SEO Wacko

The newest buzz in the internet industry is about the interest of MSN to buy or merge with Yahoo. This move is being negotiated by the two companies to take on Google and dethrone it from being the number one search engine. This is a clear sign that the two companies, Yahoo and MSN, are threatened, alarmed by the fact that Google has been rapidly gaining market shares in the internet through its recent acquisitions of a number of websites. If Microsoft decides to buy Yahoo, it would be the largest acquisition the company has ever undertaken.

Is this a desperate move by the two companies? But the bigger question is, is it enough to take down Google from being the leader in web search?

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Andy Greenberg recently made an article about Google’s supplemental index and calling it “Google Hell“. In this article, Andy stated a case of a website named MySolitaire.com being in the Google Hell and losing roughly about quarter of a million dollars because of that.

Of course, Matt Cutts has an answer for this. According to him, he checked out the case of the said site and found out a spam report from one of their email. But the main thing he pointed out is about too much reciprocal linking. According to him:

As Google changes algorithms over time, excessive reciprocal links will probably carry less weight. That could also account for a site having more pages in supplemental results if excessive reciprocal links (or other link-building techniques) begin to be counted less.

First Google doesn’t want paid link and now it doesn’t want too much reciprocal linking. Once Google’s algorithm changes to this direction, it will give SEO’s and webmasters one a difficult problem to solve; and that is how to build links the Google way.

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At around the first 24 hours of the first day of May, Digg has been flooded with this mysterious code:

09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0

This code is most likely connected to the HD-DVD hack that has been circulating online. According to Jay Adelson, “Digg has been notified by the owners of this intellectual property that they believe the posting of the encryption key infringes their intellectual property rights” so they had to remove all comments that contain this code.

Eight hours later, Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, announces that they will no longer delete such stories or comments containing the code. His last words on this statement would be

“If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.”

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The first thing that a webmaster wants to happen after he had his website set up is getting the site indexed in Google and increase its rankings. The official Google Webmaster Central blog gives some tips on this:

1. Be an authority on the subject. If users find your site useful and of good quality, they will most likely link to your site.
2. Submit your content to Google and update it on a frequent basis. Use Google webmaster tools to help you get your site crawled.
3. Don’t engage in link exchange schemes. Google Webmasters Guidelines clearly address this issue under “Quality Guidelines – basic principles”.
4. Avoid pure affiliations. Make sure you create some added value for your users and produce valuable content that a user can’t find anywhere else like product reviews and ratings and not just pure affiliations.

These tips are posted for Portuguese webmasters but are general principles for all. If you are looking to b a straight up SEO and webmaster, following these tips is the way to go.

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