Following the recent Google Penguin update that has been rolled out across their search engine just a couple of weeks ago, there has been a huge amount of concern within the SEO industry as evidence of ‘negative SEO’ seems to have come to light with people looking to investigate their search engine manipulation theories on sites that carry no risk to themselves, meaning that YOUR site could be at risk.
In a few weeks I’ll be heading to London with Becky to speak at the SMX Advanced Conference being held at Chelsea Football Club. Its been a while since I’ve done a SMX conference so it will be good to return especially with all the changes that are happening at the moment in Search, so there will be plenty to discuss and present on.
I’m speaking in two sessions during the conference. They are:
For years I have heard people say “buy links for your competitor and report them”, if it was really that easy and I’m guessing not illegal then we would all be doing it, wouldn’t we ?
Sometimes I sit at home at night and pretend I’m the Head of Google’s Spam Team, only I drink wine and not Sprite 
, and what would I do with competitor bowling and buying links in general, so here is what I think I would do.
1) Buy awesome Camera
2) start snapping
3) sit back and be revel in your handy work
Not worried
Not Ready
Smile
No Really Smile
Really WTF
“we never get a nice photo Adam always pulls a stupid face” Shelley Stafford
oh wait a minute Shelley
Wait it’s not just Adam
Hog Roast (2am bad belly can’t think why !)
Flower Abuse
more Flower Abuse
Back in November on the Google Analytics blog they announced the release of email scheduling and PDF export for the new version of Analytics claiming that “both email scheduling and PDF export functionality will be the new interface in a few weeks.” – almost 5 months on this still isn’t the case.
There are a host of complaints on that blog post of people desperately needing this feature (myself included) with absolutely no response from Google – so what’s gone wrong? Have Google released it but forgotten to enable it on certains accounts? Does anyone reading this blog have access? The Google Analytics accounts I have access to through Bronco and personally don’t have this functionality yet.
This morning we spotted that when searching for ”gmail” in Google we got this:
This also appears for the term “mashable”:
We’re also seeing it for the search “google.com” – but not “google”. We’ve searched a number of brands, but not seen anything yet – perhaps it is triggered by search volume or maybe it is just being tested on these terms, we don’t know.
It could have an effect on AdWords, but it also could mean another way of brands protecting themselves.
I did my usual check of a few different search terms today, to see what is going on, when I noticed something odd. I was using Google Chrome Incognito which prevents the use of cookies and should give me a fresh set of results each time (without any personalisation). So I checked out the term “seo” and was shocked to see myself on page one – the first thing that occurred to me was that maybe Google had done such a drastic change that it had some how resulted in me hitting page one. Then I noticed all the my local colleagues were also page one, at which point I realised it must be something to do with local search.
Let’s just cut straight to the chase, why is Google trusting Trustpilot? Surely they can see the same things as I can, can’t they ?
1) I did a search on Google and noticed this :
Nothing new I know, but how many people actually click on the star rated link or just see them and go hmmm pretty stars and click on the AD’s? If you’re in the “that’s pretty” camp click the bloody link !!
2) I’m surprised how many reviews came from Trustpilot
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