While link building is an important part of any marketing effort, I would disqualify anyone who is sending me emails promoting this as a service. I feel that anyone doing link building in volume is going to raise  flags with the search engines and is very likely to get you banned. Sure, automated or assembly line link-building may provide dramatic short-term gains, but you have to ask yourself, is it worth the risk. 

Google Official Webmasters Blog discusses the legitimate side of  link building and provides advice on building links (here).

Bing’s new interface does list the search phrases your site is displayed for, which is especially useful when your site is displayed for the wrong things, and what was actually clicked. However, since it doesn’t show the URL that was displayed or your position in the results (you can preform an actual search to figure this out), you don’t have a compete picture of what content is working and what isn’t.

Crawl errors are recorded and graphed, but Bing provides no specifics to guide you as to what the errant links are or what they are linked from. And the tool lacks reports for incoming links, linked phrases, and ranking information.

In summary, Bing’s new interface is slicker looking than the previous product and has some attractive charts. However I am hoping this is just the first pass and that Bing will flow-in additional information to expose the critical details that are currently missing.

In this meet-up we’ll discuss Google webmaster tools, Google analytics, sitemaps, and using redirects to map content with the .htaccess file (emphasis will be on Apache/Linux hosting). Please visist the meet-up site for details and sign-up.

http://www.meetup.com/web-99/calendar/13878846/

Slides from this discussion are here:
Maintain Pagerank when you Launch a New Website

The clues are all in your Analytics data. 

• Is the loss from a single referer (Google, Yahoo, Bing)?
• Is the traffic loss clustered around a specific keywords or phrases?
• Has your website been off-line due to a server outage or update?
• Is there a basic configuration issue, such as an incorrectly written “No Index” entry in the robots.txt file?
• What changes, if any were made to the website preceding the loss?

Jill Whalen with High Rankings in Boston has a really great write-up on looking for the root of the problem here.

To summarize:

1. Determine what type of traffic loss you’re dealing with.
2. Look at the extent of the traffic loss.
3. Compare apples to apples.
4. Review and filter out “brand” traffic.
5. Analyze which keyword phrases have had a significant decrease in visitors.
6. Do a quick Google search for the phrases.
7. Review the landing page for the keyword phrase that lost traffic.
8. Review your long-tail traffic.
9. Decide if you’re dealing with a search engine penalty

This issue can arrise when companies or divisions combine; product lines are renamed or when a new face is placed on an exiting website. Money spent on redesign and years of traffic building can be squandered, if this critical step is missed.

In this session we’ll discuss Google webmaster tools, Google analytics, sitemaps, and using redirects to map content with the .htaccess file (emphasis will be on Apache/Linux hosting). 

Please visist the meet-up site for details and sign-up.
http://www.meetup.com/web-99/calendar/13878846/

The seminar was lead by representatives from Microsoft and Yahoo and they set forth a time-line that showed the transition starting in August for completion by mid-October. They were careful to point out that this transition only effects search results and paid search campaigns (not other services such as Yahoo/Hotmail mail, Yahoo/Live log-ins etc).

After the transition, all organic and paid search results on Yahoo and Bing displayed will come from Microsoft. Presentation of the results may differ, but rank and ad order will appear the same in search results for both.

Once complete, the plan is to use the AdCenter interface to manage and view the performance of ads running on Yahoo and Bing with a single bid strategy across both engines. There was a good deal of discussion about  improvements being made to that AdCenter desktop to provide better support and performance for very large campaigns. The interface will have improved import/export capabilities.

Yahoo users will see new features including.

• Exact, Phrase, and Broad (formerly advanced) match options
• Match types will not apply to negatives (AdCenter is adding ability to have more Negatives)
• Separate bidding for misspellings, plural, and singular terms
• Create custom reports, improved keyword tools
• Content Network support
• 30 character headline drops to 25 (!)
• Microsoft’s Dynamic Keyword Insertion method
• A search query report will be available.
• No decision yet on how Yahoo conversion tracking will be migrated/supported, but it sounded like Microsoft conversion codes will be the norm going forward.
• Bidding/Trademark policies will be merged into a single policy.

The transition sounded somewhat like the transition from Overture to Yahoo Marketing. If you already have campaigns running in Yahoo (Panama), you won’t be forced to migrate (at least not immediately). Once Panama users migrate their accounts to the AdCenter, any accumulated conversion history from old campaigns will be lost.

More information at:

• http://www.ysmblog.com/blog/2010/02/18/search-alliance/
• http://advertising.yahoo.com/transition/en_US

Simple Facebook Connect:  http://bit.ly/d9WLoS

Simple Facebook Connect Makes it easy for your site to use Facebook Connect, in a wholly modular way.