There’s been some controversy in SEO land this week. Matt Cutts, Google’s mouthpiece for linking policies, stated publicly that websites heavily involved with paid links are considered high risk. Many of the SEO pros in the blogosphere took offense to this and feel that Google is profiling search engine optimized websites unfairly.

The issue of contention revolves around paid links – buying or selling links for money. Google often discredits these links because it does not see them as valuable or quality based. Anyone that has the money can buy links to their site, in the hopes that it will boost their rankings in Google searches. Google doesn’t want this, however, because this type of linking is not based on quality and occasionally pushes the envelope of black hat.

The paid linking penalty would probably be somewhat less offensive to SEO professionals if Google itself didn’t use paid linking strategies. Google does indeed use money and giveaways, such as free Android phones to bloggers, in an attempt to gather links and positive publicity.

They both have a point. Most of the paid link sites out there are shady in some way – their sites do not boast the highest content quality available. On the other side of the coin, Google is being hypocritical by punishing quality websites for using free product giveaways and surveys to get links when they do the same thing.

Google could probably do well to revisit how exactly it determines paid links. If a site is doing a free product giveaway and collecting reviews in the form of links or comments, that isn’t black hat SEO, that’s just traditional marketing. Relaxing the barriers slightly could help.

My solution to the problem is to stay classy. Unlike some of my more excitable blogging counterparts, I do not believe that Google is saying that any and all SEO efforts will be penalized. SEO in itself is not a dishonest activity. SEO is a way of improving your website to be more relevant and consumer friendly. As long as SEO companies stay focused on the client and stay away from questionable activities such as buying links from link farms, I don’t see why there should be a problem. Links collected to or from your website should be from credible sources, regardless of what Google is saying or doing.

-Rachel

There is currently a fierce competition underway between Google, Facebook and Myspace for the best full-service social networking hub. Google, as always, is striving to dominate user services from email, chatting, blogging and now social networking. Facebook and Myspace have also been competing to become the point of origin for all user activities.

What this means is that Google, Myspace and Facebook all want to be the point of origin from which you visit and view other sites. Facebook has recently upped the competition by announcing a new and improved Facebook Connect application. Facebook tried to release Facebook Connect about a year ago, but there were problems with maintaining security and user privacy.

Facebook Connect will partner with sites including, but not limited to, Twitter, Hulu and Digg. Once users log on to Facebook, they will be able to coordinate many of their favorite sites in one location. This will keep people logged onto Facebook for hours at a time and allows Facebook to collect valuable information about user browsing habits. This information will allow for more targeted ads, marketing and future services that will be better received by the user.

Google and Myspace are still in the running, however, with Google’s newly released Friend Connect program. It functions much in the same way as Facebook Connect (notice a similarity?), and although Facebook was first to come out with the idea, Google’s gargantuan web presence may give it an upper hand in the competition.

My money is on Facebook. Facebook has experienced steadily increasing user numbers for years and is better known as a social networking platform. Also, with Facebook’s third-party applications that users can now add to their profiles, they have already become a much more convenient way to stay current on sites such as Digg, Twitter or blog feeds like PostSecret. Third-party applications were an instant success and now almost every respectable website has a Facebook application that allows Facebook users to receive updates in their newsfeed. Facebook Connect is just one more step in the right direction.

–Rachel

Everyone knows that texting while driving is dangerous. New from Google Labs is a way to essentially type without taking your eyes off the road. Expected to roll out later today, this app, originally for the iPhone could eventually expand to other phones or mobile devices.This is not Google’s first crack at voice recognition software and appears to be a more refined version of Google 411 (GOOG-411). However, instead of providing only local results for specific businesses in your area, you can use the voice recognition software to search for everything from sports scores to the gallons of water that flow over Niagara Falls every day.

The software will translate your voice into a data file which is then sent to the Google servers. Depending on the strength of your signal, your search result can be returned in a matter of seconds. For anyone who has ever sent a text message or performed a search on your mobile phone, you can understand the laborious process of typing on the small keys, pushing the wrong button, backspacing, etc. Although not perfect, Google’s new voice search will significantly reduce the time needed to perform a search while providing a safer medium for obtaining results while behind the wheel.

I have experimented with other voice recognition apps such as Jott which often take minutes to translate a block of text. Google’s claim that this can be done in seconds is something that I am intrigued by, and if they can actually pull it off, they would set themselves apart as the leader in the voice recognition industry. This service is expected to be free which can make you question what benefit it has to Google. I will tell you what it means. Google will now have a near monopoly on mobile search once this application expands to other phones and devices giving them a significant advantage at the onset of data collection for a new demographic of searchers.

This could be almost uncharted territory for Google, who started as a competitor to other search engines when it first began. Google now has first crack at this new market, and if they display any of the dominance with mobile search that they have with regular search, it will be very difficult to compete. As for the impact it might have on search engine optimization, users will be more likely to use longer tailed, more descriptive phrases now that they don’t have to type the whole thing out on their keyboards. I would look for a slight shift towards increased use of longer tail searches in mobile search, a market until now dominated by 1 or 2 keyword phrases.

Once I download the app, I will let you know how it works out!

When I heard that Google was coming out with their very own browser, I figured that as a search engine optimization specialist, I should take a look.  I don’t want to label myself an internet browser expert, but over the years I have had my ups and downs with everything from the standard IE to Firefox to even lesser used browsers like Opera and Safari. 

My Past Experiences With Browsers 

I am not here to advocate the use of one browser over another; I think that each browser has its own unique capabilities and unfortunately, limitations.  Firefox is pretty much an SEO’s dream considering all of the capabilities for add-ons and the way that the source code is displayed.  Internet Explorer has the advantage of the highest adoption in the US market and as a result, most web pages are guaranteed to display correctly in this browser, which is not the case for some of the others.  Safari had been, to date, the fastest browser I had used and the quick ability to inspect certain elements on a web page such as how long each picture took to load versus the text on the page was a big help when improving the design and conversion of a web page. 

What Does Chrome Bring to the Table? 

So where does Google’s “Chrome” fit into all of this?  Well to be blunt, it is an extremely basic web browser.  It doesn’t have the bells and whistles and add-ons that Firefox does - a major drawback to me as an SEO.  I really liked however, that all of the pictures and URL’s found in the source code were clickable.  Instead of guessing where a certain URL would take you or what a certain picture was of, all you had to do was click on the link and boom, you were there. 

The Speed Test 

The browser speed seemed to be on par with that of Safari, which as I mentioned before, was one of the fastest I had used to date.  It also appears that the security features in Chrome are among the best in the industry.  As you would expect, the default search engine with the browser is Google, but options for Yahoo! and MSN/Live search, among others, are available.  The sleekness and minimalistic style of the browser does not allow for a lot of menu options which basically keeps the focus on the web pages themselves. 

Google’s Reason for Creating a Browser 

The way I see it, right now Google is privy to all of the information that runs through their search engines, analytics and any other tracking items they have in place.  They cannot keep track of how people use the internet outside of any Google affiliated website.  With this new browser, they will be able to keep tabs on internet users’ tendencies.  This can be a good thing in some regards considering that they can vastly improve the relevancy of many of their search features.  However, it could just be one more step towards a Google monopoly. 

Final Thoughts 

Nevertheless, I was impressed with the new Chrome browser and its capabilities, although it’s still just in its beta version.  I don’t know if it will ever be able to replace the versatility and functionality of Firefox in my mind, but Chrome has its useful aspects.  At this point, it doesn’t have all of the useful aspects that I need to do my job efficiently and right now Chrome is not worth the hassle of switching browsers.

In reviewing some keywords today in Google, we stumbled upon a highly questionable website showing up in the #1 position for “business insurance“.  We check this keyword on a pretty regular basis and have slowly seen the following site creeping up over the past 2 months, but a #1 ranking is ridiculous - especially after we detail this website’s past.

You can view the results of the query for “business insurance” here or you can just check it yourself (And no, I won’t link to the site).

At the time of this writing, thecagetattoostudio.com was ranking #1 in Google for the keyword “business insurance”.  The domain has nothing to do with business or insurance as you can obviously see.

The results immediately puzzled us, especially considering that there are close to 10 million results for the keyword and it is in a highly competitive industry.  Of course, we had a few ideas in regards to how they were able to accomplish this and several of them were verified.

So how did they get this high profile ranking… let us take a look at some of the things we know:

• The domain had expired earlier this year and was purchased by an unknown owner.
  • The domain was actually used for a tattoo shop website until it expired.  The original site can still be viewed at archive.org.
• The domain has over 3,000 links reported from Yahoo Site Explorer.
  • An aggressive & questionable linking campaign was initiated almost immediately after purchase, including a lot of paid links.
  • Most of the incoming links appear to be from Russian (.ru extension domains) and appear to be of the paid variety.  The sites are entirely in Russian aside from the select few “paid links” in the sidebars.  The link to thecagetattoostudio.com are in English and utilize one of their primary keyword targets.
• The domain is also hosted on a server with 2 other domains that are similar - the topic of the website does not match with the domain name.
• The site is nothing more than an affiliate site to generate insurance leads for another site.
• The site is only made up of 2 “business insurance” related pages.  All others showing up in a “site:” search are leftover from the tattoo shop’s site.

It would appear from the outside that this is clearly a spamming attempt at Google, but you wonder if they know about it and/or if they can do anything.

So in summary, a 2-page, 3-month old, tattoo-based domain w/ a high percentage of paid links from Russian websites is ranked #1 for a super-competitive keyword in Google’s search results. 

Has anyone seen a similar situation as this?

Google appears to be beta testing some new search results features:

The first item allows you to quickly modify the type of search you’re performing, whether it be a standard search engine query, blog/news search, video search, etc.

The second section shows you Related Searches, or queries related to your search.

Not sure I like the layout just yet, but it seems a lot more like Ask.com.  I think they’d be better off moving the features to the right hand side of the page or at the bottom personally.  It seems to distract from the results themselves.

Interview snippets from Vanessa Fox, Product Manager for Google Webmaster Tools. Full video interview w/ Rand Fishkin

I’ve tried to get the important points from the interview, so several of these items are very short and/or are specific statements made by Google’s Vanessa Fox.

Sitemaps.org initiatives

• Sitemaps.org content to be included in 18 different languages.
• New method of notification - specify in robots.txt file via:
  sitemap:filepath

  View the robots.txt sitemap inclusion discussion over at WebmasterWorld for more specifics

Webmaster Tools & Sitemaps

• Yahoo Site Explorer out of Beta.
• URL removal tool in Google (out fo 6 yrs now). Could make it’s way into Webmaster Tools.
• Real-time Google PageRank coming soon? Doesn’t sound like it (too many privacy issues).
• Google Supplemental Results - could start providing more information on why pages are in the Supplemental Index, but likely wouldn’t provide a full list of everything in the index. Not considered such a bad thing anymore - many supplemental results still rank well for specific phrases.
• Considering offering data on who’s linking to your 404 error pages and/or where your broken links are being linked from. Always try to redirect to the most relevant page on the site vs. using a 404.
• Could submitting an orphan page through Sitemaps get a page indexed?
  Yes… (but) it probably wouldn’t rank well. That means that all of the pages on a site should be submitted through Sitemaps.
• Google Link Reporting - Link sorting (currently alphabetized).
  Could make other options available in the future.
• Sounds like they could be adding features to allow you to verify more than one domain within your account (ie: multiple domains).
• Moving your website to another domain - Take pages from old site, move to new site (as is). Don’t restructure or re-design the website until after you’re sure the engines see the new domain & pages well. “Do things in stages” or “one step at a time”.

Pre-Sell Pages (ie: .edu hosted content)

• They’re aware of what’s going on and could devalue some of the trust that certain domains have (ie: .edu, .gov). “Always looking for ways to do things better.” Hoping to get some changes in the hopper and to see some changes soon.One example given was searching for “viagra” in Google - several of the Top 10 results are .edu sites that appear to have had content hosted on them. Several of the pages have custom 404 error pages coming up, so they must have figured out what was going on. Another appears to be forum/comment spam that’s somehow ranked well (???).

Buying Links (watch out!)

• Might make webmasters aware of detection of paid links (ouch!!!). The more information the better, including problems regarding ranking issues. No definitive answer though….

Sites Displaying Search Results (scrapers, shopping sites, etc.)

• She mentioned that the engines, in some cases, wouldn’t want visitors searching in Google to click a result, only to find another page of search results. I guess some filters could be expected.

Google Base

• Submit structured data (ie: feeds).
• Separate searching system from Google.com.
• Good for experimenting - “get in early”.

Google News

• Can submit News sitemap through Webmaster Tools.
• Send email to get included (for review) - English only.

In case you missed our last Vanessa Fox posting, you can view her December 2006 interview here.

The two biggest stories the past few weeks related to internet marketing and SEO are probably the new tools that Google and Yahoo both rolled out.

Google unveils more links
Within your Google Webmaster Tools account, you can now view/download a much larger scope of incoming links to your website.  In addition, you can view the links to specific pages on your site and generate an outgoing link report as well.  Here’s the official word from Vanessa Fox over at GWT:

You asked, and we listened: We’ve extended our support for querying links to your site to much beyond the link: operator you might have used in the past. Now you can use webmaster tools to view a much larger sample of links to pages on your site that we found on the web. Unlike the link: operator, this data is much more comprehensive and can be classified, filtered, and downloaded. All you need to do is verify site ownership to see this information. Read the full story

I’ve tested the new link reports out and it doesn’t give you too much information that you probably don’t already have.  In addition, Matt Cutts stated that the reports are by no means 100% of the data available and don’t reflect the true number of links pointing to your site.  He also stated that just because a link is showing up in the report, that it’s not an indicator that the link is counted in the algorithm - it’s a simple report of the links, nothing more.

Yahoo Pipes unveiled
The general scope of “Yahoo Pipes” is the ability to combine RSS/feeds (or mash them together), and then manipulate the data in a way that’s useful for you or your website(s).  It’s basically an RSS masher & re-hasher.  The “pipes” name comes from the Unix pipes that let you combine commands (foreign to this writer).

What Is Pipes? Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line. Read the full story

Nice link from Yahoo Pipes btw… what, you couldn’t figure out how to use Mod Rewrite?

The top three search engines (Google, MSN and Yahoo) announced last week that they’re all in support of a “sitemap” protocol/standard for websites.  This news should make most webmasters relax a little bit since they now only need to create a single sitemap file to appease all three engines, versus the complicated ways to do it before (multiple sitemap files).

The sitemap should be created as “sitemap.xml” and placed in the site’s root directory.

MorePro Marketing, Inc. can help you create a valid sitemap for your website and submit it to the various engines on your behalf.  If you’re interested in this service, please use the contact form on our website.