A few weeks ago Google announced the launch of Search Plus Your World, which deeply integrates social sites (especially Google+) into the Google search experience to make it more personalized.

While Google claimed that the socialization was rather broad-based, the lack of inclusion of Facebook & Twitter along with the excessive promotion of Google+ raised eyebrows…

Instead of being able to SEO the entire Internet, businesses can now only affect the search results for a tiny percentage of users. That’s a good thing because SEO can’t scale, and SEO isn’t good for users or the Internet at large…

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Categories: seo tips…

Much Quicker Updates

With a limited number of recoveries nearly a year after Panda, the first bite might seem like a big concern, however the “too many ads” algorithm updates far more frequently than Panda does:

If you decide to update your page layout, the page layout algorithm will automatically reflect the changes as we re-crawl and process enough pages from your site to assess the changes…

BBVA, Spain’s second-largest bank by assets, is teaming up with Google to use its search engine results to provide advanced forecasts of hotel and tourism demand in the country, part of a plan to market real-time economic indicators to its clients.

The bank and internet group will announce on Monday a scheme called the “BBVA-Google tourism activity in Spain indicator”…

According to this post, Google was caught scraping Mocality, calling the listed businesses, soliciting that they move to Google “Get Your Business Online”, disparaged the directory they were scraping in the client call, and then lied about having the permission of the directory they were scraping to try to con businesses into working with Google…

Everyone Except Me Should be Open

Being labeled as open or transparent is a great public relations strategy. Executed effectively it gets ditto heads to feel like they are part of a movement and spread your propaganda.

However actually being transparent is often a poor business strategy…

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• some of those sites are paid posts and have live links in them to Google Chrome without using nofollow & talk about SEO in the same post as well! humphriesnation.com/2011/12/27/google-chrome/
• some of those posts link to the example businesses Google was paying to have covered lazymanandmoney…

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Thanks to John Andrews for highlighting the above industry trend.

Categories: internet…

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For many years it was true that SEO = links, but due to the rise of rel=nofollow, fearmongering & social media, organic links have lost much of their relative importance in many verticals.

Links are still valuable in some areas of course, but where the search results are full of listings from Google.com, pushed below the fold from larger AdWords ads and/or heavily skewed by things like brand bias there is much less value in link building in numerous big money markets…

I have a huge monitor & it is impossible for me to click *anywhere* above the fold on some search results without going through Google’s toll booth or clicking off to yet another Google ad wrapped page.

(click on the image for the full sized view)

Some people have given Google the benefit of the doubt “well this is just vertical search” and “this is just for the consumer” but we see that in many cases it harms consumers by limiting choice:

Charlie Leocha, the director of the Consumer Travel Alliance, says Google Flight Search is “limiting consumers’ knowledge…

At the same time, independent webmasters face greater uncertainty than ever (legal, personal property rights, and from alleged “quality” algorithms like Panda & editorial crackdowns from Google engineers)…

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With some 1.4 million employees on its U.S. payroll, Walmart’s world is about as large as the state of Maine. That’s massive by any standard, but when you consider how social media amplifies that number, it’s not simply a huge group but an influential one. No small wonder, then, that the earth’s largest employer is taking greater measures to motivate and mobilize its people — and opening up more opportunities for consumer brands to also reach them along the way…

With some 1.4 million employees on its U.S. payroll, Walmart’s world is about as large as the state of Maine. That’s massive by any standard, but when you consider how social media amplifies that number, it’s not simply a huge group but an influential one. No small wonder, then, that the earth’s largest employer is taking greater measures to motivate and mobilize its people — and opening up more opportunities for consumer brands to also reach them along the way…

From their email:

50% Off all BOTW Products on Cyber Monday!

Don’t miss out on our biggest discount of the year!

Promo Code: STUFFED50
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Get Listed at Half the Price!

A directory listing in Best of the Web is a vote of confidence for your business website…

Anyhow…as they later ramped up on marketing, they at some point claimed that I somehow “certified” their software, even as the version changed, their product name changed, their mode of sales changed (from primarily pushing a downloadable software product to an SAAS model), many SEO fundamentals changed over the years, and so on…

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… yet Google is testing a new ad unit where users have to fill out a survey before they can view the content.

How long until the surveys include something like:

• did you vote in 2008
• what presidential candidate did you vote for
• how do you feel about issue x
• how strongly do you feel about your opinion on x

Then after the survey: “Thanks for your feedback…