Archive for June, 2008

One-way links, reciprocal links, three-way-links. What’s best?

Sunday, June 15th, 2008

There are a lot of rumors about one-way links, reciprocal links and three-way links on the Internet. Which of these links work best for your business and which links do you need to get higher search engine rankings?

What are one-way links?

A one way link is a simple link from one website to the other. For example, if you link to http://finance.yahoo.com/ and that page doesn’t link back to your website then it’s a one-way link from your site to their site.

What are reciprocal links?

A link is a reciprocal link if you link to a website and that website links back to your website. You send visitors to the other site and the other website sends visitors back to you.

That makes sense because all visitors leave a website sooner or later. You can send your visitors back to search engines or you can send them to affiliates websites that send you traffic in return.

What are three-way links?

Some webmasters believe that reciprocal links don’t help web pages to get higher search engine rankings. That’s why they invented three way links: Website A links to website B, website B links to website C, website C links to website A.

Which links will help you to get higher search engine rankings?

Good inbound links will help you to get higher search engine rankings. None of the link types above is worth more than the other.

It’s important that the links to your website are from related sites and on-topic. If a reciprocal link is on a low quality page with links to every Tom, Dick and Harry then it won’t count much. However, that’s also true if the same page carries a one-way link or a three-way link.

It doesn’t matter if a link is one-way, reciprocal or three-way. It does matter if a link is on a related website. Links from high quality websites will help your rankings, links from garbage sites won’t.

If you want to improve your search engine rankings, try to get web links from web pages that have something to do with your site.

Warren Houston
http://www.netconnexion.com

Posted in Search Engine Marketing | No Comments »

How Google might filter annoying pages

Sunday, June 8th, 2008

Google recently filed a patent application with the title “Detecting and rejecting annoying documents”.  Here’s the abstract of the application:

“A system and method for evaluating documents for approval or rejection and/or rating.

The method comprises comparing the document to one or more criteria determining whether the document contains an element that is substantially identical to one or more of a visual element, an audio element or a textual element that is determined to be displeasing.”

The document describes how Google might analyze text and audio files. For example, Google might use optical character recognition tools and pattern matching against image and sound databases.

Why did Google do this?

Google probably wants to make their ad reviewing process faster. Their AdWords system accepts images ads, video ads and text ads.

Google has ad design guidelines and Google has to review all of these ads before they can be displayed in the AdWords network.

Manually reviewing these ads would take a lot of time. Given the high number of ads that Google displays, it might be impossible to review them all.

What are they looking for? Does this affect normal website rankings?

Google wants to avoid that ads are annoying or offensive. For example, they check if an ad is flashing, has repetitive movement or infinite loops. The use of streaming video and audio is also checked as well as the quality of the images.

Google also checks the content of the ads (offensive language, adult content) and many associated factors.

While it seems that these methods are currently used for ads the same criteria can also apply to normal web pages. If an ad annoys its viewers then it’s likely that a web page with the same elements will annoy its visitors. For that reason, Google might also use these quality checks for the normal search results.

What does this mean to your website?

If your website contains many flashy elements, you might want to redesign it. Professional website design might be an important factor for high search engine rankings in the near future.

While professional design is important, it is also important that search engines can parse the content of your web pages. Use NetConneXion’s search engine spider simulator to check if search engines can read your web pages.

Warren Houston
http://www.netconnexion.com

Posted in Google Tidbits | No Comments »