• Title tag issues
• Meta description issues
• Non-indexable content issues

For example, if your title tag is too short, too long, or missing, this tool will let you know. Likewise for meta descriptions.

They'll also let you know if you've got uncrawlable content buried in Flash or images that needs to be freed up for indexing.

It looks pretty sweet, though I haven't had a chance to play with it yet. We've got similar tools available through seoinsites.com, but that's a paid service.

Maybe Google is gearing up to make their own SEO tools available for free and put all us paid tool providers out of business, like they've (somewhat) managed to do in the analytics and coversion software fields ;)

Vanessa Fox has a detailed analysis.

We're interested just in who's linking to our competition, so we'll focus on external links. If we wanted to see who was linking to CNN.com, we'd enter their domain in Yahoo Site Explorer and click Explore URL.



This would first show us a list of pages indexed from that site. To see incoming links, we'd then click the Inlinks link.

Yahoo will now list incoming links roughly in order of importance. This is a great feature since it clusters the best links near the top and cuts down the time spent scrolling through a site's incoming links.

We can then use the available drop-down menus to limit this list just to external links. Adjust the menus so that they now say Show Inlinks Except from this domain to Only this URL.



This will show us external links just to the CNN Homepage. If we want to see links to the site as a whole, set the menus to Show Inlinks Except from this domain to Entire Site.

Once you're able to see who is linking to your competition, you next need to determine why they're linking to them. Then formulate a plan for getting them to link to you. But it all starts with using the Yahoo Site Explorer to evaluate the top 10 or 20 sites ranking for each of your keywords and unearthing the wealth of link building possibilities.

A more advanced tutorial on link analysis with Yahoo is given in the SearchEngineNews.com report:

How to Analyze Competitor Sites So You Can Better Optimize Your Own

You can also view a number of your competitors' important link-related metrics by entering their domain with the Site Strength Indicator Tool (login with your SearchEngineNews.com Email and this month's Password). This tool not only gives you the Yahoo Site Explorer data listed above but also list factors such as links from .edu and .gov domains, listings in authoritative directories and much more.

You can also install the SearchStatus plugin in your Mozilla browser in order to easily see the Google PageRank, Alexa rank and Compete ranking for any site you're on, along with highlighting of nofollowed links and other important data.

What about Google? In case you're still fairly new to SEO and are wondering why we don't use the Google link command to do competitive link analysis, it's because Google provides terrible link data. Yahoo's data is much more complete and reliable. You can get pretty good link data for your own sites by registering them with Google Webmaster Central. However, that tool only lets you check links for your own sites, not your competitions'.

1. iphone
2. webkinz
3. tmz
4. transformers
5. youtube
6. club penguin
7. myspace
8. heroes
9. facebook
10. anna nicole smith

Here's how they stack up against the top 2007 Yahoo searches:

1. Britney Spears
2. WWE
3. Paris Hilton
4. Naruto
5. Beyonce
6. Lindsay Lohan
7. Rune Scape
8. Fantasy Football
9. Fergie
10. Jessica Alba

Wow. Britney, Paris, Beyonce, Lindsay, Fergie and Jessica all in the top 10.

Here's similar stats for Ask:

1. MySpace
2. Dictionary
3. Google
4. Themes
5. Area Codes
6. Cars
7. Weather
8. Games
9. Song Lyrics
10. Movies

Dictionaries and area codes. That's about the most boring list of searches I've ever seen.

Microsoft Live Search should be releasing theirs any day now, we'll see how those stack up.

It's already being suggested that Google may not actually intend to purchase this spectrum. Rather, they hope to force whoever does buy it to adhere to certain restrictions. Don Dodge:

The rules of the spectrum auction require the winning bidder to allow any device or application to access the network at "wholesale" rates, provided the winning bid meets the reserve price of $4.6 Billion.

Once Google bids that amount, they can drop out, having achieved their real aim. More background in the WSJ.

It works similar to Digg.com. You can vote up search results you like, delete the ones you don't, and even suggest pages that you think should be listed.

Seems like a search marketers dream - start up a million spambots to generate Google accounts and vote your pages to the top of the rankings.

That's a big reason why something like this would never be used by Google to influence the actual search results—too easy to spam. As Google says, this is a feature that "may be available for only a few weeks."

Pretty slick, probably good for choosing bike paths and stuff.

The old hybrid feature got moved to the Show Labels option when you click on the satellite view. More from the Google Lat Long blog, Google Blogoscoped, and Download Squad.

Google may (or may not) be gearing up to launch their long-awaited GDrive in a few months, according to the Wall Street Journal. There's been speculation on the project, code-named Platypus, for well over a year now. Google already owns at least the following related domains:

• GoogleDrive.com
• MyGoogleStorage.com
• MyGoogleDrive.com

Search Engine Land has a screenshot of a Google employees desktop showing the Platypus icon.

GDrive is supposed to be integrated into your computer software so that it acts just like another hard drive, except that all your data is backed up at a remote location. I already back up my data remotely once a week using FTP, so there's not much appeal to handing over everything to Google. It'll be interesting to see what enticements Google offers to get people to sign on.

More at TechCrunch and Search Engine Journal

They take a little while to catch, since they're not on all the videos, but if you watch a few vids in the featured videos section you'll spot one before long. Nike ads are pretty easy to spot on the sports-related videos, like this one for bull riding:

When YouTube first blogged about this back in August, they didn't mention anything about revenue share with the creators of the videos, ala AdSense, however. And advertising is currently limited to a select group of Google partners, so there doesn't appear to be anyway for the little guy to get in on this, at least not yet.

More from Search Engine Land and Silicon Alley Insider.

I think it overstates a bit the user experience problems with the mobile web. The iPhone has a pretty kick ass interface, and the lack of Flash capability has never been a problem for me. I actually have Flash disabled on my desktop's FireFox browser (using FlashBlock), just because Flash tends to slow the browsing experience so much.

The article also discusses software created by Zumobi which breaks the surfing experience into interactive tiles (demo here, in Flash, natch) which can be preloaded on the phone, downloaded from partner sites, or swapped between users.

The demo looks great, except I'm not sure how it's different than just having 16 bookmarks stored on your browser with the stuff you like. Sure, it's animated and graphical, but is it really not just bookmarks on steroids?

Most likely I just don't fully understand it yet. The tiles do need to be built (using the Zumobi SDK), they're not automatically generated by the Zumobi software. If this tile-based approach takes off, getting your site "tiled" could be a significant part of your business's online promotion effort.

My hunch is that iPhone's approach, in which the phone accommodates the web as it is (minus Flash, for now) rather than the web being modified to accommodate the phone, is what will win out in the long-term.

But Zumobi does have some cool-looking software. I wish them all the luck in anything they can do to improve the mobile browsing experience.

Here's 5 good reasons worrying about your little green pixie dust is a waste of time :)

1. Rankings - PageRank does not equal rankings. Not even close. Especially when you're talking about toolbar PageRank, which typically months out of date and bears little relation to the actual PageRank Google uses. Of course, rankings are meaningless if they don't bring you traffic, in the form of...
2. Unique Visitors - It may be fun to tell your friends you rank number one in Google for custom fit drill bits in Bumford, Indiana, but if no one's searching for that term it's going to bring you zero traffic. But even if you get 10,000 visitors a day, if they take one look at your site and turn around and leave all you're really doing is wasting bandwidth. That's why a much better metric of site health is...
3. Page Views - When your site connects with people, they're going to spend some time browsing around, reading your content, and hopefully being channeled into your sales funnel. Of course, lots of page views could really just be a product of poor site design forcing people to click too much to find what they're looking for. Time on site or return visitors may be a much better metric, but what you should really be concerned with is...
   
4. Conversions - PageRank is meaningless if it doesn't bring you rankings. Rankings are meaningless if they don't bring you traffic. And traffic is meaningless if it doesn't bring you sales. And, of course, sales are rather meaningless if you're not achieving a positive ROI.
5. RSS Subscribers - Depending solely on Google traffic for your business model is a dangerous game. Subscribers are one of the best forms of defensible traffic. John Chow may have had his Google rankings stripped and his PageRank knocked down, but his 13,000+ subscribers means he doesn't need Google to make money with his site.

So if you got slapped in Google's latest paid links offensive, pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and remind yourself that (unless you're selling text links) toolbar PageRank doesn't mean squat. Then get back in the game and focus on what really matters.

I'm a big fan of Statcounter, particularly for smaller sites. It's not the most advanced stats program, but it's drop-dead easy to use. If you just want an extremely easy and obvious way to get an idea of what keywords and links are driving traffic to your site and you don't need to bother with all the conversion tracking and advanced stuff from a program like Google Analytics, I highly recommend it.

• Shoemoney's got some advice on going after the low hanging traffic fruit and a sweet interview over on John Reese's new site.
• Yahoo's updating their index. Discussion at WMW.
• Google releases a patent on local search for mobile devices.
• Ask pisses some people off with their ads.
• Neil Patel on landing pages for social media visitors.

Bill Hartzer has a nice list over on WMW of 130 Social Bookmarking Sites Sorted by Number of Backlinks. Some of the little guys even send traffic, and probably won't bury your stories quite so fast.

Interesting medium, though likely to be out of the reach of most smaller advertisers. And maybe you don't really want your ad as the backdrop to Carl Johnson beating a hooker to death...