The following question was sent in using StepForth’s SEO question submission form . If you have a question that you don’t mind being answered publicly please send it in and we might just use it in our next SEO newsletter.

QUESTION: “When do inbound links dictate ranking?”

“We have been told by an SEO consultant that, once the number of inbound links becomes significant, this rather than any SEO optimisation of the site itself dictates ranking for search terms. How true? If so, it implies that, to make any changes in rankings and search terms, we need to devote effort to links and link text from appropriate sites (authority etc). It implies time spent on adjusting title tags, keyword density etc, is fruitless.” Paul C. Read more…

In a show of humility we are not used to seeing from Google, the Blogger team published an apology of sorts today regarding a hailstorm of Blogger outages this week.

According to the team the current version of Blogger is causing massive problems for a variety of reasons which can be summed up as one thing – they have outgrown it. The post is a good read and gives some enjoyable insight into the world of Google when it turns upside down; not something I figured happened over there Read more…

Called a “weather update” by the Yahoo search team, a round of search engine ranking tweaks have been added today according to this blog post. I am looking forward to seeing how this new set of updates pans out. There does not appear to be a concensus at WebmasterWorld regarding this update; some have noticed changes and some have not. As a result, keeping in line with Yahoo!’s lingo; StepForth’s doppler radar does not forecast a huge storm (aka, it doesn’t appear to be a huge shakeup

In addition to this update Yahoo! announced that it is now formally supporting the NOODP tag:

<meta name=”ROBOTS” content=”NOODP”> or
<meta name=”Slurp” content=”NOODP”>

Google implemented the NOODP tag around July 14th of this year. For those of you unfamiliar with this tag it is designed to tell the search engines NOT to use the description that you have in your Open Directory Project (ODP) listing. This tag was an extremely welcome addition for webmasters because search engines were using the often out of date and poorly written descriptions from the ODP as the default for associated organic results. Finally, with the implementation of this weather update Yahoo has enabled site owners to prevent the use of their ODP description.

The Google Adwords team released a new beta tool that will allow Adwords users to test and track the success of their PPC landing pages. Called Adwords Website Optimizer this new tool is not widely open to the public quite yet but you can apply to become a beta tester.

As with most Google applications I find this program to be very straight forward and clever. The concept allows for users to create a single landing page, implement Adwords Optimizer code, then configure different variations of the page from within the Optimizer (changing the title, picture, content… anything). Each variation will be served up to Google viewers who click on the advertiser’s PPC listing and then the actions that the viewer takes will be tracked to calculate the effectiveness of the landing page in comparison to the other versions. Reports are provided along with some very straight forward statistics to make it simple for the average Adwords user to use the system successfully. Read more…

It was Christmas yesterday for the SEO community as Incisive Media announced that an arrangement with Danny Sullivan was announced to continue arranging the Search Engine Strategies Conferences through 2007. At this time there is no indication that Danny is going to continue his role as Chief Editor of Search Engine Watch. In fact according to his personal blog it appears that he is going to continue writing his informative search engine articles privately.

Congratulations Danny! We are happy to see you back with SES, it would not have been remotely the same without you I am sure.

I just have a second for a quick tip but this is a good one for those of you new to link building. If you have ever done a backlink search on a competitor to find out where they have their links from you often find that a large majority of the links are from their own site. It can be a real pain separating the wheat from the chaffe so here is a little trick on Yahoo (the best place to do link building).

Conduct the following search in Yahoo replacing “domain.com” with your competitor’s address:

http://www.domain.com -site:domain.com

The result is a listing of all the sites your competitor has gotten links from minus your competitor’s own pages. This is a handy little tool. Now if you want to do this faster you can always pick up OptiLink – a program that we use religiously when we are conducting link building campaigns. Visit our recommended SEO tools section of the SEO Blog for this one and much more.

On November 1st, 2006 in Victoria, BC, Canada, StepForth is providing a 2 hour workshop to budding entrepreneurs on the basics of search engine optimization. The workshop is run by the Entrepreneurial Learning Foundation (ELF), a not-for-profit foundation devoted to supporting young entrepreneurs. Read more…

The Google Code Blog just posted that Google web gadgets can now be posted for free on websites. Gadgets available are many such as calendars, games, jokes, etc. Here is a listing of the gadgets you can add to your own webpage.

Oh no, I hope this doesn’t take us back to the old days of gadget/eyecandy overuse (remember the animated gif nightmare?).

Live.com has released a great new search option for webmasters which allows you to see just how many links point to other websites from within your own. To use it simply search using the following syntax without the quotes and replacing “yoursite.com” with your domain (do not use ‘www.’):

“linkfromdomain:yoursite.com” Read more…

First there was Google Earth, Then Google Moon, now Google Sun? Robyn Beavers announced on the Google Blog Monday that soon Google will be installing 1.6 megawatts of solar panels at their Mountain View campus. When complete Google will have the largest corporate solar installation in the US and possibly even in the world.

The electricity generated by these solar panels is equivalent to that used by about 1000 average California homes and will offset roughly 30% of their peak electricity consumption.

Good job Google on working towards a greener environment.