Pinterest – A Spammer’s Delight?
Pinterest has arrived as the new social media network. Daily Dot published an interview with “Steve,” a Pinterest spammer, who confesses to spamming the site and making money of it. According to Steve, Pinterest is the easiest site to spam right now. Least effort, maximum returns, for the spammers at least. Pinterest spam look like legit pins, but there are many duplicates and the current mega spam pins all seem to be pointed to the affiliate links of Amazon. Spammers are using multiple accounts and bots to pin and repin images that link back to their affiliate accounts. The more...
read moreGoogle Places – Hide Your Home Office Address If You Don’t Receive Clients At Home
Andrew Shotland’s blog post about how his Google Places listing was removed has generated a lot of discussion in the past few weeks about Google’s local search guidelines. The listing was removed because the home address was listed as the service area and he did not receive clients at this address. Here is the latest updated information in Google Places guidelines about how to define service area: If you don’t receive customers at your location, you must select the “Do not show my business address on my Maps listing” option within your dashboard. If you don’t hide your address,...
read moreWhat Happened to the Old Google Places Help Forum?
Now that Google Places Help Forum has found itself a new home, local search experts who were put off by the clumsy older Help platform heave a sigh of relief. However, there is a little something that mars the celebratory mood. Not only has Google decided to close down the older forum (we are not complaining), but they have also inexplicably decided to remove all the content in the old platform instead of archiving it (we are complaining, loudly!). But Mike Blumenthal managed to salvage some of the posts and has generously made it available on his website. Here is where you will...
read moreGoogle Being Investigated for Safari Cookiegate issue
Google and a few other ad networks (Vibrant Media, PointRoll etc.) were found to be circumventing the privacy settings of Safari and thereby tracking user behaviour data while using iPhones. Wall Street Journal had earlier run a detailed article about this. Though Google immediately came back with an explanation that WSJ has mischaracterized what actually happened, the fact remains that Google is under scrutiny for privacy concerns. In fact, the incident of overriding default “no third party cookies” Safari privacy settings caught the eye of even the Congress and other privacy...
read moreWhat Is Google Venice Update?
This February, Google rolled out the Venice update without much fanfare. The update has immense implications on local search results. At the Google Blog, here is what they had to say about the Venice update: “Improvements to ranking for local search results. [launch codename “Venice”] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.” Google is now going to try and get you better local results based on your location, regardless of whether you include the location in your...
read moreGoogle Search: Behind the Scenes
If you are interested in knowing more about how Google goes about creating its search algorithm, check out this article (which also includes a video clip) by SearchEngineLand. Here is what happens, in a nutshell: Search quality team meets every Thursday to discuss changes to search algorithm, tweaks, new features and test results. Google team members go into the minutest details with search. The focus is on how search can work better for the user rather than how to generate more revenues, as reported by Danny Sullivan. Here is the link to the article and the video once again, to know more...
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