Category Archives: Search Engine Optimization

Yahoo! Transitions Organic Search Back-End to Microsoft Platform

ComScore ImageIn late July 2010 Yahoo!’s announced they had started testing organic (also referred to as algorithmic) and paid search listings from Microsoft for up to 25 percent of Yahoo! Search traffic in the U.S. Fast forward to August 24, 2010, Microsoft Bing is now powering 100% of Yahoo!’s organic and paid search results in the US and Canada. For now only the English language is cut over, but Microsoft promises to add additional languages in the near future.

What does this mean for Webmasters and SEO’s? It means that it is important to be familiar with how the Bing crawler interacts with your site. After the full algorithmic transition is complete, you will only need to optimize for one crawler (Bing).

You should check out the Bing Webmaster Center for all the latest info, tips and tools, including some significant updates to Bing’s webmaster tools.

This is a great milestone for Bing and Yahoo!, but is it a great thing for SERPs?

What do you think?

Google Showing More Results From A Domain

Google’s announcement this past Friday (August 21st 2010) has many SEO talking. Everyone is well aware that Google makes approximately three hundred algorithm changes a year, which equates to roughly 1 change per day.  This time Google accompanied an algorithm update with an announcement on their Google Web Central Blog.

So what’s the announcement? Here it is. “Showing More Results From A Domain”. Google announced a tweak designed to surface multiple pages from a single site for relevant queries.

“For queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain, like [exhibitions at amnh], we’ll now show more results from the relevant site,” says Google software engineer Samarth Keshava. “Prior to today’s change, only two results from www.amnh.org would have appeared for this query. Now, we determine that the user is likely interested in the Museum of Natural History’s website, so seven results from the amnh.org domain appear. Since the user is looking for exhibitions at the museum, it’s far more likely that they’ll find what they’re looking for, faster. The last few results for this query are from other sites, preserving some diversity in the results.”

This change does not come without controversy, many SEO are screaming similarities to “Mayday”. What are your thoughts? I would love to hear from you.

The Concept Of TrustRank

TrustRank places a core vote of trust on a seed set of reviewed sites to help search engines identify pages that would be considered useful from pages that would be considered spam. This trust is attenuated to other sites through links from the seed sites. TrustRank should be combined with PageRank to significantly improve search relevancy.

TrustRank

Search Engine Click Through Rate

Below is a graphical representation of the Seach Engine Click Through Rate based on the AOL Data Set which was leaked back in 2006. The dataset contained 36,389,567 search queries with 19,434,540 clickthroughs.

“Obviously, everyone knows that the #1 spot on Google is where you want to be,” says Chitika research director Daniel Ruby. “It’s just kind of shocking to look at the numbers and see just how important it is, and how much of a jump there is from 2 to 1.”

Search Engine Click Through Rate

How does Search Engine Optimization differ for BING?

Now that Yahoo has begun showing BING search results, it is more important than ever to optimize for BING right?

The simple answer is no.

The actual question that should come to everyone’s mind is will this comprise my overall SEO efforts.

Search Engine Optimization is not magic; this topic is well documented. Many if not all of the SEO methods are shared across all the major search engines, with slight weighting differences amongst them. If you follow good SEO practice you will rank well on all SERPS.

There are however some interesting observations I have made. BING & Google both at first glance seem to weigh On Page SEO very similarly. However Off Page SEO seems to influence BING a little more. BING appears to give more trust to aged domains, along with target keywords anchor link positioning.

With that being said my personal opinion is that you should concentrate on good OVERALL SEO rather than worrying about a specific search engine. 

Remember content is king.