For our UK readers and visitors I have a nice little treat, we have partnered up with SMX London 2009 and offer all of our readers a 15% discount on your bookings to two day treat on the 18th and 19th May.

As taken from the SMX Site

Join us for a strategic view of how marketing is evolving – and the critical role search must play – from one of the world’s most influential marketing executives. Brian Featherstonhaugh, Chairman and CEO, OgilvyOne Worldwide, brings a unique vantage point on how brands are built, how corporate cultures are created and what happens as the world goes digital.

To read more click the following URL http://searchmarketingexpo.com/london

Your discount code for the event is SEOTOPUK09

Book your place now.

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There is this discussion in Webmaster World about the recent change in PR among websites. The funny thing about it is that it is not simply because of the lowered rankings of the links. In fact, the site had boosted up in rankings without links. The question that the users of Webmaster World are debating on is “How can such a phenomenon happen?”

Through the concepts of search engine optimization, we have always believed that backlinks have a lot to do with the site’s rankings. This means the more websites linking to your website, the more PR it gains. PR is very important. If you do not know what PR is, it is an acronym for page rank which is a grade given by Google to a website after it has considered several factors such as content, authority and of course, links. That is the reason why webmasters are so keen on gaining page rank in a short period of time.

However, recent news has revealed that links are not contributing to page rank anymore. This is surprising especially for SEOs who have relied in offpage optimization to gain rankings. As a Webmaster World user points out a website that gained rankings despite the absence of backlinks, he showed confusion and the yearning to find out what is happening.

It seems that Google is experimenting on something on their algorithms. Matt Cutts made a statement about “mom and pop” sites getting a boost in the Google rankings. The users of Webmaster World pertained to this theory as they try to figure out how the page’s PR has increased despite the absence of backlinks.

Does this mean that backlinks are slowly turning to be useless? We hope not. Link building has always been known to work with double purpose, promoting the website and building search engine ranking. Removing this advantage may lead to a harder internet game for webmasters.

As of now, we have no idea how this happened. As suggested by one of the Webmaster World users, it is possible that PR has increased if the website linking to it has its PR increased. But it will still not explain how one website had gained ranking with only one link to a PR0 LinkedIn account.

I guess this is one of the recent mysteries on the internet world. It may take some time to figure out what is happening but once webmasters arrive at the answer, then there is no turning back. Whatever happens, these webmasters will try to figure out one algorithm after another until they arrive at the secret of the trick. No need to be discouraged.

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There was this interesting post in YouMoz yesterday entitled “LinkBuilding:Mislead to Believe” where the author Tripti debunked 6 linkbuilding myths that has been an area for debate in the SEO world for the last few years.

Myth #1: Outbound Links can kill your rankings

There is this belief that outbound links can diminish your PR or rankings but this is not true according to Tripti. Linking to other websites will not kill your rankings if you do it to provide value to your readers. Just imagine if you become a good resource and link people to the places they like to go in the internet. Wouldn’t your website have more value? Even if some people think that the search engine algorithms is robotic, it is not. It still looks for quality websites who care for their visitors.

Myth #2: Reciprocal links won’t work

The issue here is not the act of reciprocal linking but how the reciprocal linking is done. When some people hear about reciprocal linking, they immediately assume that they should search for people with link pages. This is wrong. Search engines do penalized people who are engaging in this link focused activity. However, if one person saw his link on your website and decided to link back then there’s nothing wrong with that. Yes it is a reciprocal link but it is done all because the sites are related and they compliment each other. As you can see, search engines do not like it when you try to game their system. So it is best to do linking in the most natural way.

Myth #3: Link with a Higher Page Rank

People have always fussed about pagerank when in reality, they should be looking on the combination of page rank and outbound links. Tripti showed this in his example:

Who says backlinks from PR 5 is better than PR 1? Look at this PR calculation formula:

PR (A) = 1 – d + d ( PR(B) / L(B) + PR(C) / L(C) + PR(D) / L(D) + ….. )

d = 0.85 (damping factor derived statistically)

The final Page Rank of your web page equals to 1-0.85 + 0.85 x (PR/ number of outbound link).

Now, for instance, you have web page A. You are getting links from two pages: one is B and other is C.

Page B (page rank- 5, number of outbound links – 100)

Page C (page rank- 1, number of outbound links – 10)

According to the formula above, if web page A gets link from page B, the final PR will be 0.15 + 0.85 x 5/100= 0.193.

And if A gets a link from C, the final PR will be approximately 0.24.

So you see, the final PR value of Page A will be better if linking with C has PR 1 than linking with a page B that has PageRank 5.

Myth #4: Link with a high PR website

Linking with a high PR website is worthless if your link is not located on a high PR page. You must learn to search high PR pages. This goes for the traditional linking methods of commenting and link building as well.

Myth #5: Permanent Link Building

Links are never permanent. You have to build it on a continuous basis and some webmasters tend to remove some links as time passes. It is therefore important to make your link building process continuous.

Myth #6: Paid Links are Unethical

In reality, there is really no difference between free and paid links except that the paid links are put in particular pages they like and it is paid. There is nothing unethical about it for they are not stepping over those who are securing free links.

It is a rather interesting read. For the whole article, visit YouMoz.

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Yahoo Answers has been a very powerful marketing tool. What one needs to do to establish his expertise in a particular field is to simply find related questions and answer the questions while linking them to valuable areas of your website or blog. With this, one can expect that the person clicking through the link has an interest on the topic. He will not have asked the question or searched for it if he does not have an interest in it in the first place. This makes Yahoo answers not only effective but targeted as well.

Also, Yahoo Answers posts have a high tendency of showing up in the Google rankings. If one types a question in Google search, the results are almost always from Yahoo Answers. With Google, your link is not only getting a visit from the one who asked the question. You are also getting visits from dozens of people searching the same question in Google.

However, as one uses Yahoo Answers, he will find out that one of the hardest things to do is to find the questions to answer. You may have a lot of expertise in a particular field but you always have to sift through the results to find open questions which you can benefit from.

There are some old ways of getting some questions. One can browse through the categories in Yahoo Answers to find some related questions. Another way is to set up an RSS feed and sift the results. However, both can be a but painstaking. It also takes time which takes the fun away from using Yahoo Answers for easy marketing.

This is the reason why Yahoo Answers now implements the Suggested Questions feature. This means one does not need to go through the painstaking way of searching for related questions. He can now see related questions as they are suggested for him.

However, Yahoo noted that these questions will only pop up for people who have a decent amount of activity around a particular topic. It takes some time for the system to understand your interest so one has to tell it that “Hey! I’m an expert on this field so please give me some suggested questions.”

The key to using this feature is targeted answering. So Yahoo Answers services need to at least set up different accounts for different niches or only answer on a particular topic.

For those who don’t like the feature. Yahoo Answers allow you to turn it off. But what for when it helps you find the questions you need to establish your expertise?

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With the use of social bookmarking sites as a means of promotion, Delicious have been facing a lot of spam problem lately. Their goal of a community sharing the best websites on the internet turned to spamville overnight. People have been submitting links expecting the popular link juice.

With this, Joshua Schachter, the founder of Delicious, announced last 2007 in the SMX Conference that they are going to implement in the nofollow tag. This is to prevent people from submitting irrelevant links just for link juice. This may have stopped some from submitting spam links but it did not stopped all.

So now Delicious have resorted to another way of solving the problem and that is through silent bans. For those people who do not know what ’silent bans’ mean, it is a way of banning by not notifying the person and rendering that person’s activity irrelevant to the system. This is what Brent Csutoras experienced which he shared on his blog on a post entitled “When Did Delicious Starts Silent Bans?“. According to his post, he saw his past bookmarks disappearing from the system as his new bookmarks are rejected. Here is how he relays his story.

Last week while I was attempting to bookmark a page, I noticed that my saved page did not show up in Delicious, outside of my personal bookmarks page. So if you were to look at the bookmark through Delicious, you would not see that I had saved it at all.

I have no idea how long this has been going on, as it appears that once you’re ’silent banned’ it removes all your previous activities from the system.

Brent Csutoras claimed that this is a rather familiar situation. It was not so long ago when Reddit did the same thing. A person who is silent banned submit a particular story to the websites but then the website does not react. It will not submit the story rendering the account of the person useless.

But one question comes to mind with all these things happening. Why do social bookmarking websites such as Reddit and Delicious have to resort to these informal ways of banning? Why do they keep the account but leave the user useless to the community?

Also, as Brent Csutoras wondered, what triggers the penalty? How can he, who rarely use his Delicious account get banned by Delicious?

I guess these are some questions that Delicious must answer in the next conference they are going to attend.

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Directory submission may have been one of the oldest link building methods out there. However, it is still as effective. With the way the economy is taking the spiral downturn, a resort to free ways of link building is becoming more common. And why should they not be? Directories offer one-way quality link juice. That is, if you post in the right directory.

As Debra Mastaler puts it in her post in Search Engine Land entitled “A Link Building Stimulus“, people are “willing to cut back on the number of link building techniques they contract for, but not the quality of the links secured.” With this, she came up with some of the most popular directories.

Some of the directories she mentioned are DMOZ, Yahoo! Directory, Best of the Web, Ezilon, Joe Ant, Massive Links, GoGuides, Rubberstamped, Greenstalk, Business and Aviva. Of course some are more popular than other but submitting to each of them will still contribute to the link juice one is after.

Also, Debra noted the power of specialized directories. There are niche-specific directories such as dog directories and cat directories while there are format-specific ones like RSS directories and podcast directories. The key is to find some niche-specific directories to ensure the quality of links as well as reformat the site in different ways so it can make use of format-specific directories.

Okay, so we have established that directories bring link juice. But what about traffic? Directories may bring traffic only if the website is submitted in a relevant directory. That is the reason why finding a niche-specific directory is very important. Just think of it this way. When a person is looking for information on dogs, will he visit the cat directory? Definitely not. But if he visits the dog directory and found your website there, then he will have a higher likelihood of visiting it. That’s the simple concept.

But upon knowing the power of directories, one does not need to rush. There have been a lot of stories on the internet which have seen their sites get deindexed because they got too excited and submitted to multiple directories at once. Manual submission is still best for it can be regulated to a specific amount per day. Of course, this may take some time that is why it will be wise if you hire a manual directory submission service.

With all the things said in this article, we can expect directory submission to stay despite all the global ups and downs.

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