Source: washingtonpost.com

Yahoo reached a deal with seven major newspaper groups representing more than a 150 newspapers that would allow them to sell help-wanted advertising and offer a variety of local information services on Yahoo’s HotJobs online classified service.

The newspapers will have the right to sell ads on Yahoo HotJobs on their own or as part of a bundle with newspaper ads. It also allows the newspapers to sell employers access to HotJobs’s résumé database. The newspaper companies also are discussing a broad range of partnerships with Yahoo that could include content sharing and search technology. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The move is an attempt by Yahoo to expand its reach into local markets, viewed as a key growth prospect as it battles rivals such as Google Inc. for advertising dollars.

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By: Loren Baker | Source: searchenginejournal.com

Yahoo! and Answers.com have announced that the social media driven question and answers content from Yahoo! Answers will now be integrated into Answers.com. Yahoo! Answers has more than 60 million users globally, and will now be providing Answers.com users with a rich supplementary source of community-generated questions and answers on almost any topic, according to Answers.com.

From Yahoo! PR : “The combination of Answers.com information from over 100 trusted encyclopedias, dictionaries and thesauruses with human insight from the more than 60 million Yahoo! Answers users will help users augment reference information with real-life experience.”

“While it’s terrific to use Answers.com today to find detailed, factual information on any given topic, we are offering an even more powerful user experience by tapping into the collective wisdom of one of the Internet’s largest communities,” stated Jeff Cutler, Chief Revenue Officer of Answers.com. “Following on the heels of our acquisition of FAQ Farm, incorporating Yahoo! Answers is an additional step toward our goal of creating a dynamic educational experience and a single destination for people to find their answers.”

Spread the word: bookmark it/ readit

By: Barry Schwartz | Source: seroundtable.com

Live.com is banning sites that take part in spammy and irrelevant link exchanges which are designed to corrupt and mislead search engines into ranking such sites highly.

Barry Schwartz looks at a thread from Search Engine Watch which published an email from Live.com to a publisher:

Your site is acquiring links through posting to or exchanging links with sites unrelated to your site content. Techniques which attempt to acquire unrelated spam links in order to increase ranking are considered spam and your site has been excluded from our index as results. Please contact us once you’ve removed these links and we will reevaluate.

Live Search

So, Microsoft is making an effort on spam. But I believe, not 100% sure, the way Google handles unrelated links to your site, is by not banning your site, but not counting those links. Unless, of course, it is a clear and transparent attempt for you to hurt the search results.

Of course, I do believe Google applies the Minus 30 penalty to some sites participating in some link exchanges or communities that are outright done for the purpose of ranking well.

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