Matt Cutts started a firestorm this last Saturday by inviting people to use Google’s spam report form to report paid links. Many are interpreting this as a sign that Google is having difficulty detecting which links are paid and which are not. Others see it as Google taking another step to dictate how we should run our web sites and even our businesses.
I am just barely back in Phoenix after SES New York and what do I see all over the place in my feeds this morning? News that Google has won the acquisition of DoubleClick. The price tag rivals their recent acquisition of YouTube – $3.1 billion in cash! I don’t typically like to rehash news but this is big. So what does this mean for Google advertisers? What does it mean for their competitors?
How do you get the search engines to recognize the content of a site when it is all Flash? That was the topic of a late night discussion some of us search marketers were having in the Hilton bar last night. I won’t disclose the exact details of the site we were discussing. While cloaking is an option, it is one that comes with risk. Here we discuss when it might be okay to cloak.
Having worked with companies both large and small for almost a decade now, I have learned that there are fundamental principles that both parties must follow if they are going to have a successful SEO relationship. And that is what SEO truly is – a relationship or better yet, a partnership between the two parties. Like any partnership, there are do’s and don’ts that each party must practice if the relationship is to be a success.
One can pretty much assume that if someone steals your copy, they are not too bright. The content thief is not intelligent enough to write or develop something on their own so they pilfer someone’s else’s hard work. However there are some that are in a class all by themselves. Not only are they too stupid to write their own content, they neglect to remove references to the place where they originally stole the content.
That is the lesson that KinderStart.com has learned as their case against Google is thrown out of court by Judge Jeremy Fogel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The judge also imposed yet-to-be-determined sanctions on KinderStart legal counsel Gregory Yu for making unsupported allegations against Google.
I came upon such a question today on Search Engine Watch Forums. It is not the first time it has been asked – “Can I include my competitor’s names in my SEO strategy? Will I find myself in any kind of legal trouble?” Or even, “Is it ethical?” Sure you can do it. It is your site – you can do what you want with it. Yes, you may find yourself receiving one of those nice little cease and desist letters.
I don’t know how I missed this. Possibly because the day it was posted was my birthday and I was out of the office most of the day. What I am referring to is a post on the Stepforth blog by Ross Dunn announcing Yahoo!’s revamping of their paid inclusion program. Even had I come upon the news, I probably would have merely yawned because really, who cares about their paid inclusion program anyway? Instead of revamping it, they should killing it.
Will the fact that search engines are adding more “personalization” to the search results eventually kill the business of performing search engine optimization for web sites? SEO has become a very lucrative business and has seen many new companies as well as individuals come into the space for the last several years. SEOs fear that their livelihood may be in jeopardy as engines like Google, Yahoo and others cater to the personal searching habits of their users.
We’ve been asking for some time. It was even promised as a possible future development. Well now it is finally arrived – support for a “NOYDIR” meta tag. Web site owners have long been frustrated over the lack of control they have had in they way their home page appears in the Yahoo! search results if they are also listed in the Yahoo! Directory.
