Not talked about much, but my partner noticed Yahoo! once again shifted paid inclusion to a yearly flat rate.

While Search Submit Pro allows you to have more control over listings and is sold on a costs a per click basis, their Search Submit Basic allows you to submit URLs for $49 per year per URL.

In the past Search Submit Basic was called Search Submit Express. It charged a flat inclusion price and sold clicks on CPC basis. Here is an Archive.org link to the old program.

If you have launched a new site and are not getting much Yahoo! traffic, submitting a few of your highest value pages is a good call. If you have key deep high value pages that are not staying indexed in Yahoo! this program also makes sense.

WMW has a good thread about some of the changes people are noticing at Google. Two big things that are happening are more and more pages are getting thrown in Google's supplemental results, and Google may be getting more aggressive with re-ranking results based on local inter-connectivity and other quality related criteria. You need some types of links to have enough raw PageRank to keep most of your pages indexed, and to have your deeper pages included in the final selection set of long tail search results. You need links from trusted related sites in order to get a boost in result re-ranking.

There are also a few other types of links to look at, if you wanted to take a more holistic view:

• links from general trusted seed sites

• links that drive sales
• links that lead to additional trusted links
• links that gain you mindshare or subscribers

Some of those other links may not even be traditional links, but may come from a well placed ad buy.

Every unbranded site is heavily unbalanced in their link profile. If you do not have a strong brand then the key people in your community who should be talking about you are not (and thus you are lacking those links).

Most branded sites do not create enough content or do enough keyword research to fully leverage their brand strength, but occasionally you see some of them get a bit too aggressive.

There are many ups and downs to adding a user generated content section to a site. It has been interesting watching the effects of SEOMoz's user generated content and points systems. The ups:

• users feel they are part of the brand.

• they are more likely to push the brand and link to the site
• points are created free but give some perception of value
• users create free content for the site even when you are not doing so.
• some of their content will rank in search results. today I did a search for search engine marketing and saw Google listing a link for recent blog posts listing this post
• contributors might give you good marketing ideas or help you catch important trends before competitors do

The downs:

• people who spend lots of time contributing tend not to value their time too much AND are hard to profit from (especially in savvy marketplaces that ignore ads).

• having many relationships allows you to be a connector that knows someone for just about any job, but focusing heavily on building community and maintaining the many relationships needed to do so may hold you down on the value chain. A few strong relationships will likely create more value than many weak ones, especially as we run into scale related issues.
• if your site is not authorititative, user generated content may waste your link authority and lead to keyword canibalization
• if your site is authoritative many people will look for ways to leverage your domain or authority
• as you get more authoritative more people will try to exploit it. even friends get aggressive with it, and unless you call people out it gets out of control quickly.
• as you extend your commitments, spending time to police a site, it is harder to change course. I get frustrated when I see spam on the homepage of ThreadWatch, but I guess I can't be surprised people do it, and due to database issues I am uncertain if I will be able to upgrade TW without just archiving the old information and switching to a new CMS.
• some people looking to promote their work may spam or aggressively associate your brand with the articles they wrote. For example, is this comment spam? Or is it good?

If a relationship is affiliate based it is quite easy to police undesirable activity by banning accounts, but if people are adding content to your site and marketing it aggressively in ways that may not bode well with your brand it might be harder to police it, especially as you scale your community. And typically the people that are most likely to give you crap for it are hypocritical with their beliefs.

I think on the whole a community section is a pretty good idea if you tie it into a paid content model, but even when you do that you will still run into scale issues if you provide any type of support for the paid content. I have over 600 emails in my inbox, and recently stopped advertising free consulting with an ebook purchase because I stopped scaling as a person. As your profits scale the opportunity cost of any one revenue channel become more apparent. That is one of the things which has prevented me from putting a forum or community section on this site.

People have asked my thoughts on content remixing and syndication. It is an ineffective approach to marketing.

There is enough content on the web, which is why Google is getting selective with their index. The problem with ineffective content is not that it needs mixed up and syndicated. If a site syndicates watered down vanilla remixed content they have too much content for their link authority, and most of their pages are doomed to Google's supplemental results. Lots of content and little link authority means remixing and syndicating is NOT the answer. What is the solution?

• Remarkable original content.

• Fewer words.
• Clear writing.

Rather than syndicate garbage, create things people would want to talk about and link at.

I recently spoke to a friend about some of his internal site structure errors and figured it would be worth it to share some of the better tips I gave him with readers here.

Canonical URL Issues:

Make sure search engines are seeing mysite.com and www.mysite.com as the same site. If they are not 301 redirect the less popular version to the more popular version.

Flat Site Structure:

In an ideal case your internal site structure would not be the same for every page on your site, especially if you have different sections to your site.

• Create section related navigation that promotes other offers inside that section of your site, without heavily crossing over to other sections.

• Actively guide users from within the content area of your site. These links will drive conversions and help funnel PageRank through your site.
• Highlight featured content.

Many content management systems highlight recent content without placing much emphasis on your featured content. If you have important content make sure it is easy to access. Also use your site statistics to place more link weight on your most popular or most profitable content.

Content Duplication / Limited PageRank / Google's Supplemental Results

Not too long ago I wrote a post about how to check your number of supplemental pages and another about getting a site out of the supplemental index.

There are a near endless number of ways a site can waste link authority:

• printer friendly pages

• individual post pages in forums
• archive vs active content forum threads
• endless cross referencing heavy internal tagging and user generated tags
• other cross referencing content sections that create thousands of thin content pages

If you have thin content portions of a site or duplicate pages get rid of them or use robots.txt to prevent them from getting indexed.

If you have more pages than link equity you need to build links, but another thing you can do short term is publish more content per page and structure your internal links to place more link weight on your most important pages.

Two more things worth considering here are to limit template related duplication, and temporarily publish fewer pages until you build your link authority and clean up the supplemental index issues.

Sitewide Outbound Links:

If you minimize your number of sitewide outbound links that will keep more of your link equity flowing internally. For many sites it does make sense to link out to resources sitewide or sell links. If you are selling links try to price at a higher price point and sell fewer links. That will improve your internal to external link ratio, hold your PageRank up higher, and allow you to continue to charge higher rates.

Internal to External Link Ratio:

Make sure you have many internal links on each page. If you do not have many perhaps you can duplicate your header navigation in your site footer.

Isolate Noisy Pieces of Your Site:

One last consideration is to isolate the noisy pieces of your site. Use subdomains to divide your content by content types. For example, if you have a great blog and add a forum to it you are probably best off placing the forum on a subdomain.