You can learn a lot more about what Google really thinks by reading what their new hires say. They are not yet skilled in the arts of public relations & make major gaffs like this one: 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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Google announced they rolled out their anti-overly-aggressive-ads algorithm . They didn't give a specific % on how much of the above the fold content can be ads, but suggest using their browser preview tool . Using that tool on Google.com's search results would of course score it as a spam site, but for some small AdSense webmasters that avoided Panda, Google may have drew first blood. Much Quicker Updates With a limited number of recoveries nearly a year after Panda,

This is an interesting play: 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".

Wow...this is pretty...um... transparent . 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. A few select quotes: There are absolutely no costs,

"All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth." - Friedrich Nietzsche 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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That is what they say , typically at the bottom of the posts, in blog posts that equate Google Chrome to being the Internet & spread misinformation about how Chrome is good for small business. 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!

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Sharing is caring! Please share :( Embed code is here. 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 ,

Some of Google's new search results look quite alarming in terms of every single link above the fold is either a paid ad, or links to yet another Google page wrapped in ads. 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.

Since Panda has happened I )and others( have highlighted how brands have ranked doorway pages , ranked scraped 3rd party content , padded out crap "content farm" content to suck in search traffic , took their market leading position & used it to deliver inferior experiences , bought out bankrupt competitors & redirected the PageRank , engaged in off-topic affiliate extension ) Barnes & Noble , Overstock , Overstock AND Barnes & Noble (, etc etc etc At the same time,

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Walmart is getting much more aggressive with their online strategy : 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,

Only a few hours left in the discount, but its a great deal. :( 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 Submit Today Get Listed at Half the Price! A directory listing in Best of the Web is a vote of confidence for your business website. Only today can you receive all the benefits of a BOTW listing at half the regular cost. This offer is only good for Cyber Monday,

Over 5 years ago I had a quick chat with the folks from Interspire about their websites, including their shopping cart at the time & offered a few tips to fix some of the obvious issues I saw. This was over a half-decade ago & under a different product name & entirely informal. 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,

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In the below video Matt Cutts states that " there is no such thing as white hat cloaking " ... ... 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.

Google collects a lot of information on individuals & can have some level of confidence if the person is a real person or not based on things like their history of email usage, if they have a credit card on file, how they interact with other high confidence real accounts, how many people are friends with them on Google+, usage of an Android cell phone, their search history, etc. Google doesn't need all those signals on any individual, just some blend of them.

Google Hates Affiliates Years before Google broadly torched affiliates operating inside the AdWords channel I highlighted how much Google hated affiliates in their ecosystem. How was I aware of that? 2 ways: If you read any of Google's older guidelines that leaked over the years you would see a consistent disdain toward affiliate sites. This was also reflected in official advice at search engine conferences & whatnot.