Notice: It’s been many years, and literally all the external links on this page were 404ing so they have been removed. The post is being kept online for historical reference.
Welcome to the March 30, 2005 edition of “Climbing The Beanstalk”, the bi-weekly newsletter on search engines and search engine positioning from Beanstalk. For a time where very little happened in the way of actual updates or algorithm changes there is a lot to report and so let’s just get right to it shall we …
Jack’s House
In an effort to increase the awareness our visitors have of what’s going on in the search engine world, Beanstalk is happy to announce the launch of the newest addition to our site: An SEO Blog.
The launch of this blog marks the beginning of an even closer relationship that Beanstalk has always tried to have with it’s clients and website visitors. While we have always tried our best to keep you updated with our newsletters and replies to your questions, this blog enables up to communicate with you daily on the current events affecting the search engine world.
Look to the top right of the blog for the “Add To Favorites” button and always know what’s going on.
The Giants :
The Top Three …
Google News – Things are apparently a bit hairy over at Google. While there is an update expected sometime early next month (my personal guess is April 1st) there have been a great number of anomalies over the past couple weeks that lead us to believe something pretty big is on the horizon.
Rankings are fluctuating far more than the usual eb-and-flow of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), some datacenters are showing different PageRank results however not in the usual way they do during an update. Normally all sites show both old and new PageRanks as the information is passed among multiple datacenters but currently it appears that specific sites are fluctuating and others are not being affected at all.
What his leads me to believe is that a VERY major update is about to take place. Google, it appears, may be testing a new algorithm on a fixed number of sites to monitor the effects before applying the changes universally. The only reason they would bother testing a new algorithm would be if the changes were so significant that they could potentially damage legitimate sites (reflect back to the Florida update).
MSN News – Unfortunately there isn’t much notable going on over at MSN. There have been no significant changes to their algorithm nor has much happened in the way of major purchases or technical advancements.
Yahoo! – As noted in today’s post on the new Beanstalk Blog, Yahoo! has or is about to purchase online photo sharing company Flickr for an undisclosed amount. You can read about what this means to both Flickr and Yahoo! on our site at /blog/.
Beanstalk Articles
Non-Reciprocal Link Building For Higher Search Engine Positioning
It’s no SEO secret that inbound links to your site are an important part of any complete search engine positioning strategy. You’ve undoubtedly received numerous emails touting the benefits of exchanging links with other websites. Provided that the sites are related, reciprocal linking can definitely help you in your quest for higher rankings however, establishing quality non-reciprocal links to your website will provide added weight and many of the tactics used in developing these links have built-in relevancy … <more>
Useful Tools
We highly recommend checking our these great SEO tools. If you’re a do-it-yourselfer they will save you countless hours and headaches:
- Future PageRank Tool – A very cool tool from SEOChat. Gives you a site’s PageRank on multiple Google datacenters. While normally the results are the same, during the upcoming PageRank update you’ll be able to see in advance what you’re PageRank will be.
- Total Optimizer Pro
- ClickTracks
Resources Of Interest
We’re always surfing and always on the lookout for useful information on top of the testing and analyzing we do on our own. Below you will find links to some of the more useful information we have found recently including forum posts and articles.
Looking for Links In All The Wrong Places? – Article by Eric Ward (on SearchEngineWatch)
In their frenzy to build links to curry favor with the major search engines, web site owners miss a far more important audience that’s increasingly turning to topical search sites …
Google Agrees To Acquire Urchin – Press Release from Google
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – March 28, 2005 – Google Inc. today announced it has agreed to acquire Urchin Software Corporation, a San Diego, California based web analytics company.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed …
Common Sense Search Engine Optimization – by Jill Whalen (on HighRankings.com)
For years, when people thought about search engine optimization, in all likelihood, gateway pages, doorway pages or informational pages probably came to mind. If you’re a search engine optimization specialist, you’ve probably had clients requesting that you create these types of pages for them.
Thank You
Thank you very much for subscribing to “Climbing The Beanstalk”, the bi-weekly search engine positioning newsletter. If you have any questions about the areas covered or if there are any areas of search engine positioning that you would like to see covered in future articles/newsletter please don’t hesitate to contact us. We want to write what you want to know.