You On Top

Aaron makes a good observation about the Stanford Daily Online Edition.

It seems as if Stanford, the college that ownes the PageRank trademark, is selling links on their homepage for $300 a crack. Now, don’t get me wrong, there is no problem with selling links to cover cost, but a quick review of the links offered shows tons of gambling sites as well as Viagra and other prescription sites, and in my opinion, this is going low.
In fact, considering the fact that about 80% of the links are sold to outside sources, I doubt it has the real effect that people are trying to get out of this authority site…

A new Deep Link Analyzer Tool from the people at WeBuildPages. It basically “analyzes how the deep link ratio of a site affects its rank in search engines.” “A website’s deep link ratio is the comparison of the number of backlinks that go to pages under the top level of the website to the total number of backlinks for the entire website.”

On another note, Stuntdubl makes a good post about the importance of seeing things through the eyes of the search engines.

Linking For Google - The Web We Weave
The sudden disappearance of these sites, along with a notable difference in search results under other highly competitive phrases has led many in the SEO/SEM industry to conclude Google has implemented some of the spam-link busting filters outlined in their 63-point patent document published two weeks ago. After examining results displayed at Google since Friday April 8, we too are drawn to this conclusion. In other words, something has changed in the way Google ranks sites. Given a lack of any other credible information, we are looking toward the sorting methods and ranking techniques Google has protected under U.S. and international patent laws to provide details…

[Read More]

Link Wars

Remember the uproar about the Google patent? Well, it appears that Google has been updating their indexes to follow some of the methods for determining whether links are spammy…

[More from this one here]

According to the Internet Search Engine Database, by using Title tags correctly, you can increase your SEO conversion!

Search engine optimization (or SEO) is clearly important in this day and age. An entire industry has arisen around the quest to get to the top of the search engines, with black and white hat SEO witches battling it out to stay in the top five positions.

It sounds like a scene out of dungeons and dragons doesn’t it? However it’s a serious business when hundreds of thousands of visitors are lost because rankings disappear, which equates to hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue.

In a previous article I discussed how to select keywords to help you to start planning a targeted campaign. When you get to the end of this article I hope you should have a fair understanding of the importance of the HTML Title tag with regard to search engines and far more importantly with regards the humans, the people, the guys and gals that you want to get to your website so that they can buy your goods and services.

[Read the Rest]

“Quepasa told me over the phone that many of the users to their site are 2nd and 3rd generation Hispanic Americans that are largely more educated about the internet. Most all speak both Spanish and English, and over 45% of the estimated 14 million Hispanic users make a purchase online last year as opposed to lower numbers for different groups. Golden demographic or a bunch of backwash nonsense?”

[Read More]

If you are wanting to try something really unique with your Web content, then by all means have a look at this site here.

What is it?

Direct manipulation, particularly drag and drop, is under utilized in desktop applications and is almost non-existant in web applications. The following examples demonstrate that direct manipulation is possible in modern browsers.

Each example is a proof of concept. I’m answering the question Can I do this? without considering the question Should I do this?. That said, some of these examples are pretty impressive, so it’s nice to think that sometimes the answer will be Yes, you should. [Read the rest]

“…all other things being equal, to what degree do the various search engines understand the different spellings of common words - and how does it affect search results and ranking? For example ‘colour’ is the English and International way of spelling what Americans spell as ‘color’.”

Found on High Rankings Forum…

It is about 6 weeks now since Google has published its’ new toolbar with the “Autolink” feature and it seems that the controversy is growing…
Here is an article from the Washington Post that adds more wood to the fire:

• More auto-links are in the works (ex. telephone area codes, which link to maps of covered regions, and UPC or bar codes, which retrieve links to product descriptions.

This seems very arrogant off Googles’ side to do so as the controversy over this feature is growing and remains unresolved.

For more reads regarding this feature and how to disable it:
ocus on Google AutoLink
Google’s Statements on Toolbar Autolink
Google AutoLink: Server and Client Side Solutions

What Windows Task Manager Won’t Tell You

Over the last few weeks I’ve noticed a dramatic decrease in my system’s performance. It’s actually gotten so bad that I’m starting to think that it somehow became infected with a virus or some other piece of spyware. Proceeding under that assumption, I verified that my anti-virus definitions were up to date and ran a virus scan on the entire system. I also scanned the system using spyware removal tools Ad-aware and Spybot: Search and Destroy; but neither program discovered anything.

Read more here…

Check IT List: How to detect spyware on PCs
10 steps for detection of spyware on PC’s.

With the latest revamp in Google’s algorithm (which is still going on at this moment), a lot of people are noticing great changes (for good and for bad). One thing that is definitely changing is the different factors in the values of incoming links. It therefore seems as if the days of easy ranking gained by plenty of links and a certain anchor text are short.
One new element implemented in order to improve search results is the concept of “visual page segmentation” which was recently proposed in a paper entitled “Block-level Link Analysis”, by Deng Cai, Xaiofei He, Ji-Rong Wen and Wei-Ying.

How does it work?
In it’s first argument this paper suggests that the current link popularity algorithm is faulty due to the fact that it weighs each page as a whole, and therefore, any link, located anywhere on the page is given the same value.
However, the average page has different semantics on its different parts / blocks. That is, that the left block will most likely have general navigation links and some potential advertising. The right block, on the other hand might have links to related articles as well as additional advertising. Lastly, the middle block, will contain the actual content and therefore, the most powerful links.
Separating pages can be done using a computer with a vision-based program. Each block then can be considered as the fundamental unit of analysis, rather than the entire page.
When a link is scored in terms of its block, the links’ contextual relevance can be interpreted more intelligently by search engines.

VIPS and the SEO?
Since different parts of the page are now weighed differently, links from the “article” block will most likely be the most valued links and will likely to be considered as “true recommendation”. Rented links, and links gained by the different networks with normally are placed on the right block or on top, are risking being devaluated.

VIPS and the SE’s
By implementing this technique and separating each page into blocks, search engines will also be able to measure page relevancy more accurately. It will allow search engines to find the theme of each block rather than the entire page, and offer more accurate results.

In Summery
While some links values might be devaluated, others should be valued more thanks to a better relevancy. This can hurt some webmasters who like gaining links using certain techniques, but can also be a great tool for fighting spam. Articles, Directories and Press Releases links are going to be highly valued and therefore should be highly considered.