SEO UPDATES

… unless you have the legal budget to back it up.

Google Blogoscoped reported how SEO Inc. dropped out of Google’s rankings for virtually every SEO-related term, including their company name.

SEO Inc. fired back with a cease & desist notice.

Some people / companies will never learn.

After sending the cease & desist, Boing Boing eventually picked up the story.

A tiny little weblog post on a not-so-widely-read blog suddenly gets BoingBoing’d after getting the lawyers involved, and probably tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of Boing Boing readers now have a negative impression of SEO Inc.

Great article over on the ClickZ network that talks about Google’s new patent filing:

Google reveals in the filing its ranking algorithm is organized to thwart overly aggressive marketers. It confirms something search marketers have long suspected: Google watches how fast new links to a site appear as a way to detect and penalize search engine spam. If too many new links appear in too short a timeframe, the site may be penalized, or even banned, by Google.

According to the filing, Google also watches how many new links with identical anchor text emerge. This is another clue links may be suspect or mass-manufactured. Additionally, Google monitors the rate at which links disappear to identify the degree of relevance and sort out spam. If Google does these things, you should assume other engines do something very similar.

If you were to switch to an affiliate platform that caused all your affiliates to link directly to your site overnight, all using the same anchor text, red flags would very likely be raised with Google and other search engines. Your site might be banned or, at the very least, experience a sudden decline in rankings. Either scenario costs a lot of money and take months to repair.

Read more here