Thursday, March 13th, 2008
I accidentally did a backlink check on Google.com today. And right before I went to close the browser window my eye caught something very amusing, to an optimizer’s mind anyway.
If you subscribe to the belief that Yahoo shows backlinks in order of importance (e.g. the first backlink is the most important and so on.) then it must be surmised that the first backlink listed for Google by Yahoo Site Explorer is the most important backlink for Google. Funny enough Yahoo considers a backlink from Adobe better than a backlink from Google (see image below), although it is a subpage from within Adobe.com (the Acrobat Reader Download page).
After this initial revelation, I then decided to check the backlinks to Yahoo.com. Surely Yahoo wouldn’t consider another website more important than their own, would they? As it turns out, I was wrong and PHP.net was listed first.
PHP.net was listed under Google.com in the first search. Following this logic, one would surmise that Yahoo admits to PHP.net being more important than Yahoo.com, and we already knew Google.com and Adobe.com are more important than PHP.net. So I am led to believe that Yahoo admits to Google being more important than itself and Adobe is the Grand Poobah of all backlinks.
All this of course means little to nothing, but I did smile at the irony. You can check for yourself by clicking this link and this link.
And don’t forget to tune in next episode when we reveal that Google admits…
AltaVista is the number one search engine!
Popularity: 10% [?]
Posted in Google, Out on a Limb, Yahoo Search | 11 Comments »
Friday, December 14th, 2007
Well, I’m almost done with my 52 SEO tips, only 3 more to go so I’m trying to finish strong. And since going green is the theme lately, I’m following the trend. Recycling links can be an important part of your link building campaign.
We often overlook the links we already have or links we didn’t actively build ourselves. Your site may already have links pointing to it, but if those links aren’t keyword-rich links then you are missing out on potential SEO benefits.
Let me give you a great example of a missed opportunity. SnagAJob.com is a leading job search website and the have thousands of links pointing to their site. A large number of links is a good thing, but the majority of their links have the link text ‘Snagajob’ in the anchor text. Many of these links are on EDU sites which pass along wonderful link popularity but so much is wasted when the anchor text is your domain name, or worse, your website address (www.snagajob.com).
As part of our strategy for SnagAJob we have been contacting sites with SEO-unfriendly links asking the anchor text to be changed to keyword terms they are trying to rank for such as part-time jobs, jobs, job search, etc. Our success rate is much higher than seeking out new links. And keyword-rich links that have age is a great combination for moving up in the search results.
Do a backlink check with MSN for your site. MSN allows you to search for anchor text too which you can see how to do in my MSN backlink check post. Look for links that could be improved such as those using just your domain name and start contacting those sites linking to you. Requesting changes to your anchor text is a worthwhile investment of your time that could reap better rankings in the search engines.
‘Going Green’ never felt so good and your site may thank you with an influx of new traffic.
Popularity: 7% [?]
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, Link Building, Live Search (MSN), SEO Strategies, SEO Tools | 7 Comments »
Tuesday, November 20th, 2007
Update 1/15/08: This feature is no longer working with MSN Live.
Check on the backlinks from your competitors is part of the competitive analysis of any good SEO consultant or “expert”. Up until recently using Yahoo to research competitor backlinks was the only search engine you could do this in effectively. Well, now Live.com is also back in the game and showing you backlinks to websites. But they also have a nice trick for using keywords to narrow your search.
If you visit Live.com and search for the following: +linkdomain:www.bigoakinc.com “seo tips” you will be show search results that have links pointing to bigoakinc.com and also have the phrase ’seo tips’ on that page that links to bigoakinc.com. Be sure to include the plus sign (+) at the front or else you won’t get any results. You can click this link to see the Live.com search results for yourself: +linkdomain:www.bigoakinc.com “seo tips”.
This can be an extremely useful research tool and adding the keyword phrase to the search makes it a even more valuable tool in your SEO toolbox.
Popularity: 9% [?]
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, Live Search (MSN), SEO Research, SEO Tools | 5 Comments »
Want to know what Shell is doing?
