Search Marketing and SEO Blog » Search Engine Marketing

Checking Link Popularity

mrwebguru — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 13:00:15 +0000

Oh what an important task!

What is the best way to see who’s linking to you (or your competitors)? It seems like ages ago now, but you used to be able to check your popularity by using the command line search in Google, link:www.domain.com and see who was linking to you, but in a link-driven Web, on a link-driven search engine, Google decided this info was to valuable to search marketers and they disabled the ability to get acurate data with this method.

Googlebot (Google’s crawler) and Slurp (Yahoo’s crawler) are very similar. They are just simple crawlers, each follows links and gathers information to bring home for analysis. These two engines algorithms are very different but their bots are alike. So we can deduce that whatever links Slurp crawls, Googlebot can see and also crawl.

So, let’s use Yahoo to check our link popularity and we can fairly confidently assume that Google would have similar results.

The way I use Yahoo for this task is to do the command line search, linkdomain:mydomain.com. This query will take you into Yahoo Site Explorer, where, BLAMO! it shows that there are about 1600 plus pages with links to my domain.

There are several ways to refine the query once you are at the Site Explorer. Some are built in fields at the top left of the page while other “modifiers” to the command line can show interesting results too.

If you don’t know what to do with this data then I will be happy to teach you in an SEO consultation, where I can teach you also about cutting edge applications you can get and use to REALLY dig out this info, with link reputation data also.

By the way, if you like this post, would you link to it, or me?

Ah, it’s good to be back.

Checking Page Saturation

mrwebguru — Mon, 14 May 2007 17:31:49 +0000

If you have good content, which is helpful to your site visitors, then it is certainly good for you to grow your content. More often than not you can chart the success of a business online and see parallels with the growth of the content on their Web site that is indexed by the search engines. It makes sense also because your own pages can pass link benefits to each other, internally, within your site. Therefore it is logical that the more pages you have the more internal link popularity you can enjoy. Of course your pages all have to have a purpose and some value to the reader.

Both Yahoo and Google have introduced good Webmastering tools to help measure important data like page saturation. But if you want to see real quick where you stand at any given time, I do it like this:

Go to google.com. > Search for: site:www.yourdomain.com

On the results page, there is a blue bar at the top that tells you how many pages you have indexed in Google. Be sure to scroll down and go to the end by clicking on the last number, say page “10″ for example. If you see a link at the bottom of the page that says “see ommitted results” click on it and drill to the end again. While you are here you should see if any and how many of your pages are moving to the supplemental index, which is usually not good.

You want to see your page saturation grow, it is healthy for your business online. This is an easy and effective way to quickly check your progress. This “command line” search also works in Yahoo and in MSN.

Reputation Outranks Optimization

mrwebguru — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 18:56:48 +0000

Winter, 2005, the massive Jagger update is happening at Google and here comes the Big Daddy database too. It was a big 3 months. A lot of spam got cleaned up. And something became apparent, Google had decided that a businesses “reputation,” that is, “what others say about a business” should carry more weight than what a Webmaster, designer or SEO can do or say on the page. In other words, Google had certainly gone past the 50% mark regarding what determined position in search results. And this was to be in favor of “off-page” factors, like link popularity, link reputation and most notably, some element involving peer review, over “on-page” factors like keyword density, frequency and prominence.

Ever since, I have paid close attention and I really think that “reputation” is the word of the decade for search marketing. I believe that Google and Yahoo and eventually MSN all have this in common, that is, organically, the businesses with the best reputation will idealistically appear at the top of the search results. This way the user is more likely remember the good experience that ultimately came from using that engine to search. This is ninja branding strategy also for the search market leadership. They all want to be the “go to” search engine and this starts with getting you to come back.

So, I would say that ever-present and at the forefront of every marketing campaign should be the goal of improving the reputation of your business. Do still optimize your content! But optimize your life while you are at it. I suppose that the Golden Rule comes into play here too.

Buddha on Search Marketing

mrwebguru — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 19:18:06 +0000

During the 6th century b.c. the prophet and founder of Buddhism, Siddhartha Gautama, appeared in northwestern India teaching principles of enlightenment; specifically through meditation techniques and by knowing the Four-fold Noble truth and by practicing the Eight-fold Noble Path in life. One of those noble paths is called “right intent.”

On the path to enlightened search marketing it is imperative that one has the right intent.

If you are creating ways to make more Web pages just for improved page saturation and link popularity benefits, this will not work in Google. However, you can achieve the same effect if you just make a cognitive shift in your intent. For example, if you innovate ways to make more pages in order to better educate your audience, deepening their understanding of your products or services, or providing alternative ways of finding your information (avoiding outright duplication), then this is good for the user and will likely effectively increase your page saturation as well as your sites internal link popularity.

I’ve heard Matt Cutts from Google say it more than once, “If it is good for the user, it is good for the search engine.”

So follow Buddha’s advice of right intent and watch things improve for you online. Meditate on this subject and the truth of the matter will come to light for you.

Namaste,

Robert

Killing Five Birds with one Blog Post

mrwebguru — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 22:53:45 +0000

Hey, this blogging stuff is kinda fun! I even started a category called “Rant.” And no one complained when I posted to it. How wonderful! It’s like having a pet turtle or a goldfish or a… hmmm.

Today, while I was in a consultation with Lauryn at Jackson Hole Central Reservations, the folks who run the Jackson Hole Blog, we were talking about blogging and I thought, “you know, every blog post addresses five concerns in today’s search market.”

Blogging provides fresh content, a dynamic, links, traffic, and builds reputation. Not much packs a punch like that!

No wonder the search engines like Blogs.
Blog on!