About two weeks ago I got a trackback or something and found this site called the WAHH Marketer’s Blog linking to me, I checked out the page and the reason it had linked to me was because of Zemanta, a content enhancement tool for bloggers.
Here is what the Zemanta website says about their product:
“Simple point & click enrichment of your blog posts (and emails). In real-time, while you type. We suggest tags, links, photos, and related articles. You save time and aspirin.
5M+ pictures, 5M+ articles. 10M+ possibilities.”
So the reason I got a free dofollow link on a relevant page is because my Altavista.com article was picked up by the Zemanta system and recognised as a relevant page.
How awesome is that, I haven’t paid Zemanta any money or even registered with them and they are hooking me up with free dofollow backlinks on good quality relevant blogs.
Here are a couple more links from Zemanta that I have found on Google:
So to the guys at Zemanta thanks very much for making an awesome product, I bet it is great for bloggers who use it as well, the ones that linked me just got a decent link out of it didn’t they? I reckon other bloggers will as well.
Update: I have just found out that the 3rd blog post I linked to was actually copied from Mashable, I probably should have checked before I linked to it, I remember thinking it was a decent post because it mentioned 4 of the celebrities who I follow and I don’t follow many. I have just placed a nofollow link to that post. I’m not complaining or anything it’s still a free link, but I won’t link out properly to copied content.
Posted in Link Building News By David Eaves, a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
July 12th, 2009
I’m just trying to get the adsense setup on my new site and it’s a nightmare, why should we have to design sites around the adsense unit sizes? How come there are not more size options? We’re talking about Google here, all the technology and everything they have got and they can’t come up with a half decent system for displaying their ads on your site. Here’s an idea why don’t they make a system where you can actually choose the ad sizes. Is this crazy talk? I think something like this is well within the realms of Google’s technological capabilities, publishers will make more money, Google will make more money so why hasn’t it happened yet?
End of rant.
Posted in Search Engine News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
July 11th, 2009
A couple of weeks or so ago there were definitely some changes made to the Google algorithm, Patrick called it a brand update, but I am not so sure that it is just brand sites that have been affected.
The 1st strange thing that I saw was around 3 weeks ago our post that we did about Google maps was ranking ahead of the Google Maps API blog for the phrase Google maps in about 12th position. I stayed there for 2-3 days and then fell down a bunch of pages.
The 2nd strange thing I saw was Search Engine Land ranking on the 1st page of Google.com for the highly competitive term search engine optimization with this post about Google’s search engine optimization presentation. Compared to the other results for that phrase the post had a very small amount of links.
Finally, to top it off the 3rd strange thing that I saw was Shaun Usher’s blog deputy dog ranking on the 1st page of Google.com in the states and Google UK for the phrase porn with this post called ceiling porn. The phrase porn is just unbelievably competitive, many of the pages ranking for that phrase have hundreds of thousands of links pointing at them. In days gone by it would have been impossible to achieve a rank like this with a post that only has less then 1,000 links.
You can see a screenshot of Shaun’s rank on Google.com here. On Friday and Saturday his blog got an extra 2K+ visitors from Google on that phrase alone. The rank fell sometime on Sunday.
So IMO it isn’t just brands that are benefiting from this new algo, SEL might be a brand, but I wouldn’t say deputy dog is and I wouldn’t say this site is. I am not sure how many links the SEL post got but the post on this blog and the one on deputy dog both got a lot of solid blog links in a short space of time so perhaps the algo is just rewarding content that gets a lot of good links fast. In other words maybe anyone can achieve these amazing ranks on Google, it could just be that you need to knock something up that attracts a lot of links, it might be Google’s answer to Yahoo’s Buzz.
Posted in SEO News By David Eaves, a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
July 7th, 2009
Altavista is my favourite tool for checking links and here’s why:
1. It shows more results then any other link checking tool (not including Google webmaster tools, but you can’t check competitors with that) – You can see a maximum of 1,000 separate domains linking to a URL or domain.
2. It only ever shows 2 results from one domain so the results you get don’t get swamped with a couple of site wide links.
3. If your IP address is based in the UK the results show the links with the most juice on Yahoo UK at the top so you can find out which links are helping you most on Yahoo. From the testing that I have done I have seen that generally Yahoo rates the same UK sites Google does – the links that rank high on Altavista’s link command will be from sites with good PageRank.
So there you have it, if you like checking on who’s linking to your site or blog go to Altavista.com and give it a shot.
You can check how many links a page has by searching for link: and then the page URL and you can check how many links a domain has by typing in linkdomain: and then the domain you want to check without the www. Just like on Yahoo site explorer but better.
Posted in Link Building News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
June 19th, 2009
I remember about 3 years ago when you could actually use the allinanchor search command on Google as an SEO tool.
The allinanchor command basically shows you the search results according to links only, so content is not a factor. 3 years ago you could do a regular search and then do an allinanchor and work out things like this website isn’t ranking as high as it should do because it hasn’t got enough anchor text links or it hasn’t got the right keywords in the content.
Unfortunately at sometime around February 2006 the command seemed to stop working. Now I don’t believe Google actually disabled the tool, because if they did I think it just wouldn’t do anything. Allinanchor searches on Google will still bring up results, it is just the vast majority of the time they are no different to the regular results.
I believe the command stopped working because the algorithm changed, on page factors are no where near as important as they used to be and lets face it most of the time when people get a lot of links on something they are optimised on page for it.
So what can you use the allinanchor search command for?
OK so here it is, the allinanchor command is a Google Sandbox detection tool. If you want to get a rough estimate of where a sandboxed site should be ranking according to the links it has then use the allinanchor command.
Here is an example, one of the brand new sites that I am working on KoshCreative.co.uk is currently ranking nowhere in the 1st few hundred results for its main phrase design agency even though it has lots of links with that anchor text. If I do a allinanchor search on Google UK for design agency, I can see the site coming up on page 6 – Link
I believe that the position result is roughly where the site would be ranking according to the links it has if it were not in the sandbox.
With a little testing I think you could make a pretty good Google sandbox detection tool by using this command. If any of you know anyone who could make something like this up for me I might be willing to pay to try it out.
Posted in Search Engine News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
June 19th, 2009
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