The topic of paid links is in the headlines once again, and ironically, Google is the accused. As WebProNews previously reported, Google was recently caught up in a controversy after it violated its own Webmaster Guidelines as part of a marketing campaign for Google Chrome.
Update 2: Matt Cutts gave WebProNews another exclusive interview, in which he gave some more details about Caffeine (among other things. It's only hitting one data center before the holidays, and it isn't even live quite yet. Google will roll it out to more data centers in January.
A recent SEOBook article highlights a good deal of evidence that Google is placing more emphasis on brands than ever before. Author Aaron Wall takes an in depth look at how Google's algorithm has evolved over his own SEO career, and points out some hints Google has provided in the media as to where its headed before answering a few questions from me for this article.
In a recent report, Hitwise said that the length of search queries has increased over the past year. Longer search queries, averaging searches of 5+ words in length, have increased 10% from January '08 to January '09 they noted.
Ask has an interesting blog post up interpreting this data, and the gist of it is summed up with this paragraph from it:
I initially intended to piece together a retrospective article about the happenings in the search industry and SEO from throughout the year, based on our coverage of it., much like what I did with online video and online music. I quickly realized this would be a monumental task given that something like 90% of what we cover is search or SEO related.
Aaron Wall knows a thing or two about SEO. He's been in this game as long as I can remember. He's the brains behind the hugely popular SEOBook. When he talks about ways of getting links, people looking to increase their search engine rankings should pay attention. Our own Mike McDonald scored an interview with him out in Las Vegas while attending the PubCon conference. Video of that can be seen below.
The number of internet marketing tools launched over the past couple years has been staggering. Many of them are both free and highly valuable. SEO, which was once considered a bit of a seedy niche, has grown with search to become a mainstream marketing practice, with...
Author and search optimization expert Aaron Wall headed to Google's Knol, as did many SEO professionals, to create a page. He doesn't sound happy about what he found.
Aaron Wall put up a post about a new Google filter that causes people with high ranking terms to be bumped down to position #6. There is also a thread at Webmaster World about this phenomenon. This is still reasonably speculative in nature, but there are a lot of people who have seen this.
Let the bargaining begin. It's a natural stage of mourning. As Google shuffles loose the paid links from its algorithms, SEOs are cycling past their initial denial, their outrage, and have begun negotiating. Stay tuned; depression and acceptance are likely to follow.
