By : Nidhi Gupta

Are there broken links on your site? Have you removed some old pages while forgetting to clean up the links pointing to those pages? Did you change your file structure and leave some legacy links behind? You may not even know if you have these issues, but the search engines do.

Do these broken links affect your search engine rankings? Generally people don’t even worry about it as an organic factor, they do not believe this affects rankings. Well, I am fairly certain this is incorrect for a number of reasons. Broken links can degrade your rankings on a site wide basis. As search engines rank individual pages and not whole sites, and there are a few site wide ranking factors. I believe this is one of those factors.

Let’s set aside for a moment that having broken links on your site is bad for a wide variety of user experience reasons and focus on why it is bad specifically for search engine rankings.First and fore-most, the search engines tell you specifically not to publish pages with broken links.

The Google Webmaster Guidelines, can be vague at times, but for important issues they are fairly blunt. In this particular case the warning against broken links is tucked right in between the importance of Title tags and issues concerning dynamic URLs, both high profile SEO issues.

• Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate.
• Check for broken links and correct HTML.
• If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.

Google in particular has been very vocal about wanting to provide quality pages to its users. Taking a queue from it’s AdWords product and the “Quality Score” assigned to advertising landing pages, it is not impossible that a number of organic factors are combined to produce a site “Quality Score” for organic as well. Broken links would be a sign of a poorly maintained web site and would surely affect this “Quality Score”.

Now from a search engine spider standpoint, when a broken link is found, that equates to a dead end. If the missing page returns a 404 error, the search engine will identify the page as non-existent and catalog the pages linking to it. If the page linking to the 404 error remains on this list for too long or has too many links to 404 errors, in all likelihood this would have a negative effect on the “Quality Score” of that page.

One or two of these issues is not going to drop you off the first page of the results; however, long term publishing of broken links can degrade the overall quality of your site both in your visitors eyes and the search engines.

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By : Nidhi Gupta

PayPal, the payments service arm of online auction leader eBay Inc, is set to release a convenient way for its customers to make payments on Web sites that don’t accept PayPal directly.

The new software utility, called the PayPal Secure Card, recognizes when a user lands on an e-commerce checkout page and automatically helps the user fill out the payment form in a secure way that also offers stepped-up fraud protections.

It answers an innovation by Google Inc, which a year ago introduced Google Checkout, which stores financial details to make shopping more convenient, analysts said.

Through a partnership with credit card issuer MasterCard Inc, Secure Card generates a unique MasterCard number each time a PayPal user arrives on an e-commerce sales checkout page that does not otherwise accept its payments.

“From a merchant’s perspective this looks like any other MasterCard transaction,” said Chris George, director of financial products for PayPal. “And it’s just another PayPal purchase to the customer.”

Secure Card has been tested by 3 million PayPal customers in the past year. The plug-in will be available to U.S. customers on Tuesday, with international customers to follow.

When a PayPal customer wants to pay for something on a site that doesn’t normally accept PayPal payments, users click a downloaded PayPal button on their browsers to generate a unique, single-instance Secure Card transaction number.

“Actual PayPal activity goes up,” George said. “It makes sense, because it just makes shopping easier and safer.”

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By : Nidhi Gupta

Yahoo co-founder David Filo, who rarely gets in front of a conference crowd, chatted with John Battelle at the Web 2.0 Summit, aided by Bradley Horowitz, Yahoo vice president of product strategy. Filo is the product focused half of the founding duo. The other founder, Jerry Yang, focuses on the business issues.

You would think after 12 years in the saddle and with billions of dollars in their accounts, the motivation to keep at it would diminish for the founders, but Filo said that the opportunity that lies ahead keeps him motivated, as well as being part of the “revolution.”

Battelle asked about Microsoft buying Yahoo. “Over 12 years of our history rumors come and go,” he said. On further probing by Battelle, Filo added, “It’s pretty safe to say nothing will be announced tomorrow.”

Dave McClure, from the audience, asked why Yahoo hasn’t acquired Six Apart’s blogging tools or Facebook to gain some faster traction in blogging and social networking. Horowitz responded, “We put Yahoo 360 out there and learned a lot from it. 360 may be doing a 180, and change and adapt to address the opportunities.” He didn’t offer any specifics as to what the 180 degree turn looks like.

Filo added, “We are absolutely interested in blogging, and we hope five years from now to be a major player in that space. We will look at acquisitions.”

Horowitz dealt with the Google question, that Yahoo is slowing down as Google ascends. He admitted that Yahoo has not done a good job on the monetization side. On the other hand, products are growing (Flickr has grown 15x) and are being knit together.

Filo commented on Google, saying Yahoo has never had a shortage of competitors in its history. “The next MySpace or YouTube is just as much a threat as Google,” Filo said. “It’s more important to think about how we evolve as a company. One constant is we know things are going to change and the leader in search five years from now might be google us or some startup.”

Battelle asked about how Google or Microsoft can outspend Yahoo for acquisitions and monetization deals. “Microsoft could outspend us on anything. It’s not going to define our success or failure. In the environment we operate in, we have to build better products and services. We have looked at thousands of companies over years and generally we get the companies we want,” Filo said.

On the new ad monetization engine, Horowitz said that there are a few hundred advertisers are on the system. “We are taking it slowly coming up on the Christmas season and want to make sure we get it right. We are cautious but plan to get advertisers converted over in Q4 and Q1 [2007].”

Source: Blogs.zdnet.com

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