Weekly Search & Social News: 02/15/2011

Hello and welcome back to ‘7 Days of Search and Social‘. Another week, another drama. While I’ve not looked historically to past years, one does have to wonder if the winter blaaah creates more drama in the search industry? After so many months of peace, each week brings more excitement lately it seems.

For our part, we’ll side-step it as much as possible, ok?

Lead Story

JC Penney gets whacked

I actually had a different lead story, but that changed on Saturday. Most of you I am sure heard already, but for those that hadn’t, it seems the folks over at J.C. Penney were outed via the New york times for paid links.

The news;

It really did blow up over the weekend… poor sods. But for anyone working on big corp sites. On highly competitive query spaces. Paid links are a reality. If it is you doing it or the competition, there is no lack of crap-hat link building out there.

For me the more interesting question is; WTF is Google doing? Apparently they had dealt with J.C. Penney in the past on other infractions. You would have thought they’d gone through their link profile with a fine toothed comb no?

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Talk of the Town 

SEO is all about the situation – was an article I threw together last week to look at the not-to-often discussed area of SEO programming. And more specifically, the fact that we must bring fresh eyes to each situation. There is no cookie-cutter approach.

How Link Analysis Works for SEO – Michael had another entry into the ‘link anaysis’ discussion from the last while. This one was notable because he spends a fair amount of time on an area I don’t see enough of; on site link analysis.

Two Diametrically Opposed Google Editorial Philosophies – and of course the other never ending saga, thin content, is going strong. For the record, I still don’t see anything other than an algorithmic approach working.

Google Warns Of "Big Changes Here Very Shortly"– while I am hesitant to get worked up over a single mention, it is certainly notable given the buzz over the last while towards Google. What are ‘big changes’? No bloody idea… time will tell.

The Seven Forgotten Keyword Research Sources – not a massively innovative article, but it holds some solid tips for generating terms beyond the every-day. It’s worth a read and worth remembering the next time you’re doing some KW research.

Don’t believe Google Autocomplete when it comes to scams, – was an interesting article by Malcolm Coles that highlights some wonky suggestions and well… I just thought it was interesting. Worth a read.

Mahalo’s Calacanis: Time To End The Content Farm Arms Race – WOW. Seems that Jason is back in the (search) news and is actually taking the high road? He’s a spam fighter now? Huh… add this one to the ‘twilight zone’ section this week.

Keyword Research: Using Categories to Make Your Process More Actionable – some good geeking over on the Moz from Richard Baxter. What more do I need to say? Always worth a read… Go. Now. Read.

Excuse Me While I Have A Ranking Report Rant – while I generally don’t agree with more ranking report rants, this one surely does a balanced enough job of it for me to at least share. And yes, I do actually report on articles I don’t fully agree with. It’s only fair.

eHow and Mahalo: How Many Keyword Variations is Too Many? – Laugh, cry or shudder, either way a good article. There sure aren’t a lack of ‘content farm’ / ‘thin content’ articles of late; add this one to the collection.

Bing Results Get Localized & Personalized – YAY! It seems ol Bing is finally starting to move into the world of personalization. I’d long wondered why they hadn’t seen fit to go at it as hard as Googly. Oh right. They would have been accused of copying.. hehe.

Mea Culpa: How I Failed At Link Building – was an interesting post from Adam which looks at paid linking and related problems he’s had with them. More interesting is that we’ve seen a few of these from prominent publications of late. Is the paid links war coming to an end? Not likely…

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Search Geek Central

Search Geek Goodies

Social Search

Going Vertical

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Videos

Is the Web in Danger with Current Web Space Gone? – iEntry

Will I be penalized for hidden content if I have text in a "read more" dropdown? – feat Bruce Clay

Cutt’s Corner

Will I be penalized for hidden content if I have text in a "read more" dropdown?

Weapons

7 Free Keyword Tools for Thousands of Keyword Suggestions – SEO Begin

Linking Google Analytics to Webmaster Tools – Google Wembaster Central

Search safety settings in SEO PowerSuite: tweaking the parameters to get maximum performance. – Link Assistant

Site Update – Changes to “My Reports” – Majestic

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Search Patents

Google

Identification of web sites that contain session identifiers

Content retrieval from sites that use session identifiers

Microsoft

Cloaking detection utilizing popularity and market value

Yahoo

Discovering query intent from search queries and concept networks

Segment sensitive query matching of documents

System for personalized term expansion and recommendation

Automatic classification of segmented portions of web pages


/end SOSG session

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Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Weekly Search & Social News: 02/15/2011


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