The remaining 46 search engines it tracks accounted for less than 2.0 percent.

In a long anticipated move, Google is now taking action to web sites who provide paid links. Google doesn’t penalize the relevancy of the site in search, but rather, hits the sites in their pocketbook by penalizing their page rank. If the site has low page rank, which is generally a requirement of paid link services like PayPerPost.com, then the site starts to lose out on advertising dollars.

Danny Sullivan wrote in detail about this new development in a post at Search Engine Land, entitled Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google.

“…Overall, the move takes Google into a new era of attacking paid links, allowing it more precise weapons than it has had in the past. For example, both the Stanford Daily and New Scientist are among several prominent sites that sell links. Google has not really been able to penalize such sites as that would hurt core relevancy. People expect them to show up.

By using PageRank decreases (something Google first experimented with in the SearchKing case in 2002), Google can hurt the perceived value of buying links from a particular site without harming core relevancy.”

Bottom line: if Pagerank is important to you, you need to carefully consider buying — or selling — paid links.

• Search engine optimization, where Yield scans your Web pages for keywords associated with content, applies its library of best practices, and recommends changes.
• Second, through graphic representations it will who you how to organize content for increased effectiveness (pageviews)
• They will also provide paid search optimization services.

Yield’s service is aimed more at the midmarket than at Fortune 500 companies (who often have in-house SEO specialists and online ad channels).

Read John Foley’s article for more information.

The solution? Use 301’s to redirect pages with this architectural issue and point those old pages to the single source that is your primary, optimized-for-SEO page.

Learn more at SEOMoz

This article references a roundtable of SEO experts answering the “How long does it take to update site-wide 301 redirects in Google?” question:

“So lets say you change all of your urls on your website to a completely new url structure. You 301 redirect all the old urls to the new ones. So how does it take for this to update in Google and other search engines?” source

Sometimes it could take up to a year to update your site in the SEs; in practice (with Google anyway) its usually < 6 months.

Read more at How long does it take to update site-wide 301 redirects in Google?

• In the title tag once, and possibly twice (or as a variation) if it makes sense and sounds good (subjective, but necessary)
• Once in the H1 header tag of the page
• At least 3X in the body copy on the page (sometimes a few more times if there’s a lot of text content)
• At least once in bold
• At least once in the alt tag of an image
• Once in the URL
• At least once (sometimes 2X when it makes sense) in the meta description tag
• Generally not in link anchor text on the page itself (this is a bit more complex - see this post for details) source

It it hotly debated if the H1 or the H2 tag is more relevant; many pundits on SEOMOZ will claim the H2 tag is more important, at least with Google.

The latest iteration of Microsoft’s Live Search, which was first “leaked” last week, is now live and in the wild. According to the Live Search team, the improvements cover four major areas: an expanded index (reports say Live now searches 20 billion pages), faster load times, a new look and feel, and more integrated content.

Read full article

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Google Loves Transparent Links & Hit Counter Spam