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Little Known Link Opportunities for 2009

by Brian Ussery on December 29, 2008   | Google+ LinkedIn Facebook email author Twitter

There have been a number of recent posts focused on link building and finding quality inbound links. In addition to those better known sites offering non-nofollowed link love, here are some other examples you may not have noticed.

  • Blogger – The new “Blogs I Follow” feature doesn’t seem to nofollow outbound links.
  • Google Notebook – Google’s notebook is still nofollow free from direct inbound links…
  • Google Panoramio (photos in Google Maps/Earth) – is a good place for links but you’ll need a little content.
  • Google Profiles – one place to find all your social network and blog links.
  • Google Knol – In case you missed it, once you’ve achieved “trusted” author status, the juice follows!
  • Facebook – That’s right, it seems as though some search savvy marketers have been using Facebook’s “closed” social network for open link love. The example above changes frequently but you’ll see what I mean in short order…
  • Twitter – Have you noticed Twitter’s mobile pages in SERPs recently? They seem to be passing PageRank…
  • Pownce – Despite extinction, Pownce appears to be the gift that keeps giving in 2009!
  • MyBlogLog – A personal favorite that gives a little link love to users.

HAPPY NEW YEAR to you all and remember to link safely in 2009!

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Categories: Google, Googlebot, Knol, online marketing, PageRank, Search, SEM, seo • Comments Off

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Google No Longer Suggests Directory Submission

by Brian Ussery on October 2, 2008   | Google+ LinkedIn Facebook email author Twitter

While Google has condemned buying and selling links that pass PageRank, they’ve encouraged listing in paid directories like Yahoo for years. It seems that era may have come to an end earlier today. The following bullet points have been removed from Google’s Webmaster Guidelines Webmaster Help Center*

  • “Have other relevant sites link to yours.”
  • “Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.”

Does this recent move reflect a renewed emphasis on rooting out paid links passing PageRank and/or low quality links by Google?

*As mentioned, the bullet points above have been removed from the US version of Google’s Webmaster Help Center. Other versions may not yet reflect this change.
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UPDATE: Hat tip to Barry Schwartz who noticed John Honeck’s post in Google Groups where Google’s John Mueller comments on the change. Barry provides a full recap at SERoundTable.com and SearchEngineLand.com.

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Categories: Directories, Google, News, online marketing, PageRank, resources, Search, search engine optimization, Spam • 4 Comments »

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Google Chrome Browser

by Brian Ussery on September 1, 2008   | Google+ LinkedIn Facebook email author Twitter

Google has done it again, who says you can’t launch a new product via a commic book? As first reported by Philipp Lenssen Google, recently sent out comic books by Scott McCloud announcing their latest offering. Not so incognito perhaps but, very cool!

According to Google’s “Google Chrome (BETA)” for Windows FAQ (which wont be available until launch), “Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier.” A few of Chrome’s features include thumbnails of favorite pages, shortcuts for applications and “universal” one box functionality. Google Chrome offers webmasters built in “desktop” style features designed to deliver a better experience to end users. In addition to Google tools and APIs built-in, Google’s use of JavaScript engine 8.0 in Chrome should speed up “AJAXy” web applications. Also worth pointing out, Chrome is built on WebKit and uses the WebKit rendering engine. Thanks to WebKit, pages should look the same in Google Chrome as the appear in other WebKit based browsers like Safari. Also worth noting, Google’s new Chrome browser already supports CSS3 features even though the standard hasn’t officially been released. According to Google Chrome’s EULA “If you’ve tested your website with Safari 3.1 then your site should already work well on Google Chrome.”

Google Chrome offers several tools for webmasters including “Web Inspector”, “Task Manager” and “JavaScript Debugger”. When it comes to meta data, Chrome offers shortcuts similar to those found in Google Gears Desktop API meta data (meta tags), application-name, description and application-url for example. When it comes to search results, “By providing an OpenSearch description document (OSDD), you enable Google Chrome to include your site in the list of search engines in the browser.”

In addition to Google Chrome’s tools for webmasters, Google introduces “incognito mode” for users. While in “Incognito mode” Chrome “will not store basic browsing history information such as URLs, cached page text, or IP addresses of pages linked from the websites you visit.”

OTHER NOTES:

- Not including encoding information could prevent CSS parsing.

- User agent string: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.X.Y.Z Safari/525.13

- Google Chrome will percent-encode query parameters within a URL.

THOUGHTS:

While Google Chrome is a great new product, I feel like privacy advocates may not like Google Chrome recording “snapshots of most pages you visit (except for secure pages with “https” web addresses, such as some bank pages)”. Even in incognito mode snapshots “…could still be stored elsewhere on your computer…”.

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Categories: Beta, Chrome, Google, Innovation, News, Search, seo • Comments Off

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Google’s Cost Per Query

by Brian Ussery on August 27, 2008   | Google+ LinkedIn Facebook email author Twitter

Google recently modified how they show results and in doing so virtually crippled at least one popular “rank checking software” package. As “JohnMu” pointed out, Google has always been clear about using these kinds of tools. In fact for as long as I can remember, Google Webmaster Guidelines has clearly stated:

“Don’t use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service.”

Bottom line, automated queries require resources without any potential for generating revenue. It has been said that Google’s “ultimate selection criterion is cost per query, expressed as the sum of capital expense (with depreciation) and operating costs (host-ing, system administration, and repairs) divided by performance.“

During Q4 2007, Google reported capital expenses of $678 million with operating costs of $1.43 billion. According to ComScore 17.6 billion “core searches” were conducted by Google during the same period. Using Google’s formula and financial data along with ComScore’s estimates, it appears as though Google’s average cost per “core search query” was nearly $.12 during Q4 2007. Again, this is a rough estimate and a rounded total but, personally I was a little surprised by the number.

If 1 million sites run ranking reports on 100 keywords 12 times per year at $.12 per “core search query”, it costs Google $144,000,000. Over a ten year period, that’s more than a billion dollars. Given this data, it’s easy to see why Google uses “algorithms and different techniques to block excessive automated queries and scraping, especially when someone is hitting Google quite hard.” Matt Cutts suggests, contacting Google’s Business Development Team about permission on sending automated queries to Google.

Now, I fully understand the importance of ranking reports when it comes to SEO clients. That said, there are folks out there abusing the system, running ranking reports on thousands of keywords daily.

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Categories: Google, online marketing, Search, search engine optimization, seo • 2 Comments »

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TinyURL SEO

by Brian Ussery on July 26, 2008   | Google+ LinkedIn Facebook email author Twitter

A friend of mine recently emailed to ask, how TinyURL impacts SEO? It’s a good question and one many folks can’t answer so, I thought I’d blog my answer to his question!

For anyone not familiar with TinyURL, in layman terms it’s a tool where users can enter long displaying URLs to get a shortened version. TinyURLs are often used where long URLs might wrap and therefore break, such as in email or social media web applications like Twitter. In more technical terms, TinyURLs are short, dynamically created URLs that redirect users to another intended URL via 301 redirect. Because TinyURLs “301″ or permanently redirect, search engines should not index the TinyURL but instead should index and pass PageRank to the actual URL.

It is important to note, TinyURLs to paid links passing PageRank is a violation of Google Webmaster Guidelines and that sites like Twitter use nofollow techniques to prevent spam.

On their own, TinyURLs can be search engine friendly from a technical perspective. At the same time, I wouldn’t suggest replacing your site’s navigation with TinyURLs and would point out that tracking TinyURLs via analytics might be difficult.

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Categories: analytics, Googlebot, online marketing, PageRank, Search, search engine optimization, SEM, seo, Spam • Comments Off

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