How SEO Greed Can Ruin A Perfectly Good Linking Strategy
By now, you are likely aware of the Rap Genius “Tweet In Exchange For Anchor Text” link scheme, hencefore to be known as TieFating. Barry Schwartz reported last week on John Marbach’s exposé of the popular music site, Rap Genius, which had started an “affiliate”…
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Google Has Officially Penalized Rap Genius For Link Schemes
Google has penalized Rap Genius for link schemes this morning. If you go to Google and search for [rap genius], rapgenius.com will not be found on the first page. Instead you will find links to their Twitter account, Facebook page, Wikipedia profile an…
Google Is Looking Into Rap Genius Linking Scheme Masked As Affiliate Program
Yesterday, John Marbach exposed the popular music side, Rap Genuis, for starting an “affiliate” program in order to get unnatural links pointing to their web site. After it was exposed, Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, said, “we’re aware and looking into…
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Matt Cutts Implies Google Is Aware Of SEOs Bribing Bloggers
On Friday night, Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts tweeted a link to a Gawker story named Shady Marketing Firms Are Still Quietly Bribing Bloggers. Matt said, “we’re taking action on hundreds of buyers, dozens of sites, & dozens of spammy writers,” in reference…
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Google’s Matt Cutts On Search Spammers: “We Want To Break Their Spirits”
In episode number 227 of This Week in Google on the TWiT network, Google’s head of search spam Matt Cutts answered some questions from the hosts Leo Laporte and Jeff Jarvis. In one question, Matt explained that Google aims to “break the spirits” of spammers in order to encourage…
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Google’s Matt Cutts: When Commenting On Blog Posts, Try To Use Your Real Name
In a recent video published by Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts talks about are blog comments with links spam? In short, most of the time, commenting and leaving links to your site or resources is not directly spam but like anything, it can be abused. Matt offers some tips on how to…
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How To Leave Anonymous Business Reviews In Google+
For a long time, I’ve had some doctor friends complaining to me that once Google Places changed over to the new Google+ format, all their patients lost the ability to leave anonymous reviews (thus hurting their business and their rankings). They asked me what to do; and I, in turn, asked my…
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The Structured Data Brouhaha At SMX East: Clarifying Contentious Issues
If you attended the Structured Data Superstars session at SMX East earlier this month, you probably witnessed a very brief interchange between myself and Googler Pierre Far at the end of the session. Pierre woke everyone up by stating that some of the semantic markup recommendations I’d…
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Google’s Matt Cutts: User Redirection Based On Location Is Not Spam
Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, posted a video yesterday clearly stating the geo-location or redirecting users based on their location is not spam. Google will not consider a site that uses geo-location techniques as spam. What Google does consider spam is when you redirect…
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Google May Have Penalized Another Major Link Network: Ghost Rank 2.0
Google has significantly penalized another underground link network over the weekend and we believe that one of the link networks targeted by Google is named Ghost Rank 2.0. A few weeks ago, Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, tweeted “Thinking of ghost-related puns for a spam…
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Google’s Matt Cutts: Spammers Rarely Spam Using Multiple ccTLDs
In a recent video answer by Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, Google said that spammers rarely use multiple or mass number of ccTLDs in an effort to spam. This comment came from Matt Cutts when he answered a question on if it is duplicate content to have the same content on an IPv4…
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Google’s Cutts: Auto-Generated Content & Search Results In Our Index Violate Our Guidelines
In a recent video from Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, Matt discussed a pretty obvious spam tactic that Google will take action on. The question was Does Google take action on automatically generated pages that provide no added value? The answer is, yes. Of course, Google is not…
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Demystifying Link Disavowals, Penalties & More
Findings from a recent Google Webmaster Hangout on Air (video) demystify link disavowals, penalties and more. Read on for the official word from John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst from Google and friend to webmasters everywhere. First, Some Background Last month, I introduced Five Steps To…
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Google’s Matt Cutts On Hidden Text Using Expandable Sections: “You’ll Be In Good Shape”
In the latest video answer from Google’s Matt Cutts, the head of Google search spam, Matt answers a question about “hiding” text in JavaScript/AJAX-like expandable menus. Matt said that generally this practice is acceptable within Google’s webmaster guidelines, if and only…
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Five Steps To Clean Up Your Links Like A Techie
You’ve been in business for many years. You may have done it all on your own, or you may have enlisted the aid of unscrupulous SEO “services” to built links for you. Either way, you may be wondering whether you need to conduct a link clean up. This column contains a five-step…
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Google To Take Action Against Fake Search Results Injected Into Browser History
Google made a clear stance late Friday on the Google Webmaster blog that they will not tolerate webmasters pushing deceptive search results to searchers through the use of browser history spamming techniques. The technique uses a method of detecting a click on the browser’s back button. When…
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Bing: Our Search Results Do Not Infect Users, “Malware Study Was Wrong”
Bing has responded to the malware study conducted by AV-TEST earlier this week, claiming that Bing search results led to five times more malware than Google. To that Bing said, “the conclusions many have drawn from the study are wrong.” Why is the study wrong according to Bing? While…
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