SCOTIA SYSTEMS BLOG

The NY Times has an interesting article about how J.C. Penney employed an SEO firm to bolster their Google Rank using Black Hat SEO techniques.

The article explains how they generated thousands of paid links to rank for terms such as “casual dresses”.

You can ready the article here : The Dirty Little Secrets of Search

Unfortunately the article also rewards J.C.Penney with followed links:

Google has responded using what the NY Times reports as “manual” intervention which has resulted in JCP dropping from position #1 to #68 in the SERPS.

This manual change is interesting as Google have said in the past that they don’t interfere with the SERPs and that the results are all algorithmically generated.   So did they alter the algorithm, or is there some form of blacklist which is applied to the results?

It’d be interesting to hear a technical explanation from Google’s Matt Cutts on what actions were taken to correct the SERPS to ignore the paid links.

Posted in Google | No Comments »
Tags: SEO

I’ve been seeing this feature appearing in a lot of results recently.   When searching for a group of keywords, when you reach the destination page there is an overlay such as the one below:

I’ve only noticed this recently and it doesn’t appear on all destination pages?

Clicking on the “Jump to text >>” link takes you direct to the most relevant place on the page for the search query.

It appears that this is a feature of the IE Google Toolbar, however it must’ve been automatically enabled as it’s not something I chose to switch on?  

Now, I’m not complaining as I often find this useful to quickly find the information I’m looking for, however other users don’t like this feature as can be seen in this thread:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Web+Search/thread?tid=5e7f4946c1b363d4&hl=en

If you want to disable the “Quick Scroll” try the following:

1) Click on the wrench icon in the toolbar

2) on the Tools tab, deselect “Quick Scroll”

3) Click Save

Posted in Google | No Comments »
Tags: Google, SEO

Rand Fishkin over at SEOMoz has just posted an interesting article about how Google appear to be showing increasingly spammy entries in the SERPs.

While I agree with Rand’s conclusions, I thought it’d be interesting to compare the results with Bing so see if things are as just as bad?

Rand suggested that the following search terms provide spammy results when searching in Google:

So I decided to run the same queries through both Google and Bing, then compare the results.

What I found interesting is that when there isn’t much of an intersection in the results, it’s usually due to Bing listing more local (and less spammy) results than Google.  

Take for instance the “Birthday Party Supplies” query.   Most results returned by Bing were to local suppliers.

The following Venn diagrams illustrate the overlap in the results.   Google results are shown as yellow and Bing results are shown as orange.

SEO Software

Starcraft 2 Strategies

Birthday Party Supplies

Currency Trading Online

Tennis Racquet Review

s

Leather Crafting Supplies

Nanny Services

Home Business Ideas

French Doors

Vietnam Tours

Antioxidant Supplements

Home Espresso Machine Ratings

Posted in SEO | No Comments »
Tags: Bing, Google, SEO, SEOMoz