Google Favourite Places - Will this damage SEO business forever?

A little over a month ago, Google announced that it was sending brick and mortar businesses decals to put on their windows, with bar codes that people can scan with their phones to bring up business listings.

These were made available to the businesses Google deemed "favorite places". Over 10,000 businesses in the US got them right off the bat, and Google will most likely expand that number in the future.



Now what's worrying is how they picked the TOP businesses:

The first hint that this is the case is the manner with which Google decided which companies would receive the decals. Their formula for the top 100,000+ Favorite Places was based largely on user interaction with local listings, including how many people searched for driving directions to a given location.

Some have argued that this may have unintended consequences: certain types of businesses are likely to receive a phone call from potential visitors rather than more-easily tracked user engagement with Google. Or, certain businesses’ clientele may be less keen on using Google Maps for directions. As a result, these businesses are unintentionally penalized by the company’s formula for PlaceRank. Like web search, the structure of the system may be limited in determining the actual popularity, community standing, or other relevant factors in determining the popularity of a given business.

Does this mean that a business with a code that is scanned more frequently will get page result preference for their search terms? Is this not a dangerous move for a "organic" / "non paid" non judgemental company like Google?

We'll have to see. What do you think?

2010 - Google Updates PR

WELL!

Firstly let me start by wishing you all a happy 2010 and a very successful year to ALL.

To start the year off i thought it would e a good time to let you know about the latest Google PR update.

Just like they did at the start of 2009, Google has gifted website owners with a PageRank update to start the new year – welcome 2010.

For those of you who follow the PR indicator – chances are you’ll have noticed that your PageRank on Google’s toolbar has shifted – hopefully upwards. There was alot of HOOHAA about the the PR update around the middle of December but as of the 31st Dec 2009 – the reports started rolling in.

Whilst the results vary depending on the website and SEO activity over the past few months – “most” forum members seem to have seen some increases! The question we have is, why has their been an increase? Was this a little Christmas present from GOOGLE? And once again, the debate sparks up, DOES PR MEAN ANYTHING?
!
Funny thing I noticed. I got my send PR 5 site, but my rankings never shifted up. Anyone else see any good signs and changes?

Let us know.

Big TRAFFIC dips

Anybody else notice a large dip in traffic over the last 2 weeks. I've seen a drop in overall traffic across all the sites we manage of 5 - 15%?

If anyone else has some insight, is it just November traffic that drops?

Let me know guys would be interesting to compare stats.

Traffic Fundi Search Team

Removing Spammy Links - Google's official statement

This month, Google published an official statement about low quality links in their webmaster blog. For those of you who are new to SEO, there are various types of links that search engines consider when valuating the importance of your website but for the purpose of this article, we'll stick to 2 types;

1. High quality links (one way links from authoritative sites within the same industry, business you're in)

2. Poor quality, low quality links (one way links from either SPAMMY sites, or sites that just are nothings in the internet world)

According to Google, in order to reduce the "so called" negative effect that one way poor quality links have on your site, this is what you need to do:

1. Linking is a significant factor in Google's ranking algorithm but it is just one of many factors. Other factors are the content of your web pages, the site structure and the appearance of a keyword in the different web page elements.

2. If you have a high quality website and get links from spammy websites, try to contact the website owners and ask them to remove their links. Google will not help you with that.

3. It the webmasters of the spammy website are not cooperative, don't worry and focus on the links that are under your control.

4. Google recommends to optimize the many factors than influence indexing and ranking. The top 10 optimizer in our website optimization tool has been designed for exactly that task.It analyzes dozens of factors that influence the position of your website in the search results and it shows you what exactly you have to change so that Google will list your website on the first result page.

5. Google says that low-quality links rarely stand the test of time and that they may not be considered by Google's ranking algorithm.

6. If you want to make sure Google knows about the spammy links and is valuing them appropriately, you can report them to Google with their spam report or paid links report forms.

What are your thoughts on this?