Posted by Anthony on January 22nd, 2007
Wikipedia is a great repository of information for a net user. It exemplified the wonderful aspects of the web by being a collaborative, self-enforced online encyclopedia. SEOs know the value of an authoritative link from an authoritative site. Being a high traffic, authoritative site which allows anyone to edit its pages, Wikipedia became prone to spam links.
Not surprisingly, Wikipedia has gone the way of putting the NOFOLLOW tag on ALL of its outbound links with no exception. While this may curb some of the spamming, I don’t believe that it’ll ever put a stop to all of it. The nofollow tag is supported by Google but Yahoo, MSN Live, and Ask treat it differently. As long as links give significant weight to rankings, spammers will continue to spam.
Personally, I believe the self-policing nature of the Wikipedia should take care of most of the spam and this move isn’t really necessary. Spam aside, there are some great external links within the Wikipedia and it’s a shame that the links won’t count for much in Google.
Posted by Anthony on January 19th, 2007
Ever wonder what percentage of people use 2 word compared to 3 word queries? Data collected from users of European Web analytics provider OneStat, reveals (surprise, surprise) most people use two or three word queries in search engines.
Here’s the full breakdown:
- Two-word phrases — 28.38 %
- Three-word phrases — 27.15 %
- Four-word phrases — 16.42 %
- One-word phrase — 13.48 %
- Five-word phrases — 8.03 %
- Six-word phrases — 3.67 %
- Seven-word phrases — 1.63 %
- Eight-word phrases — 0.73 %
- Nine-word phrases — 0.34 %
- Ten-word phrases — 0.16 %
The RankStat research is based on a sample of 2 million visitors, made up of 20,000 visitors in 100 countries each day.
Via Search Engine Watch.
While the data indicates most people use fewer keywords in search, it’s good practice to optimize for longer search phrases simply because they offer higher sales conversions, in most cases. Generally speaking, going after a two word phrase might not be the smartest thing to do for businesses with a limited search visibility in the first place since it makes ranking for the phrase much harder. Establishing a solid SEO strategy usually involves a strong dose of web analytics to determine the most profitable search terms. After all, what good is traffic if it doesn’t convert?
Posted by Anthony on November 28th, 2006
Any webmaster who hasn’t signed up for Adcenter yet now has a great reason to sign-up as an advertiser. For a limited time, new advertisers get a free $200 credit after a $5 activation fee to open the account.
Code: DM-2-1106 or by clicking here
The code is valid till 1/15/07.
Great find courtesy of Aaron Wall.
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