Weekly SEO news: 14 June 2011
Welcome to the latest issue of the Search Engine Facts newsletter.

Many people think that getting links is very difficult or that their website is not attractive enough to get backlinks. There are several things that you can do to get more backlinks to your website.

Also in the news: the latest search engine market share statistics, official Google information about the perfect home page length and duplicate content in different countries, another Google update is on the way 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. Seven things that can help you with your link building campaign

Many people think that getting links is very difficult or that their website is not attractive enough to get backlinks. There are several things that you can do to get more backlinks to your website.

1. Offer reasons to link to your website

What makes your company unique? How are you different to your competitors? Do you offer giveaways or competitions? Are there any news or stories about the people in your company?

  • Create web pages on your website that deal with that content so that other websites can link to these pages.
  • Inform bloggers about your competitions or giveaways and let them review your products.

2. Check your business memberships

Are you a member in a business association? Have your company or your products received any awards? What are the governing bodies for your industry? Check if these websites link to your site and try to find new business associations that might be related to your business.

3. Leverage your offline relationships

Offline relationship that you have with other businesses, people and publications can often be turned into online relationships that include links to your website.

4. Write testimonials

If you like the product of a company, send them a testimonial. Chances are that the the testimonial will be listed on the company website along with a link to your site.

5. Check your audience

Which websites, forums and networks are used by your customers? These websites and forums are the sites from which you should get links.

6. Benefit from sponsorships and social activities

Does your company sponsor any local activities? Do you support relief organizations? If you do, you can get direct links from the organizer of the activity and you can create linkworthy content on your website by writing about your activities.

7. Check your existing backlinks

Analyzing the websites that already link to your website can help you to get an idea of the linkworthy content on your website. You will also learn why other websites link to your site.

It is very important that your website gets as many good backlinks as possible if you want to get high rankings on Google. The link manager in IBP helps you to keep track of your link building activities.

The link manager also helps you to find related websites, blogs and forums and it also checks the current backlinks to your website. In addition, IBP's link manager checks if the links to your website use the nofollow tag and it helps you to contact potential link partners.

Back to table of contents - Visit Axandra.com

2. Search engine news and articles of the week

StatisticsMay 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 CuttsMatt 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

3. Success stories

IBP



Send us a testimonial: 300,000 readers will read your success story!

Let us know how IBP has helped you to improve your website and we might publish your success story with a link to your website in this newsletter. The more detailed your story is, the better. Click here to tell us your story.

Back to table of contents - Visit Axandra.com

4. Previous articles

Back to table of contents - Visit Axandra.com

Do you have a minute?