Weekly SEO news: 2 August 2011
Welcome to the latest issue of the Search Engine Facts newsletter.

If you want to get backlinks from other websites, your site must have link-worthy content. Other websites will only link to your site if there's something interesting on your web pages. This week's article helps you to create link-worthy content.

Also in the news: Yahoo finally provides Bing results, Google Panda update 2.3 is live, Google's +1 button is 3 times faster, Bing depends on Internet Explorer, Google tests a new design and more.

Table of contents:

We hope that you enjoy this newsletter and that it helps you to get more out of your website. Please pass this newsletter on to your friends.

Best regards,
Andre Voget, Johannes Selbach, Axandra CEO

1. Why the iPhone 5 will fail (how to create linkworthy content)

If you want to get backlinks from other websites, your site must have link-worthy content. Other websites will only link to your site if there's something interesting on your web pages. There are several things that you can do to create linkworthy content.

1. Stroke some egos

People like to feel important and they like to link to web pages that confirm that they are important. You can turn this into links by doing the following:

  • Find companies that have "in the news" pages on their websites and write about these pages.
  • Write a positive product or company review and inform the reviewed company about your review.
  • Write articles that show the importance of people ("Why garbage men are so important", "If paid for all their work, housewives would earn $134,121 per year", etc.).

People like to link to that kind of pages. This method also works the other way around. For example, an article "Why the iPhone 5 will fail" might get many backlinks by angry Apple fans. Of course, you have to be careful with this tactic.

1. Write top 10 lists

Top 10 lists are a popular method to create linkworthy content. Your lists could start like this:

  • The 10 best...
  • 10 easy tips for...
  • The 10 worst...
  • The 10 most important...

Your lists can contain the best tips, resources, people, experts, websites, habits, etc. The possibilities are endless.

3. Create valuable resources

Valuable resources get the best backlinks. If there is no good guide for your industry, you should write it. Create how to's and tutorials. The more valuable the content on your website is, the more people will link to your website.

If you want to manage the backlinks of your website, try the backlink manager in IBP. IBP's link manager enables you to manage all of your backlinks by category, you can see the status of each backlink, backlinks are checked automatically, IBP gets the PageRank of the linking sites, nofollow links are marked and much more.

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2. Search engine news and articles of the week

YahooYahoo's European search engines switch to Bing

"We wanted to let you know that we are now ready to transition Yahoo! organic search results (the non-paid listings found on the main body of the Yahoo! search page) to Microsoft. [...]

The organic search transition will begin on August 3rd 2011 for Yahoo! European properties in the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy. [...] You'll want to make sure that you're prepared for this change."

Editor's note: Optimize some pages of your website for Bing to make sure that you get as many visitors as possible. The Top 10 Optimizer in IBP helps you to optimize your pages for all local Bing variations (and all local Google variations).



Google Panda update 2.3 is live

"We're continuing to iterate on our Panda algorithm as part of our commitment to returning high-quality sites to Google users [...]

This update incorporates some new signals that help differentiate between higher- and lower-quality sites. As a result, some sites are ranking higher after this most recent update."



PageRankIs Bing winging on Internet Explorer?

"Breaking down Bing's usage by browser yields some pretty surprising results. Internet Explorer (IE) commands almost three quarters of all Bing search queries, at 72%. Chrome and Firefox, the next two most popular browsers represent 9.04% and 7.94% of traffic from Bing respectively. Safari and Opera take 4th and 5th place with only 4.32% and 1.40%."



Google's +1 button is now 3 times faster

"We've begun to roll out out a set of changes that will make the button render up to 3x faster on your site. No action is required on your part, so just sit back, relax, and watch as the button loads more quickly than before."

Editor's note: detailed instructions on how to add the Google +1 button to your own web pages can be found here.



A cleaner layout for Google Search

"The new Google design uses a single column layout while the old sidebar options appear between the search box and the search results. There's plenty of whitespace between search results and links to the Cached version of pages have been removed in the new design. [...]

The navigation links are now in plain text and that long Goooooooooogle (10 o's) image, which has been around since early days of Google, is now gone."



Google+ growth since launch

"The highest share of visits to Google+ since launch is from those between the ages of 25-34 and those between 18 and 34 were more likely than the overall online population to visit. The audience to Google+ tends to be more affluent, over-indexing for those earning a household income of $60k and over, particularly $150k and up."



Search engine newslets

  • A bug in Google's ranking algorithm caused a 60% traffic drop for some sites.
  • Google releases (soon to be commercial) page speed service.
  • Google's growth unsettles Mountain View.
  • Google releases hotel finder tool.
  • Google seems to allow all caps URLs in AdWords ads.
  • Google buys IBM inventions as it aims to build patent hoard.

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3. Success stories

IBP



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Let us know how IBP has helped you to improve your website and we might publish your success story with a link to your website in this newsletter. The more detailed your story is, the better. Click here to tell us your story

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4. Previous articles

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