Is it true that google seems to put more weight on the number of good and relevant back links that you have over MSN and Yahoo? Anyone done any reseach on this?

Seems to me that MSN cares more about on-page optimization.

And Yahoo, I haven't a clue what they like. Anyone think they know?

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Tampa Bay Homes ~ Trinity Real Estate ~ Westchase MLS

Google's algorithm in terms of % cares the most about the offpage factors (Links and such) but it also puts them under the most scrutiny so harder to pull off covincing them of good links, and then of course there is a waiting period for those links to count.

IMO - Both MSN and yahoo also care quite a lot about links, however MSN happens so fast because as far as I can tell they count your links as soon as they know about them.

Specific research into this is hard to come by as it takes many other factors to rank as well, but there's my thoughts based on years of experience.

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Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles [Of Google] will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit. Google.com

thanks!

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Tampa Bay Homes ~ Trinity Real Estate ~ Westchase MLS

Well we have been known to start to look at the way other search engines rank and score websites, indeed our results change depending on what engine is being tested. Some show a huge difference in link numbers.
Not forgetting that we can check and detect a link to our search engine within a few minutes of it going live on the web and we have software that is monitoring inward links all the time.
From my search engine we have feeds coming in from other search engines that give a constant flow of the search trends as they are going on and inreturn we also allow other search engines to pass search queries directly into our servers, at the moment we feed four other Meta search engines in this way..

Your website shows a good level of scores we can see from our engine the following data about your website:
Google PageRank for www.realestatewebmasters.com is: 5 / 10
Pages indexed shows
Google 8,040
MSN 0
Yahoo 0
Altavista 54,100
Ask Jeeves 0
Total Listings 62140

Which is a really good score...

^ What the hell is that crap?

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---cK

CK Chung is an independent SEO consultant who provides premium Holistic SEO services, including services specific to Real Estate SEO. You can find his alter-ego, Kid Disco, spouting off on his SEO blog at SEOdisco.

Well that would depend on what that crap looked like, not having seen the crap in Question...

I did quick test to see how that website was linked up via search engines to get some idea of how good it was.
I suppose that you may have not noticed that I own, run and have written a search two search engines so I thought I would help people with some advice about how to get websites found using search engines.

[quote=linknz]Well that would depend on what that crap looked like, not having seen the crap in Question...
QUOTE]
Hi well now I have seen what the crap looked like, your website could do with a little help because I will let you see the scores for your site.

Google PageRank for www.seodisco.com/ is: 2 / 10

Google 0
MSN 0
Yahoo 0
Altavista 120
Ask Jeeves 0
Total Listings 120
So your website could do with a little help in getting found more:

The alexa computer reports that your website has no other sites that link to it: No Data
Online Since: 23-Jan-2006

Well by scouring around the web I have now found some more crap, it is the ramblings of some one who does'nt seem to have any idea how the web works and if I may I would like to share a quote from your website:

Anyway, that’s not really the point because I doubt that a website visitor would ever spend much time on a links page. Wait a second… actually, that IS the point. These links pages are NOT created for your website visitors… they are built to trick the search engines!
And that my friend is very wrong indeed.
The sheer level of the technology we are using within search engines these days would worry you and I would doubt if you could ever trick a search engine!

Thanks for the info, buddy... If I cared about how my blog ranked, I might have gotten offended.

That aside, the point is that the information you present is completely inaccurate. Instead of vouching for myself, I will open it up to others (if they are so inclined) to present the correct data they can easily query themselves...

As for "tricking a search engine," I will guess that you have never heard of black-hat SEO. Enough said...

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---cK

CK Chung is an independent SEO consultant who provides premium Holistic SEO services, including services specific to Real Estate SEO. You can find his alter-ego, Kid Disco, spouting off on his SEO blog at SEOdisco.