Microsoft’s new search engine Bing has now been up and working for a bit. It’s still way too early to tell how popular it will eventually be, but so far it seems to getting decent traffic and pretty good reviews. The consensus is that it won’t be really competing with Google any time really soon, but since Microsoft is in it for the long haul, they can afford both the time and money required to eventually compete with the big kahuna.

In the meantime, though, the question arises: what impact will an increasingly popular Bing have on those who’s business relies on search engine optimization? So far, the answer seems to be: not too much. Because search engines keep their algorithims a closely guarded secret, Google and Bing aren’t ripping each other off. So they both search the web differently. But, the evidence so far indicates that, for a user, search results via both engines wind up being pretty similar. Not identical, but not that different either.

Extensive testing by those in the SEO game has uncovered a few differences, though. For example, Bing gives more search value to older websites than Google. Again, it’s not a huge difference, but it is noticeable. Of course, no matter how clever an SEO whiz may be, he or she won’t be able to increase the age of the website they work for, so that particular example won’t affect how someone optimizes their website. And that seems to be how things are shaking down. Where there are differences in how Google and Bing get results, they tend to be for factors that can’t be adjusted anyway. So, for the time being at least, those who practice SEO won’t need to learn a whole new set of rules to optimize for Bing.

Google drops a bomb on how PageRank works!

The biggest news to hit the SEO community yesterday was Matt Cutts of Google announcing at SMX Advanced that using the NoFollow microformat for PageRank sculpting doesn’t quite work as everyone thought.  Apparently, PageRank distributes the same amount of PR to a page, despite how many other pages are nofollowed.  Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan explains:

“If you have $10 in authority to spend on those ten links, and you block 5 of them, the other 5 aren’t going to get $2 each. They’re still getting $1. It’s just that the other $5 you thought you were saving is now going to waste.”

For the uninitiated, PageRank sculpting is an advanced SEO technique designed to push PR to specific pages on a website, usually the top converting pages.  There have been many debates in the SEO sphere whether this is a useful or necessary technique, because if implemented improperly, it can choke and hamper a site’s deeper pages.  I’ve seen many ill-conceived attempts at PR sculpting, and in one hilarious instance, a site that NoFollowed every page except the login area (FYI, robots don’t sign up for user accounts).

Personally, I’m of the belief that a better technique is to focus your energy on improving the conversion paths on ALL of a site’s pages (adage: “Every page is the homepage”), as opposed to trying to push PR around with NoFollows, but I feel there is value to keeping spiders away from login pages and the like.

The other big news is Google announced the ability to spider JavaScript “onClick” events and indexes those links.  So, if you’ve been hiding your paid links with JavaScript, now’s the time to slap a NoFollow on that link!

One of the greatest tools Google, Yahoo and MSN has offered to site owners is their Webmaster Tools, a somewhat comprehensive look at what a search engine knows about a website.  Out of the big three, Google has the best offering, showing nifty things like which pages are 404ing, redirect loops, top search queries, inbound links, and much more.  While Webmaster tools are aimed at the more technically minded, there is one overarching advantage I’ve seen that, I believe, a number of people seem to overlook.

Once upon a time, SEOs would have to submit their website to DMOZ and the Yahoo directory to let search engines know a site existed, but the real advantage to webmaster tools is the fact that it guarantees a spider visit, as you have to verify the site either by adding a line to the <head> field of the homepage, or by uploading a 1kb file to the root directory.  By going through this verification process, you’re basically telling a search engine “Here I am!”  I’ve seen sites get indexed, literally, within hours after completing a verification process!  Even if you don’t use the extremely useful suite of tools that you get for free, it’s worth the effort just to go through the verification process.

You can sign up for Google Webmaster Tools here.  Yahoo has Site Explorer, which is not as involved as Google’s WMTools, but still valuable.  Lastly, MSN Webmaster Tools can be found here.  All in all, Webmaster tools are the quickest, and cheapest method of guaranteeing your site will get indexed!

Quite often, well meaning webmasters will skim through an SEO primer document, or get some third hand information from a friend of a friend of an Internet Marketer, and go to town on optimizing their website.  While Search Engine Optimization techniques are the best ways to improve traffic and ranking, too much of good thing can be harmful!  Over the next few weeks, we’ll look at a couple examples of “over optimization” and save your site from being stamped with the dreaded “SPAM” moniker.

(The following story is true.  To protect the privacy of the individuals, names, places, and actual events that occurred in reality have been changed.)

Over Optimization Pitfall #1:  Keyword Stuffing

Consider the story of Bob.  Bob owns a website called “usedmotorcycles.com” which provides users direct referrals to used motorcycle shops in their city.  Bob’s SEO friend Terry tells him that if he wants to rank well in Google, he needs to target relevant keywords on his site.  Terry even offers his services to Bob at a recession friendly rate, but Bob thinks “I know HTML, I can do this myself”.  So, Bob starts with his Title tags:

<title>Used Motorcycles, Motorcycles Used, Buy Used Motorcycles,
Used Motorbikes,Used Motorbikes for Sale, Used Motorcycles
for Sale</title>

After reading a link Terry sent to him from SEOMoz, Bob reads a little blurb on localization, and decides he needs to build a page for every region in every town he can think of, even though his site is limited to major cities like New York, Chicago, and California.  So now Bob has 100+ pages, all basically the same, with shallow to no content, but such unique titles such as:

<title>Olympia Used Motorcycles, Olympia Motorcycles Used,
Olympia Buy Used Motorcycles,Olympia Used Motorbikes,
Olympia Used Motorbikes for Sale, Olympia Used Motorcycles for Sale</title>

and

<title>Springfield Used Motorcycles, Springfield
Motorcycles Used,Springfield Buy Used Motorcycles,
Springfield Used Motorbikes, Springfield Used
Motorbikes for Sale, Springfield Used Motorcycles for Sale</title>

Pleased with himself, Bob waits a couple of weeks, then checks his Google analytics, and is horrified to see his traffic from search referrals dropped dramatically.  Frantic, Bob phones Terry demanding to know what happened…

Over optimization is where Bob went wrong!

Keyword stuffing was a successful technique many years ago, when search engine algorithms were far less advanced, but today’s search algo’s are far more sophisticated.  They base their results on numerous factors, and keyword density is just one small aspect.  What Bob should’ve done was looked at his changes and thought “How is this change going to benefit my users?”  Obviously, a bunch of keywords that are differing variations of the same theme isn’t useful to anyone…  you only need to say “used motorcycles” once for a user to ascertain what may be on that page.

The key to search engine optimization is, in many ways, not to think of search engines at all, but to think about the real (or fictional) humans visiting your site.

People who write articles and blog posts and whatnot have figured out a few tricks to attract readership. One popular technique is to use wild exaggeration in the headline, to try to fool people into thinking the article or post is more significant than it is. (cough, cough…) But another far, far more important and well-utilized technique is to SEO the hell out of everything you write. Now, search-engine optimization is a tried, true and accepted way to attract readers to your website, whether you’re trying to sell stuff, increase ad revenue or just bump up your readership. But where it gets a little dodgy, in my opinion anyway, is when the mainstream media starts getting into the SEO game. There’s one little throwaway line in these writer guidelines for the Huffington Post posted yesterday, where they say that submitted articles may be edited for SEO purposes.

Well, what’s the big deal? Of course media outlets want to attract readers using any method at their disposal, right? The big deal is that SEO is a slippery slope. On one end of the spectrum, it can be as simple as using tags and keywords to improve your Google ranking. But at the other end of the spectrum you get into a situation where SEO dictates content. The web is full of tens, if not hundreds of thousands of sites that create content purely to get traffic from search engines. That’s why there are, when I checked a few minutes ago, 207,000,000 returns when you Gooogle the phrase “Top 10″. A long time ago, someone figured out that top 10 lists are a great way to attract readers, and now there are more of them online than photos of Britney Spears’ crotch.

But when big media, the CNN’s and CBS News’s of the world, start creating content just to attract traffic, they’re not really doing what media should be doing. Instead of investigating and informing their readership about “real” news, they’re writing countless articles about who got kicked off of American Idol, or the “Top 10 movie car chase scenes”. Okay, maybe this doesn’t actually spell the destruction of the world…maybe I exaggerated slightly in the headline. But it is an interesting, and kinda crappy, side-effect of the intricacies of SEO.