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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When I have been surfing the internet for the latest SEO news, I came across this unique list on how to rank in Twitter for a keyword entitled “5 Steps to Ranking #1 on Twitter“. But I’m wondering what does the author mean for ranking #1. Rank where? The Twitter directory? The search engine? or the top Twitter user list?

The author of the said article indicated five ways on how to ‘increase the ranking’ of a person. He cited the name, username, bio, account activity and number of followers. I agree with him that to be able to achieve maximum potential in Twitter, one must optimize a keyword in all these areas. But what he failed to point out is the different forms of search on Twitter.

Search on Twitter is not one-dimensional. It is not as direct as search engines. Twitter can be searched in various areas such as trends, hash tags, and directories. I think the author failed to point out in the area on which his tips will be more useful.

I also tried the effectiveness of Twitter in ranking in search engines. I have found out how personalities such as Britney Spears, TechCrunch and Kevin Rose have their Twitter profiles in the top 10 rankings when their name is searched.

I have also tried it on myself and yielded the same rankings.

With this, we can say that Twitter can contribute to ranking for certain brands. But how about keywords? I think this can be effective if you put keywords in your username or bio. With hashtag search, you will be associated with a particular term and you may build your credibility on a certain topic based on Twitter conversations. However, I have only tested the search engines on brand search and not on direct keyword search. As for directories, people can control the niche they are associated with because they can freely choose which categories should they belong to.

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The latest post on SEOmoz blog entitled “Nofollow is Dying: The Impact of Microblogging and Nofollow on SEO” touched on a very important issue in the the SEO world – that is the importance of nofollow links. SEOs have always believed that links should always be done on dofollow sites because nofollow does not provide link juice. However, SEOmoz have this theory that nofollow does not matter anymore.

SEOmoz provided good basis for this claim. The author referred to microblogging platforms such as Twitter that only have nofollow links. However, the conversion of these links are phenomenal since links are shown to concerned followers. If this idea is going to be applied to SEO, this can somehow change the search engines’ algorithm. With their goal of providing the most relevant search results to their users, it is not surprising if they will consider nofollow microblogging links in the future.

Another basis SEOmoz have presented is the explosion of 3rd party program users. Like social media sites such as Twitter, 3rd party websites such as blogger, wordpress.com and others usually have nofollow links. However, with the increase in users, search engines can’t always say that the links to these blogs must be ignored. Some of them are relevant and ignoring them are not practical.

Third, nofollow links have been proven to be more trusted. This can be attributed to the announcement that nofollow links are not counted by search engines. It is with this reason that spam is not present in most of the nofollow websites. Spammers usually flood the dofollow sites with their links expecting link juice. Ironically, the people who try to game the system only make the dofollow links look worse than the nofollow links. This is an aspect that search engines may consider as they weigh which link is worth more.

I have personal experience with this as well. I have found that the search engines managed to crawl my site even if I commented on related nofollow sites. I tried searching the links and the nofollow comment came out in the listings. This means that the search engines are still counting that link even if it comes from a nofollow blog.

However, this is just a theory. I think it is still best for Google to have this rule because it limits comment spam as well as build relevant content to a particular page. But it is still an interesting thing to know that nofollow may also be valued by search engines.

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It was a surprise when we caught Google advertising on Craigslist. Apparently, they are looking for testers to try out their new application. Google is looking for Beta testers to try out their new software application called GSink. The advertisement go as follows:

“GSink is a software application designed to help share contacts between Google, Gmail Google applications users.

We are presently seeking beta testers to help us test this new software from home or work. If you’re interested in participating in our beta test, please send us an e-mail and we will share with you more details about the program.

Thank you for your interest in helping us make this a better software program” (Source: Craigslist Ad PostingID: 1036171786)

As indicated, you may simply contact Google if you want to help them out.

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Yahoo have decided to shut down MyWeb starting March 18, 2009. Known as a social bookmarking site, MyWeb has allowed its users to save, share and discover bookmarks. However, the existence of other applications such as Yahoo Bookmarks and Delicious have rendered MyWeb useless.

It is with this reason that Yahoo decided to shut down the application. After all, why keep an application if it does the same service. It is true that it may be a significant social bookmarking area. It may even contribute an extra backlink for SEOs. But MyWeb is not really a popular bookmarking site to begin with. Yahoo took this into consideration as they track the traffic from the three applications: MyWeb, Yahoo Bookmarks and Delicious.

On the bright side, a lot of improvements can be expected from Yahoo who promises to devote their time to Delicious this 2009. There will also be a clear distinction between Delicious and Yahoo Bookmarks from now on because Delicious will be taking care of public bookmarks while Yahoo Bookmarks will be taking care of the private. There will also be an export option available so users can quickly ship their bookmarks to different sites in a snap.

There are also some good news for the current MyWeb users. First, they do not need to worry about their bookmarks being lost. Yahoo decided to stash them away in Yahoo Bookmarks. So the links will still be intact. Second, their bookmark button and badge can be easily substituted by Delicious. And third, Yahoo have provided a feedback page for MyWeb users who will encounter problem during the move.

Yahoo MyWeb was launched back in 2005 with the goal of helping its users discover new links. With no significant increase in users, the application will be shut down even if it is just on Beta stage.

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With the creation of the canonical tag, the existence of a particular content in multiple links is not considered as duplicate. Finally, content can now be freely archived and searched. SEOs do not need to worry anymore about their rankings because of the new link structure.

The use of the canonical tag is better understood with an example. We all know that a blog post can exist in multiple links: a regular blog post page (http://www.sitename.com/blog/?p=12), a blog post page with permalink structure (http://www.sitename.com/blog/2009/02/blog-post-name/), a search results page (http://www.sitename.com/blog/?search=SEO) or the home page (http://www.sitename.com/blog). With this in mind, we risk the uniqueness of the content because it exists in multiple links. We may also face some problems with search engines since they only allot a particular amount of bandwidth for each website. If they manage to crawl all the pages you have that contains the same content, this may hurt your rankings.

This is where the canonical tag comes in. It simply ‘hints’ the search engine on which link to index. To do this, one has to simply put <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.sitename.com/blog/2009/02/blog-post-name /” /> within the <head> tags. The search engines will simply read this and take the hint that all other links must be ignored and only the link indicated in the canonical tag must be indexed.

Of course, this is good news for a lot of SEOs. They can now tell the search engines which part of the site to index and which to ignore. It gives both the writer and search engine an easier job.

However, this raises the question on whether or not the canonical tag will be abused. What if a website who copies its content from another site proclaims itself as canonical? Will the search engine index the other site? It is not pointed out if the tag is only applicable in one domain. The only thing one can count on is the human element in Google’s ranking system. They are the only people who can determine which is the real website to rank.

Although the search engines guaranteed that they will only use the tag 99% of the time, it still raises a lot of issues such as the abuse of sploggers and scrapers. Having the human element only 1% of the time will automate processes and please SEOs. However, it will also provide lots of venues for abuse and less security for honest web developers.

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The very latest news from the giant search engine Yahoo is that it is going to shut off its online storage facility very soon. All yahoo users have been asked to clear and remove the files stored in Yahoo’s online store box on or before March 10th. Well, having said that, the majority of users do not find it a great difference in this move of yahoo, since it is hard to find a few who use this facility this time around.

The main drawback of Yahoo online briefcase was that they never bothered expanding or enhancing the facilities of storage. It was the old 30MB storage and there are much better facilities available. Yahoo initiated this storage stuff around 10 years back, and they have not simply adapted to the changes happening in the online media. In fact, people do not find this news surprising.

The official statement of reason by Yahoo says that this facility has been over looked by the users and Yahoo do not find any point in continuing this. They admit that the service is incredibly low, and it gives clear implications of the fact that, they cannot afford continuing this in these trying times. The news that had to be read in conjunction with this is, Google is all set to go for its own online storage media.

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As the Google team tries to come up with Universal search where it integrates traditionally separated search features such as images, maps, books, video and news, it now resorted to eye tracking studies to formulate its algorithm. Eye tracking studies is not new. In fact, it has been used all over the internet to determine the focus of a particular user. As indicated in the Stanford study, there is an assumption that the more time the eyes rest on a particular element on the screen, the more exposure that element gains. However, the question here is if the time it takes the eyes to rest upon an object really equates to the focus of the user on the object.

The eye tracking study that the Google team conducted aims to determine the search results that immediately meet the eye of the searcher. The results showed that the users tend to focus their eyes more on the first result and decrease as it goes downwards. Images and videos do not affect their scanning behavior. The only exception is when a particular title in the results managed to catch the eye of the user.

Eye Tracking Heatmap

The results in the study are reasonable. People do have the tendency to rest their eyes on the first object and decrease as the page moves down. Also, users focus more on text rather than images.

The Stanford study of eye behavior in web pages showed similar results. People tend to focus on text first and only focus on images 22% of the time. Banner ads also receive a lot of attention as indicated by the 1 second focus of users on the object.

But the question here is whether or not focus equates with eye behavior. Joseph Carrabis in his article “Eye-Tracking Studies: Just Say ‘No!’” have this idea that where the eye is pointing to is not necessarily where the mind is focused on. This idea now questions the results of the eye tracking studies conducted by Google and Stanford.

Also, there is also little consideration of loading time. Sometimes people tend to focus on the first object of the page since the page takes time to load. But this does not mean that the person is particularly interested in the first element. Another thing is the focus on text. Maybe this happens because the person has the motivation to read and not view images.

The study provides a good background on how to predict users’ browsing behavior. However, its results are not final. Unless they can read the mind of their users, they cannot really predict which elements on a webpage are more focused on.

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This New Year, Yahoo brings something special for their readers and users. A team member from Yahoo has come up with a new category of search engine which is specially designed for the purpose of searching news. This was mainly intended at bringing a new innovation in the search world.

This is expected to bring more recent and latest news for the users of Yahoo. The earlier search engine of Yahoo will post news on the basis of the time when it as posted. This is done by stacking the news in a timely manner and displaying according to the latest news. The new search engine overcome all the difficulties due to this and comes up with a new method by which the old news could be updated at any time.

The TweetNews, as this is called will bring matching updates from Twitter tweets and other relevant news from Yahoo news. This will be combined and displayed to the users. This will act as a unique and attractive platform for both Twitter as well as BOSS. This can also act as a ranking signal and can be used to check and confirm the freshness of the news. This is expected to hit the market with great expectations.

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A recent patent from Yahoo describes in detail how people or users can help in the crawling of web pages. This patent is known as the automatically fetching patent and will come up with details of how a user or site interaction could be used to help the search engine crawling program.

The activities which are involved and addressed include the webmaster training the crawler of how to find out the pages which are indexed in their website. A human reviewer is teaching the crawler of how to find out the pages. The content subscriber will show the crawling program, the information that would be subscribed to and updates will be sending about it.

As per this patent, the search engine will allow people to teach the web crawling program. This will help in the navigation of pages of the website. This will be particularly more useful in accessing web pages which have java script links and those pages which are accessible only through various selections. Pages which are accessible through inputting text into forms can also be navigated with the help of this patent implementation.

The patent find application when search engines find difficulties in crawling pages which could be due to java script links.

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