Technitard

UPDATE: As of October 2011 there is a new Delicious in town. The new version does not appear to have an RSS Feed, but more information on its SEO potential to come. Check back, or subscribe to our feed…

Delicious.com (formerly del.icio.us) is a social bookmarking site that was one of the first of its kind. It allows  you to save web links, along with tags, a title and description, to your personal bookmarks page. This bookmarks page is public.

The value of social bookmarking sites for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is that you can place links to your own websites on  your bookmark page, and they will show up as backlinks to the search engines, giving you the all-important link authority that search engines use to rank their results.

The problem with this scenario is that for links to be counted as backlinks, the page they appear on needs to be indexed by the search engine in question. And as of this writing, I see NO delicious.com user bookmark pages appearing in the Google index. Nor do I see any of the tag pages, which contain lists of links based on bookmark tags, in the Google index.

What I do see is that 123 bookmarks have been created in the last minute. I just hope it’s not for SEO link-building, because it’s not going to work!

It all started when I noticed that my Bing Local business listing was still pending review, 2 months after I verified my address by mail. Not only was my local web design business not listed when I searched “Pleasanton Web Design,” but neither was any other web design company in Pleasanton. Web design companies in Livermore, Fremont, Sunnyvale and Alameda were the closest Bing could come up with. I wrote about it on my blog. To make a long story shorter, I titled the article “Bing Local Search Drives Traffic to YellowPages.com by Sucking.” Do I have proof that it is deliberate? No. Is it happening? Sure looks like it to me.

If not one pleasanton web design company is listed in a Bing local search for “pleasanton web design,” I’m obviously not the only person who is having problems with Bing Local. As a sidenote, try searching “Bing Local Sucks” on Google, and Google will remove the word “local” from your search automatically. You have to click on a link at the bottom to have the word included, even though you typed it in the search box.

As I am accustomed to do, I checked my rank on Google for the term “Bing Local Yellowpages.com” the next day to see how I was indexed. I had a preliminary hit on page one, really the Digg of my article. The next day, however the Digg listing was gone from the Google index, as I determined by searching the exact title of the article with quotes. The article itself has not been indexed, which is not that unusual as it’s been less than two weeks, and it can take that long. I have a number of blog posts written since that have been indexed and are ranking well, but I’ll give it another week before I suggest that the listings might have been removed.

Can a huge corporation pressure a search engine like Google to remove unfavorable information from it’s index? If so, is this censorship? Search engines have a lot of power in shaping our view of the world by controlling the information we see. If accurate, negative reviews or other embarrassing information is removed from the search engines, it does a disservice to everyone, except those unscrupulous businesses who would prey on people as long as they can fly under the radar.

Google has a new “feature” or ”function” or “f*ck you,” depending on your mindset. When searching using a multiple word term, sometimes the results will be delivered with one of the terms left out. You are informed of this by a “Tip” at the bottom of the results page that says “These results do not include the word (your word here) …”

Example:

1. “Let me type these three words in, and Google will serve the results I am looking for.”

2. “So far so good! Look how many hits I have for my three search words that I typed in and which are conveniently listed for me by my friends at Google”

3. “WTF!?! No wonder this S.E.R.P. was C.R.A.P. Google left out the middle search term, and informed me with a small “Tip” at the BOTTOM of the SERP, which contradicts the “Results” statement at the TOP of the SERP.”

Yes, the “Tip: These results do not include the word ” thing is a travesty. Is Google going the way of Microsoft with their “Vista” and their “Bing?” Or is there a something else going on here. Let me know what you think.

A number of people I know have been deciding not to renew their AT&T  Yellow Pages.com online advertising contracts. I’ve consistently heard two reasons:

1) They are really expensive
2) They do not get significant traffic or leads from the service.

I also have personal experience with AT&T online advertising. I was once a customer myself.

When Bing launched, I immediately went to their local business center and signed up for a listing. By the second week in June I had verified my mailing address. By the second week in August, my listing was still pending review.

I have a web design business located in Pleasanton California,  so I think it would be appropriate for my listing to show up as a local listing on Bing for the search “Pleasanton Web Design.” It does in the top 4 slots of both Google and Yahoo.

Unfortunately Bing’s results for the same search contain not one listing of a business located in Pleasanton. In fact, only one of the four has the same area code as Pleasanton:

No Results in the Same City

Why? Well, lets say I was a searcher looking for a local Pleasanton Web Design company, and all I see in Bing’s local listings are businesses out of the area. Might I be more likely to click on the “more listings” link? I think so.

Once I click on the “more listings” link, I am immediately presented with 3 sponsored links from YellowPages.com, then 10 listings, none of which are located in Pleasanton, then 3 more YellowPages.com ads.

Yellowpages.com ads on Bing

In fact, if you can believe this blogger  “the traffic to Yellowpages.com coming from Microsoft’s search engine more than doubled since the Bing launch.” That’s good news for Yellowpages.com. Many of their customers are ready to jump ship. In this tight economy, they are finally asking the question: “Why am I paying so much money for so few clicks, when I can go to Adwords and get much better bang for my buck?”  Well, maybe if the YellowPages.com sales people can show some decent traffic to their customers through this partnership with Bing, they can retain more of them. How long can they, or will they keep this up? Your guess is as good as mine.

This partnership is also good news for Bing, who is probably getting a pretty penny for those Yellowpages.com clicks. Certainly more than they would get if someone were to click on my Bing Local Business listing. If it existed, that is.