Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.
In March, I attended the "Search Engine Strategies" conference in New York . This is the major worldwide search engine event of the year and gave me the opportunity to attend presentations and to meet with a well-known search experts such as Danny Sullivan, Bruce Clay and Detlev Johnson.
Before I left, Chris, Toby and myself discussed a specific range of issues which we felt were most relevant to the web sites we are currently working with. Whilst some of these may be more applicable to your web site than others, I hope that the following summary gives you an idea of where we expect to be heading with your website over the next three to 12 months, and of the major strategies we will be using to get there.
SEO Questions
Is it true that by displaying Google Adsense, on my site I can expect the Google spider to come around more often?
What about if I bid on Google Adwords, will this increase my ranking in the main index?
Are there any penalties which could be applied to my website if I display lots of affiliate links?
How can we protect ourselves from losing our position due to the regular changes in algorithm being implemented by Google?
How important are meta tags in the current search climate? Does the keyword tag have any relevance any more?
What will Yourslice be doing to monitor my website?
What is likely to happen to the search engine market in general over the next year, and in the medium to long-term?
Is it better to have one large site with everything under one roof, or can it be more effective to use multiple domains? Specifically, is there any truth in the assertion that a site can reach a certain critical mass (believed to be around 1000 pages of content), above which rankings on search engines such as Google will become substantially more stable?
How important is PageRank™ in the current search marketplace?
Is the market going to be dominated even further by pay per click listings?
Are there any plans by search engines to use any sort of user defined quality criteria when deciding how to rank sites?
How many times should I repeat my target keyword on each page, and how should this keyword density be spread out around the page?
Are large gains in rank still possible through the use of "supatags" (highly optimised title tags)?
How many words of content should be used on each page? Is there a minimum number of words to make a page viable?
What percentage of the search engine market will the new Yahoo occupy? How do I need to adapt my site to respond to this? What will happen to the Yahoo directory?
In March, I attended the "Search Engine Strategies" conference in