Weekly SEO news: 11 April 2006
Welcome to the latest issue of the Search Engine Facts newsletter.

This week, we're taking a look at the new Google acquisition that might change the way Google evaluates web sites.

In the news: Yahoo tests a new ad model, spammers use Wikipedia to get links and more.

Table of contents:

We hope that you enjoy this newsletter and that it helps you to get more out of your website. Please pass this newsletter on to your friends.

Best regards,
Andre Voget, Johannes Selbach, Axandra CEO

1. New acquisition: Can we expect a shift in Google's ranking algorithm?

Google has recently acquired an advanced text search algorithm that has been invented by University of New South Wales PhD student Ori Allon.

Although the acquisition has not been confirmed yet, Google has confirmed that Ori Allon is now employed at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California.

Three search engines tried to get Orion

The new algorithm has been given the name Orion. The ownership rights of Orion belong to the University of New South Wales in Australia because it was developed as a part of Ori Allon's Ph D program.

The University acknowledged that Yahoo and Microsoft had conducted negotiations with its business development company. As all big search engines tried to get the rights to use this new algorithm this seems to be a hot algorithm for the future of search.

How does this advanced algorithm work?

Unfortunately, there's no live demo of the new algorithm yet. Orion aims to make searching easier and less frustrating. According to what has been revealed so far, Orion rates the found web page texts by quality of the site in which they appear.

For every search, Orion will offer a list of topics related to the original source:

"Take a search such as the American Revolution as an example of how the system works.

Orion would bring up results with extracts containing this phrase. But it would also give results for American History, George Washington, American Revolutionary War, Declaration of Independence, Boston Tea Party and more. You obtain much more valuable information from every search."

Orion finds pages where the content is about a topic strongly related to the key word. It then returns a section of the page, and lists other topics related to the key word so the user can pick the most relevant.

"Orion will display the results to the query in the form of expanded text extracts, giving you the relevant information without having to go to the website - although you still have that option if you wish."

What does this mean to your Google rankings?

It's hard to tell how this new algorithm will change the way Google ranks web pages. If the algorithm really allows web surfers to get information from web pages without really going to the web pages than webmasters might choose to block search engines that use the Orion algorithm. There is no point in giving search engines valuable information without getting something in return.

Until Google uses the new algorithm, you should make sure that your web pages are optimized for Google's current algorithm so that you get customers and sales now.

To get best results on search engines, you should use a tool that is continually update to reflect the latest search engine changes. IBP is such a continually updated tool that can help you to get the best possible rankings for your site.

2. Search engine news of the week

Yahoo! tests new search-engine ad model

    "Yahoo! has released a test version of its new search monetization in Scandinavia and will expand the rollout to the U.K. in July. [...]

    Codenamed 'Project Panama,' Yahoo’s new model will be similar to that of Google, which ranks search-engine ads by both the amount advertisers pay for keywords and the relevance of the ad."




MSN Search restored after hours-long outage

    "Microsoft Corp.'s MSN search engine stopped working for about four hours Thursday morning, and the company couldn't immediately say what caused the problem."


Search engine looks behind firewalls

    "A search engine company has begun offering free sneak peeks at premium, pay-for-view Internet content. [...] Congoo.com makes restricted or subscription-only Web content from Business Wire, Encyclopaedia Britannica Online and other publishers available free to anyone who downloads its NetPass toolbar."

Search engine newslets

3. Articles of the week

Google settlement or not, click fraud won't go away

    "With a planned $90 million settlement, Google could soon dispense with a class-action lawsuit involving so-called click fraud. [...] Despite those figures, click fraud is not deterring spending on search marketing, which JupiterResearch predicts will rise from $4.2 billion in 2005 to $7.5 billion in 2010."



A frank interview with Gary Flake

Gary Flake is a veteran of Overture, Yahoo and now Microsoft's vaunted research labs (he's founder and director of the new "Live Labs").

Wikipedia and link spammers - a“how-to” guide

"I recently witnessed someone at Wikipedia.org placing dozens of links to his own website. It’s not all that unusual for someone to place a link to their own website on the Wikipedia site, but generally the links get removed."

Back to table of contents - Visit Axandra.com

4. Preview of the next ARELIS version - part 10

We're currently working on a new ARELIS version. The new ARELIS version will have many new features and many improvements.

We think that it will be the best and most complete link exchange, link popularity and off-site web promotion solution. In the next few weeks, we'll show a preview of some of the new ARELIS features in this newsletter.

Part 10: Who links to you and how do they link to you?

As you probably know, incoming links are very important if you want to get high rankings on Google, Yahoo and other major search engines.

The new ARELIS will not only help you to get high quality inbound links, it will also help you to optimize these links for high rankings.

ARELIS will tell you which texts people use to link to your web site, how many links are on the web pages with your link, on which IP address the web page with the link resides and much more.

This information allows you to fine-tune the links to your web site so that you get high rankings for the search terms of your choice.

Of course, the new ARELIS version will be a free update for registered ARELIS 4 users. A limited preview of the new ARELIS version has been released to selected users.

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5. Recommended resources

A spam-free links solution for professional webmasters

"ARELIS is a top-rated software program that helps you to build a powerful business network quickly and easily.

Your business will benefit in many ways from that network: You'll get highly targeted visitors to your web site, you'll benefit from new business contacts and your web site will get a higher ranking on search engines because of higher link popularity.

ARELIS helps you to establish many high quality reciprocal links that point to your web site. It is the first software program that provides a serious, spam-free reciprocal links solution for professional webmasters."
Review on FindMySoft.com

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6. Previous articles

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