SEO News Blog

Danny highlighted how many aggregators of aggregators and content cesspools are bogusly clogging up Google’s search results with sites that would be viewed as spam if the owner was not socially well connected:

You kind of feel sorry for Joe Schmoe. Build a name by once having worked for Apple or by having written a few marketing books, and you seem to get much better treatment than Joe would get if he pulled the same SEO play stunts.

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Our friends at Google are kind enough to outline on their site the do’s and don’ts of SEO. They call it their Webmaster Guidelines and it’s become the 10 Commandments of SEO.

When one reads it one can’t help but view it as a best practices list and really - there isn’t much anyone can say about it to claim it’s a bad set of rules. Basically it reads, “Don’t cheat and you’ll be OK.” which can be likened to the seventh commandment, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.”
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Google’s leaked documents defining spam state:

Final Notes on Spam
When trying to decide if a page is Spam, it is helpful to ask yourself this question: if I remove the scraped (copied) content, the ads, and the links to other pages, is there anything of value left? if the answer is no, the page is probably Spam.

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I was not going to leak the document publicly until others did and it was cited by other popular sources, but given that SEL blogged about the remote quality rater document, now is a fine time to mention the best weekend reading any SEO could wish for…here are two versions of the 43 page confidential Google document: HTML& PDF.

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If…

people would not notice it when Google removes your site from the search results

Google can clone your business model without paying writers to produce content or carrying physical inventory

… then your site is spam. Maybe not by today’s standards, but eventually.

As the web evolves, a once whitelisted site can become a site that is easy to penalize. Evolve with the web, or grow irrelevant by the day.

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Posted by randfish

For the last several years, we’ve had various implementations of Google’s “sitelinks” feature, the list of pages on a domain that usually appear when a branded or navigational query are performed in the engines. The latest updates to this visual display have brought a total of up to 8 internal links, plus a “more results from domain.com > Read the rest of this entry »

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Posted by Mel Gray

Just a little under two weeks ago, we received numerous reports that a very large number of sites had experienced a sudden drop in Page Rank. Many immediately began claiming that Google had rolled out an update for its rank formula to penalize for paid links. Others played down these reports offering that their own sites had experienced no change at all.
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The people from SEO Digger recently put together some research on search spam. Some of the terminology they use (like using the word illicit) is inaccurate, but the trends they discovered align well with what one would expect.

Spam Dominates Longtail Adult & Pill Search Queries

In high money niches, spam sites tended to dominate longer search queries while having less exposure in search results for shorter queries. View the below graph with adult, pills, dating, cars, gifts, and casinos. It shows the normalized density of spam sites ranking in Google by 1, 2, and 3 word queries.
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Google tries to scare you away from renting links, but their paid link detection algorithms are at best laughable. Which is why Matt Cutts puts so much effort into trying to scare you about bought links.

_________.com has repetitive and near machine generated sounding content, like

Loan calculators are made of different calculation types. In fact, for calculating the same type of loans, a large number of different calculator programs exist that will help you think about your loan and analyze your loans from different angles.

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