Google has blogged, spoken verbally at public conferences, and have made it public that they do not condone people buying links with the intention of manipulating their rankings. This has not always been Google’s stance on the situation. To be honest this situation didn’t exists some time ago. Its just recently with the outbreak of “buying links for TBPR” that Google’s engineers have made it evident that they are aware of the situation at hand and are taking countermeasures. Some of these include situations where they will block a sites ability to pass PR, link popularity etc if they are supposedly selling links.

Could this all be a ploy by Google to protect their bottom line (ie. Adwords)? Perhaps they just say their doing this to strike fear in Webmasters. Webmasters who par take in advertising with contextual links on others sites to help drive traffic and awareness of their site.

Google has stated if you wish to buy text links then to place a Nofollow tag around them, blocking their “vote” essentially. However, if links were around before Google was established, who’s to say that you have to place Nofollow just because they want you to? The foundation of Googles algorithms were even based and still are based on the underling link structure holding it together.

Until Google changes their algorithms’ link based ranking system, in my opinion there will always be that fine line of contextual link advertisements. Whether you decide to exercise Nofollow tags on your links is up to you however.

Just remember that advertising is advertising. Google is not going to abandon there search engine architecture and completely devalue links, doing so would ruin there SERPS and would essentially create a completely new collection of search results, across the board.

If your adverts bring in quality traffic, then utilize the system for what its worth. Why shoot yourself in the foot by integrating Nofollow tags around your advertisements.

Link bait is the catch phrase of the year. If you’re not onto what link bait is then you probably aren’t too much into internet marketing. Every other blog post or search engine marketing forum post this year has had it mentioned in it.

So what is it?
Link baiting is the sole principle of making an article, image, idea, tool, etc. that is so irresistible, so remarkable, that the world feels the need to share it with others. This is why search marketers relish in it. Imagine something that can create free backlinks, free traffic, free promotion why you sleep. Proper link baiting can be an unstoppable force.

Most of the time, “link bait” is something controversial. If you notice something in your industry that is ridiculous, talk about it, blog it, then go post it in forums, get it out there so the public can relish in the “ridiculousness” of it. Then just sit back and watch as other’s do the work for you.

Google even mentioned it lately as a preferred technique for building links. Bottom line is if your not link baiting yet, you should be, so get out there and do it!

Sometimes its useful to determine which page in googles “eyes” is the most relevant for a given search term for a particular site. Take for example, a random term “swimming monk”. Go to google and use the site operator. Here is an example where I wanted to find the most relevant page on a swimming monk in the NYtimes:

This can be a useful assessment if you are looking for a good location to place a link on. Relevancy is crucial, why not let google tell you which page is the most relevant!

With the recent toying around by Google with the Adsense layout change its not a surprise that they unleash a new feature to their result page. The new feature helps users hone down general subject terms such as Trains, School, Mary Poppins, Duke, etc. The feature is found at the end of the result pages, nice, neat and tucked away in an unobtrusive format. Now the question is, will Google implement this for a wider breadth of terms?

A quick post on ways to contact google:
I have heard several people say they had success with the following email inside-adsense (at) google.com

If that doesnt work you can try…
http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py

or try their forum here:
http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help

Perhaps you need to report spam:

http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html

Keep in mind it will take some time to contact Google. They are a little bit harder to get in touch with compared to Yahoo or MSN. Be patient and persistent and you just might get through. Good luck!

There is a rumor right now that Google might be changing the layout of adsense. It will no longer say “Ads by Gooooooooogle” but instead will show an image “Ads by Google” using their logo. My guess like other’s would be this will lower the CTR of the ads. Why you might ask, well if a user can more easily notice the links are ads they will be less inclined to click on them. An image is much more prevalent then the less obtrusive method currently in place.

In a world where Branding your image is everything, it was only a mater of time until they did this. Instantly placing their logo on millions of sites is too tempting.

Old: New:

Quick tip of the week: Compare your organic ranking in google, to your “allinanchor: example term” rank. If the allinanchor rank is higher then you might need more on page optimization, if it’s lower then look at the amount of links that page has, it could need more.

Offering a free tool to the public related to your site can be a great way to generate back links. The idea is to set up a domain (separate from your current site) and offer a free tool that would be of use to the public. The users will then have access to the free tool once the back link snippet is placed and confirmed on the users website that they manage. This obviously wouldn’t work for all sites, b/c some are not tech savvy and the chances of them managing a web site are smaller. None the less a good idea for niche markets that are tech savvy.

Many webmasters now a days have networks of sites. Google has expressed that using them to artificially increase rankings can be hazardous. They have methods of identifying “networked” sites. There are several ways they go about this to take note on:

Site hosted on the same web servers
Sites with similar IP addresses even if they are 22.231.113.64,  22.231.113.65
Similar site structure
Similar editors
Sites with the same CMS
Sites who use the same affiliate ID’s
Similar Adsense publisher code

Granted, Matt Cutts, Google spokesperson has stated that simply owning all the sites doesn’t automatically hurt you in the SERPS it’s just when you start to inter link them to build up artificial rankings in the search engines that you might start running into problems.

All three search engines have their individual formulas and handle/look/score them differently. In fact Google for one looks at them extremely differently then MSN/Yahoo. It is challenging to rank well for all three and not throw a filter in one of them while doing well in the other(s).

Below is a general scorecard of the differences in Yahoo/MSN vs. Google. with regards to backlinks.

Age – is a huge underling factor for Google. They put major emphasis on it weigh links that are old and thus “trusted” much heavier then newly acquired links.
This is a huge reason sites that are currently in the top of competitive phrases in Google are hard to out rank.
Yahoo/MSN look at links on a much more even playing field. It is easier to over come well established older sites in Yahoo and MSN than it is in Google.

Repetition – Repetition of keywords in site structure is more likely to throw a filter in Google whereas MSN/Yahoo might not mind it or subsequently look at it as a good thing.

Link Juice – Ie. Link weight/ link relevancy might not be passed by all links in the eyes of Google. Google is generally smarter and more on top of defining a “untrustworthy link” then MSN or Yahoo thus MSN/Yahoo might count the link when Google ignores it.

Overall Google is tougher to rank in with younger, newer sites where MSN and Yahoo will respect a new site.