In yet another public punishment, Google catches Overstock.com paying for links and drops their search engine results from the top few rankings down to not even showing on the first several pages of results. This follows in the wake of Forbes and JC Penney being punished for link selling and buying.
RKG has reported data showing a steady decline in PPC search traffic from Yahoo and Bing since they began their merger. While their data shows the Yahoo / Bing conversion rate finally increasing to the same level as Google since the merger, the decrease in traffic continues to make them less attractive to PPC advertisers.
Google’s updated Social Search Function now shows your social media connections’ results integrated within the search results. This updated version searches Twitter, Flickr, Quora, LinkedIn or Google Reader to show applicable integrated content based on your search.
Retailer giant JC Penney was recently exposed in a New Times Article for engaging in Black Hat SEO practices, including paying for thousands of links. The result? Google slammed them in the search engine results, dropping their rankings from number one into complete obscurity.
Google launched a significant change to their search algorithm that makes sites that copy (or steal) content from other sources less likely to rank in search engine results. While some SEOs are scrambling in damage-control mode, quality SEO that didn’t violate Google guidelines are unaffected, and at times even see a nice bump.
