed me to look at a wide range of variables which took into account page authority, page trust, domain authority and domain trust. Most importantly it allowed me to see how many times the keyword they were trying to rank for appeared from a link on the higher trusted sources. It is valuable information than can be used for websites where there seems to be no other problem with the site, and the links appear (on the surface) to be as good as competitor links.

Google have updated the toolbar PageRank scores over the weekend. The last PageRank update was about 3 months ago in late December or early January. But an interesting fact is that Google has updated their PageRank values in the toolbar every year in April since 2004.

My Sports Reports website has seen a PageRank update of 2 from 0 and I only registered the domain about a month ago. Amazing. It is interesting to see that the updates are occuring around April each year. This could encourage people to push content and links to there sites after Christmas in order to give themselves a good chance of a PageRank improvement.