Toronto SEO Firm - GTA SEO & SEM Specialist

I read a good informative post by Doug Caverly at WebProNews.com, it talks about some changes Google has recently made to their section on “What’s an SEO?  It seems Google has taken down their warnings about SEO’s a few notches.

The old version mentioned “a few unethical SEOs” in the fourth line and then jumped into a list of warning signs.  The revised help page introduces a negative in line three, but uses the gentler term “irresponsible.”  From there, it names a lot of possible benefits.

“Many SEOs and other agencies and consultants provide useful services for website owners, including: Reviewing and providing recommendations on your site content or structure . . . Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript . . . Content development . . . Managing online business . . . development campaigns . . . Keyword research . . . SEO training.”

Relatively neutral, background check-type questions follow, and then the same warnings eventually appear.  It seems Google now has fewer qualms about nudging people towards SEOs, though, or has at least decided that its old description came off as too harsh.

Barry Schwartz deserves credit for unearthing the less-than-sweet version.  And perhaps as another way of saying “sorry,” Google’s asking people to contribute their own SEO-related recommendations.  Google has upset so many folks with it’s seemingly non discriminate penalties that it want to make nice with a portion of their professional user base?

There have been rumors of such techniques floating around for ages and there are even some black-hat SEO’s that specialize in this type of “link bombing”.  The gist of the deal is that you create organically or through purchase ‘bad’ links to your competitor’s websites in hopes of causing their search engine rank position to plummet.

There are a couple of interesting posts floating around about this practice because someone from Google has chimed in on this controversial topic.  It is funny how a subject matter can take on a complete different view depending on how you look at it.  There are a couple of headlines out there that in my opinion are quite deceiving: “Google Defends Bad Link Theory & Repeats That Competitors Can’t Hurt You” and “Google Debunks Link Sabotage Theories” - In both cases I think the reality is the complete opposite of the titles.  Here are the two quotes that made me realize this, “Most of these guidelines involve the content on the site itself, something which generally can’t be changed through links pointing to the site.”  To me this means that some of the guidelines refer to incoming links and those can and will affect  your site in a negative way.  The next quote is even more ominous, “In theory, I can imagine that there might be some borderline situations where that would be possible, however in all the time I have spend diagnosing website issues I have not once run into a situation like that. Also, I know that if a situation like that were to come to our attention, it would be resolved very quickly.”  This last one tells me that it is possible and because of stiff competition I believe it is even likely.  Sure, if it comes to their attention that it is being done it can be resolved but it might never come to their attention, right?

Bottom line is that it is very unfair that something beyond your control should affect your website’s ranking.  Especially when it is so easy for a competitor to use these techniques to harm your site.  I am also guessing that the occurrence of this type of black-hat technique is much more prevalent than anyone knows.  After all, a few positions in Google ranking for popular keywords can means 10’s of thousands of dollars to some businesses.

Not to say Ask.com is anything like a pimple but we are talking relative size here.  The question is, can a search engine that is 1/17th the size of the industry leader run a profitable business model?  The answer is, YES! 

Forbes is reporting that Jim Safka, head of Ask.com announced his company will acquire Lexico, the owner of sites including Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com and Reference.com.  The deal has an estimated acquisition value of over $100 million dollars.

Back in March Ask laid off just under 10% of it’s workforce and decided to focus on women above 30 and web searchers looking for answers to questions about health, fitness and entertainment because it appears this niche made up a majority of their user base.  With only a shrinking 4% share of searches Ask seems to be holding on by a thread.  There has even been speculation that they would soon be dropping its own search algorithm in favor of licensing Google’s search technology.

Safka denies this claim and say that the new Lexico acquisition is to take advantage of current Ask.com users that tend use full-sentence questions three times as often as users of other search engines.  So for now it looks like Ask.com will keep up the fight and just try not to go head on with Google but instead to attempt some innovative side-steps in hope of capturing a bit more market share and perhaps some more loyal customers.

Google Friend Connect was showcased at a Campfire One gathering of 3rd-party software developers at the company’s “Googleplex” campus in Mountain View, California a couple of days ago.  The plan comes just days after top social networking websites MySpace and Facebook broke down barriers of their online communities to let members share profile information at other websites.

Friend Connect lets website owner’s add social-networking features such as registration, member galleries, message boards, and fun or useful third-party applications called “widgets” by simply adding snippets of free computer code.
 People visiting websites using Friend Connect will be able to interact with contacts they know from online communities such as Facebook, Google Talk, orkut, Plaxo or hi5.

To demonstrate, an iLike application was incorporated into an official website of musician Ingrid Michaelson so that visitors don’t have to leave to connect with friends at their social networking profiles. All website operators using Friend Connect see are user nicknames and images, if any, posted along with them.

Concerns about protecting people’s profile data prompted Google to decide to work individually with website operators interested in Friend Connect, according to Glazer. Website owners are invited to put their names in a “white list” queue online at www/google.com/friendconnect.

Google wants to be at the heart of the Internet trend of people building online identities that play, share, and conduct business in virtual environments, according to one Silicon Valley analyst.  Google plans to phase in more websites and social networks in the months to come, with the Open Social software platform as a basis for interoperability.  This is good news for the forward development of social networks but it also will make webmasters more dependent on Google as it searches for more revenue opportunities.