This should be a regular monthly, so look out for the dates on the project wiki. see you next time…

The subjects covered by the various speakers were diverse ranging from analysing offline to online behaviour to the emergence of mobile. Unfortunately I was still travelling up from Brighton during the first session, so missed most of it. I’d really like to see a copy of Google guy, Mark Britten’s presentation on future search – it was very interesting by all accounts.

One thing you couldn’t help but notice was how far search had come along. It was an ideal place to talk about SEO from a connected and people centric view point. It wasn’t that long ago, where most search conferences consisted mainly of technical presentation, packed entirely with geek-speak in bullets.

I’m not expecting a prosecution. But, it does beg the question, could you be judged by your link network. Can the Law and potential employers use this data to discriminate against you? Let’s hope not. After all there’s only sex degrees of separation amongst all of us.

It’s been an exciting year and being part of the iCrossing group certainly has its benefits, not least the opportunity to exchange ideas with an ever growing pool of very talented people.

It was a pleasure working under Spannerworks and I’m looking forward to the coming years under iCrossing

‘Life as media’ is truly inspired coinage.

For any commercial searches (You know, the ones with lots of spam) nearly all the top 10 are littered with keyword rich hyphenated domains. On a search for ‘cheap flights’ it even pulls in a picture of some bloke, just cos he said he’s interested in cheap space flights.

The ‘search engine marketing’ SERP was like a journey back in time. There were sites in there that Google, hell even Yahoo kicked out years ago.

And no real sense of Geo targeting or localisation – guess we won’t be using it to find loans or mortgages or any local business
Ok I’ve got it – this IS like a very basic search engine and indeed it is based on the open source engine nutch. Great at basic on-page relevance.

The clever bit comes once the user base start to provide their expertise. This may yet do something useful or at least vaguely interesting but I’m not holding my breath. I love the idea of using social signals to drive search, but this is not going to fly anytime soon and I’m guessing never. No wonder Matt Cutts was happy to welcome them into this space

For anyone who missed the debate Dave Dugdale managed to video it:

Much of the anger on the part of the link buyers, sellers and brokers revolved not so much on the issue of Google’s stance on link buying, but on their right to dictate how a publisher essentially selling advertising space should code the link (with a rel=nofollow), so Google can recognize that the link was a paid vote. Google is not the Government, internet police, nor a moral guardian for the web so the argument went. Feelings were further compounded as Matt Cutts referred to an FTC finding which stated that even word of mouth marketing which does not state that it is paid for, illegal.
To me the title of the discussion ‘Are paid links evil?’ asked the wrong question. Paid link debate is about Google’s reliance on link data and more importantly the text contained within links when defining relevance, and their inability to distinguish between real votes and bought ones.
The stakes are too high not to exploit a marketing loophole if it is there. Asking marketers to unilaterally disarm because of some ethical principle or publishers to add a tag which would see their income drop while competitors profited is a bit naïve from Google, who is arguably the largest ad-broker in the world.
I’m a big fan of the ‘Kill the anchor’ club, and I strongly believe that reducing the weight of anchor text would also reduce the impact of bought links. Having looked at millions of links to large brand sites, I’ve rarely seen any natural anchors containing competitive search terms. There’re plenty of other better ways to determine relevance.
Having had the opportunity to continue the link discussion with Matt at the Google dance, I’m inclined to believe that changes are on its way, but may be not any time too soon.

BTW for anyone wondering how you should build links without paying. The guy who made the above manged to do it. Is that better or worse for the web than buying links?

He claims to have evidence which is currently being investigated by Google, which suggest, AdSense members who are connected with Al Qaeda and Hezbollah are creating blogs within Orkut and encouraging their readers to click on the ads. In addition they’re using clickbots to increase the revenue from the ads.

At search engine journal Loren Baker argues this is the kind of thing that needs to happen before Google takes clickfraud seriously. When this story breaks, I’m sure they’ll no longer be able to keep their heads buried in the sand. But, I think this particular case of click fraud maybe very difficult to stop. They may be able to identify automated software, but, if thousands of people who support a terrorist cause, decides to do the clicking, it makes things much harder.

Expect an announcement very soon from Google

There’s also more of a shift from link buying ideas to link baiting. The thing that gets me is the idea of ‘Link Baiting’. Ask an SEO what link baiting is, and they’ll tell you it’s content that attracts links. Ask them if that’s the same as ‘good content’ and they’ll punch you in the face. It’s like admitting to using ’good content’ to attract links and ranking high is like admitting to being an SEO failure.