Well, it’s been 3 full months since I started this blog, and I’m making a thorough evaluation. I gained lots of backlinks, I made new friends, I learned some stuff and I’ve read lots of professional blogs.

At the time of writing this article, Googlebot last successfully accessed my home page on October 28, 2007. I’ve increased my PageRank from 3 to 4. Take a look at the PageRank of my internal pages. My total backlinks increased from 0 to 1440, and I managed to raise a total of 4706 links to external sites. Google indicates that the number of pages crawled by the Googlebot everyday increased exponentially.

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Google has confirmed that the recent update to its “visible PageRank” system is an effort to crackdown on sites trying to rig this closely-watched web popularity contest.

Over the weekend, Google search engine guru Matt Cutts told Search Engine Journal that the company is intent on punishing web publishers that attempt to sell their PageRank currency to other sites.

A site with a high PageRank can often boost the rank of a less-popular site simply by linking to it. As a result, popular sites will often provide such links in exchange for cash. And Google doesn’t like that.

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Aaron Wall from SEOBook.com gives us some interesting video insight about how to optimize META description for search engines and why domain names play a role in SEO.

Meta description tags may appear in the search results below your page title. Descriptions should be formatted in compete sentences so they read well to humans. Google displays about 150 to 160 characters from meta description tags in their search results. If your description runs past 160 characters they will cut it short and add … at the end of their listing.

Many marketing and advertising costs are recurring. Re-registering domain names is a minimal cost, but many domains (especially .com names) get type in traffic worth thousands of dollars a year. Some get type in traffic worth thousands per day. And this traffic stream is defensible from search engine algorithmic swings.

Check out the articles to see the videos.

WordPress 2.3.1 is now available. 2.3.1 is a bug-fix and security release for the 2.3 series.

Here is a list of most of the changes in detail:

• Improvements to the email address extraction in wp-mail.php (#5169).
• An improvement to the link manager to ensure that only user with the manage_links capability can access the page (#4627).
• A security fix to ensure that edit-post-rows.php cannot be directly loaded to prevent XSS attacks when register_globals is enabled ([6258]).
• Groupings in the SQL queries used during upgrade to remove errors on duplicate entries in the old post2cat and link2cat tables (#5223).
• The Sender is set on emails to help on hosts that limit which email addresses can send (#5007).
• Fixes to category assignment during link import from OPML (#5107)
• Manifest file for Windows Live Writer so as to enable tagging support (#5023).
• Performance improvements for the Taxonomy intersection queries (#5137).
• Exclusion of the post previews from canonicalisation (#5203)
• Improvements to the handling of the main query to ensure it is saved when calling wp() (#5121).
• Fix the in-line uploader so that send to editor works with a blank title (#5080).
• Removal of the case-sensitivity on host names of wp_safe_redirect() (#5114).
• Changes to the load order in the javascript loader to ensure that Prototype is loaded before jQuery (#5067).
• Enforcement of the same sanitisation rules for pages as for posts (#5135)

For a complete list of all the changes you can read the branches/2.3 log.

It seems that WordPress is about to correct some of the bugs appeared in the minor version change, 2.3.

More than 20 bugs are fixed, and among these are:

• clean_url() should not encode ampersands on the way to the db,
• speed bug which ensure Prototype is loaded before jQuery,
• widget class name is mispelled (widget_catgories),
• “Browse” interface in “Upload” broken,
• WordPress (plugin) updates compare unexpected values to find update matches,
• add Windows Live Writer manifest XML file (and images), enables tagging support.

and many more. Find the download link here and try it before the final release.