For years, “link popularity” and “Google PageRank” have been the talk of the town in the search engine optimization community. However, the definition of link popularity and how it differs from PageRank (PR), as well as how much effect these actually have on search engine rankings, is often misunderstood.

What is Link Popularity?

The theory goes something like this: The search engine Powers That Be have decided that if other sites are linking to your site, it must be a winner; therefore, it deserves a boost in rankings (when all else is equal). If you think about it, this makes a lot of sense. People link to good sites, not bad ones.

PageRank Does Not Equal Link Popularit

It’s important to note that Google PageRank is not the same thing as link popularity. PR is actually a subset of link popularity. Whereas PR focuses strictly on the quantity and popularity of links, link popularity adds a “quality factor” into the equation. Unfortunately, many people mistakenly use the terms “link popularity” and “PageRank ” interchangeably, which has served to confuse the issue further.

(more…)

Yahoo’s search engine spider is capturing the full text of web pages, up to a 500,000 characters limit. The new Yahoo search also supports many file types, including HTML, PDF, and Microsoft Office documents.

What does this mean to you and your web site?

Yahoo is a very big player in the search engine market. Its new search technology will power nearly half of all searches conducted within the United States.

That means that your web site should have good rankings in Yahoo if you don’t want to lose customers.

(more…)

There are submission services (and spam email messages) that promise to submit your web site to 50,000 search engines. Some web site promotion tools also claim that they can submit your web site to thousands of search engines.

Thousands of search engines?

There aren’t thousands of search engines on the Internet. Period. The majority of these 50,000 so called “search engines” are free for all (FFA) link pages or special interest web pages.

Submitting your web page to thousands of FFA sites means that you’ll end up with thousands of spam email messages.

In addition, you won’t receive a single visitor when you submit your web site about office equipment to a directory of poets in Poland.

There’s only a handful of search engines that can really bring visitors to your web site. As always, it’s quality that matters, not quantity. For this reason, you should concentrate on the important search engines when you submit your web site to search engines.

Which search engines are important?

Currently, there are only three major players: Google, Yahoo and MSN Search. They are responsible for the bigger part of the search engine traffic you can get because they also power other search engines, for example the search engine on AOL.com displays Google results.

(more…)

You can benefit indirectly from high authority sites through second-tier links

Suppose you have found a great authority site that has something to do with the topic of your website. The authority site links to many other websites but for some reason, the webmaster doesn’t want to link to your site.

If the high authority website doesn’t want to link to your site, ask the websites to which it links if they want to link to your site. If you get a link from these sites, the high authority website will still have a positive influence on your own site and your SEO.

This is what you should do:

1. Find a high quality, high authority website (it should be old, have many inbound links and good rankings on Google).

2. Ask the high authority website for a link to your website.

3. Visit the websites to which the high authority website links and ask the webmasters of these sites if they want to link to your site.

Of course, these second-tier links are not as valuable as links from the top-notch site. However, they are still very valuable and chances are that they are more valuable than many other links that you can get on the Internet.

(more…)