SEO Expert, Anthony Yap

Via Nielsen//NetRatings press release:

Top 10 Search Providers for December 2006 (US)

1. Google Search – 3 billion searches – 50.8% share of searches
2. Yahoo! Search – 1.4 billion searches – 23.6% share of searches
3. MSN/Windows Live Search – 499 million searches – 8.4% share of searches
4. AOL Search – 362 million searches – 6.1% share of searches
5. My Way Search – 141 million searches – 2.4% share of searches
6. Ask.com Search – 128 million searches – 2.1% share of searches
7. EarthLink Search – 31 million searches – 0.5% share of searches
8. Dogpile.com Search – 30 million searches – 0.5% share of searches
9. Comcast Search – 26.9 million searches – 0.5% share of searches
10. NexTag Search – 26.8 million searches – 0.4% share of searches

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.

For those webmasters using Adsense and Yahoo Publisher Network as a monetization model for their sites, getting kicked out of the program hurts their bottom line. While some are guilty of blatantly violating the terms of service, many who do their best to be legitimate don’t get any reason for getting banned from the contextaul ad program. This has led to unhappiness and sometime outrage from these webmasters.

Yahoo, in an effort to communicate better with their ad partners, added a compliance manager to YPN. According to the YPN blog:

If a compliance issue is detected on one of your URLs, you will be notified via email and through an alert in your secure account interface. These will direct you to your new Compliance Manager control panel. The Compliance Manager will inform you of what the issue is so that you have the opportunity to fix it. Once you’ve addressed the issue, you can then go back to the Compliance Manager to submit the remedied URL. We’ll get back to you with a status report, usually within seven business days.

This is excellent news for advertisers and hopefully Google will follow suit.