Hi, first of all. Found this site a while ago (been lurking), and I agree with much of what is said with regards to SEO. It's nice to see some honest SEO'ers are still out there.

I thought I'd mention something some of you may have noticed lately. Yahoo & MSN value backlinks much less than Google.

Case in point: I have a blog/entertainment site.. well, I did for a few years (now it just forwards to my games site).. anyways, after many months of neglecting it I decided why not use it as a testing ground for some search engine shannanigans.

So I watched the news, and when a big buzz story would come up I'd write something about it, SEO the important stuff on the page for the buzz words, and let the engines go to work. A few I can still remember were:

President bushes comment about "Need some wood?" & "The internets" during the debates

The Jon Stewart Crossfire appearance

Ashlee Simpson lip syncing on SNL

The Scott Peterson guilty verdict

The results are very obvious and FAST, because previous to the event there's no real competition for the words, so you can see what's happened within a day or two.

I've noticed is that Yahoo and MSN will rank me top 10 most of the time for the first 4-5 days when competition is just getting going. Incidentally those first days are when most people are searching for it, so it comes with a wave of traffic. Google has also sometimes ranked me top ten for the first day, but never for long because as soon as some of the other sites pick up a buzz word backlink or two my Google rankings immediately lose out to those other sites.

Besides just being "good to know" type information, I've found buzz words a neat way to boost traffic (especially for entertainment style sites) & broker link exchanges that otherwise would be out of my league.

Just thought I'd share that, and say hi. Been lurking a while.