Some are alleging that what other web sites say in their links to you matters more than what’s actually on your web site. I don’t believe that’s completely true, but a couple of recent pranks clearly illustrate the power of link text.

Link text, if you’re not sure, is the text that comprises the actual hyperlink to another web page or web site. In the article below from August 24, the link for Google Talk points to the web page www.google.com/talk/ but it doesn’t say that. It says “Google Talk”. What the link actually says makes a big difference.

You may have heard that if you do a search for “miserable failure” or “worst president”, the #1 result in the search engines is the official biography of President George W. Bush. Try it: go to Google and type in either search term and see what you get.

Now if you go to President Bush’s biography and search it for the word “miserable” or the word “worst”, you’ll find neither one anywhere on the page. How can that be?  Apparently, many bloggers have created links that say “miserable failure” and “worst president” in the link text but which point to President Bush’s biography. So the #1 result you found in Google was driven entirely by link text.

The Moral of the Story

Take this to heart when you’re requesting links to your site. By default, most people giving you links will thoughtlessly give you a link that states your URL, like www.McHughAndMacri.com. That doesn’t help you nearly as much as a link pointing to the same page that says  Elderlaw Attorneys in NewJersey.

Continuing its rapid expansion into new product categories, Google has just today launched an instant messaging program called Google Talk. This comes just a few days after they introduced Google Sidebar, which pulls news stories, photographs, weather updates, stock quotes and other features onto your computer without opening a Web browser.  There had been anticipation of the new Google Talk product for a few days, as evidenced by this story in the Los Angeles Times. [sorry - that story is no longer on the LA Times website.]

Google Talk requires you to have a Gmail account, and is partially compatible with other IM clients. Currently, you need to download the free Google Talk application in order to actually talk with people across the Internet.

If any of you are using it, let us know how you like it!

Google recently became upset at CNET for publishing info obtained by Googling Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, promising not to talk to anyone from CNET for the next year. <Story here>

ZDNet in the UK wrote today:

Acting under the mistaken impression that Google’s search engine was intended to help research public data, we have in the past enthusiastically abused the system to conduct exactly the kind of journalism that Google finds so objectionable.

Clearly, there is no place in modern reporting for this kind of unregulated, unprotected access to readily available facts, let alone in capriciously using them to illustrate areas of concern. We apologise unreservedly, and will cooperate fully in helping Google change people’s perceptions of its role just as soon as it feels capable of communicating to us how it wishes that role to be seen.

The full editorial can be found here.

Google seems to be testing some new search features, as described in a blog by Tech Digits.

Link Buying: A panel at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose said that link buying isn’t a punishable offense (by the search engines) as long as the obvious intention of purchased links is advertising and not just to influence search engine ranking.  For example, a paid ad on East Hanover Online won’t get you penalized for “buying links”. Neither would a law firms listing at FindLaw.com.

But be careful where you purchase your links. If you’re getting a link from what could be considered a “bad neighborhood,” make sure you don’t link back to that area to avoid being penalized.

Google is being sued over accusations that it overcharged advertisers who use their paid search advertising program, AdWords, which accounts for the vast majority of Google’s revenue. The full story is available at Reuters.

In the August 3 edition of the High Rankings Newsletter, noted SEO expert Jill Whalen writes the following:

… you’ve probably heard me say a million times “Make sure to have great keyword-rich content.”

… Does keyword-rich content mean you should find every available spot on your page to stuff your keywords? Of course not! In fact, if you are even using the word “stuff” in the same sentence as “keywords,” it’s most likely not something you want to do. Writing keyword-rich content has nothing to do with stuffing. (We save all our stuffing for Thanksgiving, thank you very much!) To me, it’s common sense that it’s a bad idea to stick keyword phrases everywhere and anywhere. But unless I specifically point out the exact places on a page where you might want to put them (and might not), some people will never quite get it.

Unfortunately, even when I do spell it out, like in my Nitty-gritty Guide there will always be people who will take my suggestions further than they should. They have not learned the most important rule in professional search engine optimization, i.e., always put your site users before the search engines in anything that you do for your website.

The sad (and kinda scary) thing is that even professional SEO companies don’t always get this. I’ve had 2 or 3 emails just this week from people who hired various SEO companies to do work for them, only to have the company make recommendations that actually made the pages of their website *worse* than they were before they hired the company. Not necessarily worse for the search engines, but most definitely worse for the site visitors. In this day and age, it’s hard for me to fathom that an SEO company would still be telling their clients, “You have to do this for the search engines, even though we realize it makes your site look dumb.”

No, you absolutely do not!

There is no SEO technique that you should have to do on your site that will make your site icky for your visitors. Don’t believe it for a second. There may certainly be some trade-offs that your SEO may suggest to you, but you should be able to pick and choose the ones that will work for your site and still get the results you are hoping for.

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves!