The AltSearchEngines site on alternative search engines will no longer be updated. The editor, Charles Knight, managed to cover some 4000 search engines in its three year long life.

To Federated Search Blog he says that AltSearchEngines had reached a plateau:

“There are only so many people interested in a daily dose of niche search engines. Not only that, but after 4,000 posts, I really felt that we had found most of them.”

He is now blogging about search over at the Next Web, a new blog devoted to search and search engines.

By the way: Charles Knight’s favorite alternative search engine is the very advanced German Tag Galaxy

SMX West: March 2-4
Go to California!

People who are new to the business of search engine optimization quickly learn that they need to obtain links to the pages on their website. This can be a daunting task for a newcomer. It sounds simple until you go to do it. How are you supposed to go about it? Where do you start? What kinds of links should you be trying to get? This is where many people go wrong.

By Guest Writer Thad Olszewski

Let me share some quality insight with you that you are probably having a hard time finding online. There are two ways that people can go about link building. The first and most common one is going for quantity over quality. Most people start by going after the really low quality links that are easy to obtain.

What do I mean by low quality links?

There are several ways to get a lot of links in a short time; It is easy to get links in free for all forums and blog comments. Another way to get links quickly is through article marketing and mass article submissions. Unless you really like writing, this is going to be a hard job. You might even outsource some of it, thinking that paying less than a hundred dollars for thousands of links is a good idea.

These methods will work to some degree, especially if you are in a niche that has little competition. However, if you are in a competitive industry, you are soon going to realize that relying on this form of link building is not going to get the results you really want.

Instead of focusing on low quality links or hiring an outsourced SEO firm to build thousands of them, you will likely be far better off focusing on building fewer high quality links back to your website.

What are high quality links and what how do I get them?

The kinds of links I consider to be high quality are harder to get. They would be contextual links on the pages of certain websites. Links on websites like these would apply:

• Industry research websites
• Major news websites
• High Google Page Rank websites
• University websites
• Major industry organizations
• High traffic websites in your industry
• Major corporate websites

The best place to obtain high quality links is from other sites within your industry that are considered trusted authorities or from websites that are considered large information hubs for that industry.

For instance, a website like Pandia.com would be considered a very high value website for my field of study. This website ranks high for many terms related to the industry. Plus, there are many well known industry experts who share their knowledge here. The website contains a wealth of information related to search engines and search engine marketing. This is an ideal website for someone like me to mingle with other professionals in the industry. You can tell from reading the information here that the site is valuable to people searching for this kind of information.

Ideally you would want links that are in context (contextual), like right in the middle of a paragraph. Getting one at the end of an article or being listed as a reference is also valuable. It is also very valuable to be included in a list of links so long as the other links on the list are all to high value relevant websites. Those lists have high hub scores which pass lots of authority.

In case you didn’t know this, one good relevant editorial link from a trusted top level domain can bring you more ranking juice than thousands of those low quality links. It may take you a while to figure out how to get those high quality links, but the work is worth it in the long run. Those high quality links will stand the test of time. They will keep giving you ranking juice and traffic day after day for many years. Your competitors will be discouraged because it is so much harder to get those quality links.

Where do you start? How do you find these kinds of sites?

For starters, if you know a lot about your particular market, you will already know the domain names for some of these high value sites. If you want to find other ones, here is how you could do it.

1. Do a Google search for your main keywords. The sites that rank on page one are going to be some of the best possible places from which you could acquire links. Many of them will not be available as places to get links from. Just continue down the list for the first few pages, looking to see if there are any places you might be able to acquire a link from. Then repeat this process for other keywords that are closely related to your main ones.
2. If you own any standard industry link analysis programs, you can study the link profile of the websites that are ranking on page one in the search results for your main keyword. Find out how and where they got their links and you will find places to get some for yourself.
3. Identify a handful of top people within your industry. Using your favorite search engine, look for places where they have contributed. If you do enough digging around, you will find some opportunities. The places they have contributed to are probably valuable industry websites. You won’t find most industry experts hanging around low value websites offering their advice.

Okay – I have identified some good ones. Now how do I get them to link to me?

This is where you need to be creative. You should start by getting them to notice you in some way shape or form. There are different ways to do this. Here are two possible methods you could experiment with.

Become popular:

Maybe you can produce a piece of content that is so popular on one of the social media websites that some major industry journalists notice you. Then you might get mentioned unexpectedly in one of their articles. If you produce enough really popular content like this, you are sure to be noticed by someone. It isn’t going to happen with every piece.

Say hello:

For those people who have no idea how to produce content that becomes that popular, you could take a more practical approach. Use some good old fashioned networking skills. Introduce yourself. Hopefully you have a respectable website that showcases your quality workmanship.

Offer your help:

Find a way to create value for them. If you are helping them to create value for their property, there is a much better chance (a pretty good one actually) that they will want to reciprocate in some way. One way to do this is to send a little traffic their way or some link juice.

Be patient:

You have to give before you receive. Some people will appreciate the gesture and want to reciprocate immediately. Don’t expect immediate rewards though. Maybe this one gesture this time won’t pay you back immediately. Somewhere down the road it might, though. You should take the same approach with your website. Build real value for people.

Each situation is going to be a little different. You are going to have to spend some time to think about each one to decide the best approach to take.

It pays to get quality instead of quantity

If you have aspirations of achieving the top position in Google for even a moderately competitive keyword, then you are going to have to work on getting quality links. Too many people get hung up on whether the site uses “No Follow” links or not. This should not be your primary concern. Your primary concern should be the overall quality of the site’s content and its relevancy to what your website is about. Focus on that and you will start to find places that are well suited.

Remember that Google and the other search engines are finding new ways to devalue those really easy to get links. Every year those types of links lose more ranking power. All the while these weak links are losing power; the best links are gaining more and more juice. Get yourself the best possible quality links from the best possible sites and your work will be rewarded many times over for years to come.

photo credit: Desmond Kavanagh

Thad Olszewski owns and operates The Website Promoter service for business websites. His company helps businesses generate publicity for their websites as well as drive organic search engine traffic to them. He is the author of numerous articles including How To Get Ranked Number One on Google.

SMX West: March 2-4
Go to California!

Here is our weekly wrap-up of Internet search and search engine industry oriented headlines.

• Google Buys Online Collaboration Operator DocVerse

  Something good is about to happen with Google’s cloud computing service – that is interoperability with Microsoft Office files (SE Journal March 3 2010)

• The five-minute guide to Google Squared

  Arrange data from the web in a neat spreadsheet (techradar March 6 2010)

• Google Launches Gesture Search for Android

  To use the search, you write a letter across the screen. (SE Watch March 5 2010)

• Google Kills SearchWiki, Replaces It With Starred Results

  The ability to re-order, remove, and comment on search results has been replaced by a scaled-down version (SE Land March 3 1010)

• SMX West 2010 Live Blogging Recap

  Keri Morgret of Strike Models and Brian Ussery of Beu Blog spent a tremendous amount of time and energy live blogging the event. (March 5 2010)

• Bing & Yahoo Soon To Support Canonical Tag

  At SMX West on Thursday, reps from both search engines said they’re in the process of supporting rel=canonical right now. (SE Land March 5 2010)

• YouTube adds automatic subtitles for the deaf

  Latest speech recognition breakthrough for the hard of hearing (techradar march 5 2010)

• Peter Norvig offers an insider’s look at Google Research during SMX West

  A list of new products from Google (SE Watch March 3 2010)

• Google’s Norvig: PageRank Is Overhyped

  Speaking at SMX WestGoogle’s Director of Research said that PageRank is overhyped and probably needs a new name (SE Land March 3 2010)

• Google’s Proposal For Crawling AJAX URLs is Live

  The documentation is live on Google Code (SE Land March 3 2010)

• Yahoo CEO Bartz Says Would Have Sold Yahoo, Mocks Facebook

  Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz stated she would have sold Yahoo at $36 when Microsoft was offering (SE Watch March 2 2010)

• Google Italy ruling might very well turn out to be a blessing

  Its time to finally get the law straightened out. Laws in almost every country in the world are outdated. (State of Search March 2 2010)

• How to Check If Google China Still Self-Censors

  On January 12th, Google said they are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn (Blogoscoped March 2 2010)

• Topeka Changes Its Name To Google, Kansas (Temporarily)

  What would you do to get Google to build a super high-speed broadband network in your hometown? (SE Land March 2 2010)

• Google to Yahoo: Excuse Us While We Buy Your Photo Editor

  Picnik is, among other things, the default editor for Yahoo’s Flickr. (BoomTown March 1 2010)

• Google has acquired Picnik, photo editor in the cloud

  Using Picnik, you can crop, do touch-ups and add cool effects to your photos, all without leaving your web browser. (Google Blog March 1 2010)

• Google Maps Integrates Flickr Photos

  Geo-tagged, user-submitted Flickr photos as well as other location-specific photos from Google’s own Picasa (Marketing Pilgrim March 1 2010)

• AT&T Ditches Google For Yahoo Search on Motorola Backflip

  It’ll be the first Android device of any kind with Yahoo as the main search engine (Gizmodo March 2 2010)

• Bing Autosuggest – History Repeats Itself – and That is a Good Thing

  Bing adds support for query history in Autosuggest (Bing Community March 1 2010)

• Ballmer Sees Innovation as the Key To Search Success

  Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said he thinks the deal with Yahoo will greatly improve the relevance of advertising placed next to search results (Newsfactor March 5 2010)

• Click here to find out more! Real-time search startups blow away Google, Yahoo, and Bing at SMX West

  I don’t agree that Google has crushed real-time search for startups. (Venture Beat March 5 2010)

• Bing blocks online sex searches in Middle East: study

  The Open Net Initiative (ONI) on Friday said Microsoft’s search engine Bing is more prudish than government censors (AFP March 5 2010)

• China to punish hackers, says no Google complaint

  China has pledged to punish hackers who attacked Google if there is evidence to prove it (Reuters March 6 2010)

SMX West: March 2-4
Go to California!

Search is going mobile. The number of people accessing the web on their mobile phones is skyrocketing. Searching on your mobile or cell phone is different than searching on your computer: The screen is smaller and typing can be a hassle. To make your mobile searching fun and easy we present five great tools for mobile web search.

If you have an iPhone, you have probably already seen our Top 5 iPhone search apps article. But whether you are surfing the web from a regular cell phone, a smart phone or a web enebled PDA, searching is bound to be important to you. The five tools presented here, work on all platforms. The winners are:

Google Mobile

It starts out a bit confusing: When you first come to Google Mobile, you find no search box. Instead, Google pushes apps and a huge number of services. Click “Web” for web search.

Once you are in the right place, though, the rest is easy. You are spared the trouble of typing more than strictly necessary, as Google suggests search terms as you type. The search results are easy to scan and it is no hard to get an overview of your field of interest.

The search results are based on the principle of universal search: You get images, news, maps and more, depending on your query.

It is easy to set your location by your phone’s GPS. And Google’s local search is the only one that offered no problems in that respect. It finds relevant local businesses even here in Norway and phone number and link to directions are displayed for each business.

News search (along with images and buzz) is available via a link on the front page. I get local news by default (e.g. news about the Chile earth quake in Norwegian).

If you want to search Buzz, be aware that if you disclose your location, this information will be available to the whole world.

Google also offers speech search: No typing is involved at all, you simply say your query. This works in English, but not in, say, French or Norwegian. In English, it works like a charm, though, even for complex queries.

Taptu

Taptu is not as advanced as Google, but in most cases, it will provide just what you need. This is a service that is tailored specifically for touch screens and it does a great job at simplifying web search on touch phones.

The front page conveniently offers links to hot search terms. There are also quick links to images and buzz search.

The results are easy to access. Along with regular web pages, they include images,videos, news, blogs and more, depending on query. And in stead of clicking through to the web site and wait for it to load, only to discover it was not what you were looking for, you can choose a preview which loads quickly and includes a thumbnail of the web site as well as an excerpt from the content.

The search results also include links to “the touch friendly web”, web sites that fit your query and are optimized for small screens. What a great idea!

On the downside, Taptu offers no local options, and there are a couple of quite prominent Google ads in the search results — but this is still a great product.

Yahoo! Mobile

Yahoo! Mobile offers much of the tools Google Mobile does (there is no speech search, though). In addition, there is a list of hot topics on the front page and easy access to turn on and off safe search.

You get search suggestons as you type. At the bottom of the web search result, you get links to other relevant hits in categories like news, images and answers.

It is easy to set your location by GPS and Yahoo will suggests restaurants, movie theatres and more. I couldn’t test this, though, because it doesn’t work in Norway.

Bing Mobile

Bing Mobile has a smart design which makes searching easy: There are quick links to directions, maps, weather and movies on the front page. The search results are not universal (like Google and Taptu), but tabs provide easy access to results in the categories videos, images and news.

You can set your location, but not by GPS. Bing doesn’t attempt to find local businesses in Oslo.
A handy tool lets me save several locations (home, work, other) which I can toggle between.

Ask Mobile

I am generally a big fan of Ask, but Ask Mobile is not too impressive. The front page has convenient quick links to web, images, news, local and maps & directions. The search results are easy to navigate. Ask presents universal search results, but in strange categories. My search for pizza retrieved results in these categories: news, images, questions, ringtones (!). Pizza ringtones?

There is a local search option which might be excellent, but it doesn’t work in Norway.

Padia Powersearch has links more mobile search sites.

photo credit: Dushaun

SMX West: March 2-4
Go to California!

Outsource SEO/PPC
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This week an Italian court sentenced three Google executives to six months in prison for allowing users to post a video on YouTube.

The video, which was uploaded in 2006, showed kids bullying a child with Down’s syndrome.

Sickening video

Let there be no doubt about our position on publishing such videos online. It sickens us, and it must be possible to bring such cases to court. But it is the one that uploaded the video that should be brought to justice.

The Social Web

The problem is that the Italian judge clearly does not understand the nature of the Social Web.

He has a mental lock-in based on the old paradigm of print and broadcasting media, from a time when publishing was for the few and the editor could control what content appeared in their newspapers or on their TV channels.

The whole idea of allowing people to comment on blogs, participate in online discussions and upload their videos makes it impossible to exercise an editorial regime of the old type. Google and YouTube cannot watch every video uploaded to their sites before allowing them to be published. There are simply too many of them.

The Italian government of Berlusconi is even planning a new law making online video services like YouTube liable for invasions of privacy, violations of copyright and other transgressions that occur in user-generated content.

Don’t blame the postman

Paolo Brini, a spokesman for Movimento Scambio Etico, a group that campaigns for an unfettered Internet made the following point after the trial:

“In all of history, nobody ever thought you had to put in jail a postman because a package contained something illegal.”

He has a point, although you would expect the Post Office to help the authorities track down illegal materials like weapons and illegal drugs.

Google did act

What you can expect Google to do is to remove illegal material when they find out about it. Google does, for instance, close down Blogger blogs that violate Goolge guidelines. The Italian video was removed when Google received a formal complaint.

They also helped the police find the person responsible for the video.

The family of the boy has withdrawn its lawsuit against Google, as they believe the case is being used for other purposes than the protection of the boy. The fact that the case was not stopped after this seems to prove that they are right.

The lawyer of the family states that Google has been demonstrating care and sensitivity to the problems of persons with disabilities.

The Italian verdict represents a threat to the social nature of the Web.

Google will appeal the decision.