Search Engine News

Just noticed today that Alexa has made a few minor changes in the way it displays it’s data.

Instead of calculating in terms of reach per million users as they did in the past… they now offer you a percentage ranking based on total internet users. It’s a subtle but effective change. For example, yesterday, Google reached 25.85% of all internet users.

They still continue to give their famous “traffic rank” (Google is #3), but this now shows the data from yesterday… not today. Which is helpful. It appears that they may have taken some tips from Quantcast.Alexa continues to have many critics, but I still find the stats interesting… mostly for higher traffic websites where there is more data to go on. And it can be a good way to spot trends in certain websites. Simply visiting the homepage will give you an idea on major trends for that day. For Example, Anna Nicole Smith’s site is up 18,000% in traffic from the last couple of days.!!

According to Nielson / NetRatings, here are the top search engines, and their percentage of total online searches:

Google - 50.8%
Yahoo - 23.6%
Windows Live - 8.4%
AOL Search - 6.1%
My Way - 2.4%
ASK - 2.1%
Earthlink Search 0.5%
Dogpile - 0.5%

Wikipedia finally wised up to the PR link spamming rings, and has added a no follow tag to all of their outgoing links. The no follow tag was removed back in Nov. 2005 but just recently re-added it to help combat all the spammy links. A quote from the great Matt Cutts:

“I think it’s the right call: the incentive to create spammy links on Wikipedia has been massively reduced. Over time, I believe Wikipedia will probably find ways to remove nofollow from links that are more trusted.”

Just found a really cool new search engine that lets you visually search for a term: Quintura. The technical term is called “Latent Semantic Indexing”. And there are actually many search engines incorporating this technology into their algorithms. You can navigate through the cloud of related terms and refine it by clicking words on and off, the cloud will then update your results. (that is where the semantic word relationship comes in). Here is an excerpt from their site:

“While viewing the Quintura Cloud, you can visually navigate and easily refine in order to find relevant information faster and more efficiently! ”

“The map shows only those words that have close contextual relationships with the keywords in your query. Click a word to change your query and get relevant results that will comply with your new query. The size of a word shows its significance in relation to the query. The larger words have a strong contextual relationship with your query while the smaller words do not.”

I would bookmark this one and keep an eye on them. They are using some new technology that really makes searching easier. If you get a chance, play with it for a minute or two. Once you get the hang of it, it really makes searching faster as you can find things rather quickly without much effort.

Have you ever tried to search for something but just didn’t know what terms to use? The context cloud method makes things a snap, as it is basically teaching you which terms are related.

Now all they need to do is clean up their interface a little, and they will be a serious contender for quality search…

The obvious question is, when/if Quintura does strike it big, will they offer sponsored results? How do you optimize to score high in their results? Will we need to start rethinking our SEO efforts based on the new latent semantic indexing technology? Maybe we will start thinking more in terms of keyword context and term relationships as opposed to single keyword phrases.

The successful SEO guru will learn how to adapt.

A famous man once said: “Blessed are the flexible”

Is anyone as sick as I am of receiving reciprocal linking requests in the form of spam emails?  I read a fantastic article by Mike Banks Valentine of SearchEngineOptimism.com.  Yes the article is a bit controversial, but that’s what makes it a fun read!  The title is: “Reciprocal Linking is Dead”

Here are some excerpts that I thought were excellent:

“I will link, but I will not “swap links” with anyone now. I require content in the form of articles, press releases and news, quotes, testimonials or some form of content.”

“What was it that ruined strict reciprocal links for me? It happened when I received a polite link request from an apparently well-meaning reciprocal link partner and, as always, clicked through to his requested linking URL. I was forwarded immediately to an affiliate program page which this scammer hoped to slip by without my noticing.”

This part was great… he has a form letter that he uses to reply to those spam emails:

“I’d be happy to link to you, but my current method of linking is through articles, not links pages. If you’d like to contribute an article for publication, I’d be glad to link to you through the resource box.

Take a look at those articles I currently use and send your own articles for linking consideration. Be sure to include a resource box with the linking text included within it.

The articles are the only way I link to anyone now. If you don’t have any, consider writing a couple specifically for this purpose. I’m sure you also know the value of distributing well written articles for use by other web sites and ezines.”

I totally plan on using a letter like this to reply to those reciprocal link requests.  Who knows, maybe a motivated spammer will start writing some good content for me!

Lately, I’ve been getting a few link requests that claim to have a 3 way linking strategy that are supposed to guard against reciprocal link penalties and give a decent backlink.  The one problem is that most of the links in the requests are completely unrelated to my services.  People just don’t get it that a link from a casino website to a real estate website isn’t going to help your ranking.  In fact, it may even hurt your ranking if you have too many unnatural links from unrelated sites.

Bottom Line: If you’re going to use reciprocal linking… don’t do it just for the sake of getting more links.  Do it because you think your customers will find value in that link.  And for goodness sake, don’t spam people for reciprocal links. And finally, make sure to only accept links from sites that have content related to yours.

Here are some other helpful links on the subject:

Healthy Website Linking Practices

Threadwatch.org

SEW thread

eZine Article

Links arguing that reciprocal linking is still alive and well:

easywebtutorials.com

1stSearchEngineRankings.com

One of my favorite SEO/Webmaster blogs is SEOMoz.org. The content these guys put out is outstanding.

The founder: Randfish recently posted on the pubcon 2006, and based on some of the things he learned, he made some predictions for the next 6 months. (You’ll even notice a mention of Zillow, which shows me the reach and impact it has made in the seo/webmaster world)
Here are the ones I thought were most interesting with my comments below:

• Google’s Webmaster Central will offer full link information about your site (like the old link command before they broke it) *I’m curious to see how this will develop. It’s frustrating sometimes when you can’t see detailed link info from Google.

• Digg will reach its height of publicity and begin to wane as other verticals in the space take off. *It’s true that digg has some room to grow yet, but with the advent of other similar sites, I agree that we will see a spread in traffic.

• SearchEngineLand will become the definitive source for search-related content; most in the industry foresee SEW (search engine watch) becoming irrelevant very quickly.

• Linkbaiting will continue to grow in opportunity and popularity - many more firms will begin to offer services in that sector. *This is an obvious one. I have been seeing some very creative link baiting techniques being tested in the last 6 months. The opportunities and new ideas in this area are almost endless.

• A few SEO-backed projects will become big brands in the online world. I think the next Zillow or MySpace or YouTube will have its seeds in this industry - so many capable people are hard at work on fascinating projects. *Totally agree… again, this one is a no brainer really. The one obvious problem is that the SEO world is so chock full of good talent, that you don’t have any one major industry leader. But you have countless mid-sized firms all vying for the top spot… stay tuned on this one.

• Google will continue to make it more worth spammers’ while to take white-hat routes as they close off link spam opportunities and make authority sites impossible to resist. *Cheers to Google for plugging the holes in the damn. I’ve seen less and less link spam sites showing up in the serps lately. Quality results have become the norm, and not the exception.

• Blogs will find more creative ways to finance their growth - and while blog number growth may slow down a bit, web traffic to them will continue to skyrocket. *Hopefully this means that the rapid growth of the splog will die down, but I doubt it. Does anyone have internet wide stats on blog traffic? We are truly in the golden age of the blog. As content improves, things will only get better.

Thanks Rand for the great reviews of Pubcon, and these predictions. They look pretty sound to me.

Just found a funny but useful robot online.  He is an expert on SEO, and claims to have all kinds of industry secrets and gossip.  Here is the link

You can refresh the page to get him to speak again.  His name is promo and he was created by the gang over at Search Engine Worshops
Here is a quote from their site:

“Turn up your computer sound and click your refresh button to hear Promo, the Search Engine Robot giving you some general SEO gossip. He is libel to say anything, so be prepared!”

One minute, he’ll throw you some technical advice, then next minute, he’ll run his mouth off about how his relationship with the “female” hotbot robot didn’t workout. But it’s ok because he’s starting to date a new robot over at Yahoo.  But he’s not sure how it will work out yet, because he claims that the yahoo robot is considering a name change to inktomi.

He says some pretty funny stuff… but when he gets serious, he has some very quality up to date SEO advice.