In 2010, Yahoo announced that its organic search results would be powered by Bing which led to many Yahoo properties being discontinued. So, as expected, on November 21st, Yahoo officially took down its free, search analysis tool, “Site Explorer”. What does this mean for Webmasters? Even though the data has been integrated into Bing Webmaster Tools, it seems evident that any type of robust (and free) online tool for checking things like backlinks is gone forever. There are, of course, a plethora of third party tools, but those tools are compiling an aggregate of a multitude of different platforms, and are not a true reflection of the “true” backlink data that a specific search engine has.

Bing Webmaster Tools has made some effective improvements over the last several months and the verified webmaster for a website will now be able to get even more comprehensive data. Bing Webmaster Tools will likely show an increased number of backlinks being reported for a website, as well as provide a central location for both Yahoo and Bing data.

However, many SEO’ers, including myself, will miss the practicality of the old Site Explorer. Site Explorer was the only free, public database from a major search engine that gave you an easy way to look at the amounts of backlinks to a specific page. While privacy was a concern, making certain information public inspired other webmasters to improve their own inbound link building techniques as well as making it easy for the more novice webmaster to take a quick glance at a competitor’s website for inbound link ideas, thus inspiring innovation in the world of SEO.

On September 15, 2011, Google announced a new way to handle “pagination” issues for articles and product pages which “spreads” content throughout several pages. A fundamental issue that many webmasters have with any series of pages that contain related and highly similar data is how to alert the search engines to their preferred indexing priorities.

With the new rel=”next” and rel=”prev” link tag elements, webmasters are now able to indicate to the search engines that an interrelated series of products or articles should be indexed and assigned link value as a series:

Implementation is relatively simple; the rel=”next” tag would be placed in the section of “Page 1″ of the series, both rel=”prev” and rel=”next” would be placed on the second page, same again for the third, and rel=”prev would be placed on the last page.

Much like the rel=”canonical” link, which lets you alert the spiders to the “preferred” version of a page, this recent innovation is more of a suggestion than a directive and Google will take the rel=”prev” and rel=”next” directives into account, in addition to other factors, when determining a page’s relevance. 

We have all probably viewed site links within Google’s organic search results before.  The site links that you have most commonly seen, until recently, have probably looked something like this:

The purpose of site links is to help searchers navigate your website more easily.  They are essentially shortcuts to help funnel searchers to the specific page they are in need of as quickly as possible. However, earlier this week when searching, I noticed something very different about how Google was showing site links. Instead of site links looking similar to the image above, they now are appearing more prominently on the search engine results page. Below is an example of how these site links are now being displayed:

These enhanced site links appear most frequently when a brand name or specific website name is searched.  As you will see, there are quite a few more links displayed (up to twelve) in the newer version of site links, versus eight in the older version. In addition, the URL and one line of text are displayed, making them stand out even more.

At this time, these site links are automated; marketers can’t specify which links they want to appear. These site links can also change from query to query leading to better results for the searcher, and hopefully for the marketer, too.  These changes are now reflected in Google Webmaster Tools where you can manage your site links. Although marketers can’t select specific site links to show, they can demote site links (removal is not guaranteed).

So how do you get site links like this to show for your organic listings?  The best tactic is to make sure that the search engines can easily crawl all of the pages on your website and that you have a proper website structure. If your site does not have an optimal structure, these site links may not appear.  In addition, optimizing your meta data for every page should help, as a portion of title tag appears within the site links.

Check to see if site links are displaying for your website.  If not, search engine optimization may be in order.