There are a few recent developments, which can turn out to be new ways of getting fresh exposures for your listings
YouTube videos are now included in organic Google search results
Google now includes links to matching YouTube videos not only in their video search but also on their main search result pages. They even include playback capability inline without the need of clicking through to YouTube itself.
See for example a search for "Inman News" "Words That Sell"
It will bring up Brad Inman's Fox News interview as the number one result. I am not sure how they rank YouTube videos compared to other content (web pages and blogs) but for very specific queries they show up inline and with good position. I have no information on what mechanism Google is using to index YouTube videos and how they avoid search engine spamming, but I would assume, that video title, general description and tags are the core content which are searched. They also have a lot of additional information for proper ranking such as content of the pages which embed a particular video; comments, links and related videos.
Another feature on YouTube is the linkbacks to the sites which embedded the particular video . See this YouTube page: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDiD-xb93Vo (same example) after the Views/Comments row, there is a small link after the title Link showing sites which carry the video. Google search engine does not follow these links (nofollow tag in the HTML) so that those pages do not get improper page ranking and to avoid search engine spamming, but nevertheless, this could be a great way to point automatically to your single property website.
Yahoo also includes YouTube and Flickr images
Yahoo also released a major upgrade recently. They now also include YouTube plus Flickr photos in their organic search result. See the same example on Yahoo search
While this is only the beginning of these new developments I believe, and the ranking mechanism of such user generated content is unknown, these features definitely point to the direction of new search engine behaviors.
MyBlogLog can include your RSS feed, any RSS feed
Many of you are already using MyBlogLog to leave your "footprint" on other blogs and to network with your blog's visitors. A less known feature is that MyBlogLog includes the RSS feed in your community pages, e.g. the blog's RSS you set it up for. When you set up a new community (you can have many, one for your website, one for your blog, one for your ActiveRain blog, one for your RealBird listings etc.), MyBlogLog tries to auto-detect your RSS feed by looking for autodiscovery RSS in your HTML code. You can also add a secondary RSS feeds to your community, such as your listings RSS feed. MyBlogLog will stream your blog and recent listings into your community pages. Add a secondary RSS feed under your MyBlogLog community settings (and the primary one in case MyBlogLog missed detecting it)
See for example our RealBird MyBlogLog page: http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/community/realbird/ We manually added the RSS feed of the aggregated list of recent listings by RealBird members. These links are indexable and promoted to users on MyBlogLog community pages. In the light of the previous Yahoo upgrade and since MyBlogLog is owned by Yahoo as well, it should be just a question of time, before Yahoo starts utilizing the vast amount of information hidden in their MyBlogLog network.
Have a great weekend!
-- Zoltan Szendro
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