December 3, 2007 – 12:45 am
Just been reading Matt Cutts on pay per post. He points out that this is definitely against the Google guidelines, but takes an interesting angle, kind of appealing to the humanity in people.
Pointing out a pay per post review of a cancer treatment site and asking how you’d feel if you or a family [...]
November 29, 2007 – 10:00 pm
During a recent in interview with a journalist I was asked to consider the current state of Google, especially in light of link Spam and Google’s efforts to combat something that’s getting a little out of hand.
The last time I felt that Google was this open to abuse was probably ‘just’ before the Florida [...]
November 6, 2007 – 2:45 pm
Google has finally added a geo-targeting feature to their webmaster tools. They’ve been threatening this for a while – now you can chose the target country for your site, without having to move hosting or localising domains.
November 5, 2007 – 2:21 pm
David Naylor posted about a spam blog, which scrapes your content then blogs about you with a duplicated section of your post. I first noticed this when I had a ping back within five minutes of a post – quicker than Google blog search or Technorati.
October 30, 2007 – 1:14 pm
Yesterday, Google’s Matt Cutts confirmed in an interview with Search Engine Journal that the recent PageRank downgrades were intended to tackle sites selling links.
The partial update to visible PageRank that went out a few days ago was primarily regarding PageRank selling and the forward links of sites. So paid links that pass PageRank would affect [...]
October 29, 2007 – 4:29 pm
The times online and The New Scientist have their TBPR drop from 7 to 5 and the Hilton.co.uk from 7 to 3.
In the case of the Hilton, they’ve also lost that ranking for ‘hotels’. Someone in the office just pointed out the cross linking footer which link to the group sites – this may [...]
October 26, 2007 – 4:31 pm
It’s been a couple of days since the reported PR drops for sites selling links, and judging by some of the reports, we haven’t seen any traffic drops for the sites that have dropped PageRank. As first suspected by many the toolbar PR drop hasn’t stopped those sites ranking – though these could still be [...]
October 24, 2007 – 9:08 pm
By now there’s probably not a single search blog, not speculating about the October Google PR update. Even the Guardian has it covered. Search has certainly come a long way.
So, what’s happened? Well, a lot of people are reporting PR drops for sites which appear to be selling links or just caught up in [...]
September 7, 2007 – 12:33 pm
As this was the first major search event following the launch of Google Universal, no surprises about which topic would really dominate this year’s conference. Let’s say I didn’t see any spare seats in any of the sessions on Universal, 3D, Blended or any of the other terms devised to describe the new search [...]
September 2, 2007 – 1:02 am
The session on paid links was probably the most heated discussion this year. Rather reminiscent of the click fraud debate last year. Unfortunately for Google’s Matt Cutts the odds were stacked against him, being the only search engine representative on the panel. A real shame that all the other engines stayed out of this [...]