Libyan unrest Twitter mashup

@Arasmus has created this map using reports from trusted accounts on Twitter. Each post is reviewed manually before being added to the map.  There is currently no independant media in Libya, so Arasmus's mashup is perhaps one of only a handful of methods for understanding the full extent of the Libyan protests.

Google Maps enthusiast Virender Ajmani has created a realtime mashup which gives live tweets from Bahrain, Libya, Iran and Egypt.

Ajmani has also created a Google Maps mashup of tweets from the area hit by the recent earthquake in New Zealand.

Major American online retailer punished for black hat SEO

In the months leading up to Christmas 2010, J. C. Penney was out-performing all retailer's websites for hundreds of search phrases such as skinny jeans, furniture, tablecloths and hundreds more.  They even ranked higher than manufacturers such as Samsonite for the manufacturer's own products.

The New York Times asked Doug Pierce an SEO expert from Blue Fountain Media to look at the reasons for J. C. Penney's success in the search engine listings.  He found that the company had been using techniques which Google regards as deceptive and had embarked on "the most ambitious attempt to game Google's search results that he had ever seen."

Somebody appears to have bought thousands of links from hundreds of websites all over the internet.  They all point back to the jcpenney.com website and use link text which contains the keywords and phrases that the company would like to rank highly for in search engine searches.

Yahoo's Site Explorer is showing 139,000 links which point to the site.  Here are three examples


The link text "Furniture Sales" on a Chemistry News website.

 

The link text "School Backpack" on a diet and slimming website.

 

The link text "Peronalised Jewellry" on a website about travelling in China

Following the New York Times article, Google has reviewed the  J. C. Penney site and given them a manual penalty in all their search engine listings.  Where they were number 1 for most phrases it is now difficult to find them in the top 100.

J. C. Penney's response was to claim that it was

"in no way involved in the posting of the links discussed in the article. We did not authorize them and we were not aware that they had been posted.  To be clear, we do not tolerate violations of our policies regarding natural search, which reflect Google’s guidelines."

They fired their SEO firm SearchDex.  They also said

"Our natural search program has never included paid web links, like those described in the article.  It is against our policy, and the fact is, we don’t need to them to build our Google rankings.  We have millions of links from our web partnerships and programs that already gave us link popularity.  These included links from our 1.4 million Facebook fans"

They later back-tracked and admitted that they do not actually have 1.4 million links from Facebook pages.  Read this great post on Search Marketing Wisdom for more details about the Penney responses.

Sites with original content given boost

As part of Google's war against web spam, Matt Cutts has announced that a small tweak to the Google algorithm should see sites which copy other sites content pushed down the rankings.

"The net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content."

If you believe your site may be affected by these changes, contact us at Fuse.  We have a team of specialist copywriters who write original SEO friendly content for clients all over the world.

Bing search results are a cheap imitation of Google's

Amit Singhal has posted an in-depth description of Google's sting operation which was carried out to investigate whether Microsoft's Bing search engine has been using the Google search results to fine-tune its own search results.

Google engineers made up 100 nonsense queries such as "hiybbprqag" and inserted fictitious results in their own search results.  After a few weeks, the same results were being returned in Bing searches.

Amit Singhal has told the SEO blog that Bing is "pure and simply cheating"

Will Google crack down on paid links?

Bruce Clay has warned site owners this week to stop buying links, stating:

I want to be very clear that we think Google perceives deceptive linking methodologies and the ramifications of these actions as deceptive acts worthy of a penalty.

In the middle of 2010 Scott Willoughby from SEOmoz revealled that as an experiment, Rand Fishkin the SEOmoz CEO had bought a number of paid links to test their effectiveness.  The results can be seen in the Whiteboard Friday Post titled "We bought links and it worked!!" 

There still seems to be no answer as to what happens if you buy thousands of links and point them to a competitor's site.  One comment on the SEOmoz article suggests that 99% of paid link penalties are placed on the site selling links rather than those buying but there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that sites buying links have also been penalised.

If you would like to report a competitor for buying links, Matt Cutts has explained how to go about doing so here.