Seven things that can help you with your link building campaign

May 2011 U.S. Search Engine Rankings

"More than 17.0 billion explicit core searches were conducted in May (up 5 percent versus April). Google Sites ranked first with 11.2 billion searches (up 5 percent), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.7 billion (up 5 percent), Microsoft Sites with 2.4 billion (up 4 percent), Ask Network with 502 million (up 2 percent) and AOL, Inc. with 254 million (up 2 percent).

Google Sites accounted for 63.3 percent of total core search queries conducted, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 19.6 percent (up 1.7 percentage points) and Microsoft Sites with 13.1 percent."

Matt Cutts: how much content should be on a homepage?

"You can have too much. I wouldn't have a homepage that has 20 megabytes.That takes a long time to download and users who are on a dial-up, or a modem, slow connection, they'll get angry at you.

But in general, if you have more content on a homepage, there's more text for Googlebot to find. So rather than just pictures, for example, if you have pictures plus captions, a little bit of textual information can really go a long way. I tend to veer towards a little more content when possible."

Matt Cutts: Is the same content posted under different TLDs a problem?

Google's Matt Cutts answer this question in a video:

"If you had five or six domain names and they all ended in .com, and they all were almost identical content, then in theory, our algorithms would typically detect that as duplicate and usually just show one example instead of five or six.

If you have them on different TLDs, so for example, .uk, .ca, .nz, .au, so all of these countries where you expect to find English content, but the units of currency might be different or things like that then we might or might not duplicate them depending on the exact content within each page.

In general, I wouldn't worry about that being classified as spam."

Forum discussion: is another Google update on the way?

"My early change indicators are ringing, starting about 5 am CST this morning, and it seems to be Panda related. Possibly reverse-Panda related.

This is based on traffic patterns, not necessarily on uptick or down-tick in traffic, though. But it's been spot-on for signaling every major change in ranking for almost 5 years now."

Editor's note: another update has been confirmed by Google's Matt Cutts on the SMX Advanced conference.

Google has announced a new format for Ad Sitelinks

"With the embedded format of Ad Sitelinks, there are no additional lines appended to your text ad. Instead, text in your ad that exactly matches one or more of the sitelinks in your campaign will automatically be linked to that sitelink’s destination URL.

With embedded sitelinks, potential customers can pick the part of your ad that applies directly to their current interests and visit the most specific page for that topic."

Search engine newslets

Google now supports the author tag.Google experiments with removing URLs from search results listings.Facebook accounts for 38 percent of sharing traffic on the web.Matt Cutts: What should I do if the "noindex" attribute doesn't appear to be working? Answer: do not use a space in "noindex".Ex-Google engineer says the company's software infrastructure is obsolete.Video: how personalized search can narrow your worldview.US online ad spend poised to grow 20% in 2011.Facebook sees big traffic drops in US and Canada.Adding your site to webmaster tools may reduce your rankings (if you have a local TLD).Back to table of contents - Visit Axandra.com

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