The “Kay Bailey Hutchinson for Governor Official Website” put up by “Texans for Kay Bailey Hutchison, Allan Shivers, Jr., Treasurer” over the weekend in support of Kay Bailey Hutchinson for Texas governor was briefly in Google but now appears to be completely missing. Huh.

Odd since Bing seems to have indexed it just fine, although the snippet looks a little odd.

Let’s take a closer look at the site.

Looks OK. Maybe it’s all in images or JavaScript or something and Google is having a hard time extracting content? I’ll just take a closer look with web developer toolbar. I’ll disable CSS and…

Oh. Wait.

Do you think all those hidden keywords revealed when CSS styling is disabled might have anything to do with it? I speculated yes when first writing this piece, and after it was posted, I got this confirmation from Matt Cutts, head of the spam team at Google:

Google did take action on this site for hidden text. Hidden text is a violation of our quality guidelines. We’ve removed the site from our index and tried to contact the site maintainers by email to explain that the hidden text was the cause for the site’s removal from our index. We also recommended that the webmaster remove all the hidden text and file a valid reconsideration request. More information about requesting reconsideration of a site can be found here.

Hiring an SEO firm is just like hiring any other service for expertise that you lack. Since you by definition don’t have the expertise, how do you know if they’re doing a good job? Well, Texans for Kay Bailey Hutchinson, Allan Shivers, Jr., Treasurer, today you’re getting a free crash course in SEO evaluation.

Understanding hidden text

Hidden text is not only against the search engine guidelines and can get you banned, but is amateur and lazy. It’s like hiring a painter to paint your house and having them show up and throw a bucket of paint in the general direction of your walls.

You might find Google’s webmaster guidelines on the subject helpful:

Hiding text or links in your content can cause your site to be perceived as untrustworthy since it presents information to search engines differently than to visitors. Text (such as excessive keywords) can be hidden in several ways, including … Using CSS to hide text… If your site is perceived to contain hidden text and links that are deceptive in intent, your site may be removed from the Google index, and will not appear in search results pages. When evaluating your site to see if it includes hidden text or links, look for anything that’s not easily viewable by visitors of your site. Are any text or links there solely for search engines rather than visitors? If you do find hidden text or links on your site, either remove them or, if they are relevant for your site’s visitors, make them easily viewable. If your site has been removed from our search results, review our webmaster guidelines for more information. Once you’ve made your changes and are confident that your site no longer violates our guidelines, submit your site for reconsideration.

It’s quite possible Google has even told you about this hidden text problem. Create a Google Webmaster Tools account and verify ownership of standbykay.com. You may have a message waiting for you.

Hidden text is also frustrating for the users you’re trying to attract and may cause them to get irritated at your site and leave. Let’s say, for instance, the site does indeed rank for “what is a keg”, as it apparently is trying to do. What exactly do they expect searchers who reach the site to do? The site doesn’t actually answer the question of what a keg is. Do they think that all these keg definition-seekers are going to get distracted and decide to abandon their beer research efforts and become political activists?What other searches are they apparently targeting?

• texas bbq pit texas smokehouse
• chicken fried steak recipe
• debachary [sic] definition
• gambling addiction
• houston rockets
• why do we have knees

Why do we have knees?!!!

According to the Austin American-Statesman, which alerted us to this situation, the campaign has no intention of the removing the hidden text:

Hutchison’s campaign spokesman, Jeff ] Sadosky and other campaign aides said this afternoon that only the two phrases using “rick perry gay” will be removed because they won’t play into the campaign’s future messages.

[Note: At 2:22pm Eastern, it appears all of the hidden text is now gone.]

The explanation is that software is creating the lists of phrases based on search volume and is intended to help direct online advertising efforts. If that’s indeed the case, wouldn’t the list be more easily managed as an offline report than as text hidden inside source code of a web page? Just saying. [Can you tell I'm not buying it?]

Which brings us to the next lesson in the SEO crash course.

Understanding keyword research

Sure, there are sophisticated and expensive keyword research tools that provides lots of awesome information, but I’m venturing a guess that you’re more in the beginner stage, so you’ll do just fine with the free stuff. And as a bonus, the free tools give you files you can open in Excel rather than store the data in the source code of your site! The campaign said the software helped them figure out what else those who were searching for “Rick Perry,” “Kay Bailey Hutchison” and “Texas” were looking for, so let’s do the same, shall we?

Google AdWords Keyword Tool - this is the old standby, and it’s pretty solid and useful since it’s based on Google searches. And hey, it even lets your sort by search volume!

Tip: “Texas” might be overly broad as you’ll likely get a lot of untargeted traffic. You might want to stick with more relevant keywords, such as “texas politics” or “texas governor race”. A more targeted set of keywords can give you lots of other valuable information, like that opposing candidate has more searcher interest:

Google Insights For Search -This cool tools lets you compare search terms and zero in on specific regions (such as just Texas) and specific time frames (such as the last 90 days).

Wordtracker Keyword Questions – this new tools uses ISP data to generate a list of questions people are searching for related to keywords. Using this tool, we find that perhaps Texans for Kay Bailey Hutchinson, Allan Shivers, Jr., Treasurer has been doing a few searches of their own.

Here’s another tip! You can use these keywords in the actual copy of the website. It can help you not only be more visible in search engines, but also have deeper engagement with your consituents! How awesome is that. If you want to know what people are searching for, why only use that for ad targeting, when you can use it to understand and reach your audience more generally? For instance, people are apparently asking the question “why is Kay Bailey Hutchison running against Rick Perry for governor of Texas?” Add a page to the site with frequently asked questions, add that one, and answer it.

Understanding basic SEO

Texans for Kay Bailey Hutchinson, Allan Shivers, Jr., Treasurer, there’s another problem with your SEO. Not only does the site have elements that will get it banned, the site doesn’t have thebasic stuff that can help you be found. Let’s run down just a few of them.

Extractable text- None of the visible text on the page is viewable by search engines! (Kinda funny, huh. None of the visible text is viewable, but all the hidden text is.)  It’s all hidden in JavaScript. With images and JavaScript turned off, the page looks like this:

I should clarify, it’s not that none of the text is visible. “Political ad Paid for by Texans for Kay Bailey Hutchison, Allan Shivers, Jr., Treasurer” shows up just fine. So anyone looking for political ads paid for by (etc.), just might find the site. Well, if it wasn’t banned by Google for hidden text, of course.

Meta tags – The keywords, robot, and revisit-after tag are completely ignored in this context. So I hope you didn’t pay very much for someone to include them. The description tag is fairly important as it’s your one and only chance to provide a compelling marketing message in the search results to motivate a searcher to click over to the site. Was “Kay Bailey Hutchison – Running for Texas Governor” the most inspiring message you could come up with? Video – Don’t autoplay video when the page loads. That’s not really an SEO thing. Just an annoying-the-hell-out-of-me thing. More to the point, add at least a caption above or below the video. Add some descriptive text. Something that lets the search engines know what it is.

Canonicalization - it sounds like an advanced SEO tactic, but it’s actually a foundational element that even the most novice SEO should know. www.standbykay.com and standbykay.com both resolve to the site. One should 301 redirect to the other.

Duplicate content – Texans for Kay Bailey Hutchison, Allan Shivers, Jr., Treasurer also runs another site, texans.forkay.com. (Why the subdomain? No idea.) They also own texansforkay.com, which has a JavaScript redirect to texans.forkay.com. First lesson in redirects: always go with a 301 redirect.

The bigger issue is why two sites that have exactly the same purpose? So far, standbykay.com doesn’t have much content (and only one page), but the bulk of it is that dang autoplaying video, which is the same video featured prominently on the texans.forkay.com home page.

That leads me to think that any expansion of standforkay.com might use other content from texans.forkay.com. That’s another way to ensure the new site won’t rank in search engines, as they don’t want to list the same content multiple times. Any good SEO firm should ask why you need another site and work closely with you to define differentiation — a different purpose, audience, and goals.

But wait? What’s this? kayfortexas.com? That appears to be an exact duplicate of texans.forkay.com. Studying up on that 301 redirect is probably a really good idea.

I hope Texans for Kay Bailey Hutchison, Allan Shivers, Jr., Treasurer enjoyed this crash course in SEO. If you found it helpful and are want a second lesson, might I suggest Google’s informative Requesting reconsideration of your site.

If you use Twitter regularly, you probably know spam is a growing problem — particularly with Twitter’s search engine and the way it surfaces trending topics. Danny Sullivan described how spammers are targeting hot keywords in his Twitter’s Real Time Spam Problem article 10 days ago.

Since Twitter hasn’t addressed the problem yet, the folks behind the BLVD Status web analytics tool have created Clean Tweets, a Firefox add-on that, in my brief testing, does a good job eliminating spam from Twitter search/hot topics. According to the Clean Tweets page, the tool does three thing to cut down on spam:

• Removes tweets from accounts that are less than 24 hours old
• Removes tweets that mention three or more trending topics
• Adds a red “X” to each tweet in Twitter’s search results so you can manually remove tweets and users

You can also customize each of those options to suit your own tastes; i.e., you might consider removing tweets that mention two or more trending topics.

Does it work? Have a look at these screenshots. The first one shows the “Father’s Day” trending topic on Twitter search before I installed Clean Tweets:

And this second one shows the same group of results after I installed Clean Tweets.

The add-on removed two tweets, both of which are spam, and both which came from accounts created within the last 24 hours.

If you’re a Firefox user, you can get more info and/or download Clean Tweets on the BLVD Status site.

Somewhere online right now there’s a music fan who’s big on free downloads, likes Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida” but doesn’t know the lyrics, is looking for free ringtones, uses MySpace, likes to play solitaire and wants the latest game cheats. Like many of us, s/he uses a search engine to find all of these things.

This person may as well be playing Russian roulette.

In a recent report (PDF), online security company McAfee says those are some of the most dangerous search terms on the web.

That’s just a sample of the report’s list of the 50 riskiest search terms in the U.S. “Maximum Risk” describes the percentage of pages on a single search results page that were dangerous; i.e., on a search for “lyrics,” there was one search results page on which 50% of the ranked pages were risky. “Average Risk” is the overall risk from all five pages of search results for each term.

McAfee analyzed the first five search results pages of 2,600 popular keywords across five search engines: Google, Yahoo, Live, AOL, and Ask. They analyzed both organic and paid listings and counted the number of links that led to pages that McAfee’s SiteAdvisor tool flagged as dangerous. The study ultimately reviewed more than 413,000 unique URLs.

McAfee’s study also found that certain categories of keywords were more riskier than others. Searches related to “lyrics” and “free” had both the highest average risk and highest maximum risk.

It should be no surprise that McAfee also found scammers like to look at popular trends when choosing what keywords to target. Here’s a chart showing some of the riskiest terms related to the economic crisis:

The report also has charts detailing the most dangerous search terms in other U.S categories, as well as several other countries including Canada, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, and others. Here’s the PDF download link (2.2mb) if you’re interested in more details.

To some degree, the McAfee report calls into question how well the search engines themselves do at notifying users of risky sites. Yahoo uses McAfee’s SearchScan, Ask uses Symantec, while Live Search Bing and Google have their own malware detection tools. But, on a purely anecdotal level, if you search for the terms listed in the McAfee report, Google, Yahoo, and Bing show very few warnings in the first five pages of results.

(found via Lifehacker)

And so real-time search begets real-time spam. We knew this would happen, but it’s annoying and becoming a growing problem. Question is, will Twitter do anything about it, beginning with removing its “Trends” feature?I got an up close & personal look at how bad Twitter “trend spam” has become when this week, our SMX Advanced search marketing conference became a trending topic.

Trends are topics that are gaining attention on Twitter, usually identified by the use of a common word. For example, at SMX Advanced, attendees were told to add the hashtag of “#smx” to the end of their tweets, as a way to help those looking for real time news about the show to have a common word to search on.

Since there were many tweets containing #smx, that helped #smx to become a trending topic. As such, it showed up as a link on the home page of Twitter Search and in the trends links along the right-hand side of someone’s Twitter account, when they’re visiting Twitter on the web.

Unfortunately, anyone searching for SMX news on Twitter quickly discovered how useless this was. For one thing, Twitter search is still suffering delays, where “real time” can actually mean a 20 minute or longer delay until a tweet appears.

For another, because of how prominent trends are — people will click trends links out of curiosity — people are putting out tweets that contain the trending words but which have nothing to do with the topic.

For example, consider this tweet:

The beginning of it seems to make no sense:

#e3 air france sims 3 project natal new moon #wiebe #smx sony hummer #radio4minus1letter

But if you know trends, then you understand. Those were all the trending topics on Twitter at that time. But throwing in all these words, this person showed up in front of the curious, polluting the real-time stream for his goal at the end:

I need 100 followers by midnight! Help me!

How nice. But there are far worse examples. Consider:

In that example, someone’s dropping a link after the trend words, making you think the link is somehow related to the trending topics. OK, making you think that if you’re not realizing how odd that tweet looks — but still, it sucks. Click on the link, and you get sent to some MP3 site. But you could be sent anywhere, including a malware site.

In another example, I saw a tweet that used a real comment made by someone at SMX, except that they added a link to their eBay option. Clever, because the tweet seemed about as legit as you could want — but sucky, because it was spam.

Today, it got even more personal. Our @sengineland account is being pounded with retweet spam. Someone is using multiple accounts to retweet things we’ve said — except we’ve never said what they’re putting out:

They’ve done this so much that our replies are becoming useless, flooded with this garbage:

But the real issue is that they’re also including trending topic words, autotune, which is on the front of Twitter Search right now:

That lets them get in front of a larger audience via Twitter Search plus tricks people into clicking on the links, since they appear to be retweeting something a trusted source put out.

It’s all pretty sucky, and those who know search spam predicted this would happen when Twitter added trends to its home page. I’d point to my own tweet about this back then, and Google web spam chief Matt Cutts joking back with me about it, but Twitter Search is so broken that I can’t find anything written from my own account.

For all the love real time search is getting, old timers know well why search engines long ago stopped doing unfiltered real time additions to their indexes. It made them too easy to spam. For a brief moment in time, Infoseek allowed for “instant updates” or additions of web pages. People, to be blunt, spammed the hell out of Infoseek with this.

It’s just going to get worse, and Twitter needs to put some solutions in place. For a start, they should pull trends. By listing trending topics, they’re in turn helping to generate all this spam, some of which may harm their own users. Pull trends until some actual spam protection is in place.

And what spam protection might that be? Some quick thoughts:

• Accounts less than a day old don’t get to show up in Twitter Search and/or show up for trending topics
• Figure a reputation score for accounts and only let those appear in for trending topics
• Partner with a service for malware detection, so that any links Twitter puts out are analyzed to be safe

Finally, a note to those who are doing this. The US Federal Trade Commission has pretty strict rules on misleading consumers. Putting out a tweet on a topic with a link, when you have no relationship to that topic, is misleading. It’s even more so to pretend to retweet someone. It’s fairly easy to see who is benefiting from these tweets and hold them accountable. In the case of our retweet spam, I’ve sent notice to the site involve that if it continues, I’ll file an FTC complaint against them.

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 potentially means thousands of sites may now be violating Google’s rules on paid link without knowing it. But that’s not likely to have an immediate impact. I’ll explain both changes in more depth below.

The most important thing is that in both cases, the changes may require site owners to alter their web sites not because they were “chasing the algorithm” but instead because they were following Google’s own rules and instructions. They were doing what was advised, and now they may have to undo that work.

That’s the unprecedented part. Google has constantly upgraded how it deals with site content, from early advances like indexing PDF documents to later changes like showing “sitelinks” for web sites. These upgrades have been generally good and involved little to no work on the part of the site owner, until now.

PageRank Sculpting: Spending A Page’s Authority Money

Let’s take PageRank sculpting. In general, every individual web page that Google finds has some degree of importance that the page can pass on to other pages — PageRank. Links from that page to other pages are how it passes that importance along. And in its most basic, earliest form, each link on the page equally shared some of the importance.

Consider it like this. Imagine authority is money, and a particular page has $10 in “authority” to spend. It links out to 10 pages, so each of those pages gets $1 ($10 divided by 10). If it links to 20 pages, each gets 50 cents ($10 divided by 20). If it links to 5 pages, each page gets $2 (you get the math by now).

With PageRank sculpting, the idea is to effectively block some of the links on your web page (using the nofollow attribute or some other means) from getting any authority. Perhaps you have a lot of navigational links to other pages inside your web site. Rather than spend authority money on these pages, you might prefer to spend it on a smaller number of important pages that could use a boost.

PageRank Sculpting Gets Popular

This technique has been around for ages and had various names until the middle of 2007. That’s when it went more mainstream in the advanced SEO space. And in particular, it went that way I feel because Google spam fighting czar Matt Cutts talked about how Google’s YouTube was using PageRank sculpting during an open discussion at Google with a variety of advanced SEO people about techniques and issues.

I recall it being described as a means to ensure your best pages got the most PageRank. I also recall being kind of annoyed about it (and think I said so during the meeting). For years, we’d been told that site owners shouldn’t have to do extraordinary things to help search engines. Good page titles, good ability to be crawled, sure. But having to think about things on a link-by-link basis? That’s something I assumed Google was already up to snuff about. My assumption had been that Google long decided to discount how much credit it assigned to things like navigational links, when it could see the same links appearing on multiple pages within the same web site.

Now to be clear, it’s not like Matt told everyone in the room to immediately do PageRank sculpting. Many topics were discussed, and this was just one of many things covered. But it was advice that came from Google — and it turned into a genie that wouldn’t go into the bottle.

Soon after, Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz did an article about the topic, and more soon followed on the web. It was a topic at conferences. It was a hot new fashion in SEO. And while plenty in the SEO space will chase after the latest (and often useless) algorithm fad — this was a chase sparked by Google itself. Why wouldn’t advanced people do it?

PageRank Sculpting Gets Debated

Not everyone agreed it was helpful. There’s been quite a bit of debate on whether it gives boost or not. Some have argued against using it at all. And the search engines, when asked about it since it gained popularity, have generally said that there are other things that are better worth the effort. But neither had they ruled it out. As I summarized last year:

I agree with the view that sculpting is a marginal activity compared to other things that can be done. But if you’re an advanced SEO — even someone advanced in terms of working with design issues — maybe it’s not so marginal. The search engines themselves are saying it has some value. They’ve not said it’s a flat out waste of time. And if you’ve mastered all the other things that are much more important, then yes, something like this may very well be worth giving more attention to.

Or as Michael Gray explained, if you’re driving a beat-up old car of a web site, putting a PageRank sculpting “engine” in it probably isn’t worthwhile. But if you’ve got a hot new sports car, well….

PageRank Sculpting Gets Depreciated

So today at SMX Advanced, sculpting was being discussed, and then Matt Cutts dropped a bomb shell that it no longer works to help flow more PageRank to the unblocked pages. Again — and being really simplistic here — if you have $10 in authority to spend on those ten links, and you block 5 of them, the other 5 aren’t going to get $2 each. They’re still getting $1. It’s just that the other $5 you thought you were saving is now going to waste.

Further, it was explained that YouTube wasn’t doing sculpting way back in 2007 as a way to boost certain video content. Instead, it was that YouTube randomly shows some video content and didn’t want these random selections to perhaps gain more authority than they should. And even with the change announced today, that still works. In the past, the unblocked videos got more authority money and the blocked ones got none. Now, the unblocked videos still get authority money — just not as much — and the blocked ones still get none.

But while that may be how it works on YouTube, I still recall PageRank sculpting being positioned by Google as a way to also give some pages more link juice. To quote Matt when asked about this in an official Google thread:

What are some appropriate ways to use the nofollow tag? One good example is the home page of expedia.com. If you visit that page, you’ll see that the “Sign in” link is nofollow’ed. That’s a great use of the tag: Googlebot isn’t going to know how to sign into expedia.com, so why waste that PageRank on a page that wouldn’t benefit users or convert any new visitors? Likewise, the “My itineraries” link on expedia.com is nofollow’ed as well. That’s another page that wouldn’t really convert well or have any use except for signed in users, so the nofollow on Expedia’s home page means that Google won’t crawl those specific links.

Most webmasters don’t need to worry about sculpting the flow of PageRank on their site, but if you want to try advanced things with nofollow to send less PageRank to copyright pages, terms of service, privacy pages, etc., that’s your call.

I’ve bolded the key part. Matt stresses — as he’s consistently done since talking about this at the SEO meeting — that this is something most people didn’t need to worry about or do. But saying “why waste that PageRank” means that at the time of giving this advice, PageRank was something that could be “saved” and “spent” on other pages.

You can expect Matt will do a blog post to cover this topic more. You can expect lots of people to be analyzing the change, and what it might or might not mean. And you should really understand that it was never the case that links shared equally in the amount of authority money a page had. In talking with Matt during the “You & A Session” at SMX Advanced, he confirmed that Google itself makes many determinations of how exactly a page can spend that authority money. IE — while a page might have $10 to spend, Google itself largely acts as the page’s investment banker, not the page’s author.

I wouldn’t panic and immediately start removing nofollow attributes that have been done for PageRank sculpting purposes. In general, I’d never recommend changing anything to a site that seems to be performing well. Take the time to let more discussion and information come from Google and other sources.

JavaScript onClick & Paid Link Worries

Those who PageRank sculpted following Google’s advice may have spent time doing something that no longer will work, or work as effectively, but they’ve not necessarily wasted time. Maybe it was helping them some in the past (plenty believe this). And they might not have to spend time removing it, any more than there are plenty of sites that still have meta keywords tags in place even though widespread search engine support of this was dropped long ago. That’s good depreciation, or effectively backwards compatibility. No one needs to change anything because the sites still keep “working” despite the past support being gone.

It’s a different case with Google’s new handling of JavaScript’s “onClick” function. To fully understand it, read Vanessa Fox’s in-depth report from last week, Google I/O: New Advances In The Searchability of JavaScript and Flash, But Is It Enough?, which broke the news here.

Links in JavaScript that were invisible to Google before are now being read. And some people have used JavaScript as a way to deliver paid links in a way that don’t violate Google’s guidelines may not technically on the wrong side of the Google law. It’s been a long accepted practice that this was a “safe” way to deal with paid links, once that Google’s suggested itself.

It’s as if Google has suddenly passed a new safety helmet law for web sites, mandating that the old helmets they’d been using are no longer good enough. Now they need to do something different.

What about nofollow? After all, Google’s been pushing nofollow as something sites should do as a safety device for paid links long after paid links themselves had been in existence.

True, and there are plenty of sites out there that have never caught up with this new Google guideline (and still sucky for those who really still innocently don’t know better). But that’s different than sites that thought they were doing the right thing and now which have to change again.

For the record, Matt said today that there’s no immediate penalties likely to be given out. Honestly, I think the spam team is still having to digest how to handle this change that’s been brought about by Google’s crawling team. And he also said that the nofollow attribute can be applied to JavaScript links that are not otherwise being redirected through a robots.txt block.

As I said in the case of PageRank sculpting, I wouldn’t immediately panic. But unlike with PageRank sculpting, if you’re selling paid links and thought JavaScript was protecting you, I would fairly quickly ensure that redirects are blocked by using nofollow within the JavaScript itself or by going through a robots.txt block.

(For an example of this, our paid links get delivered through JavaScript generated by Google Ad Manager. The links all get redirected through this domain — http://googleads.g.doubleclick.net — and you can see from the robots.txt file there that search engines aren’t allowed to crawl it. So, the links pass no authority on to other pages)

Backwards Compatibility Is Important

Overall, I want Google to keep advancing. But it needs to ensure that the changes don’t dramatically cause more work for site owners, as a result. We need a period of backwards compatibility in terms of Google indexing, just as much as it’s helpful with computer operating systems.

For more about the discussions today out of SMX Advanced, also see these selected stories from the live blogging round-up:

• Duplicate Content Solutions & The Canonical Tag – SMX Advanced Coverage 2009, SEO Gadget
• Duplicate Content Solutions & The Canonical Tag, outspokenmedia.com
• Beyond the Usual Link Building, outspokenmedia.com
• Beyond the usual linkbuilding – SMX Advanced 2009, SEO Gadget
• Live from SMX Advanced: Beyond the Usual Link Building, Search Marketing Sage
• Nofollow Makes News at SMX Advanced, BruceClay.com
• You&A With Matt Cutts, outspokenmedia.com

AOL recently soft-launched Love.com, which it advertises as a collection of “topic blogs” that “provide a central view into what the world is loving now.”

But it’s really an SEO play. Give the site any subdomain under the sun, and Love.com will make a new site on-the-fly with content scraped from news sites, blogs, YouTube videos, Twitter messages and more. Like this:

Everybody loves cold sores, right?

Well, not everybody loves Love.com. Says Dave Naylor:

“Approximately 1 bazillion keyword specific subdomains filled with scraped content and ads? Are AOL so desperate that they’re resorting to five year old spamming tricks?”

Aaron Wall shifts some of the blame to Google and Eric Schmidt’s recent statements about brands being the way to clean up the Internet “cesspool”:

“Google’s original strategy with the authority-centric algorithm was a false belief that the emphasis on authority would make the web a deeper and richer experience. New content would need to be better than older established content to outrank it. But as media companies face sharp losses Google is quickly finding out that their authority emphasis is creating a shallower web, where most of the big networks have 2 primary roles: create garbage and recycle garbage.”

Aaron also points out on Twitter that Love.com has more than 100,000 pages in Google’s index and is offering a free month of SEO training to whomever guesses how long it’ll stay above 100k.

For now, Love.com has 350,000 of these “topic blogs” and gets 100,000 unique visitors a week, according to TechCrunch. TC also says a full launch of Love.com is coming later this year.

The Live Search blog posted a comprehensive guide on how to determine if your site is penalized in Live Search and if so, what actions you can take to remedy the issue. I’ll highlight some of the key points in this excellent blog post.

• Microsoft said, “most webmasters who get penalized know why it happened.”
• First confirm your site is penalized by validating your site at Live Search Webmaster Tools and then clicking on the Summary tool and then the Site status section. Blocked “Yes” means you are penalized.
• Figure out what you did wrong by using the various tools to see your crawl issues, malware issues, link issue or something else.
• Microsoft then explains various reasons why a “good guy” can be penalized.
• Once you fix the issue then go to this form and fill it out, plus select the “Content Inclusion Request” option and submit. I do wonder why the form is not also built into Webmaster Tools.

For more details, see the Live Search blog post.

Although Google Maps is now going on 5 years old, it is still in its infancy. It has become a powerful tool for local marketing yet Google’s policy of “launch early and iterate” has created a tool that has been open to an ongoing number of abuses. Recently Google announced that they had closed a major security hole in the Local Business Center that was widely breached by black hat marketers in the Locksmith industry. The recent news that claimed records are still being hijacked has put the immature nature of the Maps product in strong relief.

Google, in pushing the not-yet-finished Maps product to the forefront of search, has created an environment where businesses that would gladly trade their grandmothers for a powerful marketing strategy seemingly romp at will.

PureShear, the locksmith turned Maps black hat & black hat whistle blower, is a product of this weird interaction of the laissez faire & easily accessible marketing power of Google Maps and the hyper-competitive Locksmith industry. He recognized the problem and his tenuous position on the slippery slope of methods that violated Google's guidelines. PureShear attempted to rectify it as best as he understood and subsequently revealed the details of the illicit methods to Google.

He, much more so than Google, put his profession on the line and is paying an appropriate price. He and his listings have been banned from Google Maps. However, it is not clear that Google has dramatically changed its product nor that locksmiths practicing more egregious tactics are being equally punished.

The whistle blower never has it easy in our society. We all recognize their hypocrisy and self interest and they are often shunned by peer and corporation alike. But his wrongdoing and culpability is really much less than that of Google.

Google, in highlighting the Local 10 Pack in universal search results (ten local listings typically appearing next to a small map at the top of search results) proclaimed that the rough-cut Maps and its companion Local Business Center was ready for prime time. Their “release quickly and iterate” thinking put a product in the market place that has not been able to withstand the assaults from black hats.

The strategy, which worked so well in general search, has put real businesses on the firing line. It is not Google who has suffered as a result of this strategy. It has been the small florist, the honest locksmith and the unaware Microsoft.

Despite repeated attempts by the search industry to communicate the need for more controls and oversight, Google has continued to release features into local that are open to abuse. Google has used its release early and iterate tactic to gain market share at the expense of more circumspect competitors and on the fragile incomes of small businesses.

Local search is about accuracy and truth—not relevance, at least as that word is defined in the world of web search. The goal should be to accurately display the who, what, when and where of commerce in the non-virtual world. The practices that Google developed for search relevance worked well when taming the world wide web. Now that the need is to accurately catalog and communicate about the functions and locations of entities in the real world, these policies and practices need to be rexamined and revised to fit the new reality.

Google has offered small business the opportunity to be found via Local. Google is at the forefront of making small and medium businesses aware of the opportunities and benefits of marketing via the internet. This opportunity is a golden one as the internet moves into our lives in the new, meaningful way that is local search. The moment should not be lost. Google should assume the responsibility that comes with their leadership. They should not be guilty of carelessly turning local into the snake oil sales channel of the new millennium.

Google’s response

Google was given this article prior to publication and asked for their comments. Carter Maslan, the Director of Product Management for Google’s Local Search effort had this to say:

“Our goal is to perfect search quality, and business listing accuracy is an absolutely critical element of that goal. This is an ongoing effort and we’re continually working to improve and enhance our listings and what we offer local business owners. Abuses are bad for users, bad for Google and bad for the affected business; we take them seriously and want to tackle the problem in a way that scales to millions of businesses globally. From our experience to-date, we believe that remaining open to the local expertise of business owners and users produces search results that do a far better job of reflecting ‘ground truth.’ And we’re not judging success simply on the net gain in search quality; we’re also working to equip individual businesses with the tools required to ensure that their individual listings are accurate and in their control.”

“In addition to the corrections from business owners, the vast majority of end user edits are done appropriately — you can see some great examples of the improved accuracy resulting from high-quality edits here, here, and here. For example, that newly opened restaurant really wants to be found this weekend – both by the owner and by users – and either the restaurateur or a customer can put it on the map instantly. We want to protect that majority-case benefit while going after minority-case spammers.”

If you run a popular/successful blog, there’s a pretty good chance you’re plenty familiar with hacking and how to deal with it. But hacking comes in many forms and can hit any kind of web site that isn’t secure.

In a post today, Google’s Webmaster Central blog talks about ways to prevent hacking, including using Google search to find out if you’ve been hacked. The site: command can help identify if a hacker has added common spam content to your site when you do a search like

site:searchengineland.com viagra

Most webmasters are probably familiar with and use the site: command often. But Google also suggests something many probably aren’t doing, i.e., using Google Alerts to monitor spammy words and phrases:

“In order to constantly keep an eye on the presence of suspicious keywords on your website, you could also use Google Alerts to monitor queries like:

site:example.com viagra OR casino OR porn OR ringtones

You will receive an email alert whenever these keywords are found in the content of your site.”

Finally, Google suggests using Webmaster Tools to help prevent and identify hacking, too. The “Top Search Queries” panel may show if any pages on your site are ranking for unrelated, spammy words or phrases. And Webmaster Tools is also where you’ll want to submit a reconsideration request if you were hacked and removed from Google’s index.

Recent statements suggest that Google believes it has eliminated the hijacking of claimed business listings in Google Maps, and that hijackings overall (of both claimed and unclaimed listings) are now a rarity.

Speaking last week at SMX West, Google’s Jennifer Chin, also known as “Maps Guide Jen” in the Google Maps Help Forum, said that overall hijacking is “rare” now on Google Maps. I paraphrased Jen’s comments on my Small Business Search Marketing blog:

“We’re confident that hijacking is rare now, and we’ve put in a lot of checks to prevent it. Some cases that look like a hijacking really aren’t.”

Most hijackings on Google Maps involve unclaimed business listings, as Danny Sullivan showed previously when he took over Yahoo’s listing, put it in Microsoft’s name, and turned them into an escort service. The problem here is that Google takes a wiki-like approach to unclaimed business listings, allowing anyone to change them.

The more specific issue surrounds the hijacking of claimed business listings, something that should, in theory, never happen. But in practice, it does.

Mike Blumenthal wrote last week that Google now says they’ve fixed a vulnerability that allowed spammers to take over claimed listings. This was a particular problem in the locksmith industry. From talking with marketers in that industry, Mike learned and described how amazingly simple it was for anyone to take over a claimed listing:

“The ‘blackhat’ would create, in their Local Business Center account, a new local business listing with exactly the same information as an existing Locksmith would. The fields would be identical to the legitimate listing with the exception of a different phone number which Google would verify against. Once the new record was validated, the content would merge with the other data in the cluster but take precedence as the most recent. Once the record was secure in the wrong LBC account, the URL could then be changed.”

Google didn’t specifically explain how they’ve fixed this vulnerability, but using a postcard to verify a phone number change — rather than calling the new phone number — would be one obvious step in the right direction.