Omar Kattan - search in a nutshell

Just in… Yahoo! has acquired Blue Lithium, a San Jose, California-based company with 100 employees.  The price tag for the purchase… a whopping 300 million dollars! (thats £149.4 million). The purchase was an all cash deal!

Blue Lithium is the 5th largest advertising network in the US and the 2nd largest ad network in the UK, this is according to Comscore.  Blue Lithium also boasts 145 million unique visitors per month. 

Susan Decker, president of Yahoo!, said of the purchase:

“Blue Lithium’s expertise in network management will better enable Yahoo! to manage supply and demand across our network by balancing advertiser goals with publisher value.”

This is the official statement on the Blue Lithium site:

“The acquisition of BlueLithium enables Yahoo! to accelerate its advertising, product, and engineering roadmaps, and gives the company increased capabilities to sell and measure performance-based campaigns both on and off the Yahoo! network.”

It seems like Google and Yahoo are on an ad network buying spree…  only a few months back Yahoo purchased Right Media, for 680 million dollars and Google purchased DoubleClick for $3.1bn back in April (although this purchase is still under watchdog scrutiny).

My prediction… MSN to make the next big move.  Watch this space….

To begin lets define what’s an inbound link.  An inbound link is a link that points to your website from someone else’s website, its as simple as that!  Another important definition before we get started is Link Popularity: Link Popularity is the measure of how popular your site is from an inbound link perspective; ie how many sites are linking to yours.

Now that we got the definitions out of the way,  lets discuss the the characteristics of the perfect inbound link…

Here are the main things to pay attention to when you analyse the quality of the links pointing to your site: 

Targeted Key words in Anchor Text

The perfect inbound link has to have targeted keywords in the anchor text of the link (the text used to link to your site).  Some sites use “click here” to link to your site, thats no good unless your site is about “click here”!

A Relevant Link is Better

If your site is about holiday homes and you get a link from a site about dog kennels then thats no good either unless -maybe- of you’re selling holidays for dogs!

A Relevant Landing Page for the Link is also better

If the link is from a holiday homes site and you have a multi-themed site then make sure that the link goes to the section of your site about holiday homes. 

An Authoritative link is More Valuable

Ideally the links pointing to your site should be from authority sites; ie sites that have been around for a while and that Google et al consider as authority.  One way to get an indication of whether or not a site is authoritative is to look at its Pagerank.

A link Higher on the Page is More Valuable

Links closer to the top of the page are better than links closer to the bottom of the page, simple as that!

One-way Links are Better than Reciprocal Links

One way links are better than reciprocal.  The reason this is the case is because in the past, webmasters tried to manipulate Google’s algorithm by exchanging links and so Google now devalues reciprocal links to some extent.

Contextual Links are Favoured

If the link to your site is placed within the copy of the page then Google gives it more importance than a link in an advertising zone of the page.  Its logical, if the link is mentioned within the copy then its probably more relevant to the content of the page than a link mentioned as an advert placed in the margins.

The Link NoFollow Attribute  

Some site use the “nofollow” tag to tell Google and other engines not to give that link any importance.  Many blogs use this method to discourage spamming.  In recent month The Wikipedia also placed nofollow attribute to all outbound links from its site.  Make sure the links you acquire do not have a “nofollow” attribute attached to them.

Avoid Link Farms

Google and other search engines do not like pages stuffed with links, this is a result of the proliferation of what is termed as “link farms” that are designed for the purpose of exchanging links.  If your link is found on a page with many links (15-20+) then that link will most likely be devalues.  Ideally, aim to have your links on pages with < 2 links and at worst case scenario < 15 links.

And that is it!  These are the characteristics of the perfect inbound link!

Question?…

“This site may harm your computer”, this is what Google placed underneath all my listings towards the end of last week, why?… Well basically because a hacker managed to penetrate my server and place invisible code designed to place “trojan horses” onto my users’ computers.

If you’re unlucky enough to be tagged with ”This Site May Harm Your Computer” this is what your listing will look like:

If you actually click on the listing, Google will proceed to take you to a page that looks like this:

I spent the best part of the weekend cleaning up the mess the hacker left behind and trying to figure out a way to tell Google to remove the  ”This site may harm your computer” from my listings! I finally managed to do so on Sunday night when I discovered that the solution was right under my nose… Google’s webmaster tools!

If you don’t have a Google webmaster tools account I suggest you get one right away!  It is truly a fantastic interface that includes among other things, the quick soultion for the  ”This site may harm your computer” problem!.  Basically the interface tells you that your listings are marked with “This site may harm your computer” and gives you a sample of pages where the malicious code appears.  Its your job to go and clean that code and then submit a form telling Google that the code has been removed and request a review. 

Google will then review the site and if all is okay, it will remove the “This site may harm your computer” statement from your listings and all back to normal.  If the results of the review are negative, Google will let you know and will guide you further by giving you more sample urls were malicious coe (or malware/badware as they refer to it).  Once you’ve cleaned your whole site, Google will remove the “This site may harm your computer” from your listings.

Anyway, to cut a long story short,, sign up for a Google webmasters tool today.  I will blog separately about about this fantastic free service offered by Google so stay tuned…