Link Building Blog, News and Articles - Textlinkbrokers.com/blog

In today’s roundup there’s news of a Blogger being sued, MSN Search new features, Google’s new advertising model, anonymizing your Bittorrent transfers and more.

With so much talk about relevance these days, I thought I’d introduce you to some of the technology behind the search engine, and what the potential differences between them could be.  There are some interesting takes on search technology from pre-ranking results on the fly to neural networks to community based searching.

In the last article I introduced you to Google and Yahoo! and how their search technology works.  In this article I look at MSN and Ask Jeeves.

There is some interesting news today.  From a new online music services, to new Google Sitemaps features to a new vending machine I need to get in my office.

Well, there isn’t a lot of search engine related news, however there are some interesting facts floating around today.  From Flickr users planning ritual ‘suicide’ to Answers partnering with teachers and more.

With so much talk about relevance these days, I thought I’d introduce you to some of the technology behind the search engine, and what the potential differences between them could be.  There are some interesting takes on search technology from pre-ranking results on the fly to neural networks to community based searching.

In these articles I will focus on ‘The Big Four.’ These are the engines considered to own the search space.  They are Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask Jeeves.  First will be Google and Yahoo!

Yahoo got more pages indexed than Google. And an enormous amount more. It seems that the Yahoo index is more than twice the size of the Google index. Recently this was also announced by Yahoo, even though they generally don’t comment on index sizes.

However, a simple search for the word ‘the’ in both engines shows a huge difference. Where Google comes up with approx. 3,320,000,000 results, Yahoo spits out the huge amount of 10,200,000,000 results.

Ungoogle like, a couple of weeks later Google responded. Not by word, but in silence. An enormous crawl of the net was performed and even though it still says ‘Searching 8,168,684,336 web pages’ on the google home page, it is obvious that they have indexed a lot more pages.

The future of the web is so bright, not only do you have to wear shades, but you have to also wear fire retardant clothing just to keep up with the rapid pace of change, without igniting yourself.

It was a very quite day today and there are only three things to report.  The first has to do with AOL’s new Beta Central site, the second involves some new Google AdWords tests which were discovered while the third talks about some recent spammer news.

The publisher of an adult site is seeking an injunction against Google. That and news on AOL’s plan to reform their customer service and pay damages to the state of New York.  Plus it’s official: dashes are better than underscores.

Sure I have big Google news today, but I’m going to start with how ticket vendors seem to be the latest mark for search engines.

In my last article I talked about how content is the most important aspect of a website.  While this is true, it is only part of the equation.

Yes you can download it for free - all you need to use it is a gmail account and you too can talk with your friends via the internet.  Get it here.

Well this is refreshing isn’t it?  For once the news isn’t all about Google.  Sure I have lots of Google news to talk about, but today I’m going to start with Ask Jeeves.

If you have ever lurked around any of the webmaster forums you may have received mixed signals in that there doesn’t seem to be consistency on what’s most important to achieving good search engine rankings.

As hard as I can try to resist, it seems that Google dominates the news lately.  Don’t get me wrong I think Google is great but I’d like to see more news from the other engines as well.

From Ask PPC to Google’s domination to video piracy to unique tombstones, this issue of the daily roundup covers it all.

Many people may not know what TCP/IP is nor what its effect is on the internet.  The fact is, without TCP/IP there would be no internet.  And it is because of the American military that the internet exists.

Ok maybe the golden android didn’t join Google, but the company did purchase an Android.  That and Google is releasing more shares for sale.  That’s just two of the news announcements made today.  The days news started quiet but did pick up through the afternoon.

Well, I called it without even knowing it.  I wondered how President Bush can get his way, but he did.  Plus I found lots of Google news on Google blogs. In particular a new Google blog, plus information about new Google services and more.

When you go to a search engine and perform a search many people don’t understand how those results end up there.  Some people may think that sites are submitted while others know that a piece of software finds the pages.  This article explains one piece of that puzzle:  The search engine crawler.

This industry is in a constant state of flux, both in the new technology and even in the amount of news that there is.  Just yesterday I was struggling to write a daily roundup and today I have more than I know what do with including some Google rumors, how President Bush is trying to stop a new TLD from moving forward, and what plans may be in the work for Fox owner News Corp.

There isn’t a lot of news today:  One could be a significant announcement in that it’s future potential could be huge.  One is a Microsoft Search announcement and one involves Google.

There are many companies out there that offer links for sale on a network of sites or that offer you admission to an “automated link network” for a low monthly price. It’s common to see advertisements for 1000 links for $9.95/month, or 4500 links for $14.95/month etc… These may sound like a good deal at first but before you buy from them it’s a good idea that you understand what the pros and the cons are. In some cases it may be worth the risk to buy some cheap and easy links, but in other cases it might not be worth the potential penalizations by the search engines.

Search, both organic and paid, continue to evolve and mature.  No longer is it a matter of tweaking meta tags to get top listings.  In many cases it can take months or years to achieve top positions in competitive keyphrase markets.  However, there are some future considerations one must be aware of with search so that they can take advantage of them.  This article outlines some of the future innovations I see coming.

Many times it is advantageous to purchase multiple domain names even if you only have one website.  However in doing so you could risk getting penalized for duplicate content if the search engines find the different domains and index the site under those different domains.  This article explains how to make sure that doesn’t happen

There isn’t a lot of news today.  In fact only a couple stories.  Two of them came from blogs: One from the Google blog and one from the Yahoo! blog.  The first involves Google taking a step back after some heated debate over one of their recent product offerings.

Rustybrick is doing a great job of covering the SES conference over at seroundtable.com.  I thoroughly enjoyed reading the session about linking.  The panel is made up of Tim Mayer from Yahoo and Matt Cutts from Google. Most of what they are saying is what most of us know to be true anyways, but its nice to see them giving such clear answers in a public forum. http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002362.html

Here are a couple of the Q & A’s that really grabbed my eye.

You know a company is interested in an emerging market when they spend a billion dollars for less than a 1/2 stake in company.

Well, it is Search Engine Strategies week this week, and true to form there were some significant announcements made during this industry get together.

One of my Sales people just got back from eating lunch at a chinese restaraunt down the street and showed me the message he received from his after-meal fortune cookie. 

This is an actual scan of the fortune cookie message, I kid you not :)

The now infamous “Google Guy” recently started his own blog, which I happened to run across today after a mention of it over at threadwatch.  It can be found at www.mattcutts.com/blog which is named after him.  In case you didnt know, Matt Cutts is a PR guy for Google. 

I found his last post extremely interesting. Instead of going into detail here I’ll just post a link to the page http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/step-into-my-shoes/ .  But I would particularly pay attention to the parts where he mentions Google’s duplicate content filters and how if you get banned how Google will reinclude you once you have cleaned up your act.

If you frequent different SEO forums you may have received mixed signals on things like Flash or JavaScript.  You may be wondering if it’s safe to use these and if so, what the impact will be.  In this article, I attempt to address your concerns over JavaScript.

Pop quiz: What was 10 years ago today (Tuesday)?

What is Skype worth?  If you don’t already know, Skype is a voice over IP provider which offers free and inexpensive telephone connections via the internet.  With Skype you can call another Skype user and even someone else’s telephone via the web.  So why would News Corp (also owner of Fox TV et al) be interested in the service?

I watched a program the other night in which they tracked down an ‘evil spammer’ to his home town and confronted him.  The way the show described the guy you would have thought he was someone nefarious.  But I started thinking, what is spam and who is more responsible?  The spammer or the spammee?

There was lots of talk of money today.  Some because of yet another tech IPO that went huge and more discussion of just how much money some AdSense sites are making.

In my last article I introduced you to a brief summary of analytics and some of the benefits and disadvantages of both log based analytics and real time analytics.

I also gave you an idea of some of the really great features of analytics.

Today we will look at some of the other data a good analytics package can show you.

Yes that’s right, AOL.  It seems like forever since I’ve seen anything significant from AOL in the news.  Yet today I found not 1, but 2 newsworthy articles relating to the struggling company.

Most websites have some sort of tracking whether it is a real time analytics package, or a log analysis based webserver logs, analytics should form the foundation of any online marketing campaign.  If you are using analytics you MUST read this.

There isn’t a whole lot of news today, but I did come across some potentially scary news that will likely affect how we purchase computers in the future.

There’s some significant news to report of in today’s roundup but before we do let’s briefly summarize what Google’s been up to including seeing some of their data used on a new TV program, yet another Google patent and more

It was a quite day today on the search engine front.  While there was some expected news (from Ask Jeeves) there was also some unexpected (but not surprising) and some interesting.  Yahoo! Google, MSN And Ask Jeeves all make the news today.

When AOL bought Time Warner a few years ago, many thought that AOL/Time Warner would become THE next media empire.  Of course this never happened, in fact, recently Time Warner removed the “AOL” from the company name.  So I started looking around at other online companies, and while many think Google or MSN will be the next major media site, I disagree.  I began looking at Yahoo and found some interesting things.  Could changes at Yahoo! make it the next likely to make a run for the media empire title?