Hello and welcome to another edition of ‘7 Days of Search and Social‘. Last week was a bit of an odd one as there were a few dramas that seemed to take up a LOT of attention (Overstock and algo update). None-the-less we still found a bunch of other good reading to go with it.

On with the news….

Lead Story

Latest Google Algorithm Changes

It was a dead heat for the top story this week between the algo changes and the Overstock affair. Ultimately, the algo changes are probably more important, so we’re going that direction.

For those living under rocks, late Thursday Google announced another major change. And unlike the ‘attribution update’ a few week’s back (affecting 2% of queries), this one was HUGE. Google is looking to further curtail thin content and attribution issues and it is affecting some 12% of queries.

Details;

More Google Algorithm Changes; the Farmer update – Search News Central
Google kills eHows competitors – SEO Book
Update Data; winners and losers – Sistrix
Demand: Google Changes Have Produced “No Material Impact” Yet – SEL

This one has been pretty interesting that’s for sure, we’ve been getting a lot of reports of collateral damage. That’s fairly standard though because there’s always winners and losers with algo changes. Personally, I am still seeing a fair amount of thin content in the SERPs, which was supposed to be one of the goals here.

Let’s give it some time.

Quick Nav Links – Talk of the Town – Geek Central – Social Search – Going Vertical – Videos – Tools – Patents –

Talk of the Town

Overstock Gets Penalized by Google – This was the other big story last week and yours truly was right in the thick of things. Just like JC Penney and Forbes before it, the folks at Overstock got the Google smack down for some shoddy link building tactics. You can read my coverage (linked title) or get some more details via; Search Engine Roundtable, Blog Storm, Search Engine Land

New Google PageRank Algorithm Debunked – was a post which our new friend Val made some corrections to a previous article about the ‘reasonable surfer’ which we tore him a new hole for via SEOBS. Nice work Val, yer a good man!

How To Get The Most Search Engine Marketing Value From Key Content Initiatives – in interesting, if not a bit brief, by my standards, post from Eric Edmonds via SEL. One can never get enough good reading on content programs.

Click Distribution & Percentages by SERP Rank – while one does have to take this kind of data with a grain of salt, it is always interesting to get a sense of CTR rates for various query spaces.

Link Acquisition & Contextual Relevancy [Part 1] – what can I say? Once again Richard brings us some great geeking. Be sure to give it a read and add his blog to your RSS for the next parts in the series.

Dear Google…THAT was a content farm update? – LOL. I was also looking around a bunch of query spaces over the last few days and found myself wondering many of the same things that Michael did. Give it a read!

The SEO Industry needs to grow a pair – while I may not agree with all of Alan’s suppositions in this post, there are many that I do. There’s also some healthy discussions going on in the comments, as such, a worth addition to this edition.

Would you report a competitor to Google? – and last but not least, in light of the recent outings, I decided to write a post on SEJ that looks at the recent happenings and asks the question that needs to be asked. Please do go and leave your own thoughts in the comments.