PandaLabs recently highlighted a sophisticated attack by spammers who targeted hundreds of keyword phrases relating to Ford cars using over a million links from trusted sites. Their aim is to flood the Google rankings with malicious sites so users searching for a phrase such as “Ford Uk” are presented with a list of sites which look authentic except for telltale URLs which consist of random numbers and letters and a “.pl” Polish domain.

When a user clicks on one of the results, malicious software is installed and the user is prompted to pay money to buy ‘security’ software to remove it.

The whole episode illustrates how Google has changed their algorithm from the ‘Florida Update’ era, where a sudden influx of incoming links raised a red flag. With the advent of social networking, social bookmarking and sites built around user-generated content, Google now needs to trust these sudden bursts of new links, but it isn’t always good at spotting where the algorithm is being fooled by spammers manipulating these trusted sites.

For search engine optimisation companies, this highlights the importance not only of links from user-generated content sites, but more specifically that sudden increases in link volumes from trusted sites with ‘fresh’ content no longer incurs the wrath of Google and now does the exact opposite. Even for blackhat SEO’ers and spammers.

Labels: algorithm, Google, search engine optimisation (SEO), social media, spammers

Labels: search engine optimisation (SEO), social media

A recent post on the Google news blog has finally laid to rest a number of SEO myths about how to rank well in Google's news search.

Google confirmed that:

• Updating a news item once it has been published can create problems.
• Articles which contain only images or video won't be included.
• Redesigning your site may affect coverage in Google News.

Common myths include:

• Timing the publication of the article improves ranking.
• Having adsense on your site impoves rankings.
• Having an image next to your article impoves rankings.

Labels: content, Google, news, search engine optimisation (SEO)

A recent Vizu study shows that 43.9% of respondents stated that the quality of writing on a blog influences the blogs they read. 51% said the quality helps them assess which blogs are of high quality and 38% said it was the author's reputation which drives this perceived credibility.

Rand Fishkin has blogged about this in his recent 21 Tips to Earn Links and Tweets post.