Wed Jan 23 13:03:11 PST 2019

206
Ask and Spam
I do not know a lot about Ask's spam policies, as they rarely come up in discussion
due to their small market share.
The Problems with Teoma?s Technology
Since Teoma is so focused on local communities, it is easy for people to spoof false
topical authority onto a site by creating many sites within a specific theme that
commonly link to the spoof site and other randomized authoritative sites on that
topic.
Since Teoma does not provide a ton of traffic, there is less of a strain on their
algorithm by people manipulating search results than there is on Google, Yahoo!,
or MSN.
Comparing Search Results
Since different search engines weigh different parts of their algorithms differently,
they can all have similar relevancy while having significantly different search results.
Some people are quick to ask how their sites are being penalized in one search
engine because they rank well in others. While many sites do get penalized for
aggressive spamming techniques, most sites that do not rank well usually just fail to
satisfy the specific ranking algorithm for that specific engine in question.
? Google is primarily focused on site age and link based authority. They
are much better than their competitors at determining which links are
legitimate editorial citations.
? Yahoo! focuses a bit more on on-the-page content while still relying a
decent amount on link popularity.
? MSN is like Yahoo!, but even easier to manipulate with low-quality
links, aggressive anchor text, and keyword prominence.
? Teoma is focused on local communities.
It is far easier to spend a good bit of time learning how to get links versus
constantly tweaking pages over and over again. I do not worry much about things
like keyword density. I know that Yahoo! usually likes content to be a bit more
keyword rich and Google (which is spending millions of dollars to scan books)
usually prefers more natural reading content.
While the on-page criteria can vary from engine to engine, the ability of off-page
factors to raise your rankings is limitless. Different search engines will evaluate
different links in different ways. In general, they all like links pointing to your
website, especially links from authoritative sites related to your field.
Thumbshots has a cool ranking tool that shows you how sites rank in different
search engines, so you can compare how well different algorithms overlap one