By Aaron Wall

What is the difference between an unremarkable no value add thin ecommerce site, and a top ranked site? In some industries the difference is simply site age. Sites that were around a few years ago had fewer competitors, so it was easier for them to rank. As they aged they got trusted more, and some of those top rankings lead to many self-reinforcing links.

If your site is brand new and you want to compete against established sites directly on their most important keywords then you need to be good at public relations, have a better brand strategy, or have some remarkable feature that makes people want to talk about you. Without conversation and links it is hard to pass up sites that have been accumulating links for years.

But what if you could roll back the clock, and quickly grab market leading positions? You can.

Via SEL>>>

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By Greg Sterling

When Microsoft made its investment in Facebook I always had thought that Live Search would come to the site, together with search monetization. Later it appeared that search wasn’t part of the deal. Facebook’s competitors all have web search, including Google’s much publicized deal with MySpace.

Well today Microsoft announced that Live Search will be coming to Facebook, together with paid search ads.

Here’s the note from Microsoft PR:

Microsoft’s yearly financial analyst meeting, Microsoft SVP, Satya Nadella announced the extension of Microsoft’s U.S. relationship with Facebook to encompass search.

As part of the deal, Microsoft will work with Facebook to bring its customers Live Search-powered web search and search ads by the end of the calendar year. Facebook will work with Microsoft to design the best search experience for Facebook’s customers and advertisers.

This is a big deal for both Microsoft and Facebook, which had no web search prior to this. If Facebook eventually drives a good deal of volume it can help Microsoft gain exposure to users and potentially additional market share over time, but also will drive search revenue. Facebook now has in excess of 100 million users globally.

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“Strong international growth as well as sustained traffic increases on Google’s web properties propelled us to another strong quarter, despite a more challenging economic environment,” said Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. “As we continue to focus on innovating in our core business of search, ads and apps, we also look forward to enhancing the experience of our users and expanding the reach of our advertisers and partners with new technologies and formats, particularly as our integration of DoubleClick gains momentum and creates new opportunities in display advertising and elsewhere.”

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By Eric Enge

I always like to see what types of link building things that people talk about and/or present. Based on some basic tips provided by Roger Montti in the “Blow Your Mind Link Building Techniques” session at SMX Advanced, this post will expand upon those to describe a specific link building plan that nearly any site can use.

Here is my expanded version of Roger’s tips on how to extract which .EDU sites link to a competitor of yours (or to an important company in your space). These commands work on either Yahoo or Microsoft Live Search, but not Google at this point:

linkdomain:domain-to-check.com site:.edu “resource”
linkdomain:domain-to-check.com site:.edu “directory”
linkdomain:domain-to-check.com site:.edu “bookmarks”
linkdomain:domain-to-check.com site:.edu “links”
linkdomain:domain-to-check.com site:.edu “favorite”

Using this technique you can find a ton of link targets to pursue, all from known linkers. You can expand upon this as you see fit too. For example, you can add the industry category name for products or services like yours to the list. You can also try this on .ORG sites. Once your brain gets going you can just keep going and going.

Original post at SEL

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Mariya Moeva and Bergy Berghausen of Google posted an excellent step by step instruction manual and video on when and how to submit a Google request for reinclusion in Google. In short, the steps are as follows:

Login to Webmaster Tools and check for any crawl errors, such as “URL unreachable” or “URLs restricted by robots.txt” errors. If you find those errors, dig deeper and see if you can open up those access errors. If those are not your issues, proceed to step two.

Check in Webmaster Tools the Message Center for any notifications of site issues. If there is something there, then follow those recommendations.

Then you want to review the Webmaster Guidelines and patch up any issues with your site that may have caused your site to be deindexed form Google.

Finally, go back to Webmaster Tools and submit a “reconsideration request,” but only after you are confident your site is in compliance with Google’s Webmaster guidelines.

Via SEL

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By Barry Schwartz

Saul Hansell from the New York Times reported on an interesting discover that uncovered that Google may look at more than just your previous query to tailor the ads you see on the search page. Now, Google may look back several past queries to tailor your search ads. Yes, this is a major difference - let me explain how.

Obtaining the previous query of a searcher is technically different then obtaining a query conducted five searches ago. Obtaining the latest query does not require cookies to be assigned and tracked for that search. But to track a query from five searches ago, you will need to assign a cookie to that searcher and track his queries. Then Google can use that ‘cookied’ data to tailor the ads from a query done several searches ago.

Read more @ search engine land

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SearchEngineLand reports that Yahoo is testing out a new purple logo. The new logo, as shown in the picture from TechCrunch, shows Yahoo changed the font to a more curvy look and went from red to a purple color.

Danny and Barry Schwartz wonder if the new logo, if it happens, might be part of Yahoo trying to assert its independence by showing Yahoo purple. It is official that Yahoo is no longer in talks with Microsoft and there are rumors that Google and Yahoo will be announcing a search partnership in about 20 minutes.

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Links represent the largest factor of the ranking system for the most popular search engines. Yet link building can be tedious, and mind-numbing. How do you motivate your link marketers?

With the proper incentives, you can keep your link marketers productive and driven while reducing staff turnover. Talented link developers are hard to find — you want to retain them as long as possible.

Contest

Create a weekly, bimonthly, or monthly contest as a motivator. Make sure the prizes are worth it. Link building is hard work. Don’t insult your workers with trivial prizes — offer something of value, such as paid days off.

Design a contest that’s easy to measure and that doesn’t dilute the quality of the link campaign. If the contest is simply judged on the “number” of links people obtain, then employees will focus on numbers, and the quality will suffer. Instead, place the focus on rewarding quality links.

Some possible contest measurement:

1 point for links obtained from a domain that is at least three years old.
3 points for links obtained from a domain that is at least five years old.
10 points for links obtained from a domain that has 20 or more government back links.
20 points for getting an editorial mention on a site at least five years old.

Get the idea? Focus the contest on obtaining quality links. That way the contest is a vehicle to teach and guide link builders to pursue high-quality links.

By Justilien Gaspard, Search Engine Watch

(2 votes, average: 3 out of 5)

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By Eric Enge

The most important thing you can do when talking to an SEO client (be it your boss in your company, or a different company you consult for) is to learn how to explain SEO in the simplest terms possible.

When you are dealing with a non-SEO type, use the 30 second rule: explain it clearly in 30 seconds or less. If it takes you longer than that, your chances of getting them to understand what you are saying have gone down dramatically.

The key then, is to figure out how to net things out into higher level business concepts. This starts with understanding the perspective of your audience. The explanation you might offer the CEO are probably different than the one that you would offer the CFO. The CEO may want to understand strategic impact, and the CFO will likely want to understand financial impact.

Full Article at SEL

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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By Barry Schwartz
Over the past few days, many webmasters and SEOs have been noticing an update to the PageRank score found in the Google Toolbar. Usually PageRank updates aren’t that noteworthy, but it seems something is different about this PageRank update

In particular, it has been a really long time since I’ve witnessed such widespread discussion about a PageRank update. I have been writing about PageRank updates since 2003 and been discussing them with other webmasters years before that. The last time I have seen this much discussion was in the times of the Google Dance, when toolbar PageRank updates actually coincided with ranking changes. Those days are long gone, but yet, SEOs and webmasters seem to be even more obsessed with a toolbar PageRank update. (FYI, I am one of those that believe we should not obsess about PageRank, let alone new toolbar PageRank updates).

I have asked Google for a comment about this PageRank update, since this is sparking such discussion. I will leave it open to discussion at our Sphinn forums, where several threads on the subject have started, such as this one.

My advice remains the same as always. Do not worry about PageRank. Try on focusing on building out a better site, with better content and a better community.

Via SEL

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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