DaveN points at a screenshot of a Google search result with Paris Hilton giving.... well nevermind. ;)

I did a search on the same phrase and saw someone was putting thier URL in a top ranked image. Pretty smart marketing there, and no doubt one of the cheapest ways to tap into popular culture.

I bet eventually many non profit groups and others sites which have significant authority and limited funds will start making their voice heard in the search results far more, especially on image searches, where they may put the names of people they feel caused problems (and/or other messages) on horrific images of piss poor humanity in action.

I haven't done much on the image optimization front, but there can only be a limited number of factors for images:

• file name

• image alt text
• image title
• text near the image
• image age
• click streams
• trust of site image is on
• links referencing the image

Tag Viewer is a Ruby on Rails AJAX application that makes it easy to cross reference tagged resources at popular tagging sites.

The idea sorta came to life after I started to find the footer tag links on my keyword research tool rather handy. Your thoughts on Tag Viewer would be appreciated.

I don't intend to commercialize Tag Viewer in any way. I had it made because I think it will be useful for helping me do web research. While I claim to be an SEO, I am much more of an info porn junkie than an SEO ;)

Via Brickman comes an interesting WMW thread stating Google may be using traffic analysis and user feedback (clickstreams, etc) to help determine the quality of a site.

I have spoke to a well known engineer at another major engine who told me that it plays a significant role in their engine.

It makes sense that they would want to allow users to give feedback, but they wouldn't want to use just traffic analysis, because that would just promote large conglomerate sites and/or stifle innovation across the board (by promoting first movers at the expense of better products that followed).

In the WMW thread Walkman said:

Traffic? This would mean that a search engine is the last to know /show that you're popular.

But when you think about it, hasn't search ALWAYS been this way? Following links that OTHERS PUBLISHED. The links were not only used to crawl, but also a good way to imply trust or quality.

Quality global web search has never been about helping you find stuff first. That is what vertical databases, vertical search services, human editors and reporters are for.

Links to a site without traffic no longer imply the same level of trust that it used to. Sites selling link trading services use sales copy like:

The more websites you can get to link to your website, the higher you will rank in the search engines, guaranteed!

And even the mainstream media is talking about SEO.

Some people will claim that using searcher feedback as a baseline to help determine site quality is nonsense, but most of those people are probably launching new brands off of their old brands and current popularity, which make them much more likely to instantly get significant traffic / mindshare / linkage data.

It is easy to learn from your own SEO experiences, but it is also easy to extend what happens to you as to be the way things happen everywhere, even if that is not the case.

I don't think Google would want to base a ton of the overall relevancy algorithm on site popularity (and clearly they don't since the top results are not always the most popuar sites), but they can and may use traffic patterns and searcher feedback to filter out junk sites. And it may help certain types of link spam stick out (ie: a site that just picked up 50,000 backlinks but few of them drive any traffic) may be a red flag for spam.

Couple some of the temporal ideas with power laws and much of the spam should be pretty easy to detect.

Google talk recently even started redirecting chat URLs through Google.com. Do you think they would do that without reason?

Sometimes I get quotes like this

"Bottom line, out-going links are always a BAD IDEA for SEO. It creates what we in the SEO community call SEO hemorrhage. It BLEEDS off GOOD PR. Not a good thing. We actually NEED MORE incoming links."

and

Somewhere in Google's webmaster guidelines is a warning about having more than 100 outbound links on a page. My advice is to take that point very seriously.

Using the same principle proves, at least to us here in this one office, that 101 outbound links on a page (don't forget to count navigation links in the total) may lead to an immediate decrease in absolute PageRank even if it's not demonstrated in the toolbar.

These ideas are typically short sighted and miss a broader view of the web. Is it possible to start from scratch and build up a brand while being completely greedy with your link popularity? Sure it is, but generally it is going to be easier to create a useful site if you are willing to link out to some related resources.

Especially if you write about your industry you have to source some ideas or information. Why avoid social interaction? How can you only view links as a cost? If you link out enough sometimes they come back. Heck sometimes other content authors will even defend your brand for you without you even knowing about it.

What are search engines but link lists? And most of the links are free. And people come back and use them again.

I do have some clients that for a period of time did not link out to some sites that they should of. For about a year or so a client outranked their own manufacturer for the manufacturer brand name in Yahoo! and MSN. In that case I was greedy with the link popularity because I didn't want to lower our exposure. After Yahoo! started ranking the appropriate site #1 for the brand name then I freely linked out to it.

For most any site there are probably at least a few sites that can be linked to.

As far as controlling internal link popularity goes, the reason for the 100 link suggestion was based on page usability. How many options can you give a person before you give them too many to be useful?

As recently noted by Matt, crawl depth is typically a function of PageRank:

One of the classic crawling strategies that Google has used is the amount of PageRank on your pages. So just because your site has been around for a couple years (or that you submit a sitemap), that doesn’t mean that we’ll automatically crawl every page on your site. In general, getting good quality links would probably help us know to crawl your site more deeply.

The theory that I have though is that you have to point at others thoughts that you find interesting if you hope to have others find you interesting. There is only so much one person can do. As a bonus to getting free content ideas by reading and linking at other people sometimes those links come back.

Some people have taken the PageRank funneling concepts to an extreme where they are even heavily using the link nofollow attribute on their own internal links, or whenever they point at official documentation on other sites. Both of which are usually bad form.

To snag a quote from DG

Sorry you fucksticks, but if you've ever used nofollow as anything other than a joke or to fuck someone else, yer an idiot, Just bend over and wrap yer lips around yer own asshole and suck until yer head explodes. At the very least, you'll reduce the number of stupid people that can breed. Follow?

I think things like many nofollows to internal pages might set off some sort of SEO flag. Just like being stingy with outbound links often forces some sites to have unnatural inbound link profiles.

It is just as easy to use links within your content to funnel your link popularity and actively drive users toward your desired goals. In the end goal to funnel visitors one way make sure you make it easy for them to go back in the other direction if they make a mistake or arrive on your site on the wrong page, otherwise you may hurt your conversion rates.

Bleeding PageRank is probably a bit arbitrary when you factor in the larger social aspects of the web. Plus some engines may also look at outbound links when trying to theme the content of your site.

Most content publishers have to vote for at least a few others before too many people are willing to vote for them. If you are a business selling products and services it still makes sense to link to business partners and other useful resources just to increase the depth and richness of your site without needing to recreate the web to do so.

SEO Question:

Are you aware of a tool or a service that can provide reliable search volume history for certain keywords? Like how many searches there were for "keyword phrase" in each month of 2005.

SEO Answer:

Keyword Intelligence and Keyword Discovery (in depth review of many keyword research tools) both offer seasonal data to some extent, but both are limited in their database depth. Search traffic falls off sharply when you leave Google and Yahoo!. Unless you are Google or Yahoo! it is just plain tough to gather exceptionally useful and meaningful data (unless you are in a non English market with other major players).

With Google and Yahoo! their own commercial motivations are to show increased volume on core terms to create artificially competitive markets. Google and Yahoo! don't make tons of money when advertisers buy a bucket full of long tail 10 cent clicks instead of bidding up the core heavily searched industry terms. They don't mind if you find some long tail terms, but they want everyone bidding up the core terms.

Due to the engines recommending the most obvious terms and some advertisers feeling they NEED to advertise on those terms some keywords get so competitive that the margins are negative. This slim or negative margin environment spurs on rank checkers, click fraud, and other market manipulating activities which drive up the core search volume numbers provided by the major engines on the most common terms.

Yahoo!'s keyword research tool (my cooler version tool is available here) will show you the raw number of searches for the prior month. For example, last month they stated that SEO had 51,787 searches on Yahoo!.

Since that is a short term in a hyper saturated market you shouldn't be surprised if 90% of that search volume is junky automated traffic or ego searching. I usually rank in the top 10 in Google and Yahoo! for SEO and it typically sends me about 5 visitors a day. While Yahoo! only shows "SEO Book" as getting about 5% of the search volume as the term SEO I get way more traffic for SEO Book.

Yahoo! has recently started mailing out keyword promos reminding people to bid up the most competitive holiday related terms. Those are probably good words to steer clear of paying for. Many ignorant bidders jumping into the market at the same time creates an ugly overpriced playing field, although if you can sell them their PPC traffic the overpriced bidding may be a beautiful thing. Keyword terms with a large standard deviation may create good arbitrage opportunities.

Google recently started offering 12 months seasonal search data with their keyword tool. Unlike Overture, they only show graphical estimates and trends instead of exact search volume numbers. But I think it is only important to get a glance at trends since exact numbers usually do not matter much (due to automated traffic etc). They also provide quick snapshots of ad market competition and estimated bids. Both of which may be useful in deciding which markets are valuable to enter prior to investing into content creation.

In many markets the breadth of the keyword space matters much more than just the volume of the top few keywords. Some markets which are driven around a well known brand with few well known product names may have 90% of the search volume come in under the brand name or a couple slight variations of it. Most markets have much more traffic at the other end of the keyword spectrum though. Keyword phrase modifiers and alternate phrases may be huge. For example, yesterday over 75% of the search queries referring visitors to this site were unique.

You can also learn about many of the odd search patterns, consistent seasonal trends, and how search relates to society by reading the Hitwise blog. While they do not have anywhere near the amount of data Google or Yahoo! do, the Hitwise blog is always an interesting read, and does a great job of marketing their services.

Mind-share leads to more mind-share. And mind-share leads to expression. If the search volume trends are going up then likely the number of people talking about the topic will go up as well. If you are looking for what is hot right now there are numerous buzz trackers.

When thinking about keyword data remember:

• the biases of the providers (wanting to sell expensive clicks or having small a keyword database size)

• the numbers provided by any tools are just estimates
• consider how spread out the search terms likely are in your industry.

If you are new to an industry, have limited capital, limited brand equity built up, and your market is hyper-saturated it may be far more profitable to go for niche long tail search phrases, since those will be easier to compete for and they typically have more implied value / targeting / demand.