Well low activity of webmasters is ending - it’s PR update coming. Actually it lasts allready for a few days, but anyway, finally it began!
I’ve been waiting for it from the end of January, and, as a matter of fact, not only me.
All of us already get used to see different PageRank numbers on different datacenters, but now it really changes! Before today there were only old PR numbers and PR zero for new sites. Today it looks like new PR can be seen for young sites. For example, anastasia-in-poker.com is going to be PR4 which makes me happy

SEO activity is allmost frozen, a lot of webmasters do not exchange links at the moment. They are waiting for Page Rank update.
A lot of deals are suspended, and it feels like you are waiting for a flight but it’s delayed and it’s annoying you.

Backlinks updated a little. Maybe that was a light backlink update?

Still I expected much harder changes… very strange update.

http://www.whois.sc/. Exellent whois source which shows tons of useful information: in addition to all the standart whois info, it shows whois changes history, alexa ranks, sites on the same IP (!!!), dmoz inclusion, country of the site, registrar company of domains etc, etc, etc. Five stars “Editors choice”, absolutely.

Here will be the list of useful SEO tools.

Tools to check your positions in search engines:

* Google Rankins — check the ranking of a web page in Google.
* Yahoo Rankins — free tool to check the position of your
website in the search engine of Yahoo. Beta version.
* MSN Rankins — check the position of your web site in MSN Search.

Tools to check your PageRank:

* Google search with pagerank — free tool to check PageRank, indexed pages and backwards of your sites .
* Future PageRank tool — with this tool you can check your PageRank on various Google’s data centers.

Other helpful tools:

* Keyword selector tool — this tool shows you the number of requests per month for each keyword.
* Link popularity check — this tool will help you to check your backlinks in Google, Yahoo and MSN for your 4 sites at one time.
* Search engine relationship chart — this chart shows the data relationships between the search engines.
* Href counter - shows the number of links, diving them into external and navigation links.

If you have something to add - please leave your url and description in comments.

Let’s talk about Page Rank.
For the last couple of years it was very popular opinion that PR doesn’t matter anymore. And for all that time I was willing to agree with it in general.
But today, out of curiosity I’ve checked out this thing:
http://tools.host2play.com/search.php?q=online+poker&pp=10
and find out, that first 10, even in general 20 sites are being dispatched very smoothly, in terms of PR deacrease rate. If, let’s say, a year ago it was wild west and easely you could find PR4 site on the first place and PR7 site on 8th, right now it’s very strong and algorithmical - first 3 sites are PR7, next 5 are PR6 and so on. Some small shuffle presents, but main idea is really clear. I think it means something

I decided to write about directories at gambling-related websites.
Recently a lot of sites began to use directories of links at their websites and exchanging links in a very aggressive mode. IMHO it’s not good. Let’s remember the case with cleaning such sites, which were at good positions at Google at June 2004.

http://www.casinos-123.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11
“There was some kind of cleaning. Many doorways disappeared. But and many big and heavy sites disappeared too. They were holding first results in all gold keywords, like “online casino”, “online gambling” and now they are out.
Like dollarsgambling.com, abc-online-casinos.com, best-online-casino-directory.com
We all know them well. And we all have to think hard, what is going on.”

These sites are still out. They had lost their Page Rank, positions, everything.
Behind some of these sites were whole companies, which disappeared after that disaster.
I think that links from content pages or front pages are much better then directories with no Page Rank and thousands of links. IMHO.
We’ll see…