Google News Inside

Google Webmaster Tools Needs Improvement

Here is just one aspect of Google Webmaster Tools that I feel needs some more love. Pages with external links is a great tool to have, simply because it provides an easy-access breakdown of all the links going to individual pages. But, a huge big but, the data is provides is not displayed in a [...]

Yahoo! Directory Adds Images to Sponsored Links

Yahoo! has added images to their sponsored ads in their directory. I used to have a listing there, but it proved to be pretty worthless (purely in my opinion). [Thanks Barry] Incoming search terms:SPONSORED ADSyahoodirectory

The SEO Factor

Wow, an amazing write-up with some great industry-expert insights.
Wiep wraps up just about every question we can think of for SEO.
Here are a few specific questions and responses which I found most intriguing. Well, rather, these are some responses which I found that are worth noting, in my opinion.

[Myth Buster] Virtual Host vs. Dedicated IPs

There have been long debates about whether virtual hosts or dedicated IPs are the same, better, different, or whatever you want to call it.
Barry’s gathered some more evidence that it doesn’t matter. Do whatever you want to do. Google, in this case, will treat any outbound link as the same.
Matt Cutts touched on this subject over a year ago.
“I’m happy to affirm that this statement which was true in 2003 is still true now. Links to virtually hosted domains are treated the same as links to domains on dedicated IP addresses.”
More recently, another affirmation coming from Google Groups.
“Lots of sites are hosted on shared IPs. If this had a negative effect on ranking, it would harm most of the sites on the web–and that’s not good for small webmasters or for our users. So, understandably, sharing an IP should not have an effect your ability to rank.”
Which does indeed make sense.

I got a PR8 linkback for $20,000!!!

Well, honestly, I can get a PR8 linkback for $20,000. As I was browsing around the web early yesterday, I realized that Apache.org had a sponsorship page. After digging a little bit further, I found out some more details about these sponsorships. Platinum Sponsorship Donation level: $100k / year Your logo (max size: 250×125) on our ASF Thanks page with link Logo Location: top section

Bring Out Your Dead…Bring Out Your Dead Links

Old school Link spamming building is dead. You can no longer simply put up completely irrelevant links and hope you get link love for them.

As illustrated in the comic above (which is thanks to Monty Python and the Holy Grail [one of my favorite movies]), we can see how traditional old school link building is dead.
The old style of link building was “Hey! You have a PageRank 8 site, that must mean it’s [uber] trusted by all the search engines! I’ll give you $100 if you put my link there. K? thx!” That is no longer the case. Search engines have been smarter and better.
But from what I can tell, a lot of people are still stuck in the 90s and think that irrelevant linking still works. Let’s take a look at what I’m talking about.

Text-Link-Ads.com Video by Loren Feldman

It’s a great video that has Michael Gray and Kris Jones A well made video by Loren while in NYC. If you aren’t involved with TLA, you should be! Click here to learn more!!

How Bad is Buying Links? Amazon does it

There has been talk back and forth about how buying text link ads is bad and how it is good and how … well, basically there are mixed feelings and thoughts on the whole idea. Amazon is a well known and well trusted company and website, so why do they buy links? They most likely buy links for the same reason other sites buy links, to gain

SEO Tips: Display Your TextLinkAds.com Inventory

This SEO tip is geared more towards publishers of TextLinkAds.com (aff).
I’m a publisher along with thousands of other people for Text-Link-Ads.com. I’ve been an activate participant in helping provide new ideas for development and trying to create the best platform available today. But there was one problem that was really bugging me: there is no clear way to display what you are publishing. There was no real way to show everyone your inventory to possible advertisers that you are referring directly.
Now there is. This actually came from a friend of mine, Owen Winkler. So how do you display your inventory to advertisers directly? This is the easy part.

How do you get to this page? First go to “Edit Your Listings”, then either select “Add a Site” or edit your current listings by clicking “Edit Site Details.” Then skip the first page and go to the second page where you can edit the description and keywords.

Juice Up Your Blog

Text-Link-Ads.com has released a new and fun linking tool to rate your blog compared to others. It utilizes Technorati, Alexa, and backlinks to your blog in order to come up with your “Blog Juice.” Blog Juice Tool

10 Commandments to Link Building

Brandon has some really good and straight to the point tips about link building for your website. http://www.isedb.com/db/articles/1534/…

Adam Lasnik On Outbound Linking

It’s unlikely that your outbound linking is causing your pages to be listed in the supplemental, rather than main index. Also, be assured that we’re not looking to penalize folks for a “bad” link here and there. Rather, our algorithms are tuned to look for patterns of “egregious” linking behavior… both on individual sites and in the aggregate. With that said, it’s certainly in your users’ interest that you regularly

Best Practices for URL Structure

SEOmoz has some great tips for URL structures and the best practices. Describe Your Content Keep it Short Static is the Way & the Light Descriptives are Better than Numbers Keywords Never Hurt Subdomains Aren’t the Answer Fewer Folders Hyphens Separate Best Stick with Conventions Don’t be Case Sensitive Don’t Append Extraneous Data I agree with most of these, but I’ve had pretty good luck with how I structure my URLs.

Feedvertising by TextLinkAds.com

Feedvertising is a new platform just released today from TextLinkAds.com. Feedvertising doesn’t directly help your SEO rankings, but it does help self-promotion and does allow you to better use your feed. Something to strongly note though, this service is only available to Wordpress platforms. Sorry Blogger, sorry Movable Type (well, not really, I don’t like MT, but anyway), this service is only available to Wordpress. Add your own ads that may: promote your other sites, promote your own affiliate deal, promote a job opening… you name it. Opt in to allow some of your ad spots to be for sale through the TLA marketplace. This is a good opportunity for some users to get more visibility and maybe make a few bucks.

Text Links Bad … Advertising Good!

Adam Lasnik has his 2 cents on this matter at WMW… A clarification haiku: Advertising’s fine Buying links for PR: bad Google senses much So in short, PR building should be natural and not paid, but people are going to do it anyway…but Google knows, oh, they know.