A quick recap. Google is a multi-billion dollar US-based company which derives the majority of its revenue from advertisement on the web. These ads are shown on property outside of Google’s control as well as alongside search results which lists snippets from content Google doesn’t own.

In 2005 Google introduced an attribute webmasters were free to use on links of their choice to help flag that link as “not trusted” or “possible spam”. This attribute is called “no-follow”.

Today was a big day!  Well for me anyhow.  Just to give you a little background a big part of my job is to not only to strategize off page SEO campaigns that support all of the onpage SEO efforts for SEP’s clients, but to report on all of these efforts. 
Traffic, engagement, conversion, authority all easy…links oh those blessed one way natural links this is what we are all really after, this is hard! 
In the past the only way I knew to track the inbound links that were created by an off page campaign was using some special syntax in queries that our SEP Wis walks me through every time (I do not pretend to fully understand). 
Along with this I would also try and use AltaVista.  But AltaVista seems to report the highest number of inbound links but as I have found out not all links are visible. (go figure).   Another tool was Technorati; Technorati is good for finding fresh links to a given site very quickly.
But in general, the overall numbers of results are estimated at the very start, and this can become misleading. Not all results are reachable from the search engines, so a false illusion can be given.  Until today!!
SEP’s Wis has found out a simple traceable and free method that will stream line all of this.  Google Alerts.  Yes Google Alerts are not new but here is what is new setup your alert to report on “link: www.acme.com” this will let you know what new one way links are being created! It also works for the crawlers with using “site: www.acme.com”.

When the Toronto Star published an article several weeks back announcing that roughly 700,000 Facebook users belong to the Toronto city network, my phone rang off the hook from clients asking what their Facebook strategy will be.

SEP has been working with Social Media, at a variety of levels, for some time, so the announcement that General Motors Europe is launching a “social media newsroom” caught my attention.

Essentially, GM Europe’s new website will allow downloads of its photography from Flikr, a link to their video collection in YouTube and news to be “republished, commented on, shared and tagged by a large community where the boundaries between news provider and news consumer continue to blur,” it said in a statement.

One of the latest link building strategies is to utilize social bookmarking sites such as digg and del.icio.us to post your story. These sites have a multitude of daily traffic and refers a great deal of visitors to a site, especially if the story or headline is interesting. Although some of the links are not valued highly in search engines, the traffic will indirectly link to your site if your content is interesting.

I came across this easy to follow video that allows you to see the power of social bookmarking and how it makes web pages easy to remember, organize and share.