Paid Links Crackdown, 36 SEO Myths, International SEO, Speedlink 22:2013

Hi everyone! Hope you all had a great and productive week. FTC disclosure requirements aside, Matt Cutts from Google’s Webspam Team released a video recently reiterating that they are and will continue to take strong action for any paid content that flows PageRank and that are not “abundantly” clear that is paid content. Matt’s video explains what editorial and advertorial content are, as well as mentioning what an “advertorial” content is.

Essentially, all these boils down to receiving money to for these type of “advertising” campaigns. Google always mentioned that these are in violation of their guidelines, but this time, Matt sends a “strong warning” that the crackdown will increase, mentioning that they may remove the page, and can go further. Don’t know about you, but if these type of advertising is part of your business model, things can really get very complicated for your rankings.

Matt also tweeted this recently… (note “several thousands”)

In fact, we took action on several thousand linksellers in a paid-link-that-passes-PageRank network earlier today.

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) May 15, 2013

Advertorials

What do you think about this? What really should be disclosed? Receiving money is one thing. But what about other types of compensation like, gifts, giveaways, heck even guest posts in exchange for links? If you look at the comment thread over on Google’s webmaster channels, you will see that there are many people, including Ann Smarty (MyBlogGuest) and Dino Dogan (Triberr) leaving their two cents. A final thought on passing PageRank – a brand new post with zero PR and actually not even indexed, how’s that work?

On a different note, Stephan Spencer on SearchEngineLand.com published an article about 36 SEO myths that persistently continues to be mentioned out there, which should really have to disappear forever. Take a look at them and see if you agree/disagree. Highly recommended if you are into SEO and specially if you are outsourcing SEO work from “someone”.

Finally, Google (again) published a blog post this week providing 6 quick tips for international websites. International SEO is primarily applicable to those that have their sites in different languages. If you are an “international” website, this article should be of great interest for you.

As usual, in no particular order: