Trying to catch up with tons of information after my vacation I just read some very interesting posts on link building issues

Link Building 101 Guide

Todd has a cool summary on linking rules up that I'd call a *Linkbuilding 101" guideline… I am sure the Webuildpages guys are using that document for their internal link building classes they offer.

Offtopic Linking

Rand discusses offtopic linking and his thoughts on the valuation of off-topic links (hyperlinks to content not matching the site's theme) and points to the technology of block level analysis also called VIPS or Visual Page Segmentation

Search engine penalties and filters

One major issue for all SEOs are various search engine penalties, filters or a single hand ban by a search engine … again, while I was on vacation Todd put together a Search Engine Ban guide and discussing questions like

• How can you tell when your site has been banned?
• When is it a ban? Filter? Penalty? When is it just poor optimization or the sandbox?
• What percentage of bannings are hand bans vs. algorithmic collateral damage?
• How can you best prevent a site from incurring the wrath of a banning while still pushing the bleeding edge of search engine optimization?
• What are the best practices for reinclusion if your important or branded domain gets popped

This is an extremely high quality post with so many reference links it'll take me another hour or two to read thru all of them … one of them - the Google penalty checklist just gives you an idea of the valuable information out there. thanks for that Todd!

Linking Policies

Today's Andy Hagans post on Linking Policies is fun and rants about those typical " You may not link to us without permission " things you see occassionally on some web sites.

Improving Link Request Mails

This is like the Link Request mail clinic with an example and discussion on improving the average automatically generated delete-immediately-like link request mail.

Somehow-New Link Analysis Operators in Yahoo

RustyBrick reports about Yahoo operators that I also didn't know yet, that allow to

• find .edu links pointing to your site - which shows a scraper content on an .edu or a couple of nice .edu links to my tech weblog
• find how often one site links to the otherlinkdomain:www.marketingfan.com site:weblog.cemper.com

anyhow, I am still very keen on and waiting for the already-for-1-month-promised Yahoo Site Explorer

Google BL and Yahoo SERP update

It seems people are hoping for a PR update when just some datacenters 72.14.207. (I see changes on 64.233.183.) are updating their backlinks… however I found no evidence of a PR update yet.

Yahoo has major SERP changes again… however updating SERPs and algo changes are just happening on a constant basis… I usually wait for thing to settle and then scroll thru a few dozen or hundreds of discussion comments to find the intereresting analysis of impact… those "my site has change, too"-comments are really a waste of time and resources…