Atlanta Web Design Company – DoubleDome

Many websites will link to your website if you pay them for the link. Is this a good method to increase the link popularity of your website, or can you get in trouble if you use paid links?

Google is very clear about paid links. They don’t like them. Google even has an official form that enables webmasters to report paid links to Google:

“Google and most other search engines use links to determine reputation. A site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it.

Link-based analysis is an extremely useful way of measuring a site’s value, and has greatly improved the quality of web search. Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links count towards this rating.

However, some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.”

Christopher Bradley

Google has released an official statement about poor inbound links

Last month, Google published an official statement about low quality links in their webmaster blog. Here are the main statements:

• Linking is a significant factor in Google’s ranking algorithm but it is just one of many factors. Other factors are the content of your web pages, the site structure and the appearance of a keyword in the different web page elements.
• If you have a high quality website and get links from spammy websites, try to contact the website owners and ask them to remove their links. Google will not help you with that.
• It the webmasters of the spammy website are not cooperative, don’t worry and focus on the links that are under your control.
• Google recommends to optimize the many factors than influence indexing and ranking. The top 10 optimizer in our website optimization tool has been designed for exactly that task.
• It analyzes dozens of factors that influence the position of your website in the search results and it shows you what exactly you have to change so that Google will list your website on the first result page.
• Google says that low-quality links rarely stand the test of time and that they may not be considered by Google’s ranking algorithm.
• If you want to make sure Google knows about the spammy links and is valuing them appropriately, you can report them to Google with their spam report or paid links report forms.

Christopher Bradley

The effect of the Yahoo/Microsoft deal on your website

You’ve probably heard about the Yahoo/Microsoft deal. This will have a major impact on the search engine landscape and there definitely will be effects on your website rankings and the number of visitors that your website will get.

The basic facts

Yahoo is going to give up their own search technology and use Microsoft’s search technology instead. Bing.com will power the organic and the paid search results on Yahoo (except for premium ads on Yahoo). Self-serve advertising (i.e. the AdWords competitor) will be managed by Microsoft’s AdCenter. Microsoft will get access to Yahoo’s search technology and can use it to improve its own search technology.

What does this mean for your website?

1. You should optimize for Bing.com.??Yahoo/Bing will have a search market share of at least 15% (that’s the current market share of MSN and Yahoo combined – some statistics show a much higher market share).??If you do not optimize some of your website pages for Bing, you’ll lose a lot of visitors and sales. Fortunately, IBP’s top 10 optimizer already enables you to optimize your website for Bing.??The optimizer works with the US version of Bing as well as with many country versions. Recent research has shown that Bing’s traffic is more likely to convert.

2. Yahoo’s inbound link data will probably be lost.??Yahoo is the search engine that currently returns the most inbound link data. When Yahoo drops its index, that data will probably be lost. We recommend using IBP’s link manager if you want to get an overview of the websites that link to your website.??The link manager in IBP will retrieve all links that are returned by Yahoo, Bing, Google and other search engines.

3. A big PPC provider will be gone, an even bigger provider will appear.??Microsoft will provide the search ads for Yahoo and Bing. Yahoo will close its own paid search offerings. That means that you will be able to manage your ads for both Yahoo and Bing in one user interface. It probably also means rising bid prices on Yahoo and Bing.

4. Yahoo might close some of their websites.??Yahoo might put its Internet directory into question as well as their alternative search applications SearchMonkey and SearchBOSS. Applications such as Yahoo Maps might also be reconsidered because Bing offers similar services.

5. There will be two independent search result pages.??Yahoo will have full control over the user interface of their search form. The ordering of the results, the layout and the whole search focus can be different from Bing. That means that you still might have to optimize your website for both search engines.

Christopher Bradley