LBi Netrank: Newsletter November 2007

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2008

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Search Engine Updates

Google speaks out against paid links

Google has published a post on its official Webmaster Central Blog saying that buying or selling links that pass PageRank is a violation of its webmaster guidelines. This was posted as a culmination of recent events with regard to Google reducing the PageRank of sites which had been selling plain text links for their PageRank benefit.

Google hit out at some of the world's most influential blogs and news sites who had been engaged in such link trading by reducing their PageRank, in some cases to zero. (PageRank is Google's link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to a site roughly based on the number of links it has and the importance of the pages that provides the links - Source: Wikipedia, December 2007). It should be noted that it has been the vendors of these links, not the purchasing sites, who have been penalised in this move.

Yahoo! Site Explorer backlink counts now fixed

Yahoo! announced on November 6 that its Site Explorer results (which show the total number of backlinks into sites) had now been fixed. It had previously announced that its results were incorrect and that problems had started to occur on October 11.

Google experimenting with the permission of users to change or vote for search results

In a move that is being compared with Digg-style voting of search results, Google has created an experimental search page that lets users move results up in their personal search results page or remove these results altogether.

While this currently only affects each user's own personal search results, this sort of feature could be used to provide Google with feedback that may be used to affect the search results for all users. However, it will be difficult for Google to prevent spamming of this feature should it be made the default.

MSN Live Search Webmaster Portal public beta

MSN's answer to Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo! Site Explorer is now in public beta. MSN Live Search's Webmaster Portal includes features such as an assessment of a site's ranking for particular keywords, details about inbound and outbound links, XML sitemap submission and a robots.txt validator.

Acquisitions and Partnerships

AOL buys advertising firm Quigo for around $300 million

AOL has purchased yet another online advertising firm. Quigo's products include AdSonar, which is similar to Google's AdSense, and FeedPoint.

Go Daddy offers easy access to Google Webmaster Tools

Go Daddy and Google have partnered to allow all Go Daddy hosting customers to access Google Webmaster Tools easily. This includes automatic site verification and automatic XML Sitemap submission, although users have to opt-in for this.

New Product Launches

Google announces open source mobile phone Android - no 'G Phone'

Rumours about a Google phone have turned out to be true, but Google's approach has surprised many observers. Rather than creating a phone itself, Google has opted to create an open consortium dedicated to creating an open platform for mobile devices. Partners include phone manufacturers such as Motorola, Samsung and LG, and carriers such as T-Mobile, Sprint and China Mobile.

Microsoft's analytics now in beta

Microsoft's analytics platform, also known as Project Gatineau, is now in public beta.

Key features of the platform include the ability to determine the demographic segmentation of your site's users.

To take part in the beta, you must request an invitation.

News and Research

Older people represent a large percentage of Facebook and MySpace users

According to a recent study by comScore, nearly one third of FaceBook users are aged between 35 and 54, and 41% of MySpace users also fall into this age category.