Search Engine Optimization

On December first 2006 Search Engine Land was born and Danny Sullivan went on to congratulate his comrades on the wonderful job they’ve done.

Danny went to highlight the achievements:

• 19,250 subscribers take our main news feed as our yesterday. Want to give us a birthday present? Encourage those you know to subscribe!

• 100% Organic is our most popular column in terms of email subscriptions

• We’ve had just over 3 million visits to the site by just over 2.1 million unique visitors, producing just under 5 million page views.

• Digg was our top non-search referring site sending over 565,000 visits, followed by StumbleUpon at 86,000 visits and Techmeme at 51,000.

• Google was our top search referring site, sending nearly 750,000 visits, followed by Yahoo at 48,000.

• We’ve gained recognition from everything from the Wall Street Journal to Ad Age to Techmeme, as you’ll see in our bragroll.

Congratulations to Search Engine Land and our gratitide for keeping us informed. You can subscribe to their wonderful feeds over here, as around 15 new hot topics hit my RSS reader every day from SEL team!

Read full article here.

Search Enigine Roundtable turned four years old on December 2nd!

Another prominent figure in SEO news is Search Enigne Roundtable team, and yesterday they turned four years old!

“Here are some stats to share with you, so you know what we have been doing over the past four years:

• Published over 6,500 stories
• With about 10,000 comments (note, a server crash deleted all comments from January 2005 and earlier)
• Over 1,500 new articles this past year alone” – full article

Congratulations and thank you for the wonderful job. I enjoy their forum recap as they keep a watchful eye on the forums and discussions boards across the net to highlight debates, news and opinions.

You can subscribe to their feed over here.

Google has not been happy about paid links that pass on ranking power and it seems like Googlepplex team is taking further steps to diffuse the problem.

On the official Google blog Matt Cutts and Maile Ohye have posted another update as to why it is a bad practice to buy and sell links that affect the rankings.

“If, however, a webmaster chooses to buy or sell links for the purpose of manipulating search engine rankings, we reserve the right to protect the quality of our index. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank violates our webmaster guidelines. Such links can hurt relevance…”

Matt Cutts went further and on his own blog, and gave an extreme example of a paid review on a very sensitive subject which was poorly executed and could cost people their health.

Google so far made it very clear that they do not like paid links that affect search position and are taking steps to minimize the impact. Googlers are not alone on this issue, as Yahoo, Ask and Microsoft seem to share the same ground.

What do webmasters think about this?

Webmasters and SEOs seem to understand the steps carried out by Google, which are ultimately aimed at preserving the quality of search results, however there are a number of SEOs who are not too hype about it.

Some discussions.
Offical Word From Google About Paid Links – Cre8asiteforums.

Matt Cutts & Maile Ohye on buying / selling links – Search Enigne Watch

New Post from Matt Cutts on on Paid Links/Blog Posts... – Digital point

More on Search Engine roundtable.

“People have mouths to feed. Right or wrong, some people will do whatever it takes to pay their bills. That’s just a fact of life. Expecting people to follow rules is unrealistic.” - Shpinn

“I think it’s excellent that you are now doing your utmost to educate webmasters about the paid links issue in more public arenas than
personal blogs and search marketing conferences.” - Google Groups.

Google team made it crystal clear, they do not want paid links and are taking the steps to crack down on the practice. There two very different views on this, which can’t seem to come to an agreement.

Expect more algo updates and devaluations in a campaign to maintain the highest quality of search results at it always been since the birth of Google.