IrishWonder’s SEO Consulting Blog

As you may know already, as a result of Yahoo’s transition to Bing as a backend for organic search results, the linkdomain: command has stopped working (MSN/Live/Bing discontinued the support for such commands a while ago). I’ve been seeing 0 results for linkdomain search for some time already – must be due to Yahoo/Bing testing things. Sure there is Yahoo! Site Explorer – but so many tools depend on linkdomain: command in Yahoo proper, and so many tools will only display all kinds of additional info for a site’s backlinks in regular Yahoo SERPs but not in Site Explorer. What’s a poor SEO to do?

Luckily, not all transitions happen fast. I am not sure for how much longer this will be working, but the transition to Bing has only affected the Yahoo.com site so far – not the regional sites. Just for the sake of a quick test, I checked a few regional versions of Yahoo for backlinks of Google.com and here is the result count I got (for the list of all Yahoo regional sites see here):

Yahoo! Austria – 765,000,000

Yahoo! Denmark – 767,000,000

Yahoo! France – 780,000,000

Yahoo! Germany – 783,000,000

Yahoo! Italy – 779,000,000

Yahoo! Netherlands – 784,000,000

Yahoo! Russia – 788,000,000

Yahoo! Spain – 783,000,000

Yahoo! Turkey – 734,000,000

Yahoo! UK – 784,000,000

Yahoo! Brazil – 778,000,000

Yahoo! Japan – 781,000,000

Talking of Yahoo! Japan, it will remain unaffected by this transition as it is a separate company and previously has chosen Google over Bing as its search results provider.

In the meantime, the linkdomain: command is still available via Yahoo! API (764,175,429 results) – at least at the time of this writing.

Generally, I have nothing against link exchange. If done carefully (=3-way at least, not reciprocal), with the right sites, without involving the super-spammed “resources” pages that scream “Designed for link exchange!”, it works wonders in certain markets. But I guess we’ve all received one (or a hundred) of those lame link exchange requests offering you to link to something totally unrelated, sent to a site that you never even thought of doing link exchange for, and containing one of the top lame pitches like:

As you are probably aware, reciprocal linking benefits both of us by raising
the search engine rankings and generating more traffic to both of our
websites.

Imagine this sent to my contact email for this site!

After getting an umpteenth email like this, I lost patience and decided to reply the lame link exchanger:

Hi,

Prior to spamming everyone out there with your link exchange requests take
some effort and ask yourself the following questions:

1. Does the site I am about to spam look like they practice link exchange?

2. Is the site at least somehow related to what I am trying to get them to
link to?

If the answer is “no” to both, think of what you’re searching in the
search engines and maybe you need to refine your queries to come up with
better potential link exchange partners.

You think they would at least understand what I am on about?

(This was intended as part of the previous post. My WordPress somehow posted only the beginning of this post yesterday. Hence, let’s continue.)

To run an effective Twitter campaign, you need to first of all decide what it is you want to run it for – is it increasing the brand awareness? is it getting traffic to your site? is it selling something? (and yes, obviously if some people buy a car over Twitter then somebody actually succeeds in selling this car). Think what people potentially interested in your services would tweet about – and no, if you are a service offering resume writing help to those who do not want to write their own resumes for whatever reason, searching for tweets containing the word “resume” will not bring you your potential customers but rather competitors offering the same services, so be careful what you target not to end up selling to your own competitors. Once you have defined and found your potential customers, start interacting with them without just bluntly pushing your product down their throats – this is something that just doesn’t work on Twitter. So find the right approach, find the opportunity and then become really useful for your potential customers.

On the other hand, do not be completely silent – just creating a Twitter account won’t do you anything. If you decided you need a Twitter presence, then be present – so that your customers can notice you.

(Already after coming up with the idea of this post, I noticed this great post by Lee Odden explaining how to plan a Twitter marketing strategy – this is a must read and an additional source of tips for a successful Twitter campaign.)

Most businesses probably won’t be able to afford a full time person running their Twitter marketing campaign – so automate, there are tools in place for this, but automate wisely. Do not just run things on autopilot, unless you’re a blackhat running hundreds of accounts (but even then, use your head when setting things up). Review everything that is done by tools, and do not forget that your followers will want to see a real person behind your Twitter account, not just a bot.

For some businesses social media may not work at all unless they are really creative (if the nature of your business is such that involves certain privacy concerns, addressing a problem people are not comfortable discussing publicly – plastic surgeons, male enhancement, etc.). For some businesses it may make sense looking for partners or affiliates, not clients. In either case, I (as well as my multiple clients) have seen proof that Twitter marketing works – but to see it work for you, you need to start thinking out of the box instead of just repeating what everybody else seems to be doing on Twitter. The better you identify your needs and needs of your target audience on Twitter, the higher are your chances for success.