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.

If you have a brick and mortar location, whether you’re a single independent business, or part of a national franchise, there are specific steps you MUST take to be found by your potential customers.

Late last year I summarized some local search ranking nuggets of knowledge that came from local search guru David Mihm, and I learned more that one night than I learned at two days in California at SES Local 2007.

Just last month I moderated the session he gave on local search for SEMpdx, and if you were there, you’d know that earlier this year, Google began really pushing local, and for the past few months, even when searching for phrases without city names, Google has been mixing in local too, if they “determine your intent” to be a local search.

I don’t know if anyone saw this weeks changes coming – I wonder if it had much to do with Google’s Marisa Meyer moving to their “location based services”?

What’s New Today?
This week though, we’re not only seeing integrated local results, we’re actually seeing INDIVIDUAL MERGED results, where the organic listings and the Google Places results are seamlessly combined into a single listing!

Check out this 3 minute video – (The video player will maximize)

There’s still no consistency from city to city, or even industry to industry, but it’s pretty interesting nonetheless – don’t you?

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.

Although I HAVE seen it happen while I’m not logged into Google, I’ve also heard that it’s only supposed to affect those who are logged into their Google accounts. If you haven’t seen it, here’s a fast look -

Is Google Instant Just Special Effects?

There’s already been a very good summary written about the features and there’s lots of speculation over whether this is a good or bad thing for users and for SEO’s, but the bottom line here is that it DOES change the game quite  a bit, and it changes it in different ways for different people, depending on who they are.

Since this is my blog, here’s what I think about Google Instant Search…

How Will Google Instant Search Affect End Users?
Google Instant Search is the logical extension of Google Suggest, which gives you other search term suggestions right in the box as you type. Now though, instead of just offering suggested search terms, the results (and advertisements) will actually change too.

Some people will find Instant Search distracting while others may find that it provides a faster way to find what they want.

Peronally, I think in the long run, as people get used to it, it’s use is going to become second nature, and people will come to depend on it, but it will also broaden their thoufght process and will teach users to search more precisely, and with more specific search terms.

How Will of Google Instant Affect PPC Advertisers?
When I first saw this video several weeks ago, the very first thing that crossed my mind was, “What will this do to the impression counts in PPC campaigns?”

Decisions on pay per click advertising campaigns are based upon how often people click your ad, versus how many times it displays for a given search query. Knowing the accuracy of those numbers at least as accurate as they ever
have been) is a major concern, and fortunately Google has answered that clearly here – http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=187309

When someone searches using Google Instant, ad impressions are counted in these situations:

* The user begins to type a query on Google and clicks anywhere on the page (a search result, an ad, a spell correction, a related search).

This means that until someone has completed their typing, UNLESS they move off the search box and click your ad it won’t be counted as an impression.

* The user chooses a particular query by clicking the Search button, pressing Enter, or selecting one of the predicted queries.

In other words this is normal behavior, and nothing has changed. Pressing the button or selecting one of the suggestions count as an impression/

* The user stops typing, and the results are displayed for a minimum of three seconds.

This is self-explanatory but it’s really the only unknown piece of the pie. I’d like to believe that most people can beat the 3 seconds per letter deadline, but again, there are a lot of hunt and peck people out there. Is 3 seconds long enough?

Interestingly, the Google Webmaster Tools blog did mention today that after rollout of of Google Instant Search, your impression counts may appear to be skewed, so we’ll have to wait and see.

How will of Google Instant Affect SEOs and Organic Search?
For more interesting to me than PPC is how people find things organically, and I think this is going to be a plus for users, as well as for SEO’s.

Contrary to this article I think that this change in of Google Instant technology actually opens up the “long tail” of search even more, and will provide a greater opportunity for their content to be seen in the SERPs.

All over the web, people are giving their opinions over whether of Google Instant is a good or bad thing. Some even claim (ridiculously) it will be the death of SEO, and others in the media are parroting that sentiment!

As Matt Cutts said in his post about Google Instant Search yesterday,  “The best SEOs recognize, adapt, and even flourish when changes happen.”

Think about it – As people type, Google Instant makes the results and advertisements change before their eyes, more and content will have a chance to float to the top, for more and more laser targeted queries.

As someone searches for anything, the organic results will be changing multiple times, with a different #1 for each letter added to the search string.

Of course as people start to search more specifically, of Google Instant will show more and more specific suggestions, and people will arrow down to the “correct” choice too, so knowing these phrases, and utilizing them wisely into your content will make sense, of course.

What will be the Effect of Google Instant on Keyword Research?

Whether you’re doing research for organic or PPC, you’re simply going to have to step it up if you haven’t already. We need to know what those “suggest” phrases are, but Googles keyword tools do NOT give you that information.

Google does license out that API to others though, and the first tool I ever found for “Google suggest harvesting” was this one – http://www.promediacorp.com/suggester/ which is completely free.

Using suggestions from that tool, we were able to create lists, put phrases into Google Adwords, and after just a few hours of impression counts, we knew what was the most popular.

Yesterday, this post covered some other free tools that pull their data from Google Suggest, and I especially liked trying the two visualization tools recommended, What Do You Suggest and Seer for brainstorming ideas.

So What Keyword Tool Gathers the Best Suggestions?
Back in June, I ran across what I thought was going to be the Holy Grail of keyword tools, called Keyword Snatcher.

Not only would it compile a list based on every word with every letter combination from Google, but it ALSO used Yahoo and Amazon suggest too, gathering even more phrases.

It would also allow you to dig multiple levels deep, record the number (1-10) of where the phrase was on their suggestion list, and it even allowed for export.

The DOWN side of that tool though, was that there was no filtering, leaving you stuck with literally thousands of irrelevant phrases. The task of cleaning up the list into something useful was simply overwhelming.

So what’s the answer? For us, it’s been Keywords Magnet software, which seems to do it all, INCLUDING great filtering. There might be something come along that does the job better next month, but for now, nothings better that i’m aware of.

By the way, did you know that instant Search is not even Google’s idea? Yeah, me either…

“Universal Search” was implemented by Google quite a while ago, yet the only visible change to the search results has been occasional interspersing of some video or news.

Search was not really “revolutionized” or “changed as we knew it”, and most users have absorbed the subtle addition without even noticing.

Likewise, “personalization” has been assimilated into Googles search with only search industry professionals even noticing or caring.

Then, (what seems like ages ago), Google began implementing local results into the serps if the user searched with a geographic term, such as “dry cleaners Portland”, and just over a year ago changed from showing just three, to showing a full 10 local results.

Just a few weeks ago, Google began “determining your intent” to search locally even if you REALLY did not intend to. That means that a search for “dry cleaners” began showing the local maps results whether you wanted them to or not, and again, most end users really didn’t even notice.

This week another seismic shift took place, although in their usual fashion, Google is rolling it in very subtly, and the casual user may not even notice. They’ve added a “Show Options” link above your search results.

After hitting that link, there are a whole host of ways to filter the search results, and this is really a better implementation of “universal search”, in my opinion.

One of the new options would be of most interest to search marketers, called the Wonder Wheel, and this video takes a look at it more closely…

Google Suggest has been around for quite awhile now, but at the moment I’m noticing it take effect on the regular Google homepage.

Basically, you just begin type in something, and Google will pre-fill beneath your text, trying to guess what you’re looking for, showing you related searches, and showing you the number of results it will find.

I’ve only seen it before by going through Google labs, here at this page

A moment ago I did a search for something, and the search box popped down to bring me suggestions like this, when I begin to type “Internet marketing” -

Is anyone else seeing that?

It’s taking place whether or not I am logged into my Google account…

Last week as I was writing “Beyond the top 10 SEO Factors” I realized that it was either going to have to be a novel, or I was going to have to follow up quickly with a second post, which is what this is.

In the case of the suggestions below, some are based on proven facts, and there’s a little bit of theory, some actually still under debate, but it’s my belief that they are all accurate, worth the effort, and solidly white hat, and you can count on this page being updated if anything changes.

21. Canonical Issues – The www.vs non www
Google sees subdomains as separate domain names, and the www prefix is just another subdomain. Therefore, it’s important to remove any possible confusion on their part by eliminating one of the two versions from displaying at all. My own preference is to always use the www.

Inside Google Webmaster tools, you can go to your domain account, then go to Tools and to “set preferred domain” which will let them know that you would prefer to use the www.

This step is not enough on its own however, (some people are even skeptical that this works at all) and it’s best to take care of it at the source, on your server, by simply not allowing the duplicate version to show in the first place.

On an Apache server using mod rewrite, I have placed the following code in MY .htaccess file to eliminate the appearance of the non www version of any page. You can do the same, (but using your OWN DOMAIN NAME)

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^pdxtc.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.pdxtc.com/$1 [L,R=301]

If you’re running your domain on a Windows server, see the next item, because just like everything else on a Windows server, it’s a far bigger pain in the neck.

22. Windows Servers – Canonical issues & Page versions
Besides needing to be rebooted all the time, and being a general pain in the neck to work on, Windows servers have their own unique issues when it comes to canonicalization and content duplication.

Since there’s no such thing as an .htaccess file, there is no easy and quick fix to the www vs. non www issue, and there’s also a whole host of other problems that can come up.

In many cases I have seen websites that have multiple versions of the same page, depending on whether or not capitalization was used in the URL, or depending on which designer may have created any certain
link on the site based on their personal style.

Some designers will use a capital letter for the first letter in a file name, some designers will use capitals for every word in the file name, and some will make things simple by never capitalizing filenames, (which is my preference).

For example, these may all be meant to display the same page, but to the search engines they are completely different, they can be the source of the duplicate content, and I’ve even seen them end up with different PageRank and inbound link counts -

http://www.domain.com/PageName.asp

http://www.domain.com/Pagename.asp

http://www.domain.com/pagename.asp

If you’re running your site on a Windows server you can resolve these problems by becoming best friends with a program called ISAPI Rewrite 2.0 – URL Rewriting for Windows Server IIS -

That program will allow you to create and implement the proper rules, to avoid duplication of page names with capital letters, and removal of the www. subdomain issue.

Learning exactly how to use it is your problem though, and I find it far easier to simply avoid hosting on a Windows server altogether

23. Bloated Code and Poor Load Times
Besides the obvious, (like not putting high-resolution large photos on your page) there are other things that can slow down the loading of a webpage, and just like most people, search engines absolutely hate slow webpages.

With all of the cool stuff we’re adding to our sites and blogs these days, including multimedia, tracking software, and even certain forms of advertisements, the code on some websites can become so bloated,
that it overwhelms the actual content in not only load times, but in actual volume too.

I’ve looked at the source code of webpages before, and literally had to scroll more than halfway before even getting to the first real word of actual text on the page. This is really a bad thing for the search engines.

I’m certainly not claiming that I know specifics, like the “magic ratio of code to text is 17%” that Google considers to be “optimal”, but I do know that having too much code is a serious problem.

Be sure to make use of include files to call your scripts wherever possible, and just clean up or take out all of your unnecessary code.

Scroll line by line through your templates or pages, and see what can be removed or can be called from an external file. You would really be surprised what you can live without, and how it might speed load times.

A great tool for evaluating your site is a Firefox extension called YSlow , which is used in conjunction with Firebug. It’s detailed analysis can be quite helpful in improving your site performance, without having to guess at various solutions.

24. Intelligent use of rel= “nofollow” – a.k.a. Sculpting
One of the primary ways Google works is that it passes PageRank through link text, from one page to another, and it also assigns relevancy to the landing page based on what words are used for the anchor text, and even what words are surrounding that anchor text.

The more pages on the Web that link to a specific page with a certain phrase, the more Google believes that page is “important” and should higher for that phrase.

This is standard operating procedure for Google, and you’ll know the day that ever changes, because the download page for Adobe Acrobat reader will no longer rank #1 for the phrase “click here”.

Put simply, some pages simply were not meant to rank, like your site’s privacy policy, security policy, member login pages, and possibly lots of other things that only exist for the users benefit, but are definitely not something you want to waste your PageRank on.

Therefore, an effective tactic to prevent wasting your “Link Juice”, is the use of the rel= “nofollow” tag. Google does not pass PageRank through no followed links, and that’s why people call no follow tags “link condoms”.

Proper implementation of this tag would look like this -
<a href=”http://www.domain.com/” rel= “nofollow”>anchor text</a>

I’ve always believed that you are far better off ensuring that the only link that’s followed is one that has the appropriate anchor text. That’s why on the homepage of my own blog, the permalink title to each post is normal, but the “read more” link is rel= “nofollow”.

Some might say this is a completely unnecessary, and in fact it was at Searchfest 2008 that I first heard “officially” that the search engines will only follow the first link they come to on a page.

I heard it from Rand Fishkin, and until that point it was always my assumption that unless it was no followed, all links passed juice.

However, even though Rand made it clear that it seems to be only the first instance of any link on a page was followed, I still don’t want to risk wasting my PageRank through that incorrect text just in case Rand is wrong, or in case Google changes the rules of the game, so I still use it.

*update – June 2009 - Matt Cutts from Google announced officially, that a link which is nofollowed, will *NOT* allow it’s link juice to be siphoned off to the other links on the page.  Bad news for the heavy link sculptors and especially for us, and I had to kill off our cool project wor WordPress, the SEO Automatic NoFollowizer

26. Image Links all nofollowed
Where do your image links go? Are they represented equally by text? You’re going to be far better off using rel= “nofollow” on any image links in your header, your menus, or pretty much anywhere else throughout the site, and instead ensuring that the same page you are linking to is represented elsewhere by good anchor text.

This isn’t “cheating” or “black hat”, it’s just good common sense. If intelligent use of the nofollow attribute is one of the few advanced SEO tactics still available, then why wouldn’t someone make use of it? Matt Cutts has already stated publicly that there’s no such thing as an “over optimization” penalty to Google, so it just seems logical to me.

Also, if Rand Fishkin is correct, (see item 24 above) then this is suddenly even more important, since you’re not getting any of your own text link love for anything that might be represented by an image on the page that’s appearing before a text link.

26. Keep Your Content Updated
On a large website, once a page is created, it can sit for months or even years before anything changes on it at all, and I think this is a mistake.

Adding a dynamic component to your website that will add or change content on regular basis is a good way to freshen your page, and appear to the search engines as if the information is more current.

The easiest way I know of to do this is through the use of RSS feeds, which will allow you to have news or strategic items of interest appear automatically, each time the source is updated.

In an ideal situation, your own original content would be used to change information on these pages. However, the lazy way out is to just use subject relevant industry news feeds from other sources.

A basic example would be the top right section of this blog, where my most recent blog posts freshen the content of every single page on the entire blog.

Another example of this in action, this time delivering more targeted and page relevant content, would be on my Search marketing speaker page, where I have the RSS feed of my “Public Speaking” category feeding below the contact form.

Every time I add a new post to that particular category of my blog, the content on that speaking page changes, even though I never have to touch it manually.

Depending on how your website is designed there are multiple ways to add RSS feeds, but we created a tool about a year ago that is versatile enough to allow you to add RSS feeds to any website.

27. Leverage your older links
I guarantee that you would be surprised at how much control you might have over some of the links you have obtained in the past, simply by contacting the webmaster or business in question, and asking them to make a change for you.

Let’s say you have a link from another local business that is pointing to your homepage, but it just looks like this http://www.domain.com. Since you already have a relationship with them, and they have recommended you with a link, do you really think it would be that difficult to get them to give you decent anchor text, or perhaps link to a more relevant (deeper) page in your site?

What about getting them to allow you to provide them with a unique article, giving you perhaps 2 or 3 different inbound links to deeper landing pages with the anchor text of your choice?

It’s far easier to contact the webmaster of a site that is already linking to you and get them to improve upon your existing link, than it is to try to get a new link.

28. Build links to your links
Have you ever done some link building for your own backlinks? If you have an opportunity to strengthen a page that already has an inbound link to you, then you can make the most of it by linking back to it from your domain and other sites too.

For example, if you’re a local plumber, and you’ve gained inbound links from your local Chamber of Commerce and your state Plumbers Association, then take advantage of the opportunity to strengthen those particular pages by sending them inbound links from not only your own domain but from anywhere else you might have the opportunity.

If you’re writing a profile about yourself or company to display somewhere else on the web, be sure to link not only to your own site, but mention these relevant associations that you belong to and link to your own profile pages.

Boosting the visibility (and PageRank) of any page that already links to you, will then benefit you directly through their links back to you. This is precisely why, on the left side of my blog, in most cases, those “association” links go to my individual profile pages, rather than just the homepage of whatever association I’m linking to.

29. Harvest your own Low Hanging Fruit
Many websites often have desirable rankings lurking on page 2 of the search results, and may not even be aware that they exist. This is because so few people ever click through to page 2, and many bacic stats programs only show the most popular referring key phrases. This is a huge area of missed opportunity.

Determining what phrases your website ranks for on page 2 is made easy with a free tool called SEODigger, which allows you to put in a domain name, then quickly see all of the phrases for which that website ranks, as well as the Wordtracker/Overture data for each phrase. Typically the results are from data 3 to 5 weeks old, but it can still be very useful for identifying that low hanging fruit.

How do you move a phrase from page 2 to page 1? Well, aside from developing more extra links to those pages with proper anchor text, take a look at the next item for an easy bump.

30. Drink your own Link Juice
Looking back at your old pages, your old blog posts, and even blog categories or archived months, you can typically find pages with decent PageRank that you can exploit to your own benefit.

To spell it out more clearly, I’m suggesting that you go into some of your older pages, and add or edit some links with good anchor text pointing to critical areas of your own site that you wish to improve.

If you want to know exactly which pages on your website would be best suited for adding your own internal link to another section, then simply use Google to do a site: search for that particular phrase, and Google will tell you by order of those results which are the most valuable.

For example, if I do this search at Google, site:www.searchcommander.com ppc panagement I can see that I have five pages that rank for PPC management (yuck).

By going back in and editing some text links into the content of the other pages, all pointing at my most desirable search result, it’s highly likely that I can improve my own ranking for that phrase. (But I won’t, because I hate managing PPC).

(It’s important to note that if you search your own domain on Google for a phrase, and get no results, then you have a bigger problem.)

Once again, please keep in mind that the items on this list are all just pieces of the pie, and and no single tactic or strategy is going to make or break you.

By combining these items with what’s in my first two articles, Top 10 SEO Factors and Beyond the Top 10 SEO Factors you should have quite an arsenal that will put you ahead of the competition. At that point, it should pretty much just be creating great content and generating links that can become your focus.

This sounds to me like a great thing, being able to bypass all of the bureaucracy involved in bringing fast high speed wireless to rural areas with land lines.

There’s a reason we in the United States are NOT the worlds leader in high speed internet, much less wireless, and in my opinion, it has to do with payola, and not a lack of technology.

Searchfest 2008, Oregon’s annual search marketing conference will be held on Monday, March 10, 2008, at the Oregon Zoo’s Cascade Crest Banquet Center.

We’ve now got the prices posted, the sign-up form live, and I’m sorry, but it’s already too late for you to be the first person to sign up…

That’s okay thougfh, because it’s not too late to save some money, and if you’re already a member of SEMpdx you can save 50% compared to the door price for non-members!

These early bird discount prices will only be good through the first of February, because we’re budgeting now for headcount, catering etc. and so the sooner you get in, the more money you can save.

Here are the confirmed speakers so far, and Rand Fishkin, from SEOmoz will be giving the keynote presentation -

* Paul Colligan
* Jeff Pruitt, SEMPO, iCrossing
* Stoney deGeyter
* Matt McGee
* John Andrews
* Kevin Wilk – Yahoo
* Marshall Simmonds, New York Times
* Dan Harbison, Portland Trailblazers
* Ben Hanna, VP Marketing, Business.com
* LinkShare
* Brian Schmidt – Google

Sign up today with the early bird discount and don’t miss this rare Portland opportunity…

Good links are hard to come by, but if you throw enough against the wall, something always sticks.

By regularly submitting to web directories, making sure your blog is pinging news services, submitting your RSS feeds, submitting content to article directories, and even by linking to your own internal pages with good anchor text, you’re going to continue to grow those inbound links.

“Rented” links are another story, and Google’s position is that paid links are definitely bad. They are aggressively fighting to identify and devalue any inbound links that are determined to be paid, and they are penalizing sites that are selling the links.There’s no denying that it still works, because they can’t catch everything, but as time goes on, they’ll catch more and more. For now, there are still too many ways to “fly under the radar” and they can’t possibly catch them all, but if you’ve been buying your links, it’s time to consider a more long term strategy.

What Google can do, and what they ARE doing, is “penalizing” websites that are selling links without the nofollow tag, and they are penalizing them by lowering their green toolbar PageRank.

At this point, Google has not yet lowered these sites rankings, but in my opinion, this was sort of a warning shot across the bow to warn those selling links that they should stop, or that’s next.

I’ve personally paid for links for my own sites before, and some even on a monthly basis, because I believe they have value in the traffic they might bring. It’s a safe bet that if Google “catches” those sites selling links, then any value they have for my ranking will be removed, if it hasn’t been already.

In my opinion, Google can never penalize someone for buying links. Otherwise, an entire cottage industry would pop up buying links for your competition. Instead, what Google does is devalue an inbound link that they determine to be paid and put in place only for ranking purposes.

I believe that the way that they devalue the juice of an inbound link is not by devaluing the link itself, but by devaluing the overall PageRank of the site that is passing along the link to you – i.e. – that makes your link worth a bit less.

The bottom line is that without some sort of link building going on, you’re just not going to be pulling ahead of the competition, and you have to try everything within the Webmaster guidelines.

It’s also extremely important to build links to many different pages on your website, and with many different variations of anchor text too. There’s never a reason to focus all of your link building activity on a single web page, or with identical anchor text. When a site naturally acquires links, they come in all different flavors, to different areas of the site. The key to success is to appear “natural”, so be sure to diversify tour targets and your anchor text accordingly.

Linking to others, commenting (intelligently) on forums and blogs, writing great content of your own, and creating useful tools are only a few ways you can make links happen. Here are a few other link building ideas that might spur your imagination…

With a typical PR update, the data used is usually older, and it’s always been my belief that it’s at least three months old. With today’s update, however, I’m finding some pages that have PR that are a little bit fresher…

For example, nearly every single post on SEMpdx from September now has some PR. Here’s the last post on the SEMpdx blog from October 1 that has PR – Win a free pass to SES LA

But here’s one from October 4th that has 33 Sphinns, (presumably a lot of links too), and it’s still showing a PR 0.

Finally, here’s a post from October 8 which we KNOW has a ton of inbound links from highly relevant and respected websites that still shows a PR zero.

So, isn’t is reasonable to assume that the toolbar has been updated with data pulled sometime between October 1 and October 4th?

Gee, knowing this to be the case can give a bit of an advantage to those that know how to determine the value of an inbound link, don’t ya think?

What’s the newest page you see anywhere on the web that has PR?

Here, please allow me to leave the first comment…
Stop obsessing over PR you idiot; it means nothing for your ranking and you should not waste your time worrying about it (unless you’re placing links…). Now get back to work! – Scott H. –

I’m not sure when they added this but I just happened to notice there are new columns inside Google’s Webmaster tools.

If you go to statistics – top search queries, you’ll see that you can now see an overall percentage number for what percentage of your search terms that your site appears for,

and for how much traffic each search term drove to your site from Google -

There’s even a scale along the top now that shows you a history dating back six months -

*ahh – that’s not working – perhaps the feature needs to exist for 6 months first?

Is there is some competition going on between the team at Analytics, and the team at Webmaster tools?

I’m finding more and more useful items inside Webmaster tools every time I poke around… How long can it be before these two departments are joined together, or at least made accessible from each other’s admin areas?

That would create a huge timesaver – Maybe one could just report selected statistics to the other one?

Thanks again, Google.

The entire search engine marketing industry is quaking in fear and speculation as you read this, and the organic ranking of many sites is now subject to penalty at Google’s whim.

The debate over paid links seems to be coming to a frenzied head this summer, especially since the SES San Jose paid links session called “Are Paid Links Evil?” in August.

It’s been nearly six full months since a Google Toolbar PageRank update now, and some people have speculated that this might even be the end of the green bar as we know it.

Webmasters are now reporting drops in ranking, and insiders at Google seem to be confirming that yes, not only are they trying to discount the value of paid links and the ranking benefit they may impart, but they are actually penalizing the organic search ranking of sites that sell links.

As of Friday, the official word from Google came down that selling links on your site can lead to a penalty. The key work there is “CAN”, because it’s not happening to everyone equally.

To fully understand what is going on and how this is changing the industry right before our very eyes, you really need to grab a cup of coffee and spend some time reading these three articles by Jennifer Laycock.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Okay, now that you’ve read those, you must have your own opinion, right? Well here’s mine…

This is total crap. The hypocrisy of Google “allowing” link sales and even spammy doorway pages from sites like Forbes, while penalizing the small site for making a few bucks is ridiculous. Even when BMW got penalized they were right back in a few days.

Cronyism and antitrust issues aside, the “FUD factor” – creating Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt - (as seen in Michael Gray’s SES San Jose presentatoion) seems to be the only weapon Google has at their disposal for influencing the behavior of te majority of Webmasters and in many cases, it’s working.

Way back in 2004, Jeremy Zawodny from Microsoft mentioned the “… increasingly PageRank driven advertising economy…” and the writing was on the wall even then. Has nobody at Google seen this coming?

By being based so heavily on a VISIBLE commodity, (the green PR bar) their search algorithm is flawed, and Google is powerless to stop it any other way.

Sure, they can identify the big networks that many of us have come to know and use, and those can and should be filtered out of the algorithm to improve the integrity of the search results. You can’t begrudge them that, since it’s their search engine and they should be able to do what they want.

Unfortunately, the hypocrisy factor is heavy, and in our world, money talks. Picking on the small guys while leaving the big sites unscathed seems to be acceptable. If Google had any real commitment to search integrity they would be applying this penalty evenly, but that’s just not the way the world works, I guess.

In my opinion the only thing that makes sense at this point is for Google to to remove the green PageRank indicator from the toolbar.

Even if that was just a temporary solution, while they continue to improve the algorithm, that would effectively shut down any incentive to buy links almost immediately.

As I said in my post a couple of weeks ago, asking if this was the end of visible PageRank…

“if you don’t want someone to sell something, then don’t consistently tell them how much it’s worth.”

I picked a great day to drop my Blackberry in downtown Portland… One of the best phones I’ve ever had, (8703e) bounced once then landed in a 3 inch deep puddle.

It worked for about a minute, then the screen started flickering, then it made a little fizzing sound, and that’s the end. I KNOW I should have dried it out in a bag of rice for three days, or something, but c’mon, i had to try it, right?

Anyway, I’ll had a $50 insurance replacement here tomorrow, and it stinks going without a phone, but I didn’t stop and get another one because I just don’t know too much about what’s available.

I really do like my Blackberry, but there are a ton of amazing options coming out from Verizon, and at this time I have no reason to leave the. coverage is good, and the customer service is great, but i have to do some research before I drop a bundle on a new toy.

Not to mention that Google phone is probably coming soon, and if the Iphone were to start coming with a slide out keyboard, I’d probably want to check that out too. So many choices…

Most important for me in a new phone will be a Qwerty keyboard at least as large as my Blackberry, and now that our web hosting server supports Exchange, it might be nice to try a Windows mobile device again.

There are so many options right now I barely know where to start, so I figured I would do without my phone for a day while I investigate some of the options, and wait for my replacement to arrive.