Friday Round-Up - Facebook "Friending" and Google Patents

Google published research this week showing what proportion of Facebook users follow or "friend" brands on the site and the reasons why.

The research suggests that for 25% of users, the biggest motivation for "friending" brands is to receive discounts on products.

The second most common reason given was "to show others I support the brand" (18%) and next with 10% were users who answered "it's fun and entertaining."

Why are SEO's Hated? - Paul Carpenter's blog post p gives a number of good reasons such as:

• People cannot tell the difference between spam and good SEO
• Sites which SEOs work on rank higher than others who think they should be in the top spot because they are superior and don't understand why Google cannot tell
• We make content writers speak the language of searchers
• We make web developers re-write their code and re-architect their sites.

Can Google change the content of your website?  A patent application by Google with the catchy title of "Enhanced document browsing with automatically generated links to relevant information" seems to suggest that when a website page is loaded, Google (possibly using the Google Toolbar) will insert links into the content on the page. 

It would be desirable to provide improved techniques for enhancing document browsing by providing automatically generated links to relevant information to the reader. 

Other documents submitted to the US Patent Office suggest that Google has been taking the idea seriously since 2006.  Read more here for a good overview