In case you are outside of the bubble of search engine optimization or oblivious to it’s affects, rumor as of late is, there has been a reported link audit occurring throughout various industries throughout the web in regard to Yahoo search results and the number of links being counted as valid links to your site. To investigate for yourself go to Yahoo and check your own site to see if the digital link bandit is X-ing out your hard earned tokens by using link:www.mysite.com as the link operator / command.

It could be a temporal rift in the algorithm or the roll out of a new paradigm in web history as far as augmentation of rankings is concerned and search engine optimization. Or in fact, has Yahoo simply become more strict about what it considers a quality inbound link? are sites being audited to reflect the true relevance of the links pointing at their site? Since I do not work at Yahoo it is hard to tell, I do know however that the way each search engine ranks websites is truly unique.

For example, Google is all about the anchor text, chipping away with a solid link building campaign can nearly produce instantaneous fluid rankings that climb like a monkey on a mission for the sacred banana atop the tree.

MSN can also be influenced with anchor text link density, whereas Yahoo has a high on page requirement for word density and has a penchant for aged links. Call it a trust factor since they coined the term Trust Rank, in their mind, if your site is the new kid on the block, you may have to wait a while before you start to show up for related key words as a result of semantic “word stemming” or the affect of a plural spelling, singular instance or correlation between related phrases.

With all of the controversy surrounding why rankings rise and plummet, the devils advocate insists that if you content were the basis of the rankings in the first place, your essentially outside of the modality of the fluctuating rise and fall of inflated links masquerading as quality inbound links, which directory your website is a part of or who is linking to you.

The bottom line is, if your website has value, it will rise of it’s own accord as a resource, things like free tools, useful links, well written copy and massive volumes of data orchestrated through a column, such as an ezine, publication or highly frequently blog still passes the muster. But how long before other forms of ranking are scrutinized and reduced in their ability to pass rank?

I guess we will have to wait and see, but it the meantime stay on track, write world class content and let the chips fall where they may. It may be too soon to access the obvious solutions, but keeping a constant vigil on how things are shaping up never hurts to get the drop on the next exodus from grace in the ranking algorithms and how to stay outside of the influences of the dreaded search engine audit.

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