Do you know something about search engines and want to win a VB license? Post the most informative message on what's been going on with search engines in the last two months and you will win a VB license. Should be an interesting thread even if you don't plan to compete. Someone has already posted about Matt Cutt's speaking out on LinkVault and Digital Point Ad coop, MSN's new meta tage for not using DMOZ descriptions and more.
Blog spam is normally used by those in competive industries with troubel getting links. This includes adult, casino, and phamacy sites. Recently I've been getting lots of "horny goat weed" spam. I don't even know what that is and I wonder how profitable that niche is. If it's quite profitable we bloggers will be seeing more horny goat weed spam...
A lot of people maintain that Google likes old sites. I've seen it with my directory The domain has been around for a year or so (and had PR) but all the subpages are two weeks old at the most. A site command shows the number of indexed pages:
Google = 659
Yahoo! = 31
MSN = 24
But when I do a site command for www.pxgo.com, a site only a few months old, I get
Google = 167
Yahoo! = 0
MSN = 1,177
In this case at least the rumors apply; MSN is quicker to index and rank (I am number 1 for health message boards on MSN) new sites while Google updates old sites more frequently than the others.
A lot of talk on digitalpoint these days about Powernet advertising, also doing business as Burris Media Group or Vernell Burris. Many people claim to have been cheated out of significant money.
An interesting thread over at Sitepoint about how blog comment spam is messing up Google's results and what they are prepared to do about it...
More reasons why you should join Digital Point's free coop advertising exchange network:
Yesterday my stock market blog had moved up to #61 (from 192). Today it's #48.
My ESL site was #23 for "English as a second language" but now it's #15. That's a fairly competitive keyword and I've been high teens/low twenties for months and months now...
These are results from the first Google update since I joined the ccop. Most people report bigger jumps after the second update after joining, so I'm looking forward to much more movement in the future.
You might be wondering which ad network to join seeing as how there are some imitations starting up. Soon you will have to choose the DP network or all the others. DP will not let you place multiple ad networks on your site (soon not true yet). Many spammy are being allowed into the new networks so I would avoid them. You don't want to be caught linking to a spammy site...
Also, DP is working on a category option so all links will be somewhat related to your site...
I recently got an email about a link exchange; the proposal was for me to link from my homepage in return for a link from his PR 6 links page which was ..../links/links.html or something.
I said no because Google has experimented with not counting links from "links" pages. He said he'd heard that wasn't true. Well, it's not true now. But it could be in the future.
I'm reasonably certain that in June Google stopped counting or reduced the value of links from pages with "links" in the URL. They stopped this experiemnt and went back to normal, but I personally feel there is a good chance that this will manifest again; it makes sense for content rather than reciprocal link schemes to have more influence on SE results. Links from content pages should count way more than links from links pages (IMO).
I wrote last time about an interesting thread on IMR in which SEOs are discussing the importance of links from various IPs. A few new things have come up:
1. Some web hosts allow you to host multiple domains with different class C IP addresses.
2. This may be important because multiple cross linked domains on one IP might make Google suspicious.
I'm going to look into this because I have two new forums with unique domain names hosted on the same account as my main ESL site (which has a third domain name). I don't want my main site to get penalized for links coming from different domains on the same IP, but I want to link to my main site from every page of the forums because I need the anchor text.
I know at least one webmaster who is renaming pages that used to be links.html or similar because those pages (but not others on his site) stopped passing page rank after the latest Google update (in which I and many other people lost page rank).
My ESL site remained page rank 6, but backlinks showing on a google "link:http://www.eslgo.com" search fell from 226 to 184. There are many possible reasons for this, but one is that "links" pages are no longer passing page rank.
This makes sense to me since pagrank is supposed to help Google measure quality. Now most sites trade links with anyone willing to reciprocate and PR is becoming less important. If only links from content pages pass PR, pagerank might become meaningful again...
I appreciate the recent comments about the coop and Yahoo. So far there is no new evidence supporting my theory that the coop can be used to ban a competitor's site. A new theory is that during the recent Yahoo update they decided to do some summer cleaning and targeted sites with more coop links than normal links. If this is the case, one needs to wonder what will happen during the next Yahoo update. Will more coop sites be penalized?
http://www.seo-search-engine-ranking.com/ad_network_222.php