We have a mixed assortment of articles for you this week. We started things off on Monday by sharing with you a number of the online resources we like to consult whenever we're trying to find out what's on the minds of SEOs or looking for advice on the best SEO practices. Our own articles and forums are great resources, of course, but in this field you can never have enough information. On Tuesday we ran an article on link building, a basic SEO practice. Finally, on Wednesday, we reviewed Wikia Search. It's the search engine anyone can edit, brought to you by the same folks that brought you Wikipedia. Does it offer a real alternative to the major search engines?

Do you wonder how search engines work? Are you looking for the best way to improve your link popularity? Then you'll want to check out the SEO-related tutorials we're highlighting this week from Tutorialized. You'll learn all about these and other topics. Why not check them out today?

Our Thread of the Week this week is for all the novice SEOs out there. You've learned how to check your site's backlinks in Google and Yahoo. You know that they're both leading search engines, so why do you get such different results? This thread answers that question. Be sure to stop by the thread, especially if you have some extra insight into the matter.

Finally, our Spotlight, just for readers of our newsletter, considers deep linking. We often hear that visitors should be able to get to any page on our site with no more than three clicks from our home page. If we have a directory structure that's deeper than this, and receive back links to particularly deep pages, will the search engines devalue those links? Or is there some other reason we shouldn't have such a deep structure? Read the Spotlight to find out.

Until next time,
SEO Chat Staff

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All White Papers.

SEO Index

Wikia Search Goes Live in Alpha Mode

Establishing Link Popularity and Increasing Exposure

Online Resources for Would-be SEOs

    SEO on Tutorialized

 SEO Thread of The Week

 SEO Chat News Spotlight

Introducing Tech News by Developer Shed. News you can't use.

It's edgy! It's irreverent! It's all about technology! It's news you can't use, and you won't want to miss it! View this week's edition to learn the answers to these burning questions:

Why should you move across the street from Angelina Jolie? Here's a hint: X-ray vision... Want a degree in Nuclear Mustacheology? Here's your chance... What happens when you set a bunch of Dinosaurs loose in Dubai? Nothing...it's just a big desert. Who would rob a two year-old's piggy bank? A @#$%!, that's who. Can you really feel a color or smell a touch? How about hearing how something tastes? And most importantly, can Jen pronounce this big word? Watch the video!

Wikia Search Goes Live in Alpha Mode
by Terri Wells -- 2008-01-09

What can you say about a search engine that goes live in alpha mode and publicly admits it is “aware that the quality of the search results is low”? Say hello to Wikia Search, the open source brainchild of Jimmy Wales, the father of Wikipedia. He believes Wikia Search offers an antidote to the “black box” approach of the major search engines. Is he right?

Not according to most of the pundits. Michael Arrington at Techcrunch gave the fledgling search engine a review so nasty you could almost see the pixels flaming: “…it may be one of the biggest disappointments I’ve had the displeasure of reviewing…it’s barely a search engine at all…this product is an inexcusable waste of time…”

Chris Sherman from Search Engine Land is slightly kinder. While noting that “it’s really just yet another crappy search service that may, potentially, if all goes well, eventually turn into something useful,” he says that right now it’s “essentially useless as a search engine.” Ouch.

Read Wikia Search Goes Live in Alpha Mode

Establishing Link Popularity and Increasing Exposure
by Stephen Davies -- 2008-01-08

Online marketing is fast becoming everyone’s cup of tea. It’s a common myth that one can easily earn high profits working from home. Not everyone who enters into business on the Internet succeeds. Just building a website isn’t enough to make money online. There are a lot of online business tactics you need to know and follow.

For any online business to flourish, link popularity is a major factor to consider. So what is link popularity? Most Internet users come to know about a particular site through search engines. Based on various algorithms, search engines give a ranking to the sites indexed. The better the ranking, the more popular your site is.

The keywords in your website play a crucial role in determining the ranking of your website. The more common your keyword is, the more you come down in the ranking list. Does this mean that websites with common keywords never flourish in business?

Read Establishing Link Popularity and Increasing Exposure

Online Resources for Would-be SEOs
by Terri Wells -- 2008-01-07

Whether you’ve just learned what search engine optimization means or you smirk at the “googleprayer” tag, you know that SEO is one career that offers the ultimate in on-the-job training. So where do you turn for the textbooks? Keep reading for a guided tour.

As always, I have to start out by saying that I don’t do search engine optimization for a living. That said, I’ve been writing about it for more than three years now, and my resources have kept me on the ball as far as what’s been happening in the field. If you get a sinking feeling when you put “seo guides” into Google and see more than two million hits, take heart. You’ll still want to go through the list I’m going to give you to decide which ones will work for you. I’ve used all of them to further my own SEO education.

When you find the ones you like, you will want to consider setting up a feed to have new posts mailed to your inbox. Practically every web site is doing some kind of RSS feed these days. I don’t have everything on a feed, because I don’t want that kind of flood in my inbox. But I find myself relying more on the resources I receive in my email than I do on the ones I have bookmarked, simply because it’s more convenient.

Read Online Resources for Would-be SEOs

Tutorialized has a dedicated SEO section for Search Optimization, Website Marketing, and many other SEO/SEM related tutorials.

How Do Search Engines Work - Web Crawlers
How Do Search Engines Work - Web Crawlers.
Read the tutorial.

The Best Way To Improve Link Popularity
There are many ways how to improve link popularity.
Read the tutorial.

Link Building By Giving Free Word Press Themes
Building links by giving free Word Press themes.
Read the tutorial.

SEO Website Tips Website Analysis
4 minute ECommerce and SEO Video tutorial covering site reviews and reports.
Read the tutorial.

Website Promotion Basics
Web site promotion is the most important step in making your business succeed online.
Read the tutorial.

Google vs Yahoo backlinks

Is there a reason that when I search link:http: //www .mysite .com in Google, it returns about 4 results...

But when i search http ://www .mysite .com in Yahoo Site Explorer, I get 330 results back?

Can someone explain why Yahoo's backlinks are this much higher?

Thanks a lot for your help.

Google will not display all your backlinks as Yahoo does...You can only check your backlinks as to whether they increase or not after the Google backlinks update.

Google shows a random sample of backlinks but you can see the real number of your backlinks in Google Webmaster Tools. I believe Google does this to avoid other sites spying on the links of their competitors.

Posts from this thread may have been abridged or removed. Forum members are responsible for the content of these posts.
Read the full thread.

The Value of Links in Directories

You've probably heard that you should not build directories in your web sites too deep. That is, it shouldn't take more than three clicks from the home page to get to any page on your site. One of our forum members wondered if that was because there was a "natural depths" to URLs for SEO purposes - or if MSN and Yahoo devalue links that go to really deep pages. For example, if someone links back to a page on your site that looks like /store/housewares/kitchen/cooking/pans/copper, would that link be devalued by the search engine? Or is that just a myth?

JagNet, one of our moderators, said that Google doesn't devalue deep links. There are other reasons, however, that you might not want to create too many subfolders within a site. He said that "it makes any changes to the structure of your site that much more difficult with numerous pages to 301 redirect."

He noted the case of a store with a growing inventory of copper pans. If the store did not yet have a separate category for copper pans, but had to create one, "all my copper pans would require a new URL and a 301 redirect as a result." How much simpler it would be with URLs set up as /store/ product.html! The site owner or designer could create and delete categories as needed without changing product URLs. Worried about your visitors finding their way? JagNet observed that "A good breadcrumb trail would then still help the site visitor locate their position within the store."

So if you do have deep links to your web site, you needn't worry about them becoming devalued. But it would be wise to save yourself some possible headaches in the future by keeping your site structure relatively "flat." Do organize, but consider how much you will have to change as your site grows. You'll be glad you did, and so will your visitors.

Read the thread on this topic

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