You MUST know that Google can instantly tell whether a certain Google user who just left a review is a “real” user or not, right?

Google has access to everything a user does from their web browsing history to their Gmail habits, and they have for years. They even know where you live, so creating a completely fake / new user to leave a single review is stupid.

It looks like Google Boost has undergone a name change to AdWords Express, but it appears everything else has remained the same. (update 7/26 – Google just announced the change)

This morning while logging in to a client’s Google Places account, instead of seeing “create a Boost ad” or “See my Boost Dashboard” I’m seeing it referred to as Adwords Express.

If you look at the Wikipedia definition of a scraper website, it says

“A scraper site is a spam website that copies all of its content from other websites”.

Well Google has a new project, that in my opinion, is basically just a well done Google scraper.

I got a phone call today, that began “I’m with Google…” and of course I was highly skeptical. I take marketing calls for several clients, and this is the standard opening line for multiple unscrupulous SEO companies.

After just a minute, I realized it was the real thing, and he said he was part of the “Feet” team and he was conducting the newly laiunched phase 2 of their outreach program known as Google HotPot, which launched here in Portland in December.

This morning I got an e-mail regarding a domain from Google Webmaster Tools, pointing out that “…some of your pages were using techniques that are outside our quality guidelines”.

Wow! What the…?

It went on to say that “pages from yourdomain.com are scheduled to be removed temporarily from our search results for at least 30 days”.

I just tried to leave a review at Google, while I was logged in, and instead of being given the old review screen, I was asked to set up a new profile. Here, it’s easier to show you…

(*update four months later the name “Hotpot has finally been dumped. What a dumb idea that was anyway, huh?

Last night someone I ran into from my PCC internet marketing class told me about an article in the New York Times this Sunday, concerning a merchant who had seen an increase in his business since he started treating his customers poorly.

The eight page story that came out over the weekend is definitely worth a read, and quite thought provoking.

Matt Cutts is the head of Google’s Webspam team, and each year in the past, he’s been a participant in the “search engine smackdown” at Pubcon.

This year he had the stage all to himself, and I was in the second row for the session as he talked about the current state of Google, and about where they are going in the future,  and then I just sat idly by while he took some Q&A from the audience.

Serious “localization” of the search engine results has been going on for a couple of years now, but this week Google morphed the results again entirely.

A lot has changed since I began learning about local search in 2007, and as you likely know by now, Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. have all been aggressively separating their local listings from the organic search results for some time now.

With 100% certainty, I can say that Google Webmaster Tools Malware warnings are not arriving consistently, and there’s a breakdown in their system.

In the last two months, there have been three instances where although malware has been found, no malware notification message ever arrived in the message center at all, despite the fact that they ARE identifying malware.

Google Instant was rolled out to the world yesterday, which changes the way search results appear.

Rather than waiting for you to push a button that says “search”, as you type, search results will simply appear, based on whatever you’re typing.

I just found out that a YouTube Strike is is on my video channel, and that certainly can’t be good!

Over the past few months I’ve been using a simple embed code from YouTube to share the videos over at SEO Automatic, and it’s been easy enough.