Action buttons will allow people to complete a task related to a search query. The Bing algorithm will help the search engine to predict the possible tasks that the user could be undertaking and then the action buttons will simplify the process.

Action buttons for Hertz car rental on Bing

Bing director Stefan Weitz says that Bing will try to provide more than just simple blue links in their search results.

To start with, these action buttons will be available only on seven major search categories of popular search sites. These categories are airlines, couriers, restaurants, banks, rental cars, software downloads and hotels.

Based on the internal data of searches collected by them, Bing will then decide which are the most popular actions conducted by users on those sites. Those action buttons will then show up in the SERP.

Action buttons for Delta Airlines on Bing

Bing hopes to be able to provide more than just links to other pages, through these action buttons. The action buttons will aim to take the user deeper into the content. In some cases, the action buttons will be the same as the site links, while in other cases they will connect to a new page on the site. For example, booking a flight and viewing the status of a flight are both site links and action buttons in the screenshot above, whereas ‘Check In’ is an action button that does not exist in the extended site links for Delta Airlines.

The overlap between site links and action buttons may seem confusing and might make users wonder why Bing bothered with the buttons when the links were already there. Could it possibly be that Bing has run out of ideas and is now resorting to trivial changes in search results just to be able to make headlines?

The effects of linking to a bad quality site can be disastrous to any website’s organic rankings.

While we’ve made every effort to carefully vet each and every link in each and every comment posted on our site, what we cannot do is continuously monitor the status of the sites these comments link to.

Unfortunately, sites go down, get hacked, turn rogue and change direction all too often. As a result, what was once a good site to link to can turn into a very negative proposition if it gets hacked or turns rogue and starts spamming users or hosting viruses (viri?).

This latter scenario is not just bad for our search rankings but also for any users on our site who happen to click through and visit these rogue sites.

Hence, our decision: from today, all links in comments will include the rel=”nofollow” attribute.

We hope that our genuine readers and commenters will see agree with our reasons and will not be deterred from commenting and interacting with us in the future!

Rel=”nofollow” is an attribute that webmasters can add within the code for external links in order to signal that the link should not be followed by the search engine spiders. Bloggers often use the attribute to disuade comment spam.

The nofollow trend on Twitter started last year when they first indicated to search spiders that links posted under Web, on the right hand side of the Twitter profile, were not to be trusted. They then extended that to links within the Bio as well.

Now, Twitter adds the rel=”nofollow” attribute to all external links, be it links referencing an article or links to third-party Twitter apps that enabled posting the tweet.

Internal links remain untouched, turning Twitter into a walled garden much like Wikipedia, with lots of link juice coming in from other sites but none going out.

As Rae Hoffman pointed out on her blog, all the content on Twitter is created by the profile owners. Twitter is robbing profile owners by disallowing them to reap any benefit from their own work.

Twitter is likely to see some backlash as a result of this decision. Their justification for their decision is that it disuades spammers from abusing the service. However, Twitter is quite good at stopping spammer accounts already. And, moreover, that doesn’t then explain why verified reliable accounts such as @Google and @stephenfry also have their links nofollowed.

The popular micro-blogging service has timed these updates quite well. They are now so big, that minor backlashes and disenssion among SEO, social marketers and developers would hardly affect their growth, which is now self-propelling.

The study was carried out by Technorati asked bloggers to list the sources they refer to the most for information. While 61 percent of bloggers surveyed said they referred to other blogs, 46 percent said they were influenced by the mainstream media sites.

Credibility is an important quality for blogs, and it often decides the number of links a blog receives.  If a blogger is found to be writing untrue and baseless posts, eventually other bloggers will stop linking to that blog. On the other hand, if true and relevant material is published on a blog, more and more bloggers will link in to that blog, thus bestowing more power and authority on that blog.

Based on the results of their study, Technorati has created the ‘Technorati Attention Index’, rating the top 50 mainstream media sites that were linked to by bloggers in the past month. The index will be updated every month.

The top 5 sites this month are:

• YouTube
• The New York Times
• BBC News
• CNN.com
• MSN

In comparison, Techmeme’s Leaderboard rates the following  as the top five non-blog sources for bloggers:

• CNET News
• The New York Times
• The Wall Street Journal
• Reuters
• Computerworld

The complete list of top fifty sites rated by Technorati is available here.

Responding to a post on the Google Webmaster Help forum, John Mueller stated, “In general, I would like to add that no, backlinks from .EDU domains generally do not get additional credibility from Google.”

SEO professionals starting paying more attention to links from .edu and .gov domains after Google’s update nicknamed Jagger, where reciprocal links were devalued and more importance was paid to links from sites having greater authority. Educational institutions are usually very choosy about whom they agree to link with. Websites of well known colleges and universities also typically have higher PageRank. The conclusion that such a link would be more valuable is therefore not really far-fetched.

A link from a .edu or .gov site is neither easily available free of cost nor through payment. These websites link only to extremely relevant and trustworthy sites or other equally popular sites. Immaterial of whether the domain extension of such a site is .edu or .com, it fits the bill for a good quality, desirable site to get a link from.

Back in April 2006, a post on High Rankings Forum asked whether there was any evidence that having inbound .edu and .gov links was “better” and counted more than other links, to which forum moderator Jill Whalen answered with a simple “no”. It would seem though that Jill may have been in a minority here as many SEOs voiced their belief in the SEO goodness of .edu and .gov links on a post at SEO Roundtable.

There is no absolute proof that search engines do or do not consider .edu links to be more valuable. Even Google’s, John Mueller does not categorically deny the value of a .edu domain. All he says is that they “generally” do not get more credibility from Google. This does not mean that link from respectable universities such as Harvard, Stanford and Yale will not count for more. Though, the fact rests that there are a lot more good attributes associated with all of those university websites than just their .edu extension.

The article provides a checklist for Wikipedia image SEO, which is replicated here:

1. Do a survey to identify specific articles that lack quality images. Your aim should be to provide unique content where it did not exist before. Create a list of images that would each enhance at least one article.
2. Arrange the appropriate licensing and announce it on your client’s web site.
3. Upload images to Wikimedia Commons. Include a statement about licensing status and an outgoing link as verification. Categorize the images.
4. Over at Wikipedia, notify the appropriate WikiProject with a list that correlates available images to suggested articles and request assistance from volunteers. This indirect approach is diplomatic for conflict of interest situations.
5. Be low key and tasteful. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia.

According to Cary Bass of the Wikimedia Foundation, “The Wikimedia Foundation appreciates good quality, freely licensed images, and credit where credit is due is never an issue. Many of our images fall under an attribution license, which often takes the form of a web link back to the releaser’s web page.”