Hot news for every web-marketing newsletter is the most-recent issue cover Yahoo!'s purchase of Overture. That being said, below is a short information about this topic by highlighting the facts and speculations surrounding this important development in online world.

• Yahoo! buys Overture for $1.63bil U.S. in cash and stock.

• Yahoo! now owns - Overture, Inktomi, AltaVista, and Fast.

• MSN is Overture's biggest partner, delivering as much as one-third of Overture's revenue this year, or an estimated $350 million.

• LookSmart's stock price jumped nearly 25% to $4.21. FindWhat's shares closed up 12 cents to $23.11. 

• Lisa Gurry, group product manager for MSN, said MSN planned "no immediate changes." Says: "The company's strategy has been to work with Overture and other partners while developing its own technology."

• This positions Overture and Yahoo! to better compete against Google.

• This puts pressure on MSN to act and consolidate.

• There are only three players left in search -- Yahoo!, Google, and MSN

• Overture advertisers are likely to keep bidding programs since distribution has not changed.

• Google advertisers are likely to keep bidding programs since distribution has not changed.

• If MSN breaks its relationship with Overture (changing Overture ad distribution), advertisers may want to also buy paid ads through MSN or whatever paid listing program MSN buys or implements.

• Yahoo!-owned Inktomi (maybe with Fast and AV mixed in) will probably backfill Yahoo's listings when the Google backfill contract ends.

• MSN may or may not continue to use Inktomi's backfill for its listings.

• Yahoo may do away with its directory and replace it with paid search.

• SEO will become less and less important as the number of free listing players decrease.

• SEO will become more and more important as users become more aware of paid listing results and shy away from them -- looking instead to free listings as the "credible" results.

• Only large-scale SEO efforts will be effective as algorithms consolidate. Spam SEO / SEO "opportunism" will become more difficult to impossible to implement effectively. Affiliate marketers that rely on these techniques may suffer financially. 

• SEO and PPC will be equally important since all three major players will probably offer free, PPC, and paid search results. 

• MSN may buy FindWhat, LookSmart, WiseNut, or Espotting, or may create own PPC search.

In the context of search engines, it is the mathematical programming system used to determine which web pages are displayed in search results. A search engine algorithm is made up of many individual criteria set by a specific search engine used to rank individual pages of a web site.

There are many criteria such as: 

• title

• meta description

• meta keywords

• image alt tags

• body text

• inbound link text

• domain name

• heading tags

• filename

• phrases in bold or italics

• what other sites are linking to that page

• the importance of linking sites rated by the search engine

Focusing specific key phrases within the criteria rated by the search engine will increase the likelihood of ranking well for the search engine's algorithm.

5 - What is PageRank (PR)?

"Many webmasters have heared about it and for many people it sounds like science fiction! Lets have a deeper look at Google. What is the secret of Google top rankings? It looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; Google analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

The issue is to have your page linked to by as many high quality and high pageranked sites as possible. Right? Continue reading.

WRONG - Google pagerank system also takes into account the number of links the page that has linked to your web site has. The reason for this is that a page X has a certain amount of voting PR, if your site Y is the only link from that page X, then Google feels confident that page X thinks your page Y is the best link it has, and will give you more PR. If however page X has 15 links, page X could think your only the 15th best page. So the more links it has the less of a PR boost your site gets. Right? Continue reading.

RIGHT - Linking to a site with a 6+ PR will provide a significant boost to your PR in most cases, but in cases where the site also links with 100 other sites the boost will be almost zero. Likewise if a site has a PR of just 2 but you and only one other site are linked from it, then the PR boost would be more than the site with 100 links and a PR of 6.

It's beginning to come complex isn't it, just wait till you see this formula. Its looks scary for non math's people.

First let me explain what the damping factor is. The damping factor is the amount of your PR which you can actually pass on when you vote / link to another site. The damping factor is widely known to be .85 . This is a little less then the linking pages own PR.

PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + ... + PR(tn)/C(tn))

In simple words PR(A) is the Pagerank™ boost your page will get after being linked from someone else's site (t1). PR(t1) is the pagerank of the page which links to you and C(t1) is the amount of total links that (t1) has. It is important to know that a pages voting power is only .85 of that pages actual PR and this voting power gets spread out evenly between all sites it links to.

Imagine that jnbwebpromotion was linked by XYZ.COM's link page which had a PR of 4 and 9 other links, here's how the formula should look like:

PR(jnbwebpromotion) = (1-.85) + .85*(4/10)
PR(jnbwebpromotion) = .15 + .85*(.4)
PR(jnbwebpromotion) = .15 + .34
PR(jnbwebpromotion) = .49

To sum up my site would get an injection of .49 PR after being linked from a page with a PR of four and 9 other links.

Lets say I was linked from a site with a PR of 8 - double the previous example's amount, which had 15 other links, a total of 16 outbound links, my boost would be:

PR(jnbwebpromotion) = (1-.85) +.85*(8/16)
PR(jnbwebpromotion) = .15 + .85(.5)
PR(jnbwebpromotion) = .15 + .425
PR(jnbwebpromotion) = .575

The above two worked examples show that not only is the PR of the linking page important but what is also important is how many other sites are also linked / voted for from that page.

It's not difficult, it does sometimes take time. Just make sure you site has good content and follow the guidelines for adding a URL. Try to get you index page listed at least. I say at least because although ODP claims only to list your index page, there are plenty of sites with 5 - 10 pages listed. So if your site has very distinctive sections, then submit each section - slowly. Once Google updates it's directory, these listings could do wonders for your site maximum PR.

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