It appears that webmasters are beginning to simply write off Yahoo. Recently Yahoo started to scan websites and display the results within the search results:

Yahoo has labeled this “searchscan” and this with the over active crawl of Yahoo’s slerp is beginning to annoy webmasters around the world. On a thread in webmasterworld there are discussions about slowing down Yahoo Slerp and banning it all together.

Personally from an SEO standpoint, I am torn, traffic is traffic and even if Yahoo only gives you 10% of your traffic that is still good quality free traffic. Now the “gray hat” seo part of me, says block Yahoo Slerp, but not because of it’s over active crawl or because of its new site scan, but block it to stop your competitors from seeing what you’re doing with your link campaigns. Most software tools and competitors use Yahoo to check websites back link profiles. Your back links let your competitors have a clear picture as to what links you have, what links may be new and what links may be paid. Blocking Yahoo will eliminate the competition from seeing what links you have and what links may be new.

If you want to block Yahoo Slerp here is where you can do it.

If your heavy into link building in a highly competitive market, blocking Yahoo may be the answer to staying ahead of your competition.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…

Until now websites created from Flash (Adobe Flash (previously called Shockwave Flash and Macromedia Flash) is a set of multimedia technologies developed and distributed by Adobe Systems and earlier by Macromedia. Since its introduction in 1996, Flash technology has become a popular method for adding animation and interactivity to web pages. Flash is commonly used to create animation, advertisements, various web page components, to integrate video into web pages, and, more recently, to develop rich internet websites). It was invisible to all search engine spiders. This meant that a beautifully created flash website could not be indexed beyond and meta information or simple text included on the website.

Today Google and Yahoo announced that in partnership with Adobe they have the ability to index flash. This should come as a huge relief to high end web designers and site owners who have spent big bucks on beautiful flash websites. This technology has long been suppressed by the SEO (search engine optimization) community, because of this indexing problem.

According to Google software engineers Ron Adler and Janis Stipins:

Google can now:

Index text content within Flash

1) This Flash text can be used for the snippet that appears beneath your link in Google search results.

2) Flash text will be used to compare with keywords used in Google searches.

3) Index able Flash content includes text within Flash buttons and menus.

Index links with Flash

1) Links within Flash files can be followed by Google’s web crawler.

Google cannot index non-textual Flash content

1) Google can’t index images within Flash files.

2) Google can’t index text that appears in Flash-based images.

3) Google will not generate anchor text for non-text, Flash-based links.

Google is referring to this as the “Flash indexing algorithm” which is long overdue considering that flash has been around since 1996, and 12 years is not really the anticipated call to action that one would expect from 3 multi-billion dollar companies (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft).

The SEO community does not recommend creating websites exclusively created by flash, but using it within your site should be just fine now.

I spent this evening reading about Link Building. The question is now, what is acceptable link building? The all mighty Google has recent issued warnings to us yet again. I know what used to be OK, but nowadays Google has said that any link that is paid is against Google’s guidelines and that Google plans on penalizing sellers and buyers of links.

I never quite understood penalizing buyers of links? Are you saying now, do not buy links for your website to rank well, buy bad links for your competitors sites so they get penalized? I think I may have to run an experiment on this :-P.

Well it seems now that the masses are kind of fed up with Google’s rules, and I have read in a very popular SEO (Search Engine Optimization) forum that based upon Google’s latest guidelines that nearly every single SEO (Search Engine Optimization) company on earth is now going to be considered black hat (black hat, a term used to describe SEO companies that do not 100% obey Google). Google does not want people “optimizing anything”, they do not want link building, they accept link baiting (although link baiting it now the equivalent of fishing in a pond with 8 BILLION other pieces bait, even if you have the best bait in the pond how is the fish to find you? Google. Can you answer this?) So tighten your drawers, Google is going to change the rules, yet again.

Many SEO experts have been discussing whether anything is really going to change, or if they are just going to scream longer and louder this time? The truth be told that most sharp link builders are always going to be 3-4 steps ahead of Google, and Google will never catch up to these guys. So why bother, all Google is doing is increasing the profitability of the really good link builders. Links are the glue that keep the internet as one, and without them, the internet would be 100’s of 1000’s little internets all completely separate, can never do away with links Google.

Most SEO’s now know that Google does not look fondly upon: links in footers and sidebars, labeling links as sponsored ads or sponsored links, so these old school techniques are now fruitless and hardly worth paying for.

So what Google has done is raise the bar, what we are all going to see is the price of great links going way UP! In recent history, you could get a nice bunch of PR4-5 links for say $35 per month, well I bet in the next 6 months a solid PR5 link is going to be $250 a month, why you ask? Because Google is making it much harder to build out links that are going to pass link juice and count towards your search engine ranking and placement. Google has been applying discounts to nearly all links, footer links, sidebar links, site wide links and any kind of link floating around your website is probably only worth about 25% of what it used to be worth, because Google has been discounting these types of links further and further.

Knowing this a multitude of options and opportunities for links in text have been born. Google views these links in text as a premeditated link. Of course people are all over this theory. There are Pay for Review sites now (where you post a review of a site or product and they include links back to your website), there are 4 versions of software that will index a website and turn any piece of text into a link and so on.

So the next step in Google trying to stay ahead of the link market is relevancy. Not your old standby, a couple of sentences on topic, now you will be required to have an entire page probably 400 words or greater on topic (and you better not even try to have more then 5-6 links per page) or Google will probably not count those links.

Google is driving the price of good, under the radar links UP, so you better forget about the old stand buy link brokers, where quantity was the ticket.  Now you better look for quality, as this is all that will matter, 1 super high quality link is going to be all you need to get vastly improved ranking in the near future.

MSN, while lacking on its webmaster tools, has recently added some new tools in their MSN adcenter labs.

These are free tools, which are just fantastic!

If you looking to optimize your website, for particular keywords, or looking to micro manage your PPC ads; the tool for detecting commercial intent tool rocks. This basically displays the typical intent of the searcher (based upon their search query) and the probability of the user to actually buy. You can also use this tool to query URL’s or domains to see what the typical visitor’s action or reaction is going to be based upon statisics.

They also have a Keyword forecast tool, which will offer you details of internet search volume on daily and monthly bases, the search trends and the demographics of the searches. They offer this in multiple views, as detailed as one could possibly want (this is quite unusual for MSN or Microsoft).

The tools they are offering for free are second to none, everything: Text ad writing recommendations, keyword group detection, search funnels, product classification, even a tool for keyword extraction and keyword price estimation coming soon.

MSN has also created powerful new tool with API capabilities called the Keyword Services Platform. This information is so valuable to managing your e-commerce business, I am just starting to dig into this, but it has real promise.

I cannot recommend these tools highly enough, get in there and dig for the gold nuggets you need for your business’s future success.

Microsoft has outdone themselves with this tool and not even the master of the net Google has yet to create such useful tools, nonetheless making them free.

I woke up this morning to find out that Google had seriously altered the path of my weekend, two of my clients pages dropped in search. Man, why is it that Google has to play big brother? Google created a good system for ranking websites based upon numerous criterion, based upon meta info, page content, website architecture, links (both internal and external) and numerous other off site components. The problem is that smart people have figured out what Google does to rank websites, and they are exposing it. Now, instead of Google constantly working to improve its method, it has decided to simply become the enforcer of its territory. They invented numerous technologically advanced theories 10 years ago, and have basically become the fat cats and not continued to expand on their technology. There are numerous things they could do to improve their search results, but they are now a public company with billions of dollars in profit and are spending every resource possible to ensure that their profits and revenues continue to soar.

People involved in search engine optimization (aka SEO) are constantly watching, reading and sharing everything they figure out about search engine spiders, how they act, and what works and does not work. The internet (the vehicle in which Google has used to reach fame and fortune) is the ultimate tool for real time communication, the internet is what people involved in search engine optimization use to share insights and theory about search engine spiders, they post these thoughts and ideas across the net, on blogs, forums, wikis and email. Amazing how the internet (Google’s Playground) has become its biggest hurdle for future growth …funny how that works.