SEO News Blog

Wow! Officials just confirmed that Google is trying to make a deal with FeedBurner.com to buy it for the small sum of $100,000,000.00. The information we have is that the deal is now under a binding term sheet and will close in 2-3 weeks, and there is nothing that can really derail it at this point. That’s one of the greatest buys Google did this year after acquiring Performics. This event was somehow predictable but more like a big joke when we heard that Google bought a SEO company. We had that discussion that when Google gets SEO Experts into their team, they would most definitely like to get their hands on Feedburner as they are the largest RSS Distribution network on the planet and using their statistics Google can track down which blogs are dead and which ones are alive.

Currently we have no evidence for the intentions of Google will be using Feedburner data to change/alter its rankings but we assume that in some point they will try to use it and eventually websites with large number of users will benefit out of it. That was a predictable step after Google declared war on paid links and now having feedburner’s data on blog readerships, Google will be able to determine which blogs are dead and made only with the sole purpose of increasing/manipulating the search quality by adding website reviews made up only for the search engines. To my knowledge there are so many blogs that are selling posts and have few to none visitors other than search engine spiders, but have relatively high page-rank.

The price itself seems quite high and unrealistic. Feedburner has only 422,000 publishers and this does not seem to be worth the $100 million investment, but that 422,000 publishers actually translates into access to many millions of readers that Google can push their advertising to. Also I assume that Google is looking at the rapid increase of readers and publishers and that’s the main reason why its willing to invest such crazy amount of money.

We will give you more information as soon as we get it. This is hot topic and we will investigate as much as we can.

Last saturday our buddy buddy Matt Cutts posted more information on Google’s war on Paid Links and this time he discussed the Link Quality of Paid Links in Web Directories and WordPress Theme Sponsorships which are really hard to digest topics for professional webmasters and SEO’s.

The story begins with Matt’s opinion on Web Directory Quality and how web directories should be sorted our which one is good or bad and therefore G will/should be able to threat links in different ways. See the quite I got from his blog:

Q: Hey, as long as we’re talking about directories, can you talk about the role of directories, some of whom charge for a reviewer to evaluate them?
A: I’ll try to give a few rules of thumb to think about when looking at a directory. When considering submitting to a directory, I’d ask questions like:
- Does the directory reject urls? If every url passes a review, the directory gets closer to just a list of links or a free-for-all link site.
- What is the quality of urls in the directory? Suppose a site rejects 25% of submissions, but the urls that are accepted/listed are still quite low-quality or spammy. That doesn’t speak well to the quality of the directory.
- If there is a fee, what’s the purpose of the fee? For a high-quality directory, the fee is primarily for the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url or site.

Those are a few factors I’d consider. If you put on your user hat and ask “Does this seem like a high-quality directory to me?” you can usually get a pretty good sense as well, or ask a few friends for their take on a particular directory.

I’m not really sure what to think now. Does that mean that most of the web directories that link to MFA and other “low quality” websites will be discarded and be labeled as “potential junk” and their links will be discarded including the links to good websites??? All directories have a piece of this and that and that’s the way it is! In general terms young websites are always a bit low quality, but that’s normal right? In the beginning new web owners don’t really know what they’re doing but sooner or later they will get the hang of it and start producing better quality? Does that mean that from now on directories should accept only highly developed good quality websites and thus prevent hundreds even thousands of Newbies to have their website shared?

Lets say that at least in one way this will “prevent” the minor sort of spam that few links will cause to the Big G, but lets turn our heads to another really important case — PAID LINKS.

Paid links in general are and should be accepted as a form of advertising and is receiving as bonus some nice PageRank and thus receives/should be ranked higher in search engines (at least that’s how it was ’till now). The questions that I tried to raise on Matt Mullenweg’s blog where he commented the Sponsored Wordpress Themes was the following:

Hello All, I couldn’t resist and post my own opinion on the paid links since I do find a lot of since in them. Paid links is what it is - a form of advertising - even thou not really “major” type but still one of the largest and quickly growing on the Internet. And I’m underlining INTERNET because that’s how people advertise - Banners, Text Link and stuff like that which is totally organic. The whole thing about “spamming the search engines” is a side-effect and in our case a good side effect. Most people (99.99%) that are buying this sort of links have “high” or at least “good” quality websites because if you don’t have a good product what’s the reason to waist money in advertising it right??

Also on the wordpress sponsorships — if you don’t want to “loose your link-juice” don’t get sponsored theme. What is the big deal? There are still people that make “free” themes .. yeah .. that’s true .. they are not as good as the “sponsored” ones but that’s they have their own price!!I do support all WP theme designer with the request with CCL not to remove the sponsored links since that’s how those people earn absolutely honestly their bread! Its work and sometimes it takes few days to make a good theme and that’s just like all other professions! Do you work and sell your products for money? Yes? Is the “customer” the one who decides which product he/she should get?? Yes??Thanks for letting me share my thoughts! Cheers and have a great day/evening!

As you can see I did show my points in the wordpress themes issue and I will support it with whatever I can because that’s a real “customer” situation where nobody pushed “anyone” to get the “sponsored theme” but if he’s so worried that there will be some minor leakage of PR than get the crappy regular themes .. that it right?

Now the situation is getting so frustrating and the Google Search Quality Team is pushing their limits to get “quality search index” but is that the real situation?

I’m not a business major and I admit it. I’m a dumb Computer Science Major that doesn’t know almost anything about business but I can certainly (with my very own knowledge) derive the simple conclusion that: WHO PAYS GOOGLE’S SALARIES? ADSENSE?. Let me rephrase that now with few more words — Is it true or false that MFA websites ( if you don’t know that MFA stands for its short for Manufactured For AdSense) are forming about 50% (that’s at least) of the total AdSence income which basically goes for the GoogleGuy’s salary? Right? And Matt Cutts is saying that our little issue with Paid Links is bothering them so much that our websites are ranking higher than what????????????????? THE MFA SITES????

To my simple knowledge or call it personal experience, most of the websites that we all promote via paid links or other sorts of links are pointing to relatively high quality websites that we own or at least we promote. Those websites sell services or products and are totally legit (or not all but most). In this case I’d say that a big majority of those websites are NOT ADSENSE PUBLISHERS or at least have only a small portion of their income from advertisements. And what really gets me annoyed here is that Google is trying to kill our business??

Yes, Matt Cutts did say:

Q: Suppose I didn’t want to read all the comments on this post. Did you post any other nuggets that I should be aware of?
A: Hmm. Well, someone did mention AdSense spam and so I reiterated how to report MFA or AdSense spam. I’ll quote that for folks that are interested:

If you see a spammy or made-for-AdSense site, do the following:
- Click on the “Ads by Google” link.
- At the bottom of the page, click on the “Send Google your thoughts on the site or the ads you just saw” link and fill out the form.
- When you fill out the form, at the bottom you’ll get to a section that says “Add additional information here:”. Include the word “spamreport” all in one word to make sure that the webspam team can see the feedback.

I don’t want any Google user to encounter spam, so please feel free to use Google’s authenticated spam report form for any other type of spam. We can also handle authenticated spam reports in several different languages.

WoW! The Google Search Quality team is so concerned about search quality that they have to say “Hmm..” before they state their oppinion on MFA sites!

Now people, please share your opinions on this and I hope, You Know Who, reads my blog!

Cheers and don’t spam the Google Index! Ha ha ha ha ha …