I pointed a few links to chrishornak.tk and within 24 hours the site could be found in Google. This was great news but the celebration came to a quick end. By day 3 of the experiment I could no longer find chrishornak.tk in Google’s index. My conclusion is that since dot.tk domains  are free most of them are owned by spam websites so Google takes a closer look at any new dot.tk domain. After a few weeks of being in the index and out of the index it finally stayed in the index and the unique keyword phrase page I created “fish taco seo” ranked #1 in Google.

Three months have gone by and the homepage now has a Google PageRank of 2 and a few internal pages including the fish taco page have a PageRank of 1. This is proof that a weebly site and dot.tk domain can be used to create a website on a zero dollar budget.

Part of being an SEO professional is keeping up to date with major search engine updates. To keep things simple I’m just going to talk about tracking Google’s algorithm updates. Of course one of the best places to start is the official Google blog. Subscribe to the feed using an RSS reader like Google Reader. I attempt to read through my RSS feeds everyday, prioritizing each feed into specific categories. The official search engine blog sites are the first ones I read everyday then I work my way down my list; advanced SEO blogs, basic SEO news, social media news, webmaster news, etc. This way I get the most important updates (algorithm changes) first.

Follow Respected SEO Professionals

Now that we’re getting updates from Google themselves, we’ll soon find out we can’t rely on them to tell us every little change. At this point you’ll need to learn to also get RSS updates from respected SEO resources like;

• http://mattcuts.com/blog
• http://www.seomoz.org/blog
• http://www.wolf-howl.com

These and other blogs do your homework for you and provide case studies of their results. Reading these blogs will be the third best way to track Google changes using RSS feeds. You’re probably now asking yourself “what was the second best way?” The second best way is to do your own experiments, track your own results and analyze your own experience.

Bookmark The Important Updates

The final step of the process is having a place you can go to to review the most recent Google Updates or even look to the past to reference an older update. This process is something new that I just started doing this month but has already become very valuable to me when working with clients and explaining changes that may effect them. I have been using my favorite bookmarking delicious.com to bookmark the updates that are important. Please feel free to subscribe to this feed for yourself.

Use Collaboration to Make a Larger List

One other suggestion is to work with others to have a shared list of updates. This way you have a greater chance of catching all major algorithm updates. Maybe put one person in charge of tracking Google, another person tracking Bing and a third tracking Yahoo (even though they’ll become Bing soon) and Ask.

Good luck!

Theses are ordered in the way I would recommend to read them.

1. Search Engine History
2. The PageRank Citation Ranking Bringing Order to the Web
3. Hilltop: A Search Engine based on Expert Documents
4. The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
5. Combating Web Spam with TrustRank
6. The seven ages of information retrieval
7. Information retrieval data structures and algorithms
8. Information retrieval on the world wide web

Hope you enjoy this resource list!