SEO Dance

Yahoo! Site Explorer is one of the SEO tools most preferred due to its record of backlinks. Now this Yahoo! service has been bejeweled with more coveted features:

Site Authentication using META tags: For those of you who cannot upload an authentication file to your site, such as a blog, you will now be able to authenticate your site in Site Explorer by including an authentication key as part of a META tag on the home page of your site. This is in addition to the existing mechanism of putting a file on your site home directory.

Detailed Authentication Errors: We now provide detailed errors on authentication failures, making it much easier to diagnose possible problems.

Delete URLs: For your authenticated sites, you can now delete any URLs from the index. Simply locate the URL in Site Explorer and click on the ‘Delete URL’ button. The URL and all its subpaths will be deleted shortly thereafter. This is meant to work in conjunction with the robots.txt file while providing greater responsiveness. Please continue to use the robots.txt protocol to ensure that our crawler does not crawl pages you want to keep out of our index.

Site Explorer Badge: Get a Site Explorer badge for your Website and retrieve the count of live links from the whole web. Go ahead, watch as your site becomes more popular, and show off your link wealth to your visitors.

This Yahoo! effort is one way of showing that they do care about the needs of their users. More power to Yahoo!

site explorer, Yahoo! SEO, Yahoo! site explorer

Google clarified Googlebomb, another SEO jargon for Google search engine gaming. Or is that a redundancy?

What is a Googlebomb?” Technically, a “Googlebomb” (sometimes called a “linkbomb” since they’re not specific to Google) refers to a prank where people attempt to cause someone else’s site to rank for an obscure or meaningless query. Googlebombs very rarely happen for common queries, because the lack of any relevant results for that phrase is part of why a Googlebomb can work. One of the earliest Googlebombs was for the phrase “talentless hack,” for example.

More about Googlebomb via Google Official Webmaster blog

Googlebomb, Google, SEO term

Threadwatch has just announced a new SEO contest. The requirement is to snag the top 1 on Google for the keyword “Dave Pasternack” on March 1, 2007 Eastern time.

Now if it’s Threadwatch that gets the topmost position of the Google SERPs during that time, the next site that ranks the highest for Dave Pasternack will win.

The prize? $1,000 from Threadwatch.

Here’s how to join - Threadwatch SEO contest.

Dave Pasternack, SEO Contest, Threadwatch

I’ve always preferred Yahoo! Groups over Google Groups for a number of reasons and one of the best reasons is it became more popular a lot faster than Google Groups.

However, with Google’s announcement of Google Groups’ new look and features, my loyalty to Yahoo! Groups might get tarnished soon.

The following features are the recent addition to the Google Group interface:

- Pages. Create and contribute to shared web pages with simple drag, drops, cuts, pastes, and clicks (i.e., no coding).
- Customized look and feel. Select pictures, colors, and styles to express your group’s style.
- Member profiles. See who else is in the group and read their profiles. Personalize your own profile with a photo and other details.
- File sharing. Post documents that anyone in the group can access.
- Easy reading of group discussions. Read easily in a Gmail-style interface.

Read full press release.

Google Groups, Yahoo! groups

Brian Clark of the great Copyblogger has shared wisdom on five link building strategies that work.

Aside from the age-old tactic of using article directories, embracing the social media through networking emails and using social network sites and making guest appearances, one way to help the link popularity of your site grow that Brian has highlighted is to simply link out.

Linking out or mentioning links on your blog posts is what I’ve also witnessed to be a subtle way of asking for a link exchange. Sure, getting a link back may not be the usual reason why one would send link love to a person. But a link that’s reciprocated is usually appreciated.

link popularity, link building strategy, copyblogger

After Google’s pagerank update, (is it even over yet?) here comes Yahoo! announcing its search index update.

Just checked this SEO blog’s and fortunately, it’s holding that coveted top spot as opposed to its previous second and third placement during the past few months.

yahoo search update, yahoo index

You have these 21 symptoms:

1) You wish the people who do movie credits would start spelling stunt dubl the right way.

2) When helping a client find the right domain, you suggest she add “moz�? to the legal business name.

3) The S, E, and O keys on your keyboard are broken.

4) When your son tells you he wants to go play in the sandbox, you tell him it doesn’t exist.

or

5) When your son tells you he wants to go play in the sandbox, you fear you won’t see him again for eight months.

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DMOZ Open Directory Project is a collaborative effort of thousands of directory editors, which has just stopped from accepting submissions. The search engine marketing industry has speculated that it has reached the end of it because of a wide plethora of controversial reasons.

But just recently, Search Engine Roundtable reported that forum members discovered that DMOZ ODP has reopened for submissions. Yes, the unavailable page does not show anymore like it used to. I have just witnessed it myself and submitted this blog to DMOZ just a few minutes ago!

Websites submitted to the DMOZ Open Directory Project benefit from the inbound links whenever other directories who use the results of this open source directory get spidered or crawled by search engine bots (little critters that check out updated data and helps in indexing a website).

DMOZ OPD, DMOZ submission, directory submission, open directory

This reminds me when an e-commerce site owner asked me to SEO his sites. I told him I can only offer blogging and other web content services since I have no working experience of a full-scale SEO gig yet. He, then, asked what are the benchmarks that will show him that my services are delivering - increase of search engine traffic from content I said. I hope it’s just that as easy with search engine optimization. But it isn’t.

SEO is not a rocket science as gazillions of experts would profess. But it’s not as measurable as your cup of tea.

Although it’s easier said than done - measuring SEO success, that is, it pays to learn some relatively concrete dipsticks that could show how your SEO projects are doing. Gauges of SEO success depend on what you want to achieve of course. Here are some that might help you picture what SEO success is all about:

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Domainers, the enthusiasts of the domain name industry, who buy and sell domain names are gaining more from the domain name market as time passes by. Domain name transactions are a proof to this.

Just recently, Domain Name Values Weekly revealed the Top 20 Domain Name Transactions of 2006 by polling 30 domain name experts.

The leading criteria for the rankings? Which domain sale will provide the most value for the buyer over the long-term (4+ years).

Here are the top 20 domain name transactions according to domain name experts:

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Search Engine Roundtable forum members have reported observed changes on Google’s pagerank toolbar. I’ve checked on this blog’s pagerank today and still no Google love for its homepage but the seo tool category and other categories are already showing PR3’s.

So yeah, Text-Link-Ads and other link brokerage services can’t get anything out of this blog yet if one of their requirements is a high PR.

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Online advertisement expert Jennifer Slegg shared 25 of the most important techniques that a blogger can do if he wants his blog to get found easily to earn more traffic and get repeat visits.

Most of them tackle the very essence of white hat SEO - maintaining effective blog usability.

Aside from the regular SEO blog tips mainstays such as improving your blog’s navigation area and writing descriptive titles, one that I’d love to reiterate is writing legibly, er, more readably.

Aside from correct grammar usage, it definitely helps to keep blog readers’ eyes comfy with the use of paragraph spacing and easy-to-read fonts. Overly lengthy paragraphs and fonts that are too small can be very annoying.

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After that hoaxy search engines post, I finally got to find the real list of top search engines. All 100 of them as discovered from John Battelle’s Searchblog.

Of course, Google, Yahoo!Search, MSN Live Search, Ask.com, Digg and Technorati made it to the top according to their prominence on cloud. But I’m sad that Dogpile.com didn’t make it.

This list of top search engines though does not include what measure was used to come up with this list.

See all of the Top 100 search engines.

Update: Charles Knight compiled this list of search engines and ranked them according to his own experience in using them and features he found interesting.

top search engines, search engine list

There was a MyBlogLog sold to Yahoo! rumor last November. Now it’s official - Yahoo! bought MyBlogLog at $10 million according to sources.

MyBlogLog is a social network offering a blog tool that allows one check blog stats and gives faces to blog visitors who signed up this service.

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Or so I thought..

Kamrul tagged me to blog about “5 Things You Don’t Know About Me” so what can I do? I’m giving in to this chain blog post (instead of a chain letter, hehe) or meme. So without further adieu:

1. I love multi-tasking.
Detrimental multi-tasking that is. I’m into running hundreds of articles against Copyscape (an application for checking plagiarism hits), playing Internet Scrabble, blog post drafting, sending SMS, while babysitting my niece all at the same time. It was easy when I was still on dialup but not anymore with my cable Internet connection.
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