In an attempt to differentiate themselves while providing a highly sought after feature, Majestic SEO has managed to create a useful and visual appealing functionality to measure link trust and link profiles for websites.

Relevant and credible backlinks or the lack thereof has been widely discussed lately because of the recent Google updates. Many websites, over 1 million it seems, have been affected by the algorithm updates to manoeuvre dodgy link building techniques.

After Yahoo! closed down their Site Explorer showing detailed backlinks data for free, it’s been a wide open market for new and innovative link building tools. Some of the more innovative and useful link tools apart from Majestic SEO include Link Research Tools and OpenSite Explorer. However, none of the others are using the very helpful graphs giving a brief indication of how trusted some backlinks are.

How does the Majestics new link tool work?

Two new metrics to evaluate backlinks have been included in this update; trust flow and citation flow. While citation flow gives a predictive number between 0-100 of how influential certain backlinks and how many links there are, the trust flow metric is as the name indicate a predictive metric for how trustworthy inbound links are.

Our team at SEO Specialist look forward to evaluate this tool a bit more. If you want to learn how to detect paid or dodgy links yourself, read our SEO guide.

Barry Schwartz found an interesting discussion at Google Webmaster Help about sneaky usage of link title attributes. Even though it’s an unusual problem, I might be interesting to look into a bit more.

Do link attribute penalizes actually exist?

It appears that a website using unnatural long link titles has been penalized, with the effect of getting some kind of +70 penalties (moved down 70 positions in Google). Following a clarification from a Google employee, John Mueller, it might be worth to discuss how to use titles in link attributes and on other places.

It’s probably very unusual to receive penalties from long link title attributes, unless they are at least over 20 words (but possibly even more). After all, additional link text should be accurate, short and easy to read. Don’t do anything extreme and unnatural, since there might always be a chance of negative impact by search engines when doing way more than you are supposed to do. Rather think about the user experience and make it easy to understand. Keep in mind that links should be relevant, and you’re likely to do well.

Extract from Google quality guidelines

Some of the general best practices for webmasters can also be applied to link titles, such as:

• Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
• Make sure that your elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
• Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords.

At SEO Specialist, we tend to use link attributes in order to give a deeper understanding of the usual link text. It’s not always required to put an extra title on backlinks, but if it can be helpful for the user, go ahead.

Image credit: Photo of Mr Thompson by Yodel Anecdotal.

Scott Thompson, the CEO of Yahoo, has been caught in a fake CV scandal. While claiming he had a computer science degree in Stonehill College awarded in 1979, the truth is that Stonehill did not offer computer science degrees until 1983.

Who discovered the fake resume?

One of the major shareholders in Yahoo, Daniel Loeb, found out about the fake credentials.
The fund he represents, First Capital, owns over 5 % of the capital in Yahoo. Interesting enough, Mr Loeb claims to have found out Scott Thompsons real degree (eg. accounting) by a Google search.

Loeb said he later called the college for confirmation and was told that Mr. Thompson did only graduate with a degree in accounting.

Most of the SEO training takes place on-site, at the customer’s office. This way, your company will minimize travelling time. SEO Specialist can set-up an efficient SEO workshop which can be performed in 3-5 hours, covering a wide range of topics.

Advanced or beginner courses?

Customers can choose if they want to focus on advanced SEO training or more basic education. Our SEO training for beginners is built to learn webmasters, editors, journalists, managers and executives how companies should write for the web and how to attract links.

Our team are very flexible and can cater for a wide range of training, such as link building courses, basic SEO training or how to integrate SEO and paid search.

What can be gained?

After completed SEO training course, your company can enjoy a better understanding of how search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo works. Our SEO Specialists also teach how to think in order to rank better in search engines and which SEO strategies to consider.

However, if you don’t want to engage much yourself in search engine optimization, the alternative is to order one of our bespoke SEO services. This way, your own team have less to think about.

Online marketers have released the SEO agencies buyers’ guide on March 10 which shows that British businesses now spend over £500m on search engine optimization (SEO), according to a report by eConsultancy. These figures indicate that there was an 18% increased spend on website optimisation in 2011 compared to 2010.

The agency calculated this figure by looking at the payments to media and SEO agencies, SEO specialists and in-house staff costs. The senior research analyst for econsultancy Jake Hird said “It’s great to see that natural search has developed into a half-billion pound industry in the UK.”

This SEO buyers guide is aimed at companies looking to hire an SEO company or SEO agency, with a breakdown of the UK’s most successful online marketing firms. The collected papers also add that the year-end value of SEO in the UK was around £514 million – up from £436 million in 2010. Our SEO Specialists believe investments in both SEO and social media will increase considerably in 2012 compared to 2011.

What do you think will happen 2012? Are we going to see increased SEO spending among UK businesses or will the money go elsewhere?

However, Nominet also confirm .UK is now the world’s 2nd largest ccTLD (country code top level domain).

The organisation explains they are planning to put major investment in the brand following hitting the 10 million mark. How much they plan to spend is still unclear, but they are launching a dedicated site for this purpose.

TFL has teamed up with Virgin Media and today announced their new plan to install free internet in the underground to 80 of the 217 stations. This plan will be in action just in time for the Olympics, so spectators can enjoy some free internet on their busy travels.

This is just the start of this wonderful plan as virgin media are hoping to extend the WIFI to 40 more stations by the end of the year. But the free internet won’t last forever as there are further plans in place to introduce a pay as you go system that will allow customers to surf on the internet for a fee.

Virgin spokesmen told the guardian government computing that the service is being funded from the company’s capital expenditure budget which is roughly about £640 million so there is no cost for the London Underground

Boris Johnson is delighted with the plan and has said this “It’s vital that we harness the massive opportunities stemming from the digital revolution, by creating a vibrant, world class industry to attract investment and create jobs for Londoners.” More people working in IT department will be needed to maintain the WIFI.

“It affects us greatly. Once we’ve got that capability rolled out, we can dramatically change how we deliver services to Transport for London. No longer are we tied to a fixed copper and fibre in the ground delivery mechanism and… we can reduce costs maybe on the networks, maybe on the terminal equipment, and the types of equipment we interface with is dramatically different,” TfL’s CIO Steve Townsend

In a recent footage, Google shows a video clip featuring some of the challenges the team might face in Googleplex during a proposed algorithm update.

To SEO Specialist’s surprise, neither Larry Page (CEO) nor Sergey Brin (co-founder) is present in this YouTube clip. I’d expect them to be involved in any important decision covering algorithm updates, but perhaps they gave their thoughts to the team already?

What do Google base their algorithm updates around?

Whether Google should go ahead and go algorithm updates depends on feedback from users and their own search quality team. Smaller algorithm changes are often done several times a month, while major updates tend to occur a few times a year.

It perhaps not very surprising that Google base potential algorithm updates around experimental data. But even if an experiment gives positive data, the final decision to go ahead depends on tradeoffs such as relevance, expected latency, search engine spam, cost and possible language impact. See the full video below:

Yesterday Yahoo filed a lawsuit against Facebook claiming that Facebook had used 10 of Yahoo’s patents. Some of the patents include methods and systems for advertising, Instant Messaging (IM) and a few over technologies that are important to Facebook.

The 10 Patents include methods and systems for advertising, Instant Messaging, News feed, and other technologies that make Facebook what Facebook is today.

Yahoo are Suing Facebook just weeks before they are due to cash in with it’s initial public offering of stock which is somewhat of a coincidence since Yahoo did something similar back in 2004 when Yahoo sued Google over the use of Adwords technology that was originally owned by Overture, a company that Yahoo had recently bought at the time. Eventually Yahoo won the battle and received 2.7 million shares of stock which they then later sold to make $1.5 billion.

Yahoo have left this statement to explain why they are suing Facebook “Yahoo! has invested substantial resources in research and development through the years, which has resulted in numerous patented inventions of technology that other companies have licensed. These technologies are the foundation of our business that engages over 700 million monthly unique visitors and represent the spirit of innovation upon which Yahoo! is built. Unfortunately, the matter with Facebook remains unresolved and we are compelled to seek redress in federal court. We are confident that we will prevail.”

Facebook are thought to be puzzled as to why Yahoo want to do this after Facebook sends a lot of traffic to Yahoo and has helped them over the years in attracting new users. A Facebook spokesperson has said this “We’re disappointed that Yahoo, a longtime business partner of Facebook and a company that has substantially benefited from its association with Facebook, has decided to resort to litigation. Once again, we learned of Yahoo’s decision simultaneously with the media. We will defend ourselves vigorously against these puzzling actions.”

If you are a frequent YouTube user you may have noticed that your YouTube channel page has changed on the 7^th of March. This is because Google has released its new YouTube layout for every channel. So what does this new YouTube layout include?

• A more streamlined and consistent design.
• An easier way to find and view videos.
• New, more flexible layouts for featured content., and
• A way to keep your audience engaged even when you don’t have new uploads.

Is YouTube’s latest layout a success or failure?
I believe that Google has come with a good idea to make people stay on YouTube for longer with the bigger thumbnails on the channel and getting people using social networking to share the video also the bar at the bottom to automatically go to the next video.

But it will not help the smaller channel due the sub box feature when we had the old layout when you subscribed to a channel and clicked update it would automatically subscribe to all the channels in your sub box but now when you subscribe to a channel it does not give you the option of subscribing to all the channels that are in your sub box, I believe this will effect smaller channel that want to grow quickly in this fast growing network and with this there would be new ways of growing  by (promos).

Is the New YouTube Layout Helping Smaller channels?
Smaller channel would have to pay large sums of money to bigger you tubers to upload small promos in order for them to get anywhere on YouTube and start earning money. This could lead to more problem with scamming people for money.

YouTube has changed a lot in 2012 more people are offering to pay for you to upload their promos they do this so they can get a partnership with a network and start earning money. it’s really easy to get a partnership these days with a lot of network starting and asking for channel to sign to their partnership programs all you need is 2000 subscribers and getting around 300 views per video.

Another feature that I’m not happy about is the channel comment’s they made it harder for channel to advertise their channels. Channel comments were really important for smaller channel on the old layout it was a gateway for them to get more subscribers and it benefited the bigger channels as well  by getting them more views. Although you can still can  post a channel comment it is harder to see channel comments and to get people coming to your channel.

I don’t see why Google has taken off links from the description on the new layout for a channel like mine I have around 7 commentators working for me which need recognizing for their work. I do that by putting their channel links in the description but now people cant click on the links and also made the description shorter so you cannot have more than 10o0 characters.

This layout for me personally has had big negative effect. I normally get 2000 views per video every day but when I uploaded a video on the 7^th of march when the new layout came out I got less the 1000 views per video I think the cause of these are that people stop posting channel comments which would give me views and that the feature called bulletins was taken away which let you post a bulletin whenever you want to keep your subscriber updated on what you’re doing.

What i think
Summary: I think that the new layout has some good and bad bits, and that Google should take time to listen to what the YouTube community wanted instead on forcing the new layout on every channel. People even made a petition to keep the old layout but Google seems to proceed with their plans.

This post has been written by Cleton, a junior SEO specialist, who uploads multiple videos on HiiTmakerOfTheDay every single day.

So how will it be different from the previous version ?

In this newer version of Adwords Sitelinks it combines different text ads from your account that are relevant to what the person is searching and this way people can click onto 5 different landing pages and it helps them find what they are looking for.

This is what it may look like…