Search Banter

Search Engine Roundtable recently wrote a post saying that it appears Yahoo! is ordering the links in their site explorer based on their perceived quality. They searched a few sites including their own and found this to be the case so I decided to try a few myself. I tried it on this site (SearchBanter) and it seemed to be true. The first three links seemed to be my highest quality links. Then I tried it on WebTargeted.com and I must admit it put some doubt into my mind about the whole idea. The first link is from searchtrends.org which really, is probably the most relevant link back to the site. But the second link is from halloweencostumesnow.com. This is an affiliate site we created a while back and the link is at the bottom of the page informing visitors who the site was designed by. There is obviously no relevancy to seo on the entire site. The third link is from Dmoz.org which, due to its placement, is just a little more relevant to webtargeted.com in my opinion. However, it is a directory link, and perhaps Yahoo! doesn’t see directory links as high quality links. Some of the links which follow this dmoz link are from blogs and other seo directories which, you may argue, could also be considered lower quality links than those higher up on the list. But then you get to the 10th link and it’s coming from the home page of redcrossut.org (we did some pro bono work for them). I believe that this link should be higher up on the “quality” list. Especially higher than the halloween costumes link. It’s a .org which may not even play a factor in the quality equation anymore, but it’s also from the Red Cross organization. You would think that would count as a fairly high quality link. Then again, maybe not.

My conclusion then? I’m still not sure, actually. I think I’ll have to do some more testing before I can be conclusive, but after writing this post, I actually think it may be the case. Yahoo may be showing link quality through their site explorer. If anyone else does any testing, let me know.

Google Adsense is now allowing its users to put 3 link units on every page as opposed to the 1 link unit you could historically place. This technically means that you can have 3 blocks of Ads and 3 link units on every page.

The interesting thing about this change in policy is that it comes right after Adsense’s announcement that they were cracking down on the websites that were built purely to generate Adsense revenue. Obviously there are quality sites out there that will find this change useful, but I wonder if it won’t give more people more incentive to create ugly and useless websites.

MSN has been continually losing what little footing they had as a search engine. Every month their search engine market share percentage decreases by a percentage or two. You wouldn’t think that was much except that if the trend continues, they’ll have 0 market share before the end of the year.

So as big as MSN is, you would think they would be able to come up with some incredible fix to this fairly large problem. MSN thinks so too. They have hired new people to come up with something totally new that no one has ever seen before. That’s great and I’m all for it, but the problem with this is that building something “new” doesn’t fix the problem. The problem is Google. People want Google. They use Google. Anyone who is anyone uses Google as their search engine. Not MSN. As far as I’m concerned, the only people who use MSN (on a consistent basis) are the people who don’t know how to change their default homepage in Internet Explorer. Am I right?

You see MSN, Google has already filled the “best search engine” quota. Everyone knows it and unless Google really messes up somehow, they will continue to fill the “best search engine” quota. And knowing Google, they’re not going to mess up.

So, I hope that whatever “new” thing MSN comes up with is really “new” and by “new” I mean something that can fill a new best-of. Good Luck.