Two search tidbits

Category : Search Engines | 25 views | 2008-06-17 11:30:18

At SMX a couple weeks ago Eric Enge and I did a 20-25 minute interview. The interview transcript is now out in case you want to read through it. We discuss some of the ways to get links that are likely to stand the test of time:

Those links are typically given voluntarily. It is an editorial link by someone, and it’s someone that’s informed. They are not misinformed, they are not tricked; there is no bait and switch involved. It’s because somebody thinks that something is so cool, so useful, or so helpful that they want to make little sign posts so that other people on the web can find that out.

I mentioned link-generating methods from original research to case studies, a service, or even an open-source product. We also discussed widgetbait and some of the criteria on whether Google would consider something spammy or not. We talked about when reciprocal links can get excessive. We discussed a good rule of thumb of when to link out to other sites (when it’s good for your users).

At the very end of the interview, I took the opportunity to send some props toward SocialSpark. As opposed to some services where paid posts pass PageRank, SocialSpark posts require nofollow so that any paid links don’t pass PageRank. If paid posts respect that requirement from SocialSpark, they’d be within our webmaster guidelines. I’ve noticed once or twice where an advertiser tried to get an extra nofollow’ed link in a SocialSpark post, but when I’ve mentioned those 1-2 examples, IZEA has taken action to correct that. So we’ll continue to keep an eye on things, but I wanted to mention the progress that I saw in SocialSpark.

By the way, we’re currently caught up on paid link reports, so if you know of sites (maybe in your search niche) that appear to be selling or buying paid links that pass PageRank, it’s a great time to let us know. Use the authenticated paid link spam report form and someone will investigate the report. We’ll be concentrating primarily on the sellers, but if you send us a site that appears to be buying links that pass PageRank it’s trivial for us to look up all the backlinks for that site to find potential sellers and work from there. That feedback will also help us improve our algorithms, so thanks in advance for any feedback you want to provide.

What’s the second search tidbit? Last Thursday I was a guest host for the Daily SearchCast. I thought it was going to be a slow news day, but when I woke up that morning Jeremy Zawodny had just announced that he was leaving Yahoo. So Danny Sullivan and I ended up having plenty to talk about.