Thursday, January 04, 2007

Where to Find Great Backlinks

Back in August of last year, you may remember I was preaching the value of mining and using expired domains. Naturally, I told you this because, up to that point, for me - they were working. I even cited some examples. However, things have changed.

When reviewing my sites that use expired domain names versus the ones that depend on linking for strength, the linked sites always win. Why is this?

I believe, if you're expecting to get indexed in Google, that your expired domain that carried some page rank and back links, is flagged. It worked for the first few weeks, for me. But soon, the pages were de-indexed. So my advice is to find inbound links.

For me, the jury is still out on inbound links - mainly because the search engines don't go public on what won't work. But there are plenty of blogs out there, and SEO sites that have vast amounts of information.

My studies show that links from sub pages of other site have a little more value than links from a homepage. I mean, think about it - if it smells like a red flag... so links within content, from a content page of a site, linking to one of your inner pages (content), is probably the best link you can get.

So, how do we start? Well, there're a couple of page types I like. First, ask yourself what page on their site is most relevant to the page on the site I want a link to? And, how do I find that page?

In the Google you can search for (site:theirsite.com keyword phrase), to find that relevant page. You do know that relevance is a huge factor in linking. That's why I am not certain those free for all types of links work. Can they hurt? Maybe.

The second page I like is the one with the most "power". These are pages that have reputation - indexed, backlinked, page rank. How do you find these? Let's use Yahoo search.

Here's the syntax - (site:theirsite.com)

Yahoo is cool, because they list pages in their SERP in order of importance. That command may start Yahoo's Site Explorer. This shows the best backlinks on the top. These are the "power" pages.

The homepage is often not the best choice because your shooting for a link from their content to your site - not some simple link in the margin. Try to get the most powerful page when you're asking.

Your comments?

Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Google Granted Patent for Estimating Similarity

This one has been in the works for a few years, originally filed on December 31, 2001. Google's Moses Samson Charikar is listed as the inventor of a new method for estimating similarity between web pages and documents - designed to filter duplicate content.

Abstract
A similarity engine generates compact representations of objects called sketches. Sketches of different objects can be compared to determine the similarity between the two objects. The sketch for an object may be generated by creating a vector corresponding to the object, where each coordinate of the vector is associated with a corresponding weight. The weight associated with each coordinate in the vector is multiplied by a predetermined hashing vector to generate a product vector, and the product vectors are summed. The similarity engine may then generate a compact representation of the object based on the summed product vector.
This is designed to reduce the amount of redundant, or nearly redundant documents crawled and returned in response to a user's search query. The method will also dump sites determined to be substantial duplicators of content.