hypothetical I repeat this post is hypotheatrical !

lets say that 12 months ago a group of Googlers and anonymous friends sat down to discuss how they could kill link selling and buying, without causing death and destruction to normal sites, Obviously if Google started killing sites for buying links, then the bad people would just buy links for the competition, of course Google are smart enough to think of that they aren’t just in this for the short term fix.

So lets pretend the real option was to build teams of Link detectives that just collected data but never actioned it, just collected..

Then lets say they set up accounts at TLA, Linkworth, TLB Digitalpoint etc etc, how quick could you collect the the data covertly without people ever knowing what was coming.. because they just collected data but never actioned it.

Ok so they have the data what’s next well they need to spread fear, so what if they just fire a warning shot, say cull Pagerank but nothing else, more to deter than hurt, But what if the community mocked this ! nobody likes been mocked so what if they cross reference that with data in Webmastercentral and analytics and just killed your money words. what if they where allowed to say … move you down 6 places per infraction would that stop the the linking selling and buying.. of cousre they would be monitoring the link buying activities so buying links for competitors could be discounted for say at least 6 months …

on recent trip to SES London a Webmaster asked me if I trusted a certain Googler.. he then went on to tell me that the same googler told HIM the spam team where using webmastercentral and analytics, I wasn’t sure so I could not confirm or deny..

how long before you feel the pain..
DaveN

All right. Where is the poison? The battle of wits has begun. It ends when you decide and we both drink, and find out who is right… and who is dead.

Not that I would ever actually keep score..(and if I was Matt would still be winning

Yesterday I posted reinclusion request indigo clothing

Today I have to issues an apology to Google… SORRY !

Matt Cutts Said :

and add to the list of Questions : DID YOU SELL LINKS IN THE PAST 6 MONTHS !

Re-examine your assumptions? E.g. http://web.archive.org/web/20070817163057/http://www.indigoclothing.com/blog/ is a link that shows when they were selling links. Later versions of their site were selling even more links, e.g. “sexy underwear” links.

Google has been very clear about how we feel about selling/buying links. If indigoclothing.com has dropped their text link ads and remove the links that they sold, they could do a reconsideration request. According to the data I looked at, the site has never done a reconsideration request.

And yes he is Bang on the Money, and has I said SES NYC and say again Buying and Selling links is just not worth the risk !

DaveN

what do you do when you know you haven’t do anything wrong, but Google still gives you a penalty

Take http://www.indigoclothing.com/and Alex is a reader and sometimes comments on my blog, I got an IM from him today asking me to look at his site more a favour and than anything else, see you it looks like his site has been hit with a penalty.

so I asked Alex a few simple question.

ME: Links.. have you purchased any say in the last 6 months ?
Alex : NO

ME What site changes have you made
Alex we added a hidden Div and Google analytics’s

ME WTF .. you mad Hidden Div?
Alex you can see on homepage, the green bar below images click it…. Scriptalicious

ME ok .. how do you handle 404’s
Alex ???? serverside we serve a 404 with links

Me : you got any new links recently, it has to be link related mate
Alex : we won the Wordpress contract to run their shop

Me : Link please
Alex : http://shop.wordpress.net/

Me : http://shop.wordpress.net/world/about/ I bet that fucked you up
Alex : what should we do ask them to remove the links and file a reinclusion request

Me: WHAT ! you have done nothing wrong… I ranted for a while… what I would do is

a) If you don’t have google webmaster central account - get one
b) Yes file a re-inclusion request
c) Pray a lot

so what would you do in this case.. you know you haven’t made any mistakes but you still got hit with a Google penalty

DaveN

that’s what I get when I try to see the stats on www.davidnaylor.co.uk

“We have detected that your 404 (file not found) error page returns a 200 (Success) status in the header.”

really that’s new to me, because I handle it with a 301 plug in, all 404’s get logged and 301 to the root then I sort out, what the 301 Page should be..

but the page that Webmaster Central is looking for returns a 200 .. wtf .. and does this mean my blog just picked a Black flag in the organic listings ???

DaveN

I have been testing a new Banner - PPC tracking system it’s closed beta at the moment. but the system allows Html Banner ad’s which we split test the text you can see an example here www.davidnaylor.co.uk/v10-html-banner.html the system uses either a straight link text or 301 which of course would influence search engines, but we were happy in our own minds that if the links were internal then that was cool. The system also has a optional switch of a 302 (that’s it default) so not to mess with the search engines… But today I searched for “search marketing” in Google and noticed two listing without snippets (usually means a redirect or something bad)

I have hi lighted in yellow on the image below:

header checks show 302 redirects :

http://www.remixmedia.com
87.248.116.90
HTTP/1.1 302 Found Date: Mon, 03 Mar 2008 11:13:00 GMT
Location: http://sem.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/searchenginemarketing/index.php?&abr=2022403519

http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/index.php
87.248.116.90
HTTP/1.1 302 Found Date: Mon, 03 Mar 2008 11:14:45 GMT
Location: http://sem.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/searchenginemarketing/index.php?&abr=2022403519

DaveN

Sometimes we forget that the machine that Google is, isn’t perfect, Ok it’s nearly dam perfect, but what keeps on impressing me more and more is the honesty of the Googlers and the support they give to US the webmaster. At the recent SES in London, I spent a evening with Maile Ohye, we had met a few times in the past but in London we spent a good few hours, mainly me bitching about the world and Maile being supportive to my cause ;) in fact by the time I went to bed I felt Happy that Google was really supporting us.

Days later, and my partner on the site clinic I was doing called to say he couldn’t make it, So who stepped up, Yes Google did ! Maile again came to my rescue this time we sat together trying to help out webmasters and their sites. After the session I had a chat with Adam Lasnik for an hour or so, I’m always hard on Adam and I don’t know why maybe because me came from our ranks I don’t know, but he is a good guy we chatted about best practices for a while and Webmaster Tools even if I do disagree with some points, generally GWT is good for webmasters ;)

Finally thanks to Matt Cutts the man that keeps me on the straight and white hat path :)

DaveN

Fancy including a Google Chart API within your web-pages ? Well, it’s not at all difficult and Google Charting seems somewhat overlooked by Seo’s.

The charting has a limitation of 50,000 queries per day go beyond this and the API ceases to work. Web ready the format returned is PNG as a response to the URL entered. The Google API Chart certainly has functionality with a number of ready charting formats available, you can opt for several image types, including line,bar and pie charts to name but a few.

Webpage inclusion of the API is really easy too,just embed the URL with an <img> tag. Rendering is done automatically within the webpage.

Go check Google Charting out today.

Tmobile dump google.  Then they revamp their business tariff whilst starting a potential mobile price war offering unlimited call rates, plus there is the Starbucks deal going on. Not to mention that Microsoft have just bought Danger…and of course are bidding on Yahoo.

The future of search is definately mobile…

I read to today from the BBC that Microsoft are “hiring a firm that specialises in proxy battles” in order to get rid of the current board of directors at Yahoo. A good way to gain the sympathy of the shareholders vote to secure the Yahoo deal ?

No, probably not. Never the less this does push Yahoo into moving quicker. You have to admire the commitment in following the Yahoo bid and tactics like this have been used before by other Search Engines. Business is business. In any event Microsoft will eventually gather more and more kudos for advertising and online search.

With the Microsoft bid on Yahoo and Google still aquiring more and more companies will we recognise the face of search in years to come ? Microsoft are well known for selling software, will they need to change their identity to make some real headway within the search industry?

How indeed can you become a leader within search when your are late into the game ?

Google on the other hand are known primarily for search yet are going fully into online office soultions and the mobile market.