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fellow bloggers Infopirat and Datenschmutz’s Ritchie Pettauer (both links german-only) have started a combined link- & Technorati-favorites exchange (the more readers favor your blog, the higher your authority calculated by Technorati). to get a Technorati-favorite from me, just backlink to this post and add my blog to your favorites - voila! as soon as I find your backlink I’ll add your blog to my favorites as well. more participants after the fold…
(more…)

Mitch Kapor’s (inventor of Lotus 1-2-3, co-founder of the EFF) bookmark-synchronizing utility for Firefox-based browsers, foxmarks, is about to enter the market of human-powered search engines - a space currently heating up - not only since the recent launch of Mahalo. the search engine will utilize user-generated metadata on URLs to deliver - according to TechCrunch - superior search-results compared to Google - especially for popular search-terms, which naturally suffer the most under SEO-efforts. thinking about foxmarks, three questions arise:

• there are obviously privacy issues when using user-submitted data for a public search-offering (update: the foxmarks-Blog promises to give users the ability to opt-out before they’re going to launch a public service)
• when is Yahoo! going to leverage del.icio.us in a similar way? given that del.icio.us has far more users than foxmarks (I’m guessing) this seems to be a no-brainer…
• how is foxmarks going to protect their service, which might work very well while it has not appeared on SEO’s radars, from spammers?

update: after reading that Yahoo! just integrated Flickr’s image search-results (which is superior to the image search at Google or Ask, at least according to Zooomr CEO Thomas Hawk) tightly into their main Yahoo! Image Search product, a possible adaption of del.icio.us-metadata to the Yahoo!-searchengine does sound even more interesting…doesn’t it?

John Chow really has mastered the art of semi-organic link hustling building… in a recent post, the web marketeer asks for inbound links containing certain anchor-phrases (like “make money online“) in exchange for a pagerank 7 back-link from the frontpage of his blog. since the call is out since mid of may 2007, and literally hundreds of bloggers urging for traffic have joined John’s effort (and with this post, including me too), I really wonder why his page still ranks quite poorly on most term’s Google-queries…

(via Datenschmutz)

SEOmoz updated their ranking of search engine ranking factors according to 34 independent SEO specialists. along with their Beginner’s Guide to SEO, this is a great entry point for anybody new to SEO. the top 10 reason your site ranks in search results as it does are:

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag
2. Global Link Popularity of Site
3. Anchor Text of Inbound Links
4. Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure
5. Age of Site
6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links To Site
7. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community
8. Server is Often Inaccessible to Bots
9. Keyword Use in Body Text
10. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site

(via Search Engine Land)

Peter Norvig (director of research at Google) compares real-life traffic numbers of several sites with their reach as reported by Alexa. Norvig emphasizes the selection bias introduced by Alexa as a tool preferred by members of hte SEO-industry.

Super Affiliate Marketing Blog gives a 10-step introduction to PPC(pay-per-click)-marketing.