Tuesday, March 29, 2011

news tidbits

Last week, Google was granted a patent that describes how Google might segment the content of a web page. Depending on the location of the content, a web page will get higher or lower rankings.

Also in the news: Yahoo introduces Search Direct, Matt Cutts talks about localized content and Google, Bing adds real-time results to news search, further information about Google's Panda update and more.

From Matt Cutts about Google Panda:

"The update is definitely not sitewide ? there are a number of sites we looked at where the update had only hit pages of a certain type. For example ecommerce sites where the category pages were fine but product pages were hit hard. [...]

This update is going to cause major issues for anybody that has a large site with product descriptions that are duplicated across lots of other sites. If you have a few of these it?s not an issue to rewrite them but a lot of big ecommerce sites have 10,000+ products and to rewrite those is going to be a major headache."

From Alexa news about paid links:

Once again, paid links are a hot topic in the search engine optimization community. The website of J. C. Penney had number 1 rankings for many competitive keywords. It turned out that the J. C. Penney website obtained these rankings through buying links on over 2000 pages.

The paid links were reported to Google and many of J. C. Penney's rankings dropped from number 1 to number 70 and below.

What are paid links?

If you pay the webmaster of another site to link to your website, then the link is a paid link. Paid links can be used to advertise your website on other sites. As long as the paid links use the rel=nofollow attribute, Google doesn't have any problems with them.

The problem arises when paid links are used to get higher rankings in the regular search results on Google.

Google is very clear about paid links

Google does not like paid links. According to Google's official statement, you should avoid paid links at all costs:

"[Some] webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results."

Google even has an official form that enables you to report paid links to Google:

"If you know of a site that buys or sells links, please tell us by filling out the fields below. We'll investigate your submissions, and we'll use your data to improve our algorithmic detection of paid links.


More tidbits to come soon until then have a great week!


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