While Google’s hands may (or may not) be pretty clean in these respects, the company continues to press ahead with initiatives that may be more likely to generate the kind of legitimate, hard evidence, formal complaints that regulators will use to exert control over Google’s stranglehold on the internet search process.

Google Linking Product Usage

One of the things the legal system hates to see is when giant companies use their power to force services or products upon other companies or consumers. This not only limits innovation, it costs other potentially powerful businesses in ways that neither politicians nor judges approve of. Intel, for example, was forced to refine the way it sells computer chips after forcing manufacturers to accept terms that made it impossible to use AMD chips, even if they were better for a specific usage.

Google has made a subtle change to the way they handle results from their dominate search platform. Although the company claims it is making the changes for privacy reasons, there is an exception big enough to drive a truck through that points directly to the beginnings of tying less dominant products to the company’s monopoly product in order to stifle competition.

Users logged into Google will have their searches encrypted by default. On the surface, this sounds perfectly reasonable. However, what this means is that the owners of websites visited by users from searches will not longer be able to see what the exact keywords were that led to the visitor finding the website.

For example, these days, if someone searches for freelance writer and they end up on my freelance writing website at ArcticLlama.com, I get a report that says the user came to my website from Google and that the search that led him to my website was freelance writer. This is useful information for me, because it shows why and how people end up at my website. It can also offer a reason for unexpected things that happen.

My freelance writing business is named ArcticLlama, so when I found a funny joke in the form a Llama Font, I wrote a little post about it and put it up on my website. A month or two later my site got a lot of extra traffic. Since I hadn’t done anything, that I was aware of, out of the ordinary, I wondered why there were more traffic to my website. Had a popular website linked to me? Was there an article I wrote that went viral? Was there a serial killer our there with the same name? Had Brian Nelson just won a million dollars and people were desperately trying to find me?

As it turns out, it had nothing to do with me after all. Upon looking at my traffic logs and Google Analytics, I was able to see that one of the top keywords for users coming from search engines was "llama font". The joke font had gotten popular and people were finding my article about it on Google. It was good information to know so that I didn’t make wrong assumptions.

As a website owner I have no inalienable right to a person’s search keywords per se, and therefore, Google’s decision to encrypt outgoing traffic in such a way that I will no longer see why keywords bring visitors to my website isn’t something that I have any standing to complain about, except Google isn’t doing it properly.

Instead, Google has a very big exception to the rule. If you are a paying advertiser on Google and someone comes to your website from a Google search, then the company gladly hands over the keywords that brought that user to your website.

In other words, If you buy something from Google, then Google will give you something free that no one else can give you and that no one else gets unless they buy from Google AdWords.

Note to Senate committee: If you don’t want to look like you are just chasing after the biggest kid on the block for no reason, start paying attention to these kinds of things. Keywords are valuable SEARCH information and Google just locked them down so that only the people who buy from Google’s ADVERTISING group are allowed to see them. Vertical integration by monopolies is a no no.

Google Abusing Monopoly Power? is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

Essentially, I use HubPages as the place where I publish stuff that doesn’t fit on any of the other websites I write for, or occasionally, to post something that links to content I want to provide a little boost to.

In other words, despite a HubPage Author Rank consistently over 90, I am not a big HubPages users, nor would anyone consider me a power publisher there. You can check out my HubPage Profile if you are so inclined.

HubPages Rise in Google Search Rankings?

What is interesting is not how I do or do not use the HubPages platform, but rather what has happened to the traffic there over the last few months. It seems as if HubPages may be recovering in Google’s rankings.

Like most other content mills, HubPages got hit hard by Google’s Panda algorithm update. One of the interesting things about writing for HubPages is  that they allow you to include your Google Analytics information, and thus, get similar analytics to those that you get from your own websites. I noticed a substantial decline in my HubPages traffic when the Google update hit earlier this year. Traffic to my hubs dropped about 50 percent.

Keep in mind that I don’t get a ton of page views at HubPages so this is hardly definitive, but it does match up with what was reported. Lately, however, things have picked back up.

I haven’t published a new hub in a quite a while, so there has been little or no change made by me on my end. Whatever HubPages is doing, however, might be working.

On July 24th, my traffic was at the same reduced level it has been since early this year after the Panda update. On July 25th, traffic increased substantially and has stayed at the new higher level ever since. Traffic has doubled, back to where it was originally. The former high peaks on my analytics graph from March to July are now the low points on the graph since July 25th.

Again, I don’t have enough traffic or hubs to say anything definitive, and it is entirely possible that HubPages overall is still down while my own content has been judged worthy, but the most likely explanation is that whatever HubPages did to “fix” things after the Google search update is working. Either that, or Google changed the algorithm again and HubPages is out of the dog house.

Anyone else have any experience with this? Is there a domain-wide HubPages recovery going on?

Update: Thanks to the reader that pointed out that there was a confirmed update to the Google Panda search algorithm at about the time of my HubPage traffic improvement. Have other HubPages users seen the same improvements in their overall traffic?

Google Search Update or HubPages Improvement ? is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

I’m Brian Nelson on Google Plus if you are interested.

Well, actually, there has been a lot of noise in the echo chamber of the techie dome. It turns out that none of my family members, nor any of my no-IT friends have even heard of it. Even less are interested in doing anything with it. Many of them get to see pictures from friends and family on Facebook and keep up with what is going on with those same people via Facebook status updates. Unlike the Scoble’s of the world, they don’t want or need anything beyond that.

What seems to make this all the more interesting is the difference between the techie impulse to be on the leading-edge of technology and the I already have what I need impulse of non-techies.

Facebook versus Google Beginning

There are plenty of technology writers out there comparing the nuances of Facebook to Google Plus to Twitter. There are those who already have crowned one of them the champion and proclaimed that it is only a matter of time. Plenty of pundits have already whipped out their terminology bag and written about the either insurmountable network effects of Facebook or the over-hyped network effects of Facebook.

For those of you without a techno-speak / business babble dictionary, network effects is the concept that by having a lot of people already in place (your "network") you are more likely to start using, or keep using, a particular service or technology.

For example, a grandmother may be on Facebook for no reason other than to see pictures of her grandkids. Nothing Google does will make that grandmother sign up until someone in her network (one of her kids, in this example) starts posting pictures of grandchildren over there.

Which brings us to all of the noise.

Compare Twitter to Facebook, for example. There are millions of stories about your (or someone you know) mom wanting to be your friend on Facebook. Ever hear of a mom who wanted to follow you on Twitter? Despite having millions of users, Twitter is not as mainstream as Facebook despite a huge number of users and a commanding spot in the field of social networking. Google+ is neither Facebook nor Twitter yet. It is simply new. It is not, however mainstream in any way.

Techies love to rush to the next big thing and then pronounce how it will change our lives and everyone will be using it in the future. It rarely works out that way. While most technology types spend plenty of time online, and therefore have plenty of time to try and use numerous services, most non-techies have a more limited interest in what happens on the internet. In fact, the entire value of Facebook comes down to not what it does, can do, or will do, but that it has drawn in the mainstream population as users. That didn’t happen quickly, it took years.

Google+ has a big head start in that most people who use the internet at all have heard of the company and use its search service. But, it is a much smaller part of the population that use its ubiquitous email service and and even smaller part that use any of its other services. For them, "another Facebook" is not something that they need or want, no matter who is behind it.

As of today, that is about all you can say. Anyone predicting the assent or demise of Google+ is missing the boat. If, and only if, Google+ can extend beyond the internet-savvy population will it have any affect on Facebook. For that to happen, it will take time and some non-techies to get on board.

Is Google+ Worth It? is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

The idea is that by enabling each new third-party advertising network manually, and then watching my AdSense reports to see if my earnings go up or down, I should be able to tell which networks hurt my earnings by either lowering the click-through-rate or by lowering the average cost-per-click. The catch is that my AdSense earnings naturally increase and decrease even without making any changes. Some times the end of the month generates higher CPC and sometimes lower CPC. In some cases, the click thru rate goes up on Fridays and sometimes it goes down.

I noticed recently that I had a couple of dozen third-party ad networks still blocked on my Google AdSense account. Some I determined to have a potentially negative effect, but many others had never been tried at all, let alone for more than a day or two.

So, today I enabled all ad networks, including the Google AdSense third-party networks lowering earnings in my previous tests about how well the 3rd party ads perform for my websites. We’ll see if there is a major impact, or if there is no impact at all.

Read this: Is Credit Karma a scam or not?

Hopefully, Google knows what they are doing and using all of those additional third-party ads makes my AdSense income double! Actually, I solid increase of AdSense income would be nice, but I suspect that for all my efforts manually adding and removing the new ad networks, that everything stabilizes pretty much the way it was before.

How have you handled your third-party ad networks on AdSense? Do you enable them all or only a handful? Have you tested how the 3rd party ads hurt your earnings or boost your AdSense profits?

Time will tell how things work for my small network of websites.

Allow All Third-Party AdSense Networks is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

This NY Times article shows, yet again, major retailers engaging in link spam by buying numerous paid links in order to boost their position for popular internet search terms. In this case, a list of florists attempted to boost their search engine rankings by buying links to Mother’s Day related keywords. When contacted by the newspaper about the paid links that violate Google’s terms the search engine giant blew it off saying that the paid links had no effect.

In other words, Google will not penalize you, nor take any action against you for intentionally violating its Webmaster Guidelines if it thinks that what you tried to do didn’t work.

If you try to rob a bank, but you don’t get into the vault, the police will just let you go. Does that make ANY sense whatsoever?

It’s just another example of how Google’s reliance on counting links can only continue to produce increasingly bad search results as more and more companies and web publishers deliberately game Google’s search results for profit.

Pop-Quiz: What strategy would be more effective at protecting the long-term value of your company’s most prized asset?

1. Letting people attempt to ruin it without consequence as long as they fail
2. Quickly and harshly penalizing anyone who even tries to mess with it

Can you imagine what would happen if Google actually penalized 1-800 Flowers or FTD during the week before Mother’s Day for violating the rules against link buying? No legitimate company would ever try it again for fear of triggering a severe penalty that could actually harm its bottom line. Instead of company’s playing innocent and blaming SEO consultants, they would aggressively monitor the tactics being used on their behalf. The battle against paid links would be won in a single move, but alas, Google has decided to use the wet noodle strategy instead.

Google seems to grow more naïve by the day when it comes to its search engine rankings. The recent Panda update deflected the uproar about search quality earlier this year, but the march toward every #1 search result being the webpage with the most paid links or the most spambot created links continues unabated.

Google Says Cheating OK? is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

I use AdSense to help me make money writing online with some of the various websites I publish. I don’t make millions but I do well enough to care about the amount of passive income generated by AdSense each month for my freelance writing business.

The ad types performance report on Google AdSense shows that of the five ad types — text, rich media, image, animated image, Flash — the Flash ads have both the lowest click-through rate and the lowest cost per click (CPC).  What makes that standout is that the majority of my ad impressions, or page views, are from text ads and that the other types of ads all have a higher CPC, and some also have a higher click-through-rate. One can draw the conclusion that those ads, while displayed less often, are a valuable addition to the advertisements displayed on my websites.

For example, rich media ads have a higher Page CTR and a higher CPC, based on a monthly report, than the text ads do. That obviously makes them worthwhile ads to have.

Image ads, on the other hand, have a higher Page CTR but a lower CPC.  That means that even though an image ad pays less for each click, people are more likely to click on them. In other words, you make up the lower CPC with higher clicking volume, a valid business strategy. Google’s value metric is Page RPM which suggests a slightly lower value for image ads than for text ads, but theoretically, Google’s ad auction is displaying image ads when text ads of greater value are not available.

Flash Ads Worth Less

Which brings us to Flash ads. On my websites, Flash ads have a lower Page CTR and a lower CPC. That means that people are more likely to click on a text ad, and that text ad is more likely to pay more. There is no way to make that up on volume.

In fact, on my websites, the CPC for Flash ads is less than half what it is for text ads. According to Google’s Page RPM metric, Flash ads are worth one-third of what my text ads and image ads are. That leads me to think that Flash ads, for whatever reason, do not perform well on my websites.

Of course, that does not mean that Flash ads are worth less for every website, which is why Google should give publishers a way to choose whether to allow Flash ads.  Google already lets webmasters choose whether to only allow text ads, or whether to allow only image ads, or whether to allow both.  None of those choices is optimal for my online empire. I earn good money on image ads, just not Flash ads. Choosing to allow only text ads would lower my AdSense income.

What I need to maximize AdSense earnings on my websites is an option to block only Flash ads. In fact, since there are five ad types reported, I think it makes sense for Google to offer the ability to allow or not allow each of the five categories. In my case, I will block all Flash ads and the money I make with AdSense will increase. Others could use the optimal strategy for their websites.

I bet that Google does not allow this option because it knows that too many people would block Flash ads if they could. Not only do they pay less, in at least some situations, but they are despised by pretty much anyone who understands enough about web technologies to know the difference. That means that many webmasters would block flash ads without giving them a chance, even if it meant lower overall income. I think Google should allow people to make that choice. After all, it’s our money.

Of course, that is the problem. It isn’t just our money, it’s Google’s money too, and unlike me, they have plenty of other websites to show the better paying ads on.  What they really want to avoid is not having enough places to squeeze out whatever amount of lower earnings they can get by pushing those Flash ads out there too. Advertisers probably love Flash ads too. They pay less per click with those, so each click is cheaper than with a text or regular image ad.

Until that dynamic changes, us website publishers don’t have much choice but to wonder what might have been if we didn’t waste so many page views on underperforming Flash advertisements on our websites.

Block Flash Ads on AdSense Option is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

Various web traffic measuring firms published winners and losers from the original Panda update showing that sites like Suite101.com and HubPages had been hammered while eHow and others had emerged mostly unscathed.

Lately, another round of complaints have come courtesy of those who escaped Panda I but were subsequently slaughtered by Panda II. The second Panda update affects even fewer websites than before, according to Google. The most notable hit this time around was eHow.

What Changed In Google Panda 2 Update?

That eHow parent Demand Media escaped mostly unscathed from the original Panda update was a head-scratcher for many. After all, if the update was to go after the so-called content mills, then shouldn’t the mother of all content mills be hit?

The quick re-update released by Google may have been in response to such criticism. It may have been that no one was more surprised than Google that SEO content generation master eHow slipped away from the original Panda update.

What changed between Panda 1 and Panda 2?

Google, of course, has been only vague about what things were changed to update its all-important search algorithm.

What many people have seized on is Google’s statement that having lots of low quality webpages on your website can hurt the high quality webpages on your website.

That’s a nice theory, but there is a major problem there. Google has admitted that they cannot algorithmically determine what is high or low quality on a single page of text. That means that Google is using other factors to determine, by proxy, what is high or low quality. What are those new factors?

One Google source mentioned that having too many ads, or too convoluted of navigation, things that deliberately put the monetization of a webpage above its usefulness could be a factor. This makes sense if that was how the first wave of Panda was implemented.

Consider that among its many sins, the one thing eHow does not do is complicate its webpages. Sure there are plenty of ads, but the content runs uninterrupted down the center of each page. Likewise, reasonable content based navigation takes prominent places on each page. The top-left placement is links to other content, for example, not an ad (which is below). Likewise, at the end of the articles are more ads, but they are Google’s own text ads, right where the company recommends placing them. The graphics are all normal and natural based on the content. There are no garish, giant graphics or other usability sins. In fact, the quality of content (which cannot be judged algorithmically, yet) aside, there are no real design issues with Demand Studios.

What Google Penalizes In Panda 2 Update

What Google may be penalizing in its second round of updates is likely to be less about what is on the page, which is what they did their best to judge in the first round of Panda, but rather what is not on the page.

Consider a site like eHow. With millions of pages of content, there is one thing that makes website like eHow different than other websites: links.

Don’t get me wrong, eHow has plenty of incoming links, it makes sure of that. And, that, is precisely what Google could target.

Consider that eHow has a dozen articles, or more, about many topics, each with a title that differs by just a few words, and each cranked out quickly and cheaply by freelancers who get a flat-rate fee for each published article. How could such webpages ever build up any incoming links? How could they ever be found in the first place if traffic was not sent there directly by Google?

The front page can’t hold every article published each day for more than a few seconds each. Writers get a flat-rate pay with no additional revenue sharing or other reason to build their own links. And eHow isn’t exactly a site that you brag about writing for.

In other words, the only links going to eHow articles are eHow links. Tons of them. Tons and tons of them.

Google has always counted incoming links from the same place as worth less than links from multiple websites. That makes sense. Internal links are like your mom saying that you’re cool. Sure, she really believes it, but that doesn’t make it a worthwhile assessment.

But sites like eHow can overcome reducing internal link worth with sheer volume. Assume that each “same site” link were valued at 1/10th of a unique site link. In that case you need just 10 of your own links to equal 1 “real link”. Even a 1/100th or 1/1,000th, eHow is one of a handful of sites on the Internet that can send that many links to each and every webpage it has, and it can do it dynamically to ensure that every page gets incoming links of some sort.

With Google’s over-reliance on the title tag to determine any webpage’s relevance, only a handful of link power is needed to push a webpage to the top of the search results when the title is an exact match to the search performed, and eHow has more than enough links for that.

Of course, ignoring internal links can be a bad move. The more times the Washington Post links to its own article, the more likely it is that webpage is a definitive source of information about the topic. The catch is, that the same article is also  likely to have several of incoming links from non-Washington Post websites. That gives Google a way to separate “good” internal links from dime-a-dozen computer generated internal links.

As we’ve seen, giving internal links a lower value cannot overcome massive internal linking. But, what if Google tweaked its algorithm to count external links, judge the relevance, and ONLY THEN count those internal links. That would make those exact match titles that eHow depends on so impotent to overcome “real” content, no matter how many internal links it throws at them.

Another possibility is that Google stopped counting links that are computer generated. Crawl the same page more than once and only count the links that haven’t changed. That would take a lot more power than the above solution, but it would ensure that only “real” links were counted. Of course, that would diminish the power of worthwhile lists of dynamic links like “Most Popular” or “Most Commented”.

Regardless of how it was actually done, what Panda II did was to change how internal links were used in determining the quality or relevance of a webpage. Having done that, eHow’s millions of pages all became members of that sad group of webpage unlinked by anyone but their own website.

Still, SEO experts and technology writers around the web insist on harping on the Panda I update news about low-quality content somewhere else on your site. They might be right, but the way Google is judging low-quality is now very different than it was just a few weeks ago.

How Google Panda 2 Update Hit eHow and Others is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

In March, Google only controlled 64.4 percent of search. While it is possible to have a monopoly with control over just 65 percent of a market, it isn’t likely to hold up in this case. First, the other 30 percent is controlled by a single competitor, so we aren’t talking about one company with a huge share and then 35 companies fighting over 1 percent scraps. In fact, a 65/30/5 split sounds like a lot of markets with a number one and a number two player.

Sadly, these numbers won’t stop the anti-trust trolls from making a run at Google. For one thing, in the U.S. at least, anti-trust is often highly political, and in politics perception is reality. Right now, the perception is that Google is all mighty.

For another, anti-trust lawsuits are, by nature, historical in nature. In order to prove that a company has used its dominate market position in an anti-competitive nature, the company has to have already used its dominate market position in an anti-competitive way.

In other words, the anti-trust actions that come Google’s way would be talking about 2009 and 2010, not March 2011, although Google may be able to play those numbers — particularly if they continue — into lesser penalties should they lose and/or choose to settle.

After all, it doesn’t make any sense to go breaking up the number one company in an industry just so the number two company can become the number one company.

In the meantime, maybe the company has paid a price for Google’ broken search algorithm being allowed to run too long. Maybe other non-Microsoft companies like Blekko can gain traction. And, maybe, all of this is nothing but a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.

Either way, the headlines for the technology writers out there virtually write themselves for anyone looking to get into a tizzy about the whole thing one way or another.

Microsoft Bing Now Controls 30 Percent of Search is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

I had an HTC Touch for a few years. I’m not a cell phone power user and I spent most of my non-phone call time on the HTC reading news, using Google maps, or settling disagreements or looking up that kind of trivia that seems to pop-up whenever you are out with friends.

When the power button on the top broke, it was time to get a new cell phone.  I had no interest in paying several hundreds of dollars for a device that is basically a phone plus a GPS and internet browser.  In addition, I had the old school, original, Sprint SERO plan which gave me 500 minutes of call time (plus unlimitted calls to other Sprint users, which includes my wife, and thus makes the 500 minutes more than enough time.)  More importantly, it gave me unlimited text messaging and data all for $30 per month.  There was no way I was giving up that cell phone plan because there is nothing out there near as cheap and Sprint’s coverage in the Denver area is actually quite good.

It all added up to the elimination of any of those gee-whiz, top of the line, phones like the iPhone or Evo, or whatever.  At the time, there were no Windows 7 mobile phones so my choice was the aging Windows 6.x line of cell phones, old out of date Palm phones, or Android.  I ended up with an LG Optimus S cell phone on Sprint and it has worked out just fine.

Along the way, however, there has been one thing missing from my Android cell phone. There is no built-in way to sync Android with a PC.

Syncing to the Cloud

I am well aware that “the cloud” is all the rage these days.  However, I am a techie from back in the day.  I’m still a freelance technical writer today.  In other words, I believe in being responsible for my data.  It’s nice when someone, or something, else backs up important data for me, but I don’t trust anyone as much as I trust myself.  It hasn’t happened yet, but the days will come when an online service provider loses a bunch of data that cannot be recovered, and when an major service has a significant security breach resulting in a lot of data becoming public.

So, while I am happy to have my email synced with Gmail automatically on my Android device, and I’m perfectly content to sync my contacts there as well, I want my text messages between me and loved one archived on MY COMPUTER, not out in the cloud somewhere.  I want my photos of my kids backed up to MY COMPUTER, not to Picasa or Flickr, or whatever is out there.  Since Google’s entire business strategy is to make it so you don’t need a computer for anything but accessing the web, they don’t have a desktop sync in Android by default.

I can get my photos easily enough by just copying the files manually or through Dropbox, but getting all of my text messages is trickier.

Fortunately, I recently discovered a free desktop synch program for Android called Android Manager.  It provides the same kind of backup and synchronization between a PC and Android phone as ActiveSync provided for Windows Mobile phones with Windows.  Coupled with Evernote to synchronize my “memos”, it provides pretty complete data coverage for what I end up creating and saving on my phone.

Interestingly, it does it over WiFi instead of a USB connection, which would be really cool, except it does not work over the Internet or anything.  Rather, you have to be connected to the same wireless access point with both your PC and Android phone.  That works out OK once you have gotten your first sync in, but it takes a really long time for the first sync, especially if you have a bunch of photos on your phone. If you buy the OEM version I guess it has a USB synch option, but for now, this works OK.

Now all I need is a decent calendar/to-do list combo that is able to convey BOTH of those simultaneously to a well-designed widget in order to remind me what I should be doing at 3:30 p.m. when I look down to check the weather.

Synchronize Android Phone with Windows 7 is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

Both the writer and Matt Cutts quickly lose sight of the real issue and veer off-track into the actions taken by Google after the fact. However, the real conclusions that should be made come from what was happening to Google’s results BEFORE someone (a high-profile someone) pointed it out to the company.  The data gathered in reporting how JC Penny scammed its way to the top of Google’s search results without anyone noticing is not so easily explained away.

How Google Search Spam Keeps Getting Worse

It has been suggested by stock investors and analysts on Wall Street that Google as a company is a one-trick pony whose only ability is to make money from online advertising clicks.  Perhaps there should be more concern that Google is a one trick pony whose only ability is to count incoming links to webpages.

Google has a carefully constructed mythology in which it insists two core ideas are true.  First, that content is king and that quality content will naturally attract links and, by extension, that the best quality content will attract the most links.  Second, the company has webmaster guidelines, and unofficial company spokespersons, constantly reiterating that counting links is not all there is when it comes to ranking highly, and that those who engage in forbidden practices like buying links or link schemes will be detected and punished.

The Times article proves that neither of these things are true.

While investigating the mysterious #1 Google ranking for everything from dresses to area rugs it was noted that there were tons of incoming links with the same anchor text from websites all over the web.  Many of these links came from low-value, low PageRank webpages and websites.  In fact, many of them came from seemingly dormant webpages.  Most came from sites completely unrelated to the search terms that JC Penny was ranking #1 for.

Unfortunately, the article heads off course with the sensationalistic news that JC Penny was manually penalized for cheating Google’s rankings, or more officially sounding, "violating Google’s webmaster quality guidelines."  Google’s Cutts and other commentators have attempted to spin this as a lesson in what happens if you do naughty things like buying links or other black-hat SEO tactics.  Ironically, it actually proves the opposite.

Google Cannot Detect and Filter Spam or Black-Hat SEO

The article notes that JC Penny was able to rank #1 for all of these high-volume search terms for MONTHS, completely undetected by Google. It was only AFTER a journalist detected it and gathered up the evidence that Google MANUALLY adjusted the rankings to penalize JC Penny’s, who unlike smaller website will reap no long lasting penalty from Google because they are both too big to eliminate from the rankings and because they are blaming their SEO contractor for the issue.

In other words, if you cheat, lie, and steal your way to the #1 Google ranking without attracting the attention of a major journalist, you are going to be very successful for a very long time.

Here are the real lessons to be gleaned from the New York Times article.

1. Black Hat SEO Works — Not only does it work, but it either takes a very long time to detect, or it cannot be detected at all.  JC Penny violated one of the "biggies" by buying links and no one noticed a thing until it was all over.
2. Google’s "Hundreds" of ranking factors are a joke — Google goes out of its way to say that there are hundreds of factors that go into a ranking, and there probably are.  Unfortunately, none of those factors has anything near the weight of backlinks.  Google-bombs have shown this to be true for years.  All that really matters is that there are a lot of links with the right anchor text and any webpage will rank higher and higher for that term.
3. Links are Links – Google always says that links from "related" pages are more valuable than links from unrelated pages.  This is either untrue, or the additional value is so insignificant that it affects nothing but tie-breakers between two equally linked webpages.  Most of the links Penny bought were on pages that have nothing to do with home goods or clothing and yet they were enough to propel them to the top of the SERPs for months during the holiday shopping season.
4. Google’s Algorithm Is Flawed — In order to "fix" things, Google had to MANUALLY tweak its search results. In other words, the company’s vaunted algorithm would keep ranking Penny’s #1 for all of those terms without manual intervention.  That means that unless what you are doing ends up in the New York Times, chances are that no one will detect what you are doing and that even if they do nothing will happen.  Google can’t have an algorithm with hundreds of thousands of manual patches on it that have to be managed.

Link Counting Is Dead

The biggest lesson from the JC Penny search spam scam is that link counting is worthless.  It may have been true that links were earned in the past, but that is no longer the case.  Webmasters routinely link to their own stuff for the sole purpose of SEO.  Numerous website owners and publishers post articles anywhere and everywhere for the sole purpose of getting links to their websites.  Bloggers and others routinely exchange links in order to help each other out.

Perhaps most telling is the increasing number of websites that deliberately link without the primary keywords.  Technology websites writing about Norton Antivirus no longer link to the company using the anchor text Norton Antivirus because that will just boost another company’s website.  Rather, they link with the work Norton or with a unusable "click here" type of text.  Keep in mind that these websites no exactly what they are doing and they are deliberately withholding link value for their own benefit.

The day has come for Google to admit that counting links is no longer a meaningful way to rank websites.  While it may be useful as a lessor factor, it has no place in the mix as a primary ranking criteria.  The only reason Google continues to dominate search is that it has the best index of websites to pull from, not because it returns the best results from an equal index. 

As technology matures and indexing becomes less of a technical challenge, the company’s edge will diminish.  The only question is whether Google can figure out a new trick before that happens.

NY Times Exposes More Google Spam is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC