Brian Bluff

What types of sites generate the most valuable links?

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

This morning a read a LinkedIn discussion on titled “What types of sites tend to generate the most valuable links for search rank?” The discussion was posted in the LinkedSEO group and was started by Tom Shivers. The discussion was moderately popular – 18 comments in 16 days.

While there were no surprises among the responses, I found the discussion interesting and therefore wanted to share… Here is a summary of the points made the group relating to the most valuable links:

high trust, pagerank, authority links
.gov, .edu, .org links
links from aged domains
links from pages containing relevant content
links from sites in the same geographic area as your site – helps with geo-modified terms
links from pages generating substantial search engine traffic
deep links – directly to an internal page
blog links – comments or through a guest post

Want to learn more about the types of sites that generate the most valuable links, join LinkedSEO and follow Tom’s discussion.

Have a great day!

@ssiBrian

Posted in Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »

Yahoo!’s Multiple Personality Disorder – The Microsoft-Yahoo! Deal

Sunday, February 21st, 2010

Does Yahoo! have multiple personality disorder?

Since 2000, when I entered the search engine marketing business, Yahoo! has changed organic and paid search results providers more often than most people change their mind.

Who is Yahoo! anyway? I guess that depends when you ask the question. Yahoo! has switched paid and non-paid search results provider/technology numerous times in the past decade.

Yahoo! started out as a human edited directory and added algorithmic search when it couldn’t keep up with the explosive expansion of Internet content. Over the years, Inktomi, Google, and its own search engine (based largely on Inktomi, which Yahoo! bought in 2002) have all provided organic search results to Yahoo!. Now with this latest deal, Yahoo! will receive its organic search results from bing.

On the pay per click front, Yahoo! first partnered with Overture (formally goto.com) and bought the service in 2003. After a little tweaking and rebranding, Yahoo! Search Marketing was born. In 2007, Yahoo! introduced its Panama upgrade which added a quality scoring system to its pay per click ranking algorithm. This change mimicked Google’s approach and supported a better user experience. The Microsoft-Yahoo! deal requires that Yahoo! abandon all this work and serve up Microsoft’s adCenter ads.

The Microsoft-Yahoo! deal.

On Thursday, the Microsoft-Yahoo! deal was given the green light. See “US and European regulators have cleared the way for Microsoft and Yahoo! to blaze on with a planned tie-up aimed at taking on Internet search king Google.” Yahoo!’s switch to bing and adCenter will likely occur in late 2010 or early 2011, with care taken not to disrupt the lucrative holiday advertising season.

So what’s next?

All of this turmoil was caused by Yahoo!’s and Microsoft’s inability to compete effectively with Google. In fact, it is Yahoo!’s decade long hemorrhaging of search market share that has placed its head on the chopping block. As for me, while I’m a big Google fan, I can’t help but pull for the underdogs – Yahoo! and Microsoft. In any case, the face of search is changing and we at Site-Seeker will react accordingly.

Posted in Business, General Internet Marketing | 1 Comment »