Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Blog

Teoma is the search engine that powers Ask. In early 2006, Ask killed the Teoma brand and the Teoma.com website, but Teoma is still the search technology used to power Ask.

The core of the Teoma search technology is based upon the idea that society and the Internet consist of tiny communities that self-organize themselves into hubs and authorities.

Hubs and Authorities

An authority is a site that is linked to by many sites and pages covering that topic. A hub links to many relevant topical sites. It is said that a good authority has links from many good hubs, and good hubs link to many good authorities.

If you read search engine papers and information mining topics such as latent semantic indexing and multi-dimensional scaling, you can learn how some of those technologies are similar to what Teoma does. LSI works at understanding word relationships, but Teoma looks at understanding link relationships between pages within communities.
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Popularity: 15%

The most time-consuming part of SEO is building a linking campaign. Tools or ideas that help us save time doing this are extremely valuable.

You can classify domain extension or specific site ideas when searching for potential links:

In Google you are not able to use the "link": function with other advanced search operators at the same time; in Yahoo! or MSN you can.

Filtering out a site can be exceptionally helpful. If there is a specific site that is clouding up your link search, you can filter them out by placing "-site:www.whateverevilsite.com" in your search string.

Popularity: 10%

Google is harder to manipulate than the other search engines, and Google tends to trust new sites much less than their competitors do. If you run a new website, do not expect to rank well in Google for competitive queries until AFTER you rank well in Yahoo! and MSN.

If you have an old, well-trusted domain but have not focused on SEO yet, then doing simple things like fixing up your page titles and gaining a few authoritative or descriptive inbound links might be all you need to do.
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Popularity: 8%

One of the first thing that normal webmasters do after building a site or blog is to build links. Link building is one of the most important part in the search engine optimization process. In the old days, webmasters build links by exchanging links (reciprocal linking) but since Google changed their algorithm, one way links are so much more better than reciprocal links.

Since Google changed the algo's, many new (and experienced) webmasters had a problem. Finding natural or free one-way link(s) for a new site or blog is nearly impossible. Unless you're blog or site is providing a service or web tool that a lot of people use, getting one way links is nowhere near possible.

The solution? You'll have to buy one way links. Although some webmasters agree that it is not ethical to buy links, most webmasters choose to ignore this and it seems that the process of buying links is now on the 'grey' side of SEO.

If you want to have a look at how much it really cost to get one way links, have a look at http://www.4th-media.com/link_building/. I'm sure you'll be pretty surprised

Popularity: 7%

Google using multiple algorithms in conjunction can allow them to place exceptional positive bias on links that fit most or all their bolt on relevancy boosting algorithms. This means the best links are those from the following places:

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Popularity: 9%

Rewriting an article is an ability that many writers think they have, but very few in reality, do. The need for rewriting an article could encompass many reasons, and the methodology used to attack the task will in the main depend on the motives and the requisite outcome, but each will have their very own pros and cons, so let's have a look.

The first reason we will look at is the case of article directory submissions. The preparation of a rewritten adaptation of a previously commissioned article in order to obtain two articles instead of one, allows for one version to be placed on a website, for example, and the rewritten one could be submitted to the various article directories. The reasons for doing this are to offshoot the disadvantages of competing with other people utilising the exact same content. On article directories, although gaining valuable backlinks through the resource box, one is actually challenging for keywords against all the other websites that are using the very same article. One could then be faced with the problem of duplicate content and all that particular scenario entails.
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Popularity: 12%

When the supplemental index was first launched Google labeled the supplemental results. SEOs came up with hacks for figuring out how many supplemental results different websites had, and after they got popular Google disabled them and removed the supplemental results label.

Google has an auxiliary index where it stores some documents it may not trust enough to include in its regular index. Supplemental search results are used to provide search results when not enough regular search results are available. Why do sites get put in the supplemental results?
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Popularity: 9%

Here are a few SEO Tips to help boost your search engine ranking. When you are building your website and want to make sure that you maximize your search engine optimization (SEO) you can make a series of small changes to it that are easy and quick. These changes may seem very small and unimportant, but you will be surprised at what a difference they make the next time your site gets ranked by a search engine. If you are building a site from scratch, make sure that you include these points; if you are just revamping an existing site, look for these items and make the necessary changes so that you can start driving customers to your site.

A big part of search engine optimization is keywords and keyword phrases. Look at your file names. Do the file names include one of your keywords or keyword phrases? (more…)

Popularity: 9%

First off, common sense usually goes pretty far. If a page or site links to a bunch of off-topic or low-quality garbage, you can feel safe, assuming the page does not pass link authority. If you have doubts, you probably do not want to link.

Secondly, Google has a toolbar that shows how it currently views a web page or website. The Google toolbar is one of the top search engine optimization tools for a person new to search engine marketing. It works on Windows and is downloadable at http://toolbar.google.com/.

PageRank is a measure of link popularity, which can come and go. It's not hard for a successful business to rent a few high PageRank links into their site and then leverage that link popularity for link exchanges. A site with decent PageRank can get penalized just the same as a site with low PageRank. Usually, you will want to error on the side of caution off the start.

Instead of making PageRank your primary criteria when evaluating a page or site, just think of it as a baseline.
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Popularity: 40%