Yahoo and Bing Announce New Ammended Search Partnership

As the number two and three players of the top three search engines on the internet, Bing and Yahoo have announced a recent ammendment to their search relationship, to "improve the search experience, create value for advertisers and establish ongoing stability for partners." The two companies have had an agreement in place since 2009 and this is just an evolution of that partnership. Yahoo will continue to serve Bing Ads and will now be able to give consumers the same experience on both mobile and desktop platforms. Microsoft will be in charge of all ads through the Bing Ads services while Yahoo will be the sole salesforce for the Yahoo Gemini platform, allowing the sales and engineering teams for each product to operate closely together in order to serve advertisers best. Microsoft gives Yahoo a portion of the revenue obtained through Yahoo's search user, a fact that remains unchanged with this update to their agreement. For more information, the full press release is available here.

Blog Comments For Backlinks No Longer Provide Link Juice, Most Blogs Using NoFollow For Comment Links

A few years ago when SEO just started to become very competitive most people were scrambling to get as many links to their sites as possible. They didn't care about the quality of the links, if there was relevant content on the page, anchor text, page rank of the linking domain, etc. But now things have changed, no longer do people want as many links as possible. Many SEOers believe that too many bad quality links actually do harm to your site's SERP results. And since Google has started the "NoFollow" tag which means that the spider doesn't follow the link or give you any credit for it. One of the easiest and quickest ways to get some fast back links was to comment on people's blogs and use links in the body of your comment and for your name. But now most blogs automatically use the NoFollow tag on any links in the comments section making this practice pretty much futile. There are still a few blogs out there that pass on their link juice to links left in the comments section but for the most part the only good a comment link will do is if somebody reading that blog clicks on your link. Some search engines count these links, and of course nobody knows exactly what is in the search engine's algorithms but most people in the SEO field seem to agree that NoFollow links don't count for anything in the top three search engines - Yahoo, Bing, and of course good old Google. So next time you see an offer for 10,000 backlinks from blog comments for $10 you know that it isn't even worth that. The better way to get quality links and real organic traffic is to take your time to get high quality links. Submit press releases to attract links and articles from real people, not automated scripts. Create useful articles that are relavent to your site and the site you post it on. Post good answers to people's questions in forums and other sites. Submit to high quality web directories like DMOZ. Create a real blog with lots of good content for your site with news and info about your products or services. Don't spam the entire web just to get a few crappy links. It won't help and many people claim it could actually harm your SERP rankings. So just like they taught you in school - don't follow the crowd, just say NO!

Pop-Ups and Pop-Unders

Pop-up ads are nothing new. Neither are their ugly evil twin the pop-under. They have been around a while and most browsers do a decent job at blocking a lot of them. However they don't block them all because some sites legitimately use pop-up windows. If browsers blocked them all then many sites would lose part of their functionality. But you would think that most users by now have figured out that these unwanted windows that appear out of nowhere are simply blatant advertisements. But they haven't. And some pop-up and pop-under ads tailor directly to these users who are unaware of this type of spam. If you've spent any amount of time surfing the web then you have seen the ads that try to disguise themselves as system windows or an application that is telling you have viruses or something of that nature and you need to download their software to fix it. And of course there are the ads that promise to make you a millionaire with only a few hours of work.

Personally I don't use any plug-ins or add-ons that would block them because I know that some sites do use them legitimately and I don't want to miss out on any of the functionality. Anyways most modern browsers will block multiple attempts to open separate windows and give you the option to open them for that site. But sometimes this doesn't work for some reason and I still get attacked by a seemingly endless amount of windows that come out of nowhere. As a web developer, it is my duty to keep use of pop-up windows to a minimum. And if a client requests a pop-up window I politely tell them that it is a bad idea and why they should try and figure something else out. I have used them in the past - for legitimate site functionality and for advertisements. The ads that I've tried in the past don't perform well at all. I've gotten a few clicks on the ads, but none that convert. So while I may have made a few pennies for a couple of wild clicks, pop-up and pop-under windows have never gotten me any sales or leads. So if you are thinking of using pop-ups, think twice. And if you are thinking of using pop-unders, I highly suggest not to. If a person leaves a page it is because it doesn't interest them, you don't need to keep attacking them with windows that they won't see until long after they leave your site. Sure you may get a few pennies CPM but it is not worth it to annoy your visitors. If a person gets annoyed by your site it is very unlikely for them to come back. And I bet that Google and other spiders can detect them in your page source and I guarantee that they don't like it. So think of pop-up and pop-under ads like drugs, and just say no!