The most time-consuming part of SEO is building a linking campaign. Tools or
ideas that help us save time doing this are extremely valuable.
• You can classify domain extension or specific site ideas when
searching for potential links:
o “Inurl:+”.edu” and
o “intitle:links” or “intitle:partners” or “intitle:resources” or
“intitle:engines” and
o “searchenginewatch” or “search engine watch”
• In Google you are not able to use the “link:” function with other
advanced search operators at the same time; in Yahoo! or MSN
you can.

Filtering out a site can be exceptionally helpful. If there is a
specific site that is clouding up your link search, you can filter them out
by placing “-site:www.whateverevilsite.com” in your search string.
Who is in Your Community?
Google TouchGraph graphs out sites related sites (by looking at the Google
related:site.com function). If your related sites do not consist of sites topically
related to your site, then you need to work on getting more people inside your
community to link to your site. The following is a picture of my topical
community. You can see many of the sites are exceptionally related to my site.
Google and Spam
Google is primarily a mathematical company, and they usually state that they try to
handle spam via algorithms.
While the term algorithm can be used loosely, there is human intervention.
However, they do not specifically respond to most spam reports. You can report
spam to them, but do not expect it to have much immediate effect on search
results. Generally, time spent reporting spam to Google would be better spent
making a better site. Also, some competitors can get a bit feisty if they are snitched
on. I know a guy that got so mad at being turned in, that a month later he ranked
1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, and 10. He then e-mailed the snitch thanking him for the
motivation to create all those other pages.
If your site is kicked out of the index for an automated spam penalty, it will usually
come back after 60 days after the thing that triggered the spam penalty has been
removed. If your site was manually reviewed and removed, the penalty period
might be much longer.

You can send Google a re-inclusion request via a form inside of Webmaster
Central after you have cleaned up your site explaining a sob story of how some
SEO company ripped you off. They prefer to receive this feedback from within
their webmaster console because it shows that you are related to the site you are
requesting a re-inclusion for. The key is to let them know that whatever was wrong
will not happen again.
If you are still having problems after e-mailing them a few times, you can call them
at 650-330-0100. Google usually will not reply to most bans. If your site is
manually banned for industrial strength spam, you stand a slim chance of getting
back in the index unless you are a large advertiser, have a well-known brand, or you
getting banned was a large public issue.
While they do not openly and publicly advertise it, I have been told by a few big
spenders on Google AdWords that they have received low-level, one-on-one
ranking consultations.
In addition to banning sites from the index, Google also has numerous filters they
apply. For example, sites with excessive duplicate content may end up in the
supplemental results. In addition, sites with excessive low-quality inbound or
outbound links may be placed on a reduced crawl priority or have a -30 ranking
penalty applied.
Google’s webmaster guidelines are located at:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

Problems with Google’s Technology

Jeff Dean, a Google engineer, also talks about Google’s technology a bit in this
video at: http://www.uwtv.org/programs/displayevent.asp?rid=2459.
Since Google has the broadest distribution, people also work the hardest to game
their system.
Google tends to take the view that any relevancy manipulation is inherently wrong
and the SEOs are the enemy. In doing this, Google often prevents many quality
resources from ranking and ends up having substandard relevancy. It seems they
would rather make their own results slightly substandard than allow others to
manipulate their index.
Currently, Google’s algorithms place way too much emphasis on domain age and
trust. This will lead to a stale index, and worse yet, many spammers have been
buying old sites (or finding content management issues trusted sites) and adding
tons of spammy content to them. A relevant thread worth reading about how easy
it is to game Google with old domains can be found at

http://www.threadwatch.org/node/6484.

You can also use SEO for Firefox or Archive.org to see how old the average, topranked
site is for your primary keywords. Typically the top-ranked Google results
will be older than the top-ranked results on other search engines.

Google & Duplicate Content

Since December 2004, webmasters have been noticing Google has been tweaking
their duplicate content filters. If you have many pages with near similar content,
then they may struggle to rank in Google.
If you rewrite your URLs, make sure they are not getting indexed under the old
and new URLs. Also, ensure print only and other versions of similar content are
not getting indexed. WebmasterWorld had a good thread about the topic
mentioned here: http://www.seobook.com/archives/001230.shtml.
As automated spam spreads and rich consumer feedback is posted to the web,
hollow merchant sites will be forced out of the Google search results, which is a
trend that has been going on for a couple years now.
The best solution to that problem is to be able to collect rich user feedback on your
site or find other value add ideas to differentiate your site from websites that are
hollow product databases.
Wildcard Replace
When search engines compare one page to the next for uniqueness of content,
they can use sliding text readers across the text. This is one of the things that hurts
many information-light product catalog databases. If one page is like Cheap green
baby seat blah blah blah and the next page is like Cheap red baby seat blah blah blah then
when the search engine compares Cheap * baby seat blah blah blah, both of the pages
will appear identical.
Search engines do not want to index multiple copies of identical content.
If the only difference between template-driven pages on your site is part number
you may eventually run into problems where you notice search engines do not
want to index much of your site.
WWW versus Non-WWW
Some search engines may view site.com and www.site.com as being two different
URLs. If you split your link popularity amongst both versions, you will have less
authority on each version than if the two were combined.
To prevent both versions from getting indexed, you may want to 301 redirect one
version at the other version.
Informational Bias
Yahoo! has a tool called Yahoo! Mindset that allows you to place greater emphasis
on commercial or informational results.

By default, Google tends to bias the search results heavily toward informational
resources. This makes business sense for them for many reasons:
• They want to promote creating additional search inventory to
show search ads against. As inventory is created, they can demand
more out of new content by biasing their algorithms to work harder at
promoting the creation of higher quality content.
• As more information clogs up the search results, more searchers
will click on AdWords for commercial searches. Merchants are
then stuck using AdWords for commercial transactions.
• Many informational sites are monetized using contextual ads
such as Google AdSense.

Google Hijacking

Sometimes people can hijack the search results of other webmasters. This is rather
uncommon in most fields, but if you get into high-margin areas, such as
prescription drugs, it is much more common.
In May of 2005, Google actually had one of their sites hijacked. Notice below how
the Google AdSense site is showing up as being part of the all-in-one-business.com
domain.

While the hijackings are uncommon, if you are going to play in hyper-competitive
fields, make sure you make friends with some people who can help you out of
sticky situations. People usually do hijacks via 302 redirects, meta redirects, or a
combination of the two. An unwritten law amongst many of the most aggressive
SEOs is that you should never hijack a listing, and you should never file a spam
report. If you do, most likely you will not like some of the retaliation actions that
other webmasters may do.

Google Product Search & Google Base
Google Product Search is Google’s shopping search engine. Via Google Base, it
accepts free merchant product feeds. It also searches the web to find products and
match them up with their associated images as a backfill.
To optimize your site for great Google Product Search listings, you need to submit
a data feed to Google Base. It is a good idea to use descriptive image names and
titles as well as use your keywords in the data you submit to get top Google
Product Search placement.