So, not to be left out in the cold, the key factors for number one websites in Bing seem to be:

• having an old domain name
• having quality inbound links, specifically from pages that have the same keywords in the title
• then the usual good amount of quality content (I’ve read Bing likes more than 300 words on a page), clean code and a sitemap

If you’ve done a good job of optimising your site for Google then your rankings shouldn’t be too different for Bing. If you’ve got loads of spammy links holding your website up in Google then these won’t help you in Bing. Bing seems to like better qualified links than Google – it’s about time!

Read more over at Bing

It smelt like a Google penalty, in particular a -50 penalty. But I didn’t understand, we hadn’t purchased any links, all of the links we obtained were on topic, relevant, using a range of anchor text. So I went to the source to see the outcome. Googling the clients URL I discovered they had over 600 links, amazing since we’ve only created about 60 for them, six months ago they had about 70, so something odd was going on. Close inspection of the sites linking to them revealed a heap, I’d be guessing at least 500 sites, were other Australian businesses with links pages.

And then it twigged. I’d remembered the client was involved in the Traffic Accelerator Program last year. They hadn’t created a links page themself, but every month they were emailed a list of websites to link to, including the anchor text and description.  So presumably, all the other companies involved in the program had also been emailed my clients details and asked to add them to their links pages.

That means about 500 sites are linking to my client with exactly the same anchor text and description. Clearly Google doesn’t like that, so they’ve updated the algorithm.

These pages are spammy, but more importantly they are just not useful – they add no value for anyone! The title on the pages is either links, resources, useful links, useful websites, or some other red flag that says to Google “I am spam” or something to that effect. They link to other websites that are completely unrelated to each other and provide no value to the user whatsoever. If you Google the URL of any of the sites in the Netregistry Traffic Accelerator video you will see the what I mean. Obviously for the companies that appear in the video their sites are strong enough to take take the penalty, which indicates they have a number of links that outweigh the spammy links, but for most in the program, these links would be all they had.

I’ve always maintained links pages and reciprocal linking are a waste of time. Now it seems they are detrimental.

What do these mean for the future of search engine optimisers? Well, it seems Google is finally yielding to the fact they can’t create the perfect algorithm, they still need human input. Whilst there is no official line the promote or remove buttons will have any effect on a website, it’s only a matter of time before Google use the data and the SERPs will start to produce results based on promote and remove.

And why not. It will encourage businesses and website owners to create useful content, and hopefully banish spammy sites to the black hole. Just think about all the crap websites you currently have to sift through that just happen to be good at SEO, but provide no real value, this is a way to reduce them.

Will the system be gamed? Of course we’ve already heard the urban myth of SEO agencies outsourcing to China and having lots of people search for and click on their websites across internet cafes, so you’d assume this would be the next step. Except they’ll each have to have their own Google account, no big drama, but the different accounts would need to register a different promote and remove vote from different IP addresses, meaning one person would need to login to one account, promote or remove, then go to another internet cafe, login to another Google account, perform another promote or remove and so forth – not time effective at all. I’m sure if a heap of different accounts were promoting and removing the same websites from the same IP address Google would notice (at least I hope they would!). Or I guess you could have a range of IP addresses and move around from computer to computer for different accounts – not an easy setup and I’m actually imagining it would seem a bit futuristic sci-fi. It would be cheaper to just create some decent content…I can’t imagine it would be worth the investment for the outcome.

So, fingers crossed for Google working the promote and remove feature in their search engine results.

It’s a quick tool with an easy to understand graph that should really be used for more less serious searches or in this case political searches, so here goes. Over the last 90 days more people in Northern Territory, Tasmania and SA have been searching for “Olympics” than those in the Eastern Seaboard.

But when it comes to “Tibet”, the Eastern Seaboard leads the way, with no searches from NT or Tasmania.

I’ll let you make your own assumptions…

Last month, 87.81% of all Australian search engine queries were through Google. They’ve taken back some of Yahoo’s share, but have mostly reduced MSN’s search traffic since June 07 to half.

In the last year Google have gained 12% of a very competitive stake. Will they be able to grab the remaining 12% of the Australian search market? I doubt it, but the way these trends are pointing, it looks like it might just be possible.

View the stats over at Hitwise.

If you do a search for businesses on http://maps.google.com.au/ and type in SEO as the service and Sydney as the location, you’ll see our friends of Nestsoft appearing in the number four spot : Nestsoft Web Development, Designing, Seo Services…mother ****** (Gordon Ramsey can fill in the *******)…

Now I’ve just noticed I can claim this listing – it has a sparkly “NEW” link next to it. Even though it’s already in my Business Centre, anyway I’ve gone through the whole claiming and filling in details again – thinking it will all be sorted when I get the phone clarification straight away – only to find I can’t do phone clarification – it’s disabled. Mother ******! I’ll have to wait weeks for the mother ******* postcard.

The race is on.

Who will be quicker:

• Snail mail or
• Google Maps or
• Google AdWords (yes, I also wrote to them as they disapproved one of my local business ads based on mismatching business name)

Sadly my bets are on snail mail.

Even sadder: it’s Friday at 7.55pm and I’m still at my computer…

But I read today in the SMH that Google has pulled the plug on them, saying it’s against AdSense policy. As Ecocho is founded by Tim Macdonald of the Found Agency I kind of thought – oh – how sad (in a somewhat green-eyed manner), he already made a mottsa last year by selling to the Photon Group. But reading through the article, I feel it’s somewhat unfair and I’m wondering just what is going on in Google Australia.

This is the second major company this year who has shown Google Australia what they are doing before executing it and not being told it’s against Google Guidelines.  I’m referring to the Flight Center debacle at this years SMX – they too had shown their stuff to Google earlier in the year, were not told it was against the Guidelines, then made to look rather silly in front of crowd of eager optimizers.

So I take back my oh – how sad attitude. If I was Mr Macdonald I would be rather peeved that someone’s standing in my way of earning another million this year…

And 92% click on a result within the first three pages. If you’re not in the first three pages the only clients you’ll be getting are those 8% with lots of time on their hands – and we all know what a joy they are to work for…

The study is actually about blended search results, aka universal search and it’s obviously changed our tolerance for results. Now, 49% of users who don’t find what they are looking for on the first page change their search query. So rather than click through those extra 2 pages, they’ll just type something else in. Our desire to go deeper into the black hole (past the first three pages) has decreased from 22% in 2002 to 9% in 2008.

Do we really trust that each of the big three search engines are returning the best results on the first three pages?

I certainly don’t, this survey makes me want to dive into the black hole more often.

Make up your own mind by reading the report.

Find out more from one of the discoverers, Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-dangers-of-cloaking-revealed-at-smx-sydney-4086#jtc55210

Update: Flight Centre has posted a response and explanation on Neerav Bhatt’s blog here

Google Enterprise Custom Search will allow users to customise results and apparently you can skew the results to guide them to the products you want to sell. For more information go to Google Enterprise