In an interview with Eric Enge at the Search Marketing Expo Advanced, Matt Cutts, the Head of Google Webspam Team, spoke about link building and gave his views on the same. Matt Cutts stressed on the fact that the best links are those that are original research and provide value to readers for example, in the form of a Firefox extension. Moreover, he also expressed his concern over too many reciprocal links. Here are some excerpts from the interview with Eric Enge:

Yahoo! has announced, the completion of formalities for its multi-year advertising deal with the retail-king Walmart. The new deal will enable Walmart to use Yahoo’s advertising platform and simultaneously, Yahoo! will be become the sole platform for the online display of Walmart’s advertisements and inventory.

As per the new deal, Yahoo! will use its existing abundance of leading brand advertisers for Walmart, as its primary marketing and sales channel for its video display and advertising. Through the use of Yahoo’s AMP (Advertising Management Program), Yahoo! has also taken the responsibility for Walmart’s ad pricing, targeting, delivery and reporting. This would mark Walmart as another addition to Yahoo’s AMP. In a related AMP news, Yahoo! has also announced its multi-year Global Partnership with Havas Digital, where Havas too, will be borrowing heavily on Yahoo’s AMP.

Google and Yahoo! have finally done it. Yahoo Inc and Google have announced a non-exclusive advertising agreement. Yahoo! Press Releases give out the details of the partnership and also state that Panama will be functioning just the same. Yahoo! shares still dropped Friday in spite of this good news. Henry Blodgett from Silicon Valley Insider thinks the deal is very good for Yahoo, even better than the strange “wacky chop-shop plan Microsoft proposed” that has now died.

More at Yahoo! Finance

Yahoo! Press Release:

Agreement Advances Yahoo!’s Open Strategy; Enhances Ability to
Compete in Converging Search and Display Marketplace

If you are a Webmaster, then you must be scared of the possibility, that your website might be penalized for duplicate content, even if it wasn’t your fault. In a recent post at the Google Webmaster Blog, Google has explained the concept of duplicate content and how it may or may not negatively affect your website. This post has been written keeping in mind the dilemma of duplicate content, that every Webmaster faces.

Webmasters at Webmaster World, have been running a thread, almost 5 pages long about a serous concern, that has all these Webmasters on the edge. According to the reports, there seems to be a sudden and a dramatic traffic drop from Google. This drop in traffic is estimated to be 90% of all Google directed traffic. Google also seems to be dropping hundreds or maybe thousands of pages from these Webmasters’ websites.

Due to sheer volume of posts in the Webmaster World thread, I’m displaying a couple of selected and relevant posts, just to give you an idea about the severity of the situation:

According to Search Engine Watch, Google has redefined the term ‘Doorway Pages’

The new definition at Google Webmaster Help Center reads:

Doorway pages are typically large sets of poor-quality pages where each page is optimized for a specific keyword or phrase. In many cases, doorway pages are written to rank for a particular phrase and then funnel users to a single destination.

Whether deployed across many domains or established within one domain, doorway pages tend to frustrate users, and are in violation of our Webmaster guidelines.

However, the cached version of the same page still contains the old definition:

Users at the Webmaster World have updated a list of almost all of the Google Data Centers, spread throughout the globe. Here are some of the Google Data Centers from the updated list:

1. 66.249.81.nnn – gfe-bx/bx2/bx3

2. 66.249.83.nnn – gfe-wx/wx2

3. 66.249.93.nnn – gfe-ug/gfe-ug2

4. 72.14.205.nnn – gfe-qb/qb2

5.72.14.207.nnn – gfe-eh/eh2

6.209.85.129.nnn – gfe-fk/fk2/fk3

Here are a few excerpts from that thread:

“Google search can be accessed in several different ways:
There is of course, google.com and all the various country google TLDs.
Next there is the direct IP address. There are several thousand of those, as listed below.

According to the Market Pilgrim, the Google Custom Search Engine Business Edition is now being given a new name and is now also equipped with custom indexing. This service will now be known as Google Site Search. Apart from the new nomenclature, there have been incorporated several new features and upgrades in the new version. These features are:

• Enhanced index coverage: Comprehensive search results on any website by crawling and indexing more content, even pages deep within a site. It would mean that Google will be looking for and assimilating more content so as to make the Search results even more relevant.

News.com reports that, Google is finally making some highly visible changes in Gmail. It has introduced a new ‘Labs’ option for Gmail. The ‘Lab’ option will incorporate 13 new features in Gmail and will be available on a ‘Test’ basis to users worldwide from 6 pm. PDT, Thursday. These features can be enabled and disabled from the Gmail ’settings’ page.

According to Keith Coleman (Gmail product manager), “The idea is you can do whatever you want, get it out to tens of millions of people, and get feedback.”

Some of the possible new features are:

360 Enterprises Inc. which is the parent company of TextLinkBrokers.com and SponsoredReviews.com has announced, that it has acquired the SEO & Social Media firm HybridSEM.

The owner of HybridSEM, Joe Whyte in a statement said, “Access to 360’s resources allows HybridSEM.com to scale our services from a niche market to a massive market. I am proud and excited to be working with such talented and energetic industry leaders who share the same innovative vision.”

360 Enterprises intend to add HybridSEM’s video marketing, link bait, on-page SEO and social media services to its list of services provided.