The story comes down to J.C. Penny using link buying into link farms, etc to rank first for many terms as it was discovered by looking at their link profile with the right keyword anchor text.


“The New Yorks Times presented their findings to Google. Googler Matt Cutts, head of webspam, confirmed that the tactics violated the Google webmaster guidelines and shortly after, the J.C. Penney web site was nowhere to found for the queries they had previously ranked number one for.Matt tweeted that “Google’s algorithms had started to work; manual action also taken”.”

Read The Whole Story (very good snapshots of investigation) —–> New York Times Exposes J.C. Penney Link Scheme That Causes Plummeting Rankings in Google

With the growth in traffic for both news aggregator websites, sharing on the web is stronger than ever. Where is Digg in all of this? With the growth in traffic of both Stumbleupon and Reddit will tech companies now go back to trying to grow social news websites?

Digg continues to have its big problems as the companies new CEO tries to take the company in a new direction by actually trying to bring features back that really helped build that community. For one, one of the biggest complaints is about homepage activity which seems to slow down at night and weekends and its said its to keep sending a large amount of referral traffic to those in the front page.

Just last week we revealed the leaked AOL guidelines to push stories to better rank in the search engines. Google has come under fire as of late by the SEO industry to see how they will combat content farms. Many SEOs are concerned about the quality of stories on the web regarding low quality content ranking well in authoritative websites.

The purchase of HuffingtonPost by AOL is rumored to be a big part of its SEO efforts to rank well for big trending stories. Slate has a GREAT piece on this and starts by reporting, “Before I go on, let me stop and say a couple of more important things: Aol, Aol Acquires Huffington Post, Aol Buys Huffington Post, Aol Buys Huffpo, Aol Huffington Post, Huffington Post, Huffington Post Aol, Huffington Post Aol Merger, Huffington Post Media Group, Huffington Post Sold, Huffpo Aol, Huffpost Aol, Media News.

See what I did there? That’s what you call search-engine optimization, or SEO. If I worked at the Huffington Post, I’d likely be commended for the subtle way in which I inserted all those search keywords into the lede of my article. In fact, the keywords above are taken directly from HuffPo’s page announcing its acquisition, and my first paragraph is a rip-off of a search-engine baiting article the site posted on Sunday, “What time does the Superbowl start?” HuffPo’s facility with keywords seems to be one of the main things that Tim Armstrong, AOL’s CEO, loves about the site. Armstrong, a former Google exec, can’t get enough SEO—according to an internal memo that Business Insider posted last week, he’s pushing for the company to use an “SEO checker” to look over 95 percent of AOL’s stories by the end of March. He believes this will yield a big payoff for AOL; 40 percent of its traffic, the memo says, will come from search engines.”

What if Google changes its whole search algorithm tomorrow and affects HuffingtonPost? Will the acquisition be a total failure?

Read the whole story @ ——> HuffPo’s Achilles’ Heel

AOL needs it needs to do more to survive in todays web as many other properties, one such as Mashable, a now the big content players online in their niche.
What is the AOL WAY? “AOL is using this document to train editors right now. It is an illuminating look into how AOL, a company with hundreds of millions in dollars in annual funding, is trying to turn itself into a 21st century media giant on the fly.”

Some tidbits:

• AOL tells its editors to decide what topics to cover based on four considerations: traffic potential, revenue potential, edit quality and turn-around time.

• AOL asks its editors to decide whether to produce content based on “the profitability consideration.”

• The documents reveal that AOL is, when the story calls for it, willing to boost traffic by 5 to 10% with search ads and other “paid media.”

• AOL site leaders are expected to have eight ideas for packages that could generate at least $1 million in revenue on hand at all times.

• In-house AOL staffers are expected to write five to 10 stories per day.

• AOL knows its sites are too dependent on traffic from AOL.com, and it wants its editors to fix the problem by posting more frequently, with more emphasis on getting pageviews.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-aol-way#ixzz1D0WMnGDk

What is really surprising about this news is the fact that is has overtaken the position of eBay which I believe has been in decline for a while now. With its poor customer service (which I believe it is a big part of its downfall,) and Amazon building its empire and providing a better product for the end consumer and merchant alike, eBays strongest product is PayPal where it really has built the largest online payment solution in the world and that is just for the time being as I don’t see why another company won’t come in the market or an established company come and take significant market share from PayPal.

Through SecondMarket, Amazon is worth $74.4 billion and Google currently valued at $192.9 billion. Facebook has monetized itself from selling advertising and I’m sure will find other ways to monetize itself where I see a big potential to dig deeper into search.

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

Honestly, if you’re doing online marketing, it is a great book to get your hands on and give it a quick read. It’s very straight to the point and not a boring read with great tips from some real great experts in the field such as Tim Carter, Brian Clark, Joel Comm, Jim Kukral, Ted Murphy and many others. If you’re looking for some good information on internet marketing, give this a read.

Overall, as you’ll see on Amazon, the book has some good reviews already and hopefully we’ll continue to see good reviews from readers! Congratulations to Shawn Collins for doing a great job with the book and everyone else who took part in it.

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

Facebook is now a goldmine for online marketers as search engines have become in the past 2 decades. Social is a huge focus, this also commands a shift in the search engines with the social graph of the search engine algorithm changing around this shift.

“According to Web measurement firm Compete Inc., Facebook has passed search-engine giant Google to become the top source for traffic to major portals like Yahoo and MSN, and is among the leaders for other types of sites.

“People are spending less time navigating the Internet on their own and are now navigating the Internet based on their friends’ recommendations or their friends’ activities,” said Dave Yovanno, chief executive of Gigya Inc., a Palo Alto firm that offers social-media services. “That’s one of the big trends we started picking up on probably four or five months ago.”

Read The Whole Story @ SFGate.com ——> Facebook directs more online users than Google

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

From todays press release:

Social media giant Facebook has decided to strike out on its own in the advertising arena as it has ended its display advertising deal with Microsoft.

However, the ties between the two companies have not been severed completely. Microsoft will continue to be Facebook’s search provider and will make more features from its search engine, Bing, available to Facebook users.

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

As this isn’t 100% verified for the moment, it seems Apple is very close to signing a deal with Microsoft to make BING the iPhones default search engine. As the iPhone has most of the share on smart phones (I think), the default search engine on these phones can make a big difference in search share over the next year or two. Apple and Google have started to distance themselves in a big way when CEO of Google Eric Schmidt resigned from the board of Apple and Google has now launched its own phone, the NEXUS ONE. (Compare the iPhone vs. Nexus One)

“Nearly 13 years later, Apple and Microsoft are reportedly in talks to strike another deal, one that would make Microsoft’s Bing the default search engine on the iPhone. According to Business Week, sources close to the matter have said that Apple and Microsoft have been in negotiations over the past few weeks, and even if a deal isn’t ultimately reached, the fact that Apple is considering it underscores just how seriously Apple views the threat from Google and its ever expanding range of products/services.

Over the past few months, the relationship between Apple and Google has done a complete 180. One minute, Google CEO Eric Schmidt is a member of Apple’s board of directors, and the next thing you know, Schmidt resigns due to conflicts of interest and Google and Apple are battling it out over Apple’s rejection of Google Voice from the iPhone.”

Read the whole story @ NetworkWorld.com ————> Apple in talks with Microsoft to make Bing default search engine on the iPhone

——————————————————————————————————————————————————-

Share

The article goes on to say, "The next-most-effective conversion tactic for smaller marketers was e-mail and e-newsletters, followed by pay-per-click and search ads, behavioral targeting and page sponsorships.

For larger marketers, the list of effective online tactics was nearly the same, except search and e-mail were flipped. Pay-per-impression ads were also more effective for larger marketers (presumably because they have the funds to experiment in an expensive medium). "

Through much research of my own, SEO and eMail marketing have the best ROI. Pay-Per-Click can have outstanding results but it could also have very disappointing results. The one thing about PPC and many small businesses know this, it has to be managed very well, at least until you can get a great rhythm going.

>>WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS TOPIC? COMMENT AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS POST<<

- Social Plus Search Will Equal Better Results, More Ad Opportunities
- Social Ad Networks Will Expand
- Twitter Expanding
- Online News Sources Will Experiment with Paid Content

Read The Whole Story at eMarketer.com ——> eMarketer Weighs In on 2010 Trends: Social Media & Paid Content
—————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

>>WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS TOPIC? COMMENT AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS POST<<

Niche marketplaces are the next wave of online marketplace where you can go and sell used goods such as electronics marketplace Gazelle.com and others coming up with this NICHE theme.

Read the whole story at WALL STREET JOURNAL —–> Niche Sites Going After eBay

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————

Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land takes us through Googles Real-Time Search. Read The Post: -->> Google Launches Real Time Search

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————

Nevertheless, many newspapers can blame much of their demise on Google. The largest search engine in the world that indexes billions of pages and has advertising models in place that bring incredible revenue. Though they can be blame for their demise, I would think Google is another channel to these news sources.

Eric Schmidt from Google (Left) and Ruper Murdoch from Newscorp (Right)

The SeattlePi blog reports, “Google CEO Eric Schmidt must be having a tough year. Media organizations, especially News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, have been picking on Google for destroying their business. They blame the Internet giant for giving away their content for free and stealing their ad revenue.

Google is a great source of promotion. We send online news publishers a billion clicks a month from Google News and more than three billion extra visits from our other services, such as Web Search and iGoogle. That is 100,000 opportunities a minute to win loyal readers and generate revenue – for free. In terms of copyright, another bone of contention, we only show a headline and a couple of lines from each story. If readers want to read on they have to click through to the newspaper’s Web site. (The exception are stories we host through a licensing agreement with news services.) And if they wish, publishers can remove their content from our search index, or from Google News.

News Corp has quite a few properties online. They own the Wall Street Journal, social giant Myspace (although not mentioned in the story above) and if a property such as the Wall Street Journal was out of the Google index, news or search (or both), the loss of traffic would be significant to the revenue stream of these properties.

When it comes to the revenue model of news sites online, it all comes down to traffic. You can capitalize on your traffic by selling ad space based on your traffic or you can sell subscription. For the most part, the subscription base model is a tough competitive market due to the fact that there is so much news content out there, you have to have a very loyal following to have people pay for your content. News sources such as the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times are free. Why? Because the revenue model that fit best was free-for-all equals a lot more traffic equals a lot more money based on selling ad space.

In the comment by the story reported by SeattlePi, a reader comments, “It’s worth reiterating: It is extraordinarily easy for a website owner to lock out Google from indexing the site’s contents. Rupert Murdoch could do it right now if he wanted to…He doesn’t. Murdoch knows that Google is his butter.”

Two words, VERY TRUE. No matter the issues at hand as media companies may clash, Google is the main highway of traffic right now and last thing you want to do is block your exit as the possibilities of traffic are endless AND the amount of money Google generates (and traffic) for News Corp online properties are too big to just drop. That’s reality.

As Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa states, “”We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true,” says Moskwa. “We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.”

As described by Wikipedia, “PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page,[1] used by the Google Internet search engine that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is also called the PageRank of E and denoted by PR(E).”

There is a great video on WebProNews with EricWard from EricWard.com regarding if PageRank never existed.

“As Eric notes, Google has never actually said don’t buy links. They just say don’t buy our PageRank. Don’t buy the PageRank measure that they’ve assigned to a site. Buying a link would make sense just like buying a banner would’ve made sense ten years ago. If your motivation is click traffic that’s fine, says Ward. If your motivation is that you want to buy a link from a high PageRank site so that you can rank high, then you’re in the area that Google doesn’t like.”

So, with that said, will you change your link building strategies? If pagerank is really irrelevant, do you still think its best to get a link from a site with a PR 2 or a site with a PR 5?

Other Articles Regarding PageRank For Your Interest:

Say Pagerank Update and Everybody Jumps

PageRank Update: To Follow or Not To Follow?

Paid Links Don’t Hurt Your PageRank Right? Matt Cutts?