Got Bad Incoming Links? Google Says, “Don’t Fret It”

The Google Webmaster Central blog has a post on "dealing" with low quality backlinks. In that post, Google basically explains that incoming links is "just one of many" ranking factors. That being the case, Google says if you have bad quality incoming links, "don't fret" it and focus on things you can control, like your content. Google does offer advice, such as asking the source of the link to remove your site from their page. If that doesn't work, there is not much you can do. There is currently no tool in Webmaster Tools to communicate to Google to ignore certain links from sources on [...]

Filed in: Google: SEO, Link Building: Paid Links, Top News


Are You Helping Facebook Outrank You For Your Brand Name?

Facebook allows you to embed fan pages on your own site, which might result in Facebook outranking you for your own brand name. For example, the Search Engine Land fan page has a link for me to "add a fan box to your site." If you look at the code of that widget, you might notice Facebook is using your brand name as the anchor text to the Facebook URL. Since the URL is search engine friendly and since Facebook has a lot of link popularity and trust, I wouldn't be surprised to see some Facebook pages outranking the official brand web site, due to this new gadget code. Here is a screen cap [...]

Filed in: Link Building: General, Link Building: Paid Links


Google Loses “Backwards Compatibility” On Paid Link Blocking & PageRank Sculpting

Imagine that you fired up your computer and found that a bunch of your programs no longer worked, because behind the scenes, the operating system had been upgraded without any backwards compatibility. That's what happened this week with Google. Some things that were working just fine now are broken, because Google isn't being backwards compatible. And that's fairly unprecedented. Don't panic. One of the changes really shouldn't hurt many sites, impacting only a "power SEO" technique commonly called PageRank sculpting that I'd say fairly few use. The other has a bigger impact and pote [...]

Filed in: Features: Analysis, Link Building: General, Link Building: Paid Links, SEO: Duplicate Content, SEO: Spamming, Top News


Google Penalizes Google Japan For Buying Links

Matt Cutts twittered that Google.co.jp was penalized for paying for blogger reviews. If you look at the FriendFeed details, you will see Matt first said, "Google.co.jp PageRank is now ~5 instead of ~9. I expect that to remain for a while." And then when he was questioned if this was a paid link penalty, he said "yes." Google Blogoscoped has more details about the why with their story named Google Japan Reportedly Bought Blog Posts in Promotion Campaign, Now Issued Apology. Akky Akimoto at the Asiajin blog recently reported that Google Japan was paying bloggers to review a new Google widg [...]

Filed in: Features: Analysis, Google: SEO, Link Building: Paid Links, Top News


Google & Microsoft Share Advice For Webmasters, SEOs

The ever-helpful teams writing for Google's Webmaster Central blog and Microsoft Live Search's Webmaster Center blog have published a variety of videos and presentations this week in the name of helping webmasters and search engine optimizers. On the Live Search blog, Nathan Buggia recaps his SMX East presentation on Webmaster Guidelines, shares the slides from his talk, and expands on topics such as paid links, cloaking, and website penalties. He shares some detail on how Live Search handles paid links: Essentially we look at each link individually to understand the degree to which the si [...]

Filed in: Google: SEO, Google: Webmaster Central, How To: SEO, Link Building: Paid Links, Microsoft: Bing SEO, SEO: Domain Names & URLs, SEO: General


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