AOL has a bias toward consumer (ie: non b2b) type queries, and they may have a higher % of brand related searches that both act to place a bit more emphasis on the top search result than general searchers from other search engines, but some people have dug through the 20 million search queries AOL gave away and come up some stats.

SEO Blackhat dug through the numbers and has a free tool for estimating clicks based on search volume estimates and rank position.

I only attended a couple panels at SES, but Greg Boser was on one of them, and he always has a way of saying things in a clear way. He mentioned in the past that a divide and conquer technique was a great way for small sites to compete with larger rivals. He then went on to say that with Google's current reliance on site age and link related authority that it may no longer make sense to use a divide and conquer method to rank well in Google. If you look through Google's search results for competitive insurance related phrases typically they are dominated by old sites, government and education sites, news sites, and/or sites which are focused on all 50 states. In the past it might have made sense to make sites for each of the most important states, but with the current Google one site with an authority rank of 8 is probably going to be worth far more than a half dozen sites in the same vertical that only have an authority rank of 6 (there is no AuthorityRank meter...just assume it is some arbitrary value based on age and link equity).

Another thing which Greg mentioned in his speech was that it seems Google is really moving away from trusting anchor text as much as they used to. I recently bought an old domain from a friend that was just wasting away. It was old and had a few average type links from related websites, but had no relevant anchor text for the terms I wanted to rank.

I changed the internal link structure to focus the home page on a moderately competitive term. Just doing that ranked it in the top 20 for that term. I then got it a couple low-to-average-quality links with the plural version of that anchor text and got it ranked in the top 10 for both versions. In the past that site might have required either higher quality links or many more descriptive link anchors to rank.

In the past (say a year or two ago) I was way more focused on getting specific anchor text from external sources and probably went a bit far with it. Now it seems all you need are a few relevant decent quality descriptive links and your site will rank so long as your site has a bit of age and a few legitimate links.

Large websites tend to have many useless pages associated with them. They may be caused by any of the following

• poorly structured or poorly formatted user generated content
• content duplication due to content management issues
• canonical related issues
• dangling nodes which act as PageRank sinks
• navigational pages which are heavily duplicated and soak up link authority and do not provide a clean site structure

I recently have had a couple SEOs show me various navigational techniques which made thousands of thousands of somewhat similar mid level navigational pages.

Some pages make sense to be indexed and provide a great user experience if searchers land on them. Others provide a poor user experience.

Search engines do not like indexing search results from other engines, so if your navigational scheme has an element which acts similar to an internal search engine you probably do not want all those search pages getting indexed if they are heavily duplicates of one another.

I was talking to Stuntdubl the other day, and he stated one of the main things he likes to look at to get a general indication of the health of a site is to look at the ratio of quality pages indexed to total pages indexed from your site.

If lots of your indexed pages are heavily duplicated and/or of low value that may cause search engines to crawl or index your site less deeply and not index all your individual product level pages.

A few people have created free cool web based tools which allow you to search through the 20 million keywords AOL recently shared with the marketing community. http://www.aolsearchdatabase.com/ - allows you to sort data by:

• User ID
• Keywords
• Date of search
• URL

http://www.askthebrain.com/aol/

• allows you to sort data by TLD
• allows you to sort data by keywords leading to a specific domain
• by default the tool also displays the top few thousand URLs, the number of referrals to a URL, shows the top keywords leading to a URL, shows the keyword diversity ratio

http://www.dontdelete.com/ - search by keyword, keyword stem, or part of a keyword to find related keywords. For example, if you searched for dati it would return all keywords that had dating in them.

Anyone think I should add a link to any of these tools on my keyword research tool?

So I went to a party last night, and a friend of mine was not on the list, but got there before me and said he was my guest. Fair enough, and good for him. Usually being on the list is a good deal, but with internet marketing using the default list is a bad deal. Let's say there is a place that does cheap article submissions that has 50 places they submit articles to. Even if they did a kick ass job of it, no way would I want to submit my site to all 50 places if that list of submission places was the default one used by the industry.

I might consider submitting to the top 10 or 20 article sites, but the deeper you go the more abstract and lower quality of a link you are getting, and the more likelihood there is that those sites would probably be in a bad web neighborhood (ie: have low quality inbound AND low quality outbound links). In most fields only the top few sites are typically going to have many high quality links.

Also, if there is a potential gem that is not on the list (just for a rough example, say Buzzle.com as a decent article submission site) then maybe getting a few links from those types of sites that are not on default lists are worth more than just pushing to do what is easy to replicate and widely done by those using a default list.

That is part of the reason I do not keep my directory list up to date so much anymore. IMHO, many of the search engines have evolved far beyond that. Sure a Yahoo! Directory link is great, a Business.com listing could be money well spent, and maybe there are a half dozen or so other general directories that are going to be longterm useful and valuable to be listed in. But if you submit to 400 directories from a commonly used (and abused) industry list do not be surprised if your site does not rank as well as you would like.

As long as your mindset is stuck on a list, if you keep going deeper you may be digging a deeper hole. The more your marketing strategies, data sources, link sources, niche market selection ideas, keyword ideas, and content creation ideas are hidden from the common lists that everyone use the easier it will be to quickly create value and extract profit from your work.

If you go to an affiliate convention and see a merchant advertising all their offers to top affiliates that is a sign that their market already is or may soon be saturated beyond profitability.

I have even heard some people who sell AdSense keywords lists scrub the words with the highest easily accessible profit potential from their keyword lists.

And, this really is what makes writing a book about SEO and trying to keep it up to date somewhat hard. People want easy, simple, and straightforward lists that guide them toward success, but the more your marketing strategies, data sources, link sources, niche market selection ideas, keyword ideas, and content creation ideas are hidden from the common lists that everyone use the easier it will be to quickly create value and extract profit from your work.

The easiest way to get quality citations is through social relationships and unique original marketing ideas, but you really can't put those on a list unless people can infer how to extrapolate how an idea relates to their core strengths, potential customers, and/or marketplace.