Yesterday Google announced you can now notify them via Webmaster Tools that you are moving domains. In addition they provide some ‘best practices’ so to speak on how to most effectively do this.
Recently Matt Cutts basically announced that PageRank sculpting was dead, saying that links tagged with nofollow don’t pass PageRank to the destination URLs, but do still inherit their share of PageRank from the page they exist on.
They can now also crawl links within Javascript.
Each day/month/year Googlebot is becoming much better at crawling the web and allowing poorly constructed sites to still get indexed and their pages ranked. Mechanical SEO used to provide sites a significant advantage but that advantage is shrinking each day.
As the web becomes more social, attention and conversations are going to be far more important factors in how your site ranks than anything you can do technically. As Stephen Spencer pointed out recently the Pinkberry website is friggin awful from an SEO perspective, yet still ranks very well due to it’s popularity. The best pizza place in Phoenix has an atrocious site, yet amazing pizza, and almost 200 reviews on Yelp discussing how amazing it is (or how it’s not worth the 2+ hour wait, depending on which review you read). Yet it ranks #1 for Phoenix pizza in Google.
Mintel recently put out a study which concluded word of mouth from friends and family is still the most important factor people consider when looking to buy products or services.
Mintel’s exclusive consumer survey showed most people who bought a product or service based off a recommendation did so on a referral from a friend/relative or husband/wife/partner (34% and 25%, respectively). Only 5% of respondents bought based on the recommendation of a blogger, the same for a chat room.
Word of mouth marketing is not going anywhere and will always be very influential in consumers decision making purchases.
Instead of worrying about PageRank sculpting, send an email to your best customers and give them something of value. Encourage them to talk about you. Don’t stress over how many pages you have indexed in the search engines. Worry about how your business is perceived by those that matter, by those that talk about you offline or online. Because no matter how good or bad or site is technically, if people are talking about you, the search engines will find you and rank your site.