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The market for essay writing seems to be heating up, judging by the spam comments that we’re blocking at Best SEO Blog and SEO Theory. For a few weeks I have found myself marking various off-topic comments as spam on both blogs.

Many of the email accounts associated with these comments are from Gmail.com, one of the worst sources of forum and blog spam at the present time. Google, of course, claims it works hard to find these accounts and disable them but they apparently are being created by contractors and/or firms in India, Pakistan, and Malaysia (and probably a few other countries where labor is inexpensive by U.S. and European standards).

The powers behind this particular essay campaign appear to be based in Canada, although I cannot be 100% certain of that. The domain receiving the links is quality-papers.com, which appears to be using a standard Wordpress template that would have been quick to set up.

Terms the comment spammers are targeting include “classification essay writing”, “essay writing service”, and other variations on “essay writing”. These essay writing spam links don’t see the light of day on our blogs but I am sure they have slammed past many bloggers’ defenses (assuming they all have defenses).

A quick check of quality-papers.com’s link profile as reported by Yahoo! Site Explorer indicates there may be as many as 91,000 links pointing to the domain (many of them appear to be site-wide links). I have no interest in validating that link data. I’m pretty sure someone is conducting a huge, massive link spam campaign on behalf of the domain.

When I look at the various queries that quality-papers.com is being targeted for, it doesn’t rank all that well. Take “classification essay writing”, for example. It appears that quality-papers.com is ranking around the 10th position.

The top-ranked site for “classification essay writing”, essayinfo.com, appears to have fewer than 2,000 reported inbound links. Like many of the sites involved in this query space, essayinfo.com appears to be anonymously registered, so tracking down the owner would be a challenge (although you might be surprised to learn there are ways to track down some of these anonymous registrants).

Essayinfo.com is a made-for-advertising site. Quality-papers.com appears to have neither advertising nor outbound links. For a site that has been online since at least December 2008, that’s a very suspicious signal.

The articles you’ll find on quality-papers.com are the nondescript kind which are commonly found in the affiliate marketing industry. They appear to have been written by low-quality overseas contract writers. I could be wrong. They could be scraped or original content written by the owner.

Normally, I would not care about a site like this. The fact it keeps popping into our comment streams, however, is annoying. Besides, I needed to write an article today and this seemed like a good topic.

If I had to guess what its purpose is, I would suggest that quality-papers.com is trying to get in someone’s way. I would guess that the owner probably wants to position the site highly enough that one of the major competitors in the industry will make a bid for it.

In some affiliate marketing verticals Websites can change hands for as much as several million dollars (US). It depends on whether the real money-makers — the people selling the goods or services — conclude that it would be cheaper to take possession of the domain than to pay the affiliate marketer commissions.

When there is no advertising on a site that gets in a marketer’s way, the site may be looking for bidders, as any marketer who fails to capture significant market share in these highly competitive verticals stands to lose a lot of potential revenue.

Of course, quality-papers.com could be serving other purposes. For example, it could be a spam test site. The spammer might be trying to see how effective his linking resources are. If we assume for the sake of discussion that all the “essay writing” queries resemble those I have given a cursory examination, then it would seem that high numbers of links are not winning the game.

In other words, our spammer appears to be relying mostly on low-value or no-value links. The links may be easy to acquire but they don’t seem to be helping much.

And there could be other, more (or less) nefarious reasons for attempting to rank an unmonetized site in a competitive query space. For example, maybe someone just wants to showcase the “value” of their essay writing service (hosted on another domain) to prospective clients.

Showcase sites are useful but if someone is touting the search engine value of their custom essays, people who buy that content should be sure to do a little bit of research. Make sure you understand the queries in which the essays are being promoted. That means looking at who is ranking, what they seem to be trying to accomplish, and how they are ranking.

We don’t know how much of a factor backlinks are in the essay writing vertical (probably not nearly as much as many SEOs would assume). That is, people may be building (or stealing) links in huge volumes, but the majority of the links probably don’t pass value.

Still, the fact that someone would go to the trouble of acquiring almost 100,000 links to an unmonetized domain implies they don’t have much if any faith in the quality of their writing from an SEO perspective.

NOTE: The third-ranked site for “classification essay writing”, custom-essays.org, appears to be catering to the high school and college essay cheating market. Yahoo! reports fewer than 1,000 inbound links for that domain.

Keep in mind that Yahoo! only knows about the links it has found (or thinks it has found). Do not mistake the Yahoo! numbers as an indication of what Google or Bing have found or allow to pass value. Each search engine does its own crawling. Attempts to measure overlap in the major search engines in the past estimated that there is no more than 40-60% overlap in their data.

That means you cannot use any third-party tool (like Yahoo!, Linkscape, Majestic SEO, et. al.) to analyze how links affect the search results in Google (or bing). I used Yahoo! Site Explorer to get a rough idea of who is aggressively building links.

In my experience, the most aggressive link builders tend to be doing SEO the wrong way. That doesn’t mean every site that has 100,000 backlinks is doing SEO the wrong way. If all the players in a vertical have 6-digit backlink profiles, they may be attracting those links naturally or the query spaces may have become hyperoptimized (everyone is building links to compete with everyone — which is the only way to work in a hyperoptimized query).

When a site that cannot rank well has ten-to-fifty times as many links as the sites outranking it, you really have to ask which SEO book, blog, or forum the site promoter has been following.

It just seems to me that someone is going to a lot of trouble to create false value in a site that doesn’t achieve much.

Is that any way you want to optimize for search? Think about it.

What is the difference between a Link Farm and a Blog Farm? Well, if you browse the SEO Theory SEO Glossary you find entries for both “link farms” and “blog farms”.

Blog Farm – Noun phrase. A group of blogs operated by a single person or group that are populated by software, usually RSS-feed scraping scripts. Used for link building, blog farms are created by special software that installs popular blogging software on multiple domains and hosting accounts. Sometimes confused with links farms (q.v.).

Link Farm – Noun phrase. Any group of Web sites where every member site in the group links to every other member site in the group.

Keeping in mind that there is no central authority for deciding which phrases actually mean what, we should accept that people are going to disagree on their definitions from time to time. In particular, academics who publish research on detecting and fighting Web spam often (in my experience, almost always) use terms that were developed by the Web spam community inappropriately. The academic community’s terminology is often adopted by search engineers at the major Websearch services.

Except for the fact that their blog posts may cause the rest of to feel puzzled, the search services are generally perceived as both authoritative and knowledgeable in these matters. For example, Bing search engineers sometimes share their views on Web spam. These posts are quite enlightening but as you can see from the comments I could not refrain from offering what I hope was a gently worded clarification in terminology.

My purpose is to ensure that people see both sides of the discussion, not to sway search engineers to use my terminology. They are dealing with abstractions most people never see. But the confusion over terminology is easily found around the Web. For example, a recent discussion at HighRankings concerned link wheels. Again, I offered a counter-example of how the phrase can be defined (and, in my opinion, how it is properly defined).

I don’t coin most of these expressions. I learn them from other people, watching how they use the terms. Take “link farms”, for example. The earliest link farm I know about would be Brett Tabke’s Buddy Links program, which he put together after I shared my findings on a forum about how I was able to improve my Inktomi stability by using crawl pages on different domains. Link farms became all the rage for several years and they morphed into different types of content.

Some people today ask what is the difference between a link farm and a directory, for example. Some link farms were designed to look and function just like Web directories. There was one popular program that would crawl the Web looking for Websites with reciprocal link pages, add those sites to a custom “directory”, and then send an email to the sites asking for a link back. Clever, right? It eventually led many sites down the golden path to search invisibility through bans and penalties.

Some — but not all — reciprocal link management programs were also link farms. Reciprocal link management services followed several different paths but the earliest one I know of (no longer in existence) grew out of the link farm concept. As the years passed reciprocal linking services became more selective and, according to some of the service providers, less interested in building links for SEO and more interested in building links for traffic and branding.

Search engineers in academia and industry hold an annual conference called AIR Web (AIR = Adversarial Information Retrieval). I am sure they feel they derive a great deal of value from the conferences so I don’t mean to belittle that perceived value.

I have no real idea of what goes on inside a search engineering organization. But I have noticed from the published papers that the research usually deals with spam techniques that are 2-3 years old, if not older. The apparent lag time between the widespread adoption of the latest Web spam techniques and the identification of those techniques by researchers is somewhat concerning to me, but then just because state-of-the-art spammers have moved on from 2007’s tactics doesn’t mean they are irrelevant to today’s Web.

What I find more troubling is that the AIRWeb papers (and other published research) often use definitions of Web spam tactics that are radically different from what the actual spammers use. That doesn’t mean these folks don’t know what they are talking about but it does imply they don’t know what the spammers are talking about — and vice versa. In other words, spam by any other name would still smell as foul (may the Shakespeareans in the audience forgive me for that). Web spam, however, seems to be staying ahead of search technology in part due to the differences in dialect between spammers and search engineers.

This plurality of technical definitions for the same concepts we all run into is very confusing, so it’s no wonder people often “discover” new ideas that are really old ideas. Still, one must also be careful not to judge too quickly.

For example, suppose what the Bing engineers identified as “link farms” in the post I commented on really are NOT blog farms (as I speculate)? The article did not provide enough information for me to be sure of what they were talking about — sure, that is, in terms with which I am familiar and comfortable. The distinctions between artificial Website paradigms blur very, very easily.

For example, you could easily set up a link farm using blog farm software, wherein all the blogs link to each other. You have both a link farm and a blog farm, but neither is the other — conceptually the blog farm should still be distinct (in your abstraction of definitive terminology) from the link farm, even though the instance of both is the same group of Websites.

Only someone as esoteric as I would care about that.

You might ask if the so-called “SEO friendly” Web directories that I have ranted against for years are link farms. Some of them are like link farms in that they required links back from listed sites, but they were still not link farms because they didn’t meet the technical definition of a link farm. That is, the listed sites don’t all link to each other. They just link to the faux Web directories.

People sometimes call these sites Spam Directories but I haven’t really see enough general usage for any one expression to feel justified in including such a term in the SEO Theory glossary. Dictionary editors sometimes wait several years before adding new words or expressions, to see if they really fit into general usage. I suspect we’ll never be able to document a widely used expression for “SEO friendly” spam directories (other than SEO friendly spam directory, but that is a pejorative term used by critics of the sites, not users of the sites).

The diff between link farm and blog farm expression arises from someone’s curiosity about link farms and blog farms. It is, to me, an indication of the widespread interest in Web spam. I am sure there are new faces appearing in the Web spam community all the time. I usually call those folks script kiddies because they often start out using the older tactics (and software) that hard core, experienced black hat spammers have moved on from or downgraded in their strategic arsenals of spam techniques.

This is a hard topic to write for because of all the different uses for common terms, as well as because of the plurality in terminology for common techniques and Web structures. I don’t expect academia and search engineers to suddenly change their vocabularies just to satisfy my ego but if you’re going to study Web spam then you should at the very least be aware that there are different dialects in the discussion.

A client calls you up and says “I want to optimize for New Brand Name” and you say, “You’re doing a bad job of optimizing for Abused Brand Name“. How do you think that conversation should go forward?

If the SEO specialist is not paying attention to the client’s stated marketing objectives, then how useful is the SEO advice that the SEO technician has to offer?

Before you reach for your tattered old copy of “Classic Client Blunders In Search Marketing”, take a long hard look at what Bill Gates is trying to do. On the little SEO-stomping floater that pops up when you hit the site, Bill says:

I thought it would be interesting to share these conversations more widely with a website, in the hope of getting more people thinking and learning about the issues I think are interesting and important. So, welcome to the Gates Notes.

He doesn’t say anything about becoming a blogger or joining the blog community.

You know, there IS still a World Wide Web beyond the blogosphere. Bill Gates’ site doesn’t look like a traditional blog in any sense to me. I get the distinct impression he doesn’t want to be just another blogger.

So the fact that a lot of imposturous blogs are crowding a name space (”Bill Gates blog”) that Bill has eschewed doesn’t lead me to conclude he is doing anything wrong.

I have, through the years, criticized Bill Gates and Microsoft in many ways, but I have always lauded Mr. Gates’ marketing savvy.

His approach to launching his Website flies in the face of SEO expectations — and that is EXACTLY the kind of thinking the SEO community needs to learn from.

Just because every idiot with a Bill Gates Complex wants to rank for “Bill Gates blog” doesn’t in any way mean that Bill Gates should want to. In fact, that is the most compelling reason for Bill Gates to avoid the “Bill Gates blog” name space completely.

Sure, Bill could hire a search reputation management company to clean up the name space for him but he doesn’t need to. He has caché — an intrinsic value that ensures millions of people will follow his footsteps across the Webosphere wherever he goes.

Bill Gates can easily do what most people only dream of: build a query space. People will search for “The Gates Notes” because that is the name by which Bill Gates Website is being promoted.

Whether people find it using “Bill Gates blog” doesn’t matter any more than whether they find it by using “Bill Gates sucks”, “Bill Gates is evil”, or “Bill Gates should fire Steve Ballmer”.

The brand name the client chose was “The Gates Notes” and it was a stroke of basic marketing savvy — no one had made an effort to pollute the name space. Bill Gates scored a coup over all the illegitimate bloggers and armchair SEO advisors by deftly moving around the problem.

In fact, I am sure many people will link to http://www.thegatesnotes.com/ with the erroneous anchor text “Bill Gates blog” and variations on it because everyone thinks that all you have to do on the Web is create a blog.

If The Gates Notes is a blog, it must be a proposal for what 3rdGen Blogs should look like, because it doesn’t look like a blog, it doesn’t act like a blog, and it doesn’t have to be a blog if it doesn’t want to be.

Danny Sullivan’s very long-winded SEO analysis of the Gates site has undoubtedly earned far more links and commentary from news organizations and bloggers than this little ‘ole response will — so the public has been led down the wrong path once again by the good intentions of someone who forgot to apply the standards of the Web to the subject of his post.

Oh, wait. The Web has no standards.

In fact, neither does SEO — and if SEO did have standards we have no way of knowing whether those standards would have discouraged the shot across the bow that Danny lobbed at Bill Gates.

It’s unfortunate that someone so visible in the SEO community should go to such extreme lengths to offer what amounts to a load of hogwash — or, what we would call in more polite terms — very poorly framed SEO advice.

You don’t just run down the client and say, “Hey, Bub! More people search on ‘Bill Gates blog’ than know to search on ‘The Gates Notes’ so you need to change your title tags.”

That would be equivalent to telling Dial Soap that they need to change the title tags for their site to include the words “hand soap”, “bar soap”, and similar generic expressions.

How much money do you think you would make as an SEO offering that kind of advice?

Although “bill gates blog” is nowhere near as ubiquitous as “hand soap”, it’s still not the brand that Bill Gates chose to build. Should Dial Corporate start marketing its site as “tips on how to use soap”? What about “the best soap blog around”?

Before you go shooting off your mouth, criticizing people for not using obviously spammed out keywords in their title tags, stop and consider that maybe — just maybe — some people are a little more comfortable with the process of building a brand than the average small business and affiliate site owners.

The SEO industry really doesn’t get the full value of what it means to be a brand.

Danny Sullivan is certainly a very successful thought leader in our field — he could teach most people more than just a thing or two about search engine optimization.

But I really have to say, Danny, what were you thinking when you wrote that post — except that maybe it would be a great piece of link bait?

The SEO rarely if ever gets to pick the brand keyword — we just have to knuckle down and do our job to ensure that the right site(s) appear for the new brand.

THAT is what search engine optimization is really all about. It has nothing to do with calling out people for the sake of obtaining a few golden links.

Disclaimer: My use of “the client” is only figurative and not intended to mean that Danny Sullivan has a business relationship with Bill Gates.

One of the most controversial practices in SEO wisdom is to use a blog service like Blogger for your blog. Most people in the industry advise against using third-party services to host blogs, especially for businesses. In a perfect world, that advice could be the best or the worst advice. In the real world, it’s just one more piece of flotsam on a sea of conflicting opinion. Here are some reasons for why you should use Blogger for SEO. Below those reasons you’ll find my tips.

Why should SEOs use blogger?

• So that you don’t look stupid when people ask for help specifically with blogger
• So that you can give informed comparisons when people ask for them
• So that you can see how Google favors some blog systems over others
• So that you can explain the benefits of using Blogger to people

The SEO industry looks unprofessional when people ask for help with their Blogger blogs and SEOs step up to the plate with such gleaming gems of wisdom as “Get a real blog!” Millions of people use Blogger for their personal blogs. Their reasons for doing so are legion, although most of them probably don’t know enough about the Web to feel comfortable using anything more sophisticated than Blogger. Treating people badly when they ask for help is sure to put you on most people’s DO NO BUSINESS WITH lists. Either give specific, helpful, detailed advice tailored to the level of knowledge of the person asking the question or don’t reply.

Any competent SEO technician should be able to provide at least basic help for Blogger users. Blogger is not rocket science. You don’t have to commit everything to memory. Just set up a Blogger blog, use it occasionally, and stay on top of how it works. Log in to refresh your memory before replying to someone’s plea for help.

You should be unbiased in your comparisons because on those occasions when people do ask for opinions about which service to use, they usually get rather useless advice like “I use Blog X! It’s great!” or “Don’t use Blog Y! It sucks!” Again, when SEOs don’t tailor their advice to the level of knowledge of the person asking the question, the SEOs don’t fool anyone. Showing how incompetent you can be as source of professional help isn’t going to win you many customers.

If you cannot already provide a concise, informative comparison of 2-3 blog services then you should make that a project you complete within the next month. Don’t just look at the terms of service and features pages — set up some blogs and use them. Understand what is good for an inexperience user and what is helpful for an advanced user.

You cannot possibly know in advance which blog service will be best for another person. You may be able to help them understand the complex documentation that all blogs inevitably accrue. Don’t limit your knowledge to just the basic services. Build a library of tips and tools for each service.

Google does inherently favor some blog services for reasons I cannot explain. How do I know this? I know this because I maintain multiple blogs on multiple blog services. Blogger blogs have advantages over other blog services’ blogs. But those advantages are offset by disadvantages, too. Nonetheless, if you don’t know how having a Blogger blog works better with Google in some ways than using other blogs, your SEO knowledge is weak in this area.

Sometimes it really is best to suggest people use blogger because, frankly, Blogger is sometimes the best solution. You need to know when that is true and why.

Why should anyone use Blogger?

This is the easiest question to answer. Blogger is a fast, easy-to-set-up service that is tied in with Google AdSense and other services Google offers. Google has done a decent job of integrating some of its technologies across the platform. So for people who want to use fairly sophisticated blog tools without having to figure out how to make everything work together, Blogger offers a fairly stream-lined plug-n-play interface. (Wordpress, for example, won’t allow you to embed Javascript on its hosted blogs.)

Most bloggers do not host their own Web sites. Why? I don’t know and frankly you don’t need to care. When someone asks for advice on how to set up a blog, the first words out of your mouth should be, “How comfortable are you with Web hosting technology?” Many SEOs fumble the ball and say, “Use Wordpress!”

Now, Wordpress.com is a great site (I use it) for third-party blog hosting but before you recommend Wordpress.com, ask if the user wants to integrate Google tools and technologies. If they answer “Yes” and if they are not comfortable with Web hosting technology, you should not need to wait for that truck to knock you into next week to figure out that this is a prime candidate for Blogger.

Some spammers love Blogger, btw. They set up blog farms with it. Of course, Blogger has struck back by testing blogs to see if they are human-controlled. There is a neat little trick Blogger has been using for several years that occasionally frustrates legitimate users. I’ve found references to it going back at least as far as 2006 (that may be the year when Google implemented it). Basically, you set up a blog, start posting to it, and after a few days, maybe a couple of weeks you log in and find a message that blatantly and falsely accuses you of being a spammer. It demands that you click on a button within 30 days or your blog will be deleted.

I used Blogger for several years before that happened to me. When I researched the test I found that every person who complained about it was still blogging several years later. They all clicked on the button. So I clicked on the button and the problem went away.

Does this filter out all the spammers? Probably not. Supposedly a human reviewer looks at the blog after you click on the button but I don’t know. In any event, new bloggers should be reassured that Blogger is trying to keep the service useful because it does send traffic to random blogs. That is one of the most useful features of Blogger — its built-in Webring service lets you click from blog to blog without having to search for stuff. People occasionally find blogs they bookmark for future reference.

How To Use Blogger For SEO

Make sure the blog pings – This is the Number One (1) Reason why anyone should use Blogger. After a few posts your blog will usually start showing up in Google Blogsearch. There are many well-established, aged blogs that don’t appear in Google Blogsearch. Why? I have no idea. But I see Blogger blog after Blogger blog move quickly into Blogsearch. Blogsearch is a good bellwether tool for SEO to see how well a blog is performing. If I cannot get a blog into Google’s picky Blogsearch, I feel like the blog lacks something.

Of course, many Blogger blogs fail to appear in Google Blogsearch. There are, I am sure, many reasons for that. Nonetheless, using multiple blogs on multiple platforms in exactly the same way, I have consistently watched the Blogger blogs move into Google Blogsearch faster than all the others. The only way I have found to get a blog in as quickly or faster is to link to it from many other blogs that are already indexed regularly in Google Blogsearch.

If a blog appears in Blogsearch it should get into Google Websearch, but that isn’t always the case. So another good bellwether test for a blog’s health is to see if it appears in BOTH Websearch and Blogsearch. If it does, you’re probably on the right track.

Pinging, of course, can get your Blogger blog into other services as well, so that needs to be said.

Use recap posts – One of the disadvantages of Blogger is that Google automatically sets the robots.txt file to block indexing of all /search results. That is the subdirectory where your labels go. So using labels on Blogger is almost pointless, although some people have developed clever ways to create categories on Blogger. Those categories won’t be crawled and indexed but they will help your users.

Still, many people are not comfortable digging into HTML so it is a good idea to write a monthly recap post that links back to your older articles. Danny Sullivan has provided the best examples of how to do this with his regular recaps on SearchEngineWatch and SearchEngineLand (I’m not sure SEW has kept up the practice with their new design). Barry Schwartz also provides frequent recaps on Search Engine Roundtable. Recapping your posts helps get them recrawled and keep them in the index.

Linking back to older posts is also helpful. It’s not well known but many Wordpress.com cross-links within their network are nofollowed. You don’t have to worry about that (yet) with Blogger.

Use Blogger to link to your primary site – I’m not talking about spamming the index with fifty reposts of your front page. Let’s say you have 50 pages of content on your site. You should be able, over time, to write 50 articles on your Blogger blog that link to relevant pages on your site. The Wordpress.com terms of services discourage this practice. Blogger’s do not. But you should also link out to other content as well, thus making your blog a useful resource.

Being able to get a Blogger blog indexed quickly and thoroughly offers you a linking resource that is generally safe to use. Just understand that Blogger is being watched closely for abuse. It’s not offering open invitations to create crawl pages.

Use Blogger to test expressions – Some queries are more competitive than others. Relying on your link research to determine which queries are competitive is a bad idea. If you can use an active, eclectic Blogger site to get an article into the top 20 or 30 search results for a query without investing in a lot of links, the odds are pretty good that you don’t have to go into hyperoptimization overkill to participate in that query. And it gives you a place for a relevant link.

Conclusion, Recap, and Winding Up (or Down)

Even search engine optimization gurus can learn something from using Blogger. It is by no means the best blogging platform around but it is still useful, popular, and well worth understanding. SEO arrogance has relegated Blogger mostly to the unwashed masses and Web spammers. The so-called black hat spammers may not be getting as much benefit from Blogger now as they used to, but remember that most of what the black hats do is exactly the same thing as what the white hats do — the black hats just take the good stuff to excess.

You don’t need to create blog farms populated by autogenerated mush and rehashed RSS feeds to get some good SEO benefit out of Blogger. Nor do you need to act like a snob and try to proselytize for your favorite platform when people ask for help or advice about Blogger. Either step up to the plate and show people you’re a professional who knows how to deal with the platform or shut up, step aside, and let a REAL SEO do some work.

I’m writing this article on Monday and scheduling it for a Thursday post. I HOPE the link stays live at least long enough for you to try it.

Check out Blind Search, which compares results for BING, Google, and Yahoo!. The tool was developed by a Microsoft employee but I found that it is a good test for which search results I like.

You type in a query and then pick the results you prefer. If you use queries you monitor regularly you’ll be able to figure out which search engines are which, but if you just randomly type in queries you’ll be better able to see where you really get the most relevant results.

For my tests I found that BING did indeed outperform Google and Yahoo!. What surprised me was that Yahoo! outperformed Google as well.

Why is that? One reason is that I am sick and tired of all the commercialized ad-laden crap Google pushes up in its search results. I recognize those sites now and try to avoid them like the plague.

Sometimes I want to see those sites when I know they organize information in a way that works well for me. Most of the time I am usually looking for something else and the blind search test tells me that Google is probably not the search engine I should be using.

On the other hand, you can use the tool to evaluate your optimization strategy. If you get very little traffic from Yahoo! and BING and your site doesn’t appear in the top results for queries where you’re in the top ten for Google, don’t blame Yahoo! and BING for your lack of optimization.

If the tool is no longer available by the time this article goes live, consider developing your own tool. Compare all the major search engines side-by-side and see which ones give you the best exposure. If you find a correlation between minimal exposure and minimal traffic, you know where you need to turn your optimization strategy to next.