This is pretty cool for webmasters – Google now offers you to see the most popular link text pointing to your site. Just go to your Google Webmaster Tools -> Statistics -> Page analysis.

A recent article posted on Slashdot looked at various website design points of the top 6 Presidential Candidates.

I am actually not going to tell you much about this, other than it is totally legitimate and could act as a source of high quality links and trafffic… the type who not only might click through to read what you say, but also write about it.

I’m not exactly sure what caused all this secondary fuss about no-follow and reviews lately but I think it’s time someone pointed out that Google is being extremely hypocritical about the entire thing and using fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) to corral web publishers to their way of thinking.

Matt asks for your favorite Web 2.0 companies. Here’s a huge list from Seth Godin and another from SEOMoz.

If there’s any one site I use more than others (with the exception of Gmail), it’s Technorati. This site is a fantastic window into the psyche of the more digitally inclined. Here, in another in my series of hack postings, are 10 ways I get more mileage from T’rati.

Google’s official corporate blog, while improving, has largely been antisocial to date. Now they have added a nice implementation of backlinks on their posts.

Google’s resident rock star, Matt Cutts, has posted that a little Google Dance is underway again. Google probably doesn’t derive any pleasure from sending the ranks of SEO and SEM pros hustling to tweak hundreds of web sites for better placement each time they update.

One of the more important tasks in relation to search engine indices involves the keeping this content fresh and up to date. To accomplish this, search engines have developed a number of procedures designed to refresh and update their respective databases. In all likelihood, the most popular of these events has to be when Google performs a backlink and PageRank update, which happens throughout the year at determined intervals.

We all know just how important it is to get as many incoming links as possible. The top search engines love backlinks; and you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure out that link popularity plays an important role in their ranking algorithms.

I had a hunch that Google would do an update this weekend and this morning I have logged on to find that an backlink update is under way.

Does Google place varying levels of value on the types of links pointing to a site when it comes to ranking considerations? This is one of the most oft discussed topics on the subject of Google linking strategies. Will Google punish what it may perceive as too many links too quickly? Are relevant links the only ones given weight?

Google is updating the backlinks reported by the link URL command. This is not really a Google Dance …

A Google backlinks update is now on its way! You can see some changes via the “link:” command in Google.

On the forums or by email I am often asked the following sort of question: “How many Backlinks do I need to get in order to have PR5?”. The answer is simple and always the same one: “This question cannot be answered because the PR doesn’t only depend on the number of backlinks, it also and above all depends on the PR of each of those links…” Or to put it differently, a page can have PR5 with a single backlink whereas another one can have 3,000 backlinks and PR5 too.

Well, I bet many of you have been trying to find tools to help you in optimizing your website for search engines. So I thought I would throw together an article with a list of really useful tools (and of course ill give you a link to their websites so you can download them to!)

How do search engines evaluate relevancy when ranking search results? Do they concentrate on optimized content, or do they value contextual backlinks more? Do they place more importance for on page content (optimized web copy)? Or do they emphasize off page, anchored links pointing to the site in question?

What’s the best way of finding all the existing links to your site? It’s widely acknowledged that Google doesn’t show all the links when you do a “link:www.yoursite.com” search. Dave Hawley said that Google confirmed to him that they only ever shows a sample of the links to a given site.