Google’s search results on page one have been changing and include more and more listings from various sources including the following:

• Organic Results
• YouTube Videos
• Local Search
• Google Merchant
• News Results
• Sponsored Listings

That’s why it’s important for you to know how to promote your web site’s products and services in all the areas included on a page one result. Although on-page optimization and link building is still important, it’s no longer enough if you want to be competitive in today’s world.

Natural link structure

• inbound anchor text varies
• inbound link count increases gradually
• site links-out to only reputable pages
• links are rarely reciprocal

Artificial link structure

• inbound anchor text identical
• inbound link count increases suddenly
• site links-out to link farms or web rings
• high percentage of links are reciprocal

---

“ It’s finally happened, the top three search engines will soon be the top two. On July 29th, 2009, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer signed the papers agreeing to a partnership that will last a decade. Although the agreement is signed and the lawyers have been paid, it may take up to two years for the full plan to take effect. Of course, all the fine print has to make it past the antitrust regulators, before Bing can officially do the victory dance.

There is a lot of buzz online about who gets what. Right now the main thing to know is that Bing gets control of all things search related and Yahoo gets…the rest? Okay, in all fairness – they get money and potentially lots of it. Although it’s not last year’s $47.5 billion dollar (up front) offer, they do get 88 percent of all generated revenue from sites owned and operated by Yahoo. “

Planet Ocean August 1st, 2009

• The Site’s Total Number of Incoming Links
• Topical Relevance
• Traffic to the Linking Page
• Link Location on the Page
• The Type of Page
• Accessibility to Search Engines
• Outbound Links
• Possible Penalties
• How to Evaluate a Link From a Blog

You’re not actually penalized by Google for having duplicate content on your site.

Rather, the issue is that duplicate content causes problems for you in lots of other ways. For instance, if you have different URLs pointing at the same content, Google will only show one of the those URLs in the search results. The other URLs aren’t banned or penalized, they just don’t get shown. Google does this to avoid displaying redundant listings in the search results.

The problem is that Google might not choose the URL you want them to use. Also, the more time that Google’s spider spends crawling and filtering out redundant URLs, the less time it’s likely to spend indexing your important pages.

Anyway, here’s how to entice Google to always index the “correct” URL without wasting time dealing with duplicate content:

• Solve your site’s canonical problems with a 301 redirect.

• Be consistent in your internal linking. Link to the version of URL you want indexed, and be consistent in how you format your links.

• When creating a Google Sitemap, make sure the URLs in your sitemap are the ones you want indexed.

• Block duplicate versions of your URLs using your robots.txt file

Remember, duplicate content won’t cause your site to be banned or penalized, but it certainly can cause your site to perform badly in the rankings. Obviously, it’s a problem you’ll want to avoid. ..citation Planet Ocean

Google Launches Insights for Search, a Kick Butt New Keyword Research Tool

Google recently released Insights for Search, a tool designed to give advertisers demographic data about any keyword, providing an enormously valuable way to directly targeting your advertising to the best possible audience.

Insights for Search is essentially a super-charged version of Google Trends, a tool which allows you to compare keyword data side-by-side so you can determine which keywords are most popular for various regions, and how that popularity changes over time. Insights for Search takes things up a notch by allowing you to drill much deeper into that data.

However, like many Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools, there’s so much great data available that it can be a little overwhelming and confusing to get started with. So we’re going to demonstrate some simple yet powerful ways you can use this new tool to boost your bottom line at our next Search Engine Marketing (SEM) seminar. Stay tuned!

Yahoo Redesigns Site Explorer, Including a New Feature Allowing You To See Your Total Unique Site Link Count and is hands-down the best source of link information on the Internet.

Yahoo recently did a major rewrite of Site Explorer. But while the interface is cleaner and prettier, they really didn’t change the link analysis functionality.

However, they did add much more functionality to their URL rewriting feature, which allows you to tell Yahoo which dynamic parameters in your URLs you’d like Yahoo to ignore. Yahoo has increased the number of parameters you can exclude from 3 to 10. The Yahoo help files have more on dynamic URL rewriting.

Site Explorer has also added a statistics page (similar to the one Google Webmaster Tools uses) which allows you to see various data for sites you’ve authenticated with Yahoo, such as…

• Number of pages known
• Number of pages crawled
• Number of host on this domain
• Number of inlinks
• Number of inlink domains
• Number of outlinks
• Number of outlink domains

The number of inlink domains feature is particularly useful, since most link tools will tell you how many links you have, but not how many links you have from unique sites. So if you have blogroll or run-of-site links where every page on a site links to you, most tools will tell you have hundreds or thousands of links, when in actuality you only have a few dozen sites linking to you.

Blogroll links can be nice to have, of course, but it’s also important to get a clear picture of how many actual sites are linking to you. Unfortunately, the link numbers Yahoo gives on their statistics pages are wildly different from the numbers Yahoo displays in Site Explorer. Hopefully that’s a bug they’re planning on fixing soon.

We will talk about this in our next seminar. Stay tuned!!