trevin

Some sophisticated SEO link spam for 'pay day loans'

Out of curiosity, I looked up that particular pay day loan site's backlink profile. They went from having zero websites linking to them to around 250,000 in the matter of a few hours. All of the links had anchor text with some variation of 'payday loans' or 'payday loans UK'

Here's a screenshot of their backlink increase: http://i.imgur.com/Qo20DkL.png

Doesn't look like they are ranking on page 1 yet for any of those terms, which is good. Hopefully Google is on to them.

The way Fusion Tables are set up can be pretty confusing. In order to embed your table somewhere, you have to make the Google Docs data behind it public & searchable. http://support.google.com/fusiontables/answer/171221?hl=en

My guess is a lot of people are creating data visualizations for their own site/business and making the sets public without thinking of them being indexed and searchable. As I said, the documentation on this within Fusion Tables is pretty awful.

Looks great with professionally shot, high res photos. Most of the photos that will be shared out in the wild won't look nearly this good in the new layout. Same thing happened with the Cover Photo.

After reading through this a second time, I'm convinced it's an elaborate press release. Way too much of the article is devoted to the benefits of Tide and why people are so brand loyal.

Also, many of the quotes and details given appear to be pretty tongue-in-cheek.

I'm excited to see this. People in the SEO industry have clamored for this for a long time, but it wasn't really necessary until negative SEO has became more prevalent and effective the last few months. Traditionally, a link to your site could never really 'hurt' your domain. That has changed as Google has rolled out Penguin though and there are plenty of horror stories of people building 1000s of spammy links to a 3rd party sites and harming their rankings[1]. It wasn't fair to allow website owners to have their domains penalized for something that they have no control over...you can't prevent people from building malicious links to your site.

Also worth noting that Bing rolled this same feature out in June of this year[2].

[1]http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2369-case-study-negative-seo-... [2]http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive...

I believe the URL parameters at the end of the submitted URL above make it unique.

?sc=tw&cc=share&utm_source=buffer&buffer_share=f34b7

I've seen this issue pop up a few times before on HN.

This is almost a year old. Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3238834

I think somebody read your post.

Just got my invite an hour or so ago...Simple has a big section on "what's in the pipeline" for them.

• Android: click the link above and fill out your info through the "device" step. We'll reinvite you as soon as it's ready! • Joint accounts: Sign up with Simple now and add your partner when we're ready! • Mobile check deposit: Coming soon–sign up now and you'll have it as soon as it's ready! • So much more!

Interesting coincidence.

By 'penalizing' sites for bad links, Google is opening a lot of scary doors. Historically, they've instead devalued bad links which makes a lot more sense to me.

Penalizing a site for websites that link to them simply isn't fair. There is no way for a website owner to control that.

What is scary about this is that iAcquire was deindexed by Google for something that they did to a client's site. Their own site was penalized despite having no violations of Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

These ridiculous penalties by Google have already opened the floodgates for negative SEO. This penalty proves that you can pay somebody to build spam links into another site, write a blog post 'outing' them for this practice and then Google might remove them from the index.

Distilled, one of the more well-known and reputable SEO agencies have a good post on what they've been seeing: http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/google-updates-april-2012/

I also work with a larger number of sites and have seen all kinds of crazy things in a number of different industries the last few weeks. Fllow SEOs at other agencies are seeing the same fluctuations.

Google has been testing some pretty major algorithm changes in the last 5 or so days. Everything has been extremely volatile and major SERPs are changing every few hours.

Several prominent, white hat companies have even went missing in the Google's rankings for their [brand name] this week: https://plus.google.com/111294201325870406922/posts/NhssnKgf...

Not buying this as a long lasting rankings change until it sticks around for several weeks.

Here's an audiobook version of this: http://ia600307.us.archive.org/26/items/WithALittleHelpMp3s/...

It's a lot more complicated than you are letting on.

What you are saying is like saying architecture is just drawing diagrams or good journalism is just writing about stuff.

Like many industries, there's an art to SEO and plenty of nuances far beyond clean coding and user friendly design.

It's part of Google's recently launched program to do Places/Street View photos of businesses in select cities

http://maps.google.com/help/maps/businessphotos/

More info from Google - http://maps.google.com/help/maps/businessphotos/

Google's definition of a bridge page: http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

Few buildings evacuated in Harrisburg, PA

Yep. The whole 'business model' of his website is based off of Facebook's success. He definitely has a vested interest here.

I also think it is simply too early to define what Google+ is or what niche it serves best. A lot of these criticisms could be said about Facebook when it was in its early stages too (no brand profiles, lack of returning users, etc).

On the whole, I find the new GA to be very clunky and a lot harder to navigate than the previous version.

Now that they are adding new features like this, it might be time to start getting used to it.

Hmmm...for me, when I click to view the comment on Google+, there is a string in the URL ?gpinv=randomchars that I'm assuming functions as an invite. (currently 404)

Seems to be different for everybody. Who knows...this whole process is a disaster :-)

That is the current alternative to sending invites...sharing posts/comments which gives you an invite when you go to view.

I've found clear calls to action that lead users to a custom landing page on your site work. The key is to tailor everything to the FB experience, design of the landing page on your site included.