Google 'unfestive' towards paid links

Christmas is the time of year when search engines such as Google alter the way in which they rank websites, reports the Guardian.

The newspaper claims that search engines change their algorithms in order to weed out the sites which are not organic results and are simply there to increase their search engine optimisation (SEO).

It claims that a drop in Google ranking can possibly have a "fatal" drop in trade as the first site to appear in search listings will attract around half of all clicks, whereas for a site which appears on page two, it can expect less than one per cent.

The newspaper reports James Keehan, SEO expert, as saying: "It's an odd grey area, because it is very happy to take advertising money off the sites that it says other people shouldn't be using to boost their search engine rankings."

A study by Enquiro Research found that search engine users were 220 per cent more likely to remember a brand which appeared highly on a search engine ranking compared to a side advert, reported in Brand Week.

Google finally pushes the PR Export!

After so many months of speculations on Google PR updates and the doubts that Google will discontinue the PR export in order to fight link sales, today we’ve finally saw the change in the green bar on all websites. Thank you G.

Today’s Google PR Export or Update (its not actually update because Google updates it dynamically every day but only exports the results in few month or sometimes a bit more) was as always one really interesting event. The one of the things that we can quickly realize is that all web directories are will lower page rank than before, but unique content websites are with a bit low amount of links scored higher pagerank than others. This most probably means that the duplicate content algo is somehow modified to capture much more spam than ever before (which is something rather expected)

Also another really interesting and also expected outcome was that due to the progressive expanding of the web, all page rank values require more and more links to be achieved. Now for pr 3 you need more than 2.5k link popularity, pr 4 more than 5 to 20k links and pr 6 > 150k. Note that this is LINK POPULARITY not links only which is relatively the number of actual links since most search engines don’t show the real value.

I’ll update this post as soon as I get more info on the topic as see what my buddies are saying about it.

No truth to LinkedIn rumor

Reuters is reporting that an anonymous source has squelched the rumor that Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. is holding takeover discussions with LinkedIn.

The rumor first surfaced two weeks ago when TechCrunch reported that Murdoch had taken a fancy to LinkedIn. It was fueled last week when VentureBeat weighed in, reporting that its "well-placed source" has confirmed that News Corp. is in "serious" talks to buy the social network geared to professionals.

Analysts say the deal would make a lot of sense, giving News Corp. the technology and service underpinnings to connect the business world readers of its Dow Jones publications. And Murdoch has been known to exploit fast-moving opportunities before they peak, such as his purchase of MySpace.

But the deal may not be necessary, as News Corp's Fox Interactive Media (FIM) internet division, which oversees MySpace, reportedly may already be moving to serve the business world.

FIM President Peter Levinsohn told Reuters last week that MySpace plans to let its users create different profiles to attract different contacts, such as personal friends, business contacts or family members

Source: www.imediaconnection.com