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I have worked with some large multi-national brands who had multi-lingual sites, but they typically hired us for English optimization, and never really asked for much more than general advice and strategies (internal link flow, subdomains vs unique domains, etc.) when it came to other languages and cultures. I noticed a few differences between Google.com & International Google results while traveling, but I still only analyzed stuff that was published in English.

What are the best informational sources for SEO in Japanese? SEO in Chinese? SEO in Spanish? SEO in your language or region? How do you feel SEO in your area differs from the SEO advice you read from those of us who operate in the English US marketplace? I also would love to publish a guest article for each language.

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Mark Glaser recently queried me about improving the SEO of PBS's MediaShift. The tips and advice I gave him apply to most blogging and media websites. The piece was well balanced, with information from Poynter, and he mentioned Joost's great article on Newspaper SEO.

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As Google clearly states (with their actions), bartering for links is fine as long as money is not part of the exchange (or if there is editorial discrimination and relevancy when it is). What is the guiding principal for bartering links? Massa said:

When do other people WANT to accept your link request, publish your article, run your press release or accept your submission?

When it does something for them.

Either it makes them money, saves them time, provides added value to their visitors or they believe it makes them look good or smart or benevolent to their visitors, their peers, their friends, their relatives, to the search engines, award sites or just about anyone that can make them a buck or stroke their ego.

So, the absolute best chance you have of getting that link is to cover as many of those bases as possible at the same time. When you can satisfy some need, want or desire of the webmaster, the visitor to the hosting site and it makes the search engine look smart, BINGO. You just hit the SERP buster hat trick!

If you are going to sell links, you can cloak them as being AdSense ads to lower your risk profile, because if it's Google its got to be Good! Or you can require the link purchase be wrapped in a guest article or some other format that does not look like a link purchase. :)

Update: Gab Goldenberg wrote this detailed post on real sneaky text link ad disguises.

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The line between being clever and giving out too much information, can be seen here.

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One of the reasons I was so motivated to change the tagline of this site recently was because the new site design contained the site's logo as a background image. The logo link was a regular static link, but it had no anchor text, only a link title to describe the link. If you do not look at the source code, the link title attribute can seem like an image alt tag when you scroll over it, but to a search engine they do not look that same. A link title is not weighted anywhere near as aggressively as an image alt tag is.

The old link title on the header link for this site was search engine optimization book. While this site ranks #6 and #8 for that query in Google, neither of the ranking pages are the homepage (the tools page and sales letter rank). That shows that Google currently places negligible, if any, weight on link titles.

I have ranked other sites for more competitive queries based exclusively on internal links (without thousands of links from other sites, like those pointing at the SEO Book home page).

Does the image alt text carry more weight? In a word, yes. Here is now I proved that to myself through yet another site error. :)

One of my hobby sites has a fairly flat file structure, and some of the internal pages are somewhat linkworthy. The site was not marketed aggressively and the only sitewide link to the homepage was the logo, which I forgot to put an image alt tag on. Google ranked 2 pages on the site well for the core keyword, but neither of those pages were the homepage. I noticed the lacking image alt tag, fixed it, and within a week my homepage was outranking the other pages.

If the only link to your homepage is a logo check the source code to verify you are using descriptive image alt text.

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Would this be considered a paid link? Where is the line drawn?

Nice business model too. Are those arrows pointing at the ads legit? How about the request to support our sponsors?

Get a few hundred million in VC funding, buy some old domains. Fill the domain with user generated content. Place a thin layer of link schemes and please click ads on the top. Web 3.0...Wow. Exciting times.

Also, learn how to rent millions of links in a Google friendly way.

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The SearchGuild domain auction at Sedo just ended. $8,655 for a known brand, an old trusted site with references from sites like Wired.com, and 28,000+ inbound links. Even without getting the content that is still cheap. Some of my leading affiliates make that per year just from recommending my book, let alone all their other affiliate income from recommending other products and services.

If you had to try to build those same links Search Guild has in today's market they could cost $100,000 and/or a couple years to build. Even after the site changes ownership, most of the inbound links will stick too. In fact, if you move a domain to a new URL and ask people to redirect the links, over 90% of them will not.

Just like a strong domain name offers defensible traffic, so do those old links pointing at an old trusted site. If I had not already bought, ran, and closed Threadwatch, I might have considered buying SearchGuild, but I already have too many SEO sites to spend another $8,000 on a domain name that I would then have to develop. I hope they do something cool with it.

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In the past many Google penalties were blatantly obvious. You either got traffic or you did not. But as time has passed penalties are getting blurrier, meaning your site can be penalized and still get traffic from Google. Some traffic reductions are due to competitive market forces, some are due to algorithm changes, some are due to automated filters, and some are due to penalties. If you are new to the market (and in some cases, even if you are experienced) it is hard to know which problems, if any, are holding back your ranking potential.

A friend just told me about how his Google traffic went way up after he spoke with a Google engineer, but he didn't want to talk about it publicly. I wonder how many other people are just like him, but don't speak about it or don't know they are penalized? And then I think back to the ban of the official AdSense blog, Brian Clark's PageRank hit, and Sugar Rae's ranking woes, and have come to the conclusion that spam fighting has become more of a shoot first and ask questions later game. They do not make a lot of mistakes, but when your site is just a number, it hurts pretty bad.

From a marketer perspective this shoot first shift is an important one which requires a few things of online publishers hoping to keep their businesses profitable:

• Track your traffic using analytics tools, such that you know if/when something goes wrong, can prove it with hard stats, and can research it more specifically.
• Publish at least 2 or 3 sites in different markets to give yourself additional data points on whether the issue is site specific or not.
• Use public relations and viral link marketing where you once used link buys. If you are still renting links try to make them covert, and offset them with many natural links.
• If possible package your offering as a service, so that you can justify charging recurring, and/or create an affiliate program. These make your income less reliant on search engines.
• If nobody cares that the site is missing there is no harm nor foul. Build up enough social significance that you can cause enough noise if/when something goes wrong such that Google gets enough blowback to fix the issue quickly.

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Wiep published a group survey of SEOs on factors affecting the value of a link.

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So Worried that You Forgot to Compete

While on the link buying panel at WebmasterWorld's Pubcon a few people were pushing that you might need to consider how Google will view your current link buys 5 years down the road, and that they may hurt you then for what you do now. Upon hearing that I said something like "less than 5 years ago I bought spammy links and if I did not I probably wouldn't be speaking here right now". That got a cheer from the crowd. Who wants to be worried about what Google thinks or does 5 years from now? That is no way to innovate or take marketshare from current market leaders.

Reviewing Result Quality

When engineers view your site they don't just look at "if you have a few spammy links" but they try to consider the quality of user experience and the ratio of clean links to dirty links. If your site is good and ranks for years then you are going to get many natural links that dwarf any spammy links that were part of your site launch.

Building a Real Business

If your business model is entirely reliant on Google 5 years from now, your user experience is sub-par, and you haven't built up any brand equity after ranking for 5 years then there was not much effort put into building a legitimate business, and it deserves to fail. But the sites that rank get self reinforcing exposure. If SEO is part of your brand building and site building strategy you simply can not sit around waiting for the rankings to come in.

Inferior Sites Ranking #1

It is easy to lack objectivity when talking of the quality of your site, but in some fields I compete in, many of the top ranked competing sites are ran by people buying a slew of spammy links and pointing them at their (quite obviously) English second language sites. Because they rank, those sites get some number of self reinforcing links. If I did nothing but create great content they would still outrank my site. You have to buy marketshare in one way or another (public relations, AdWords, link buying) if you are trying to gain marketshare and your market is competitive.

Who Buys Links & Uses Push Marketing to Buy Marketshare?

That does not mean that I am an advocate of bad user experience or poor quality content, but if you care about SEO and have a new site in an old market, user experience and content quality are not enough unless you do some push marketing at launch.

• AOL sent out millions of spammy CDs to market their service.
• Google pushes their logo onto ads they distribute all over the web, has the largest push ad network on the web, has some of the dirtiest domain traffic partners (many cybersquatters), recommend infidelity, and bundle Google Checkout usage with lower ad prices and free links.
• Yahoo! has an in house SEO team and a few years ago Yahoo! was one of the leading link buyers.
• IAC buys a ton of links and aggressively cross links their sites.
• Microsoft has got in trouble for launching new products by bundling them with their old products and steals traffic by sending seobook.om traffic to their live search product.
• Monster.com owns a ton of thin lead generation sites.
• eBay pays affiliates to spam Google.
• One of Google's large ad distribution partners tried setting up a deal with me to rank their ads in Google's search results using aggressive black hat spammy techniques, in which I declined to participate in.

We Don't Write the Algorithms (or Hand Edit Search Results)

As an SEO you simply give the engines what they want. Looking at what they rank and how they market their sites gives you better insights for how to rank than blindly trusting the tips they give you to prevent you from ranking and suggesting you buy their ads. All of the web portals you know and love use push marketing to build their businesses. Why shouldn't you?

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The Wikipedia ranks for a lot of competitive keywords because they are cited everywhere while acquiring the back links to be envious of. They also keep most of their link juice by linking to their internal pages and placing no-follows on external links.

I found out recently that they rank for competitive key phrases on Google such as:

• Loan - #1 and 2
• Mortgage - #3
• Insurance - #4 and #5

The chart below is from the RankPulse list of top websites ranking in the top ten results for their 1,000 keywords sample database.

But when I added high traffic classifiers to the phrases above, Wikipedia’s rankings dropped significantly.

• Insurance Quotes – Not found in top 1000 Google results
• Mortgage Rates – Not found in top 1000 Google results
• Loan Consolidation - #36

1. Although Wikipedia ranks well for competitive phrases, they don’t belong to the associated topical communities. They rank primarily on site authority.
2. While they have enough content to rank for said terms, they don't have pages targeting those terms. In many cases the relevant content for the phrase is compressed as part of a broader related page.
3. Their title tags target core keywords and lacks modifiers needed to rank well for popular terms that Wikipedia did not dedicate unique pages to.

By fixing the above issues, they may very well rank for the remaining 11 keywords.

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Philipp Lessen recently asked me to guest post on Blogoscoped about the state of the world of SEO in 2007. I talked about recent events, editorial considerations, industry consolidation, and all sorts of other goodies.

I also did a mini interview with Web Pro News at the Blog World Expo. I pulled my wonderful wife into the interview, and she was kinda shy. :) Today is her birthday so we are about to go out soon.

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MSN Search Update

MSN announced they are upgrading relevancy and coverage. The increased coverage likely means that more inbound link sources are getting indexed. From looking at rankings of a few of my sites it looks like:

• anchor text got A LOT more weighting

• many lower authority links that were not passing weight (due to not being in their index) are passing weight. For some competitive core industry related phrases (not SEO, another industry) I see a site that went from #150 to top 5 based on the anchor text of lots of low authority links.
• fresh links are still heavily trusted, but sites with older links but few fresh links now rank a bit better than they used to in the older MSN, likely due to the more comprehensive index coverage. for as much as Google has beat down some directory links, MSN just gave them a lot of love.
• MSN is still screwing up some navigational queries. For example, my homepage does not rank for seobook. Though I have already seen them fix some of these issues.
• Internal anchor text still counts, but it might seem slightly demoted, as a side effect of more competing pages and more links getting indexed.
• MSN mentioned that they were also looking to get more into universal search.

Yahoo! Search Update

Yahoo! recently updated their infrastructure, then rolled out universal search and are getting more aggressive with search suggestions. You can see they are serious about universal search because they are not only promoting their internal content, but they are also promoting YouTube videos. I believe this also indicates that YouTube will remain the #1 video destination in years to come.

Rand also noticed that Yahoo! is using their homepage to drive search queries for recent news. As Yahoo integrates their own content in their SERPs even more aggressively look for them to get more aggressive on this front to help further their search brand.

Google Tests

You can read about the Google test on WMW, which is seen on some Google IP addresses, but has yet to spread to Google.com.

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As noticed by Dave, some of the Google search suggestions are leading to thin affiliate sites. See generic viagra or generic valium for example.

As shortcusts and search suggestions get more advanced and more common they are going to be cheap traffic sources for those who understand the engines well enough to benefit from them. As search engines roll out these features you can always keep searching and keep testing until you figure out what causes them to select certain pages.

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If you are looking to build links one of the easiest ways to do so is to place yourself inside a conversation that is already wildly spreading. Sites like Techmeme and Del.icio.us show what stories were recently hot, and you can find some bloggers who cited those stories using Technorati and Google Blogsearch. Google has a date based filter on news and recently launched a date based search filter for their regular search results which allows you to find fresh content on any topic. If you follow up on a popular story and contact these people you might find a few easy to acquire high authority links.

Find a Popular Idea and a Hook

Lets run through an example of how to do this. So on Techmeme right now Google vs Facebook is a popular story. The thesis of the story is that Google is going to create an open API. So I ask myself if I have an original take on Google and openness. I remember my post about Google not being very open.

Polish Your Story

I can polish that post and market it, or I can take the best bits of it and rewrite it as a new post that cites some of the popular people posting on Google vs Facebook, insert pictures and a chart comparing Google to Facebook, and then start emailing some of the websites I came across on Techmeme, Google blog search, Technorati, and recent results in Google's regular search index.

Polishing your story, aggregating data in a pretty format, citing sources, and stroking egos are crucial to helping your story spread.

Avoid Brand Damage

It might be harder for me to succeed with this on Seo Book since Google branded SEOs as being scumbags. If my site was not about SEO it would be far easier for me to get links from those other sites, but it is hard to push market an SEO site to high authority tech channels without expecting some brand damage as a result.

Even if your site covers a lovable topic you still can get burnt if your ads are too aggressive, your contact email looks automated or spammy, or you contact mean spirited people. Use your gut instincts for judgement calls on who you should contact and how you should contact them, and don't place ads on your linkbait.

If your site is brand new then you likely are not risking that much if one person responds with a hate post. I once had a person link to me from a PageRank 8 site with over 1,000 inbound .edu links as the punishment for contacting them. Sorry to offend and thanks for the high authority link worth about $500. :)

Use Blog Comments Too

Another option would be to leave blog comments or have a friend leave relevant blog comments, but these are typically much less effective than personalized emails at building links. If you leave insightful comments without looking like a link spammer you are more likely to get links from your comments.

Many Ways to Filter Blog Search Results

When you search on Technorati and Google Blogsearch you can search for people writing about a specific subject and then organize those results by freshness or authority. You can also search for blog posts that cite a specific post related to your post. Another option with using date and blog search filters is to go back to some of the people who cited one of your recently popular posts and ask them to look at the post you are trying to spread.

These Tips are Timeless

You can use all these search tips to aid your link research using seasonal stories that spread a month ago, last year, or three years ago.

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I need to verify the new CMS is working ok. I figure the easiest way to do so is to do a bunch of stuff with the site. Plus this will help me know what other features should be added. If you have any SEO questions please ask them below. Also if you have any ideas for improving the site layout and feature set I am all ears on that too.

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Sphinn published a post about many general directories getting nailed by Google. It is a case of marketing too heavily to the SEO community without being able to face public scrutiny.

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When a page or section is new and you are competing against older sites that have built authority for nearly a decade one of the easiest ways to gain traction is to pick a specific keyword phrase that is not that competitive and go after trying to rank for it.

Often I find myself making a page title relevant for a wide basket of related keywords, then when I check the rankings the page comes in at #12 or #16. My mom's blog currently ranks at #13 in Google for weight loss calculators and #4 for free weight loss calculators using the page title Free Diet, Calorie, & Weight Loss Calculators. The page also ranks #30 for diet calculators and is deep for calorie calculators.

The best thing to do here is to focus the title on the phrase closest to ranking at the top, and try to get it a few more links. If the page starts picking up organic traction after ranking and eventually grows into a self reinforcing authority status then I could help it get more traffic by including those related phrases that don't make much sense to highlight in the page title right now.

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If a site has 100 units of link equity and offers 10 sitewide categories then each category gets 10% of the link equity. If that same site limits its number of sitewide categories to 5 then each category gets 20%. By being a webmaster who tracks results one of your biggest advantages you have over webmaster who do not track results is you can limit your navigational selection to suit your financial goals.

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I have been noticing with Google recently that if you search for something like seobook video that Google pulls in results for SEO Book video as well. They may have been doing this for a while, but if so it seems like it recently got more aggressive. If you are banking on targeting an unpopular version of a keyword you may actually end up having to compete with some of the most authoritative pages ranking for the alternate more authoritative version.

This feature, spell correction, and toolbar search suggestions eat away at some of the easiest portions of the organic SEO arbitrage market by helping search engines consolidate language usage patterns as best they can.

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Many authoritative tool pages have gobs of link equity, but rank for few keywords beyond their official name because they offer little background information. Providing no background information not only wastes ranking opportunities, but also makes it hard for some people to use the tool.

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In an SES panel yesterday Matt Cutts claims paid links pollute the web ,while he advocates off topic link bait as a useful search marketing strategy. Michael Gray and Greg Boser are a bit more honest:

Link Baiting, what Google’s suggest as link building strategy, is as egregious if not worse for relevancy than paid links - viral content of such an off-topic nature should not help your rankings and is more “polluting” than relevant paid links.

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Wikipedia can cross link just about everything and look legitimate with it because they are non profit. Independent webmasters have to be more focused if they are trying to create profitable websites. Navigation can be nearly useless and spammy looking, or with a few minor tweaks it can look legitimate and well categorized. Compare the following two examples:

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The types of link buys that Google has a distaste for are the links that are exchanged directly for cash. Modify your way of thinking just a little and there are a wide array of easy to buy high value links awaiting your purchase. The key to having a low risk profile is to make the link appear indirect.

Most links occur because of a value exchange of some sort. People link because

• they find a resource to be valuable

• they get paid directly for linking
• they get paid indirectly for linking

Here are 16 indirect ways to buy links without looking like you are on a link buying binge.

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Dan Thies published a post about how people have been hacking Google's search results using proxies to get the original sites nuked as duplicate content. He also explained how to defend sites against the problem using free PHP scripts developed by Jaimie Sirovich.

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One of the comments on the article I wrote for Wordtracker mentioned WordsFinder, which allows you to create a list of keywords from a piece of content. Their tool uses the Yahoo! Term Extraction Tool, and also provides a few additional keywords next to the results.

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I recently was asked to write an article for Wordtracker about finding sources of keyword inspiration. I tried making it fun. Let me know what you think of it.

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I recently changed one of my robots.txt files pruning duplicate content pages to help more of the internal PageRank flow to the higher quality and better earning pages. In the process of doing that, I forgot that one of the most well linked to pages on the site had a similar URL as the noisy pages. About a week ago the site's search traffic halved (right after Google was unable to crawl and index the powerful URL). I fixed the error pretty quickly, but the site now has hundreds of pages stuck in Google's supplemental index, and I am out about $10,000 in profit for that one line of code!

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Jim Boykin recently offered tips to help webmasters understand how to audit a site to see what pages are the most link rich, how internal link equity flows around websites, and how to optimize your internal link architecture.

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SEO Question: Do domain names play a role in SEO? Do search engines understand that the words are in the URL even if they are ran together without hyphens in between them? What techniques are best for registering a domain name that search engines like Google will like?

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As an SEO one of our primary goals is to get more search traffic for targeted search terms. Search traffic is typically far more valuable than other traffic sources because it is so targeted. But non-search traffic is perhaps the single most reliable sign of quality.

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Frank mentioned this NYP article about how some companies are buying sites outright rather than increasing their AdWords bid prices. I expect this to be a large and growing trend for at least a couple years. As Google gets more efficient at pricing the ads they increase the value of the top ranked sites that sit alongside those ads.

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Subdomain Spam

Since Google has been over-representing site authority in their relevancy algorithms many sites like eBay have begun abusing the hole with the use of infinite subdomains. These techniques not only effect branded search results, but also carry over to many other competitive keywords.

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A friend named Brent sent me a link to the Cyc project page on Wikipedia and a background video on Google Video. Cyc is an AI project which aims to enable AI applications to perform human-like reasoning.

What happens to the value of your content when search engines get better at providing answers directly in the search results? Is your site the type of site they would like to cite, or does it fall further down the list on another category of queries? What can you do to make them more likely to want to source your site? Does your site have enough perceived trust and value to draw clicks after they put your content directly in the search results?

As search engines work harder at things like universal search, search personalization, and cyc any sites which are only facts and filler won't get much exposure.

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Some top ranking sites do not deserve to. When one is lucky enough to be in such a situation it allows us to get away with being lazy, because a site does not have to be too efficient to make money if it is well represented for targeted search queries that send free traffic. But every website has upside potential, even if it already ranks #1.

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By the time people are looking to automate a no cost SEO technique, as a competitive strategy it is already dead. Blog spamming was once highly effective, but when commercial blog comment spam software was available the practice already stopped working in Google.

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Danny Sullivan's recently made a post highlighting the downside of human review for search engines:

[Tim] Mayer reminded that what's relevant for a query can often change over time. Google's Udi Manber, vice president of engineering, made similar remarks when I spoke with him about human-crafted results when I was visiting at Google yesterday.

One example he pointed out was how Google's human quality reviewers -- people that Google pays to provide a human double-check on the quality of its results, so they can then better tune the search algorithm -- started to downgrade results for [cars] when information about the movie Cars started turning up. The algorithm had picked up that the movie was important to that term before some of the human reviewers were aware of it.

Obviously human review is used at all major search engines, but even when outsourcing reviews humans have limits just like with producing content. Even if Google has 10,000 quality raters those people can only be trained to find and rate certain things.

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Joe Whyte offers tips on how to get free .edu links - just ask students to work for you on campus websites in the help wanted section.

Students = under-priced workers.
Free or cheap .edu links = under-priced links.
Nice

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SEOish offers 7 different views on how to become successful in the search game starting with next to nothing.

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Information architecture is probably the single most important and most under-rated aspect of the search marketing strategy for large websites.

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Google Trends now shows the top 100 fastest growing keywords by date. Each keyword shows peak search time, search profile by hour, related keywords, top web results, news results, and blog results.

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Eric Enge noted that at the Searchology event that Google's Udi Manber stated that 20 to 25% of the queries that Google sees in any given day are queries that they have never seen before.

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When creating a robots.txt file, if you specify something for all bots (using a *) and then later specify something for a specific bot (like Googlebot) then search engines tend to ignore the broad rules and follow the ones you defined specifically for them. From Matt Cutts:

If there's a weak specification and a specific specification for Googlebot, we'll go with the one for Googlebot. If you include specific directions for Googlebot and also want Googlebot to obey the "generic" directives, you'd need to include allows/disallows from the generic section in the Googlebot section.

I believe most/all search engines interpret robots.txt this way--a more specific directive takes precedence over a weaker one.

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You can learn a lot about how the search results will change based on recent changes that have been made and by seeing what tests the engines are running. As SEOs we track the algorithms quite intensively, but the search result display is just as important. Google allows webmasters to see what search tests they are currently performing via Google Experimental Search.

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Google bought YouTube, but is struggling with ironing out ad revenue shares and advertising. What is the easiest way for Google to fix these issues? Integrate YouTube and Google Video directly into Google's search results.

Using what legal loopholes they may and something they call universal search, you can now listen to music videos directly from Google.com search results. This creates a marketplace that many businesses will need to be in to stay relevant, destroys a whole vertical of web spam, AND allows Google to monetize the organic search results (via YouTube).

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A friend recently launched a new site and promptly crafted a great linkbait award idea that got so many links that over 95% of the website's inbound links were reciprocal links. The award program worked so well that traditional PR firms used our list of award winners to seed their list of people they wanted to contact to talk about a client.

The site did not rank anywhere near as well as it should have because there were too many reciprocal links gained far too quickly when you consider the rest of the site's link profile.

One of the reasons that it is so important to mix link types is such that if any of your marketing really takes off you want some semblance of balance to your link profile.

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DaveN offers his recovery plan for a recent Google algorithm which has affected the rankings of many sites engaged in buying and selling links.

Key points from Dave's post and comments:

• DaveN focuses on the importance of building topical and trusted links before reaching into the outlier parts of the web. Older and more trusted sites can then loop back to buying lower quality links to shore up their rankings for important keywords.

• Links from high quality trusted blogs are a more effective way to buy / build links than links that have obvious footprints associated with being bought in a group of other links.
• Dave also noted that in the past people who bought links may have got hit, and link sellers might have got their outbound link passing ability blocked, but this is the first time Google actively lowered the rankings of link sellers.

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If you are passionate, a site can have value without ranking, as rankings are a lagging indication of site quality, market timing, and/or marketing savvy. If you are offering something that is substantially similar to competing sites, it has virtually no value until it ranks at the top of the results.

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Many publishers hide additional information sections that they want people to be able to select viewing if they show interest in the topic. For example, each of Think Progress's navigational sections are expandable, and some publishers have more information or other informational cues to make additional page content visible. These can be used deceptively, but if you have a strong brand and are trying to use them with the end user in mind, I doubt search engines will think the intent is bad.

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Forbes recently wrote an article about Google's supplemental results, painting it as webpage hell. The article states that pages in Google's Supplemental index is trusted less than pages in the regular index:

Google's programmers appear to have created the supplemental index with the best intentions. It's designed to lighten the workload of Google's "spider," the algorithm that constantly combs and categorizes the Web's pages. Google uses the index as a holding pen for pages it deems to be of low quality or designed to appear artificially high in search results.

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I once saw a college professor cite a page about caffiene on a low quality site about pornography, gambling, and drugs on his official profile page. Many people never look beyond the page when linking to a story.

This is not to say that one should put a story on a bad website, but that one should make the story page they are currently marketing as clean as possible so it is easy to link at. And you are probably better off placing your marketing stories on your key site if you think they will still spread.

Over time people will become more aware of using content bait on a crappy site, but for now most people don't look beyond the page when referencing a story.

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Social news sites come to prominence largely over the controversies associated with people gaming them, and without people gaming them few would ever garner a critical mass. Marketers spamming a social news site is part of the growth cycle.

• Andy Hagans highlighted 17 social sites that send traffic.

• Some authoritative sites like CSS Reboot and Recruiting.com are powered by Pligg.
• You can find thousands of Pligg sites here, and find a few that are relevant to your industry by adding your keywords to this string. For example, business.

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If search engines already have a reason to trust your site then leveraging SEO may help you gain more exposure. However, if your conversion process is not smooth, search as an isolated marketing channel is rarely an effective long-term business model.

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Not talked about much, but my partner noticed Yahoo! once again shifted paid inclusion to a yearly flat rate.

While Search Submit Pro allows you to have more control over listings and is sold on a costs a per click basis, their Search Submit Basic allows you to submit URLs for $49 per year per URL.

In the past Search Submit Basic was called Search Submit Express. It charged a flat inclusion price and sold clicks on CPC basis. Here is an Archive.org link to the old program.

If you have launched a new site and are not getting much Yahoo! traffic, submitting a few of your highest value pages is a good call. If you have key deep high value pages that are not staying indexed in Yahoo! this program also makes sense.

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There are two basic ways to do SEO. One is to look for the criteria you think the search engine wants to see, and then work to slowly build it day after day, chipping away doing great keyword research and picking up one good links one at a time here or there. If you understand what the search engines are looking for this is still readily possible in most markets, but with each passing day this gets harder.

The other way to do SEO is to move markets. When I interviewed Bob Massa, his words search engines follow people stuck in my head. So what does it mean to move markets?

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WMW has a good thread about some of the changes people are noticing at Google. Two big things that are happening are more and more pages are getting thrown in Google's supplemental results, and Google may be getting more aggressive with re-ranking results based on local inter-connectivity and other quality related criteria.

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Wikipedia ranks #2 for Aaron right now. They also rank for millions of other queries. They don't rank because their information is of great quality, they rank because everything else is so bad. About.com was once considered best of breed, but scaling content costs and profitability is hard. Google doesn't hate thin affiliate sites because they are bad. They only hate them because the same thing already exists elsewhere.

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There are many ups and downs to adding a user generated content section to a site. It has been interesting watching the effects of SEOMoz's user generated content and points systems.

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Jill Whalen recently posted to SEL about how duplicate content penalties are not penalties, but filters.

If you duplicate on a small scale duplicate content does not hurt you (other than perhaps wasting some of your link authority), but if you do it on a large scale (affiliate feed or similar) then it may suck a bunch of link equity out of your site, put your site in reduced crawling status, and / or place many of your pages in Google's supplemental results.

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People have asked my thoughts on content remixing and syndication. It is an ineffective approach to marketing.

There is enough content on the web, which is why Google is getting selective with their index. The problem with ineffective content is not that it needs mixed up and syndicated. If a site syndicates watered down vanilla remixed content they have too much content for their link authority, and most of their pages are doomed to Google's supplemental results.

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Rae recently posted a 5 person interview about link building that is well worth a read. 5 experts are interviewed. Each answers a set of questions without seeing the other answers until after the interview.

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I recently spoke to a friend about some of his internal site structure errors and figured it would be worth it to share some of the better tips I gave him with readers here.

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Google works so well because they are scalable, but they are not adverse to paying people to review content quality, because they love human computation, just see their Google Image Labeler game.

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Jen noticed that Google's Kim Malone announced that in the next couple months AdWords will start displaying content targeted ad locations.

Google AdSense pays most publishers crumbs for their ad space. People who are running AdSense ads are willing to sell ads. And sites that have AdSense ads on them are probably actively managed.

Is there a better way to get a list of relevant pages to acquire links from than to run a content targeted AdSense ad campaign and ping those webmasters?

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David Berkowitz recently wrote an article asking what if links lost their value?

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[Update: use this supplemental ratio calculator. Google is selfish and greedy with their data, and broke ALL of the below listed methods because they wanted to make it hard for you to figur out what pages of your site they don't care for. ]

A person by the nickname DigitalAngle left the following tip in a recent comment

If you want to view ONLY your supplemental results you can use this command site:www.yoursite.com *** -sljktf

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If something ranks and it shouldn't, why not come up with a natural and easy way to demote it? What if Google could come up with a way to allow scrapers to actually improve the quality of the search results? I think they can, and here is how.

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WebmasterWorld has been running a series of threads about various penalties and filters aligned with specific URLs, keyword phrases, and in some cases maybe even entire directories.

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Some people are wildly speculating that Google and other engines may create historical databases of SEOs and site relationships to identify spam.

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Ever since Google has got more selective with what they will index, the model for profitable SEO changed from chucking up pages and hoping some of them are profitable, to where it makes sense to put more strategy into what you are willing to publish.

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A current dumb, but popular, trend is to get user to tag pages.

How valuable is a Technorati tag page to a Google user? Probably just about worthless, IMHO. The only reason they exist is that it gives bloggers crumbs of exposure in exchange for their link equity, and it gives Technorati a way to build authority and get an automated scraper to pass as real content.

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If you put one form of internal navigation in parallel with another you are essentially telling search engines that both paths and both subset pages are of the same significance. Many websites likely lose 20% or more of their potential traffic due to sloppy information architecture that does not consider search engines.

Many people believe that having more pages is always better, but ever since Google got more aggressive with duplicate content filters and started using minimum PageRank thresholds to set index inclusion priorities that couldn't be further from the truth. Shoemoney increased his Google search traffic 1400% this past month by PREVENTING some of his pages from being indexed.

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Many people are syndicating the story that search personalization will kill SEO. Nothing could be further from the truth. Each time search engines add variables to their ranking algorithms they create opportunity. Plus as the field gets muddier those who understand how communities interact with search will have more relative influence over the marketplace.

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Google claimed they killed off the ability to GoogleBomb sites. Matt Cutts stated that it should not affect people SEOing their own sites, but some SEOs are already talking about GoogleBombing competitors to knock them out of the search results.

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Are you suffering from the Google Sandbox, the -30 penalty, the -950 penalty, too many reciprical link partners, an anchor text or link spam related penalty, duplicate content issues, or the latest algorithm, search index, or quality update? It may not be what you think. DigitalGhost recently described Google's most common SEO related penalty:

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Right now search relevancy algorithms are heavily tied to overall autho