EzSEO Newsletter # 21
Andy Williams ez SEO
.com
Hi All
It has been an interesting few week in search engine land. Google is once again going through major changes, Yahoo is gearing up to drop Google results in favour of Inktomi, and MSN has released a beta of its new search engine. Want to learn more? Read on...
This week:
1. Google changes.
2. MSN beta search
3. Yahoo, Inktomi and what it could mean for you
4. Protect your computer with these free tools
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1. Google changes.
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Google once again seems to be upsetting webmasters everywhere with its latest update. Most vocal of all webmasters are those who have seen yet more rankings slide down into obscurity. However, if you think about it, for every page that has gone down, one must has also gone up. There must be an awful lot of very happy webmasters too. So what have those happy webmasters done that the unhappy onces haven't? How can you get back to your rightful place at the top of Google.
Well it is interesting to see that Google has been issues a couple of patents recently.
Patent No. 6,526,440 which is entitled "Ranking search results by reranking the results based on local inter-connectivity".
Basically what this means is that when someone searches for a keyword phrase, Google will return a set of matching documents like it does now, based on a ranking algorithm. However, before showing those documents to the searcher as search results, Google re-ranks the documents so that the one that contains the greatest number of links from the other documents in that group, will be shown as number 1.
What does this mean to you?
1. Make sure you optimize your pages properly so that you have a chance of appearing in the group Google picks initially. If you are stuck on optimization, you could do worse than read Battle or the Top 10 released last week. I won't put a link to it, as I am sure you all know where my site is ;-)
2. Make sure you get links from other sites.
Think about this for a moment. Someone types in a search phrase "blue widgets" at Google. Google searches its database for relevant pages and selects 30. Google them looks to see how many links each of those 30 have from the other 29 pages in the set. Google then ranks them in order of links and returns the search results to the searcher. The one with the most links from the other web pages in the set ranks #1.
Something that may become important here is that if Google's final ranking is based on incoming links from other pages in the set, your sites internal links may become less important in this stage of ranking. I would think that your internal links are very important to get you into the set in the first place, but then links from other sites take over.
This ranking strategy will mean that individual pages of a web site need to have links from other sites. When requesting your link exchanges, why not request that the other webmaster links to internal pages of your site instead of the homepage. Build up a few links to each page and you will find these pages quickly becoming authority pages and ranking well.
Link exchanges are time consuming, but a necessity. You can do all this by hand, but there are tools available to help you. The one I use is Arelis and it has saved me huge amounts of time in finding quality links and checking to make sure my link partners don't remove my link at some future stage. You can read my review of Arelis.
Jut briefly, the other patent I wanted to mention is Patent No, 6,615,209 which is entitled Detecting query-specific duplicate documents
Effectively what this means is that Google will look at the part or parts of the web page that matches the query phrase. Google will probably condense these parts into a smaller block of text, and then compare this with the condensed blocks of other pages. Where these blocks are very similar, or the same, Google will probably remove the pages assuming that the pages are identical, or are doorway pages.
Doorway pages use to be able to get you good rankings. Webmasters would create an optimized web page around one keyword or phrase and then create hundreds of duplicate pages. They would then replace the main keyword with another, so that every page was identical except for the keyword it targeted.
Duplicate content filters have been working for a while now, and the results at Google have seen a lot less duplicate doorway pages. However, you should think about this technology when you design your pages. Are you cutting and pasting affiliate links with pre-written text provided by the merchant? How many other affiliates use identical text? It really is worth changing the text a little to make your pages unique.
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2. MSN beta search
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Found at: http://beta.search.msn.com
Check a few rankings of your own pages. I am seeing pages that have been dumped by Google appearing up there at the top (where they once did in Google). MSN seems to rank pages much more like Google use to. I have always told you to optimize for Google as the other engines seem to be trying to mimic its success.
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3. Yahoo, Inktomi and what it could mean for you
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With Yahoo switching to Inktomi supplied results (away from Google) sometime soon (in fact I see Ink results at Yahoo most of the time here in Spain), this could be a great opportunity to get some page up there in Yahoo. You can pay to submit a web page into Inktomi at http://www.positiontech.com
Unless prices have changed, it'll cost you $39 for the first URL, and $25 for the next ones. This fee will get you listed for 1 year, and can bring you a lot of visitors if you rank well for your chosen terms. You can tweak your submitted pages and they will be re-ranked within 48 hours (usually takes a little longer than this), check your listing, tweak a little more and repeat until you get a good listing. Because Inktomi will spider your pages every 24 hours, you can see the effect of your tweaking almost immediately. This is a great way to experiment and learn the Inktomi algorithm.
If you find that a page just cant get to the top of Inktomi no matter how much you tweak, you can swap the web page for any other at the same domain without cost. In fact you can swap it as many times as you want for free.
Inktomi does spider the web for free too, so you may be lucky enough to get pages included for free in their database. If you want to check Inktomi rankings, visit:
http://search.positiontech.com/
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4. Protect your computer with these free tools
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If your computer gets infected by a virus, any number of things could happen. You could find out that your computer sends out hundreds of virus-laden e-mails to your friends and family, you could find your computer hard drive crash. You could find your credit card details being sent to the people who put the virus on your machine. The authors of these viruses are evil, pure and simple. Make sure you have an up-to-date virus checker and firewall installed. These don't have to cost a lot, in fact there are two very good pieces of software that will not cost you a cent.
Sygate personal firewall - a great firewall that is easy to use.
http://www.sygate.com/ Note I had difficulty locating the exact download page, but it you cannot find it, go to www.nonags.com and search for it under firewall.
AVast anti virus - I have been very impressed with this anti-virus scanner. It updates weekly (automatically if you want) and found some viruses on my machine that Norton failed to find.
http://www.avast.com/
Ad-Aware - this tool will scan your machine and look for malicious code installed on your machine. This will ensure that delicate information is not sent out from your machine.
http://www.lavasoftusa.com/
As with anything, read the instructions before installing any of these programs.
OK, that is it for another week. Keep the feedback coming - good or bad.
Have a great week..
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