Free Traffic Tips

In case you missed the Yahoo! Search blog post on the morning of the 20th:

“We will be making changes to the index tonight so you should be seeing more of your pages in the index as well as some fluctuations in the rankings of results from previous searches.”

So if you’ve noticed changes, don’t panic. If pages of your site get dropped that you feel should not have been, give it a week and see if they are restored. If not, there are some resources in Yahoo’s Search blog that will tell you how to get in contact with them to ask questions.

This one is a link development tool to help you find more sites to get links from.

If you’re blogging this is particularly useful – put your keyword in quotes and then add the word “blog” or “feed” to find other bloggers in your industry that you can engage in conversation.

Just remember what I say in my traffic book about blogs : you want to be a responsible member of the Blogosphere – get to know the other blogger, talk about something they said and link to them, and use your blog as a networking tool NOT purely as a way to get links.

Read the article about this link development tool at SEO Scoop, or visit the tool here.

If you’ve been thinking about doing Podcasting, and you’re able to figure out the audio part but not creating the feed, try Podblaze. There are instructional videos on the website for users to see just how easy it is to create a podcast using their services, and the accounts are free.

Many business owners are finding that podcasting is a great way to market their business or services. Some owners are conducting interviews with industry experts in their market niche and making them into a podcast.

Podblaze also recently launched a directory of podcast shows that enable interested listeners to search, locate and listen to a large number of audio podcasts. Any podcast RSS feed can be submitted to the directory for inclusion.

The website also has flash media players that allow users to instantly listen to any podcast show; even from a slower speed dial up connection. I tried it during their beta testing, and it’s really easy for your listeners to create a listener account where they can store and create you own playlist of your favorite podcast shows – no more explaining what podcasting is – just put the mini-version of the flash player on your site. (more…)

“Want to understand how PageRank will build between pages you link? Only Google actually knows how that works. There’s been so much tinkering and tampering with what they do since the original PageRank formula was published years ago that using that equation to understand what happens today is like teaching sciences with a textbook that’s hundreds of years old.

Nevertheless, that’s all PageRank Decoder has to work with — the old formula. Spotted via Search Engine Roundtable, this Flash-based application lets you link between actual pages to guestimate (strong on the guess) how things might change.”

Visit PageRank Decoder :: Read the whole article in Search Engine Watch’s blog.

If you’ve been to Yahoo lately, you may have noticed the “save” and “block” links after certain results.

: “I can see Yahoo using this data to implement Bayesian filtering for personalized web searches. As people continue to block and save sites in My Web, the filter gradually will define what people see as spam or relevant.”

That’s an interesting take – and I can’t see why they wouldn’t use that data for that, among other things.

Read the rest of the article :: Yahoo Allows for Personal Spam Filtering – Search Engine Journal.

MSN may be late to the party, but some preliminary reviews are giving the impression Microsoft’s Search Network might be the ones who brought the beer…

“Though late to the party, MSN is the last but not least major search entrant in the effort to deliver local.

With the transformation of its “near me” functionality into a more fully formed local-search application, Microsoft now joins Google, Yahoo!, AOL, A9/Amazon, Internet Yellow Pages, newspapers and, increasingly, local TV sites in the competition for local consumer usage and advertiser dollars.”

Read the rest of the article: � MSN Local Search Goes Live – Search Engine Journal.

“The search results seem more relevant to the query and MSN feels that RankNet “has improved [their] relevance and most importantly gives [them] a platform they can move forward on.” The new ranking technology is based on neural net, which was discussed by Microsoft in a research paper headed by Chris Burges titled Learning to Rank using Gradient Descent.”

Read the rest of the article: � MSN Search Updates Results Based on RankNet – Search Engine Journal.

Since I wasn’t able to bring you Search Engine Tuesday yesterday, I’m going to bring you various news related items today.

“Google’s top executive confirmed on Tuesday that the company is planning to expand into broader online payment services but said it will not compete with a PayPal-like service.

In a company-issued statement, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said the company does not plan to offer what he called a ‘person-to-person stored-value payments system.’”

IE – Contrary to popular belief, the official statement is that this won’t be another PayPal as some sources have reported.

Read the rest of the article:
News from PC Magazine: Google’s CEO Confirms Work on Online Payment Service: