As part of our standard operating procedure around here we setup all of our sites with Google Analytics including goal tracking and funnel pages. Recently however I came across an anomaly on one of our client’s sites. I’m not at liberty to reveal the client so I can’t back up what I’m about to tell you with screenshots, however I am fairly confident that goal tracking via Analytics can play a large part in determining how Google calculates sitelinks. How? A form spammer recently spammed the hell out of one of our forms that was tied to a goal conversion. The site in question is little more than an SEO directory of states and the form spammer just happened to trip conversions in analytics on the South Dakota page. Now I can promise you we get very light traffic on the South Dakota page compared to some of the larger states like NY and California, however over the course of a week the spammer completed 100’s of conversions on the page before we were able to beef up countermeasures. A couple of weeks later I noticed a funny thing in my Google Webmaster Tools account: the South Dakota page had been picked up as a sitelink.

Some specifics for my blackhat readers:

All ip’s used by the spammer were from the same subnet, but were more or less unique ip’s.
The site typically has 50-100 conversions per day.

Copywriting is important and it seems search engines are giving it more and more weight. As the we all know the Internet is full of crappy information but if you know where to look you can find really valuable things too. Over the years some sites have made a living out of scraping the content of other sites, copying pictures or videos and posting them as their own content.

Although Google or other search engines are trying to keep this phenomenon under control by applying penalties like the duplicate content, the -30 or -950 they can’t really handle this completely. As the web continues to evolve even greater than some people would have anticipated, manual reviewing sites is simply a physical impossibility.

So the only way to fight against the big outlaws of the web is by working on the reviews they get for common abuses we see on the net like:

• duplicate content (counting site copying and redirecting) because even search engines can be tricked if the site has 30% of their content changed here and here.
• major examples of cloaking because the competition is always watching your move.
• paid links that seem to annoy everyone except the link building firm and the site who pays for them.
• owning illegal media.
• etc.

So don’t get surprised if you come across this while browsing the internet:

They started cleaning and this is a good thing overall because people should get credit for what they post on the internet. More changes will come, we just need to keep our eyes open and learn from others and their mistakes.

Not that anyone should be surprised but it looks like Google Local is being overrun by spam. I’ve come across many regional verticals loaded up with spam to the point of exclusion of legitimate businesses. The decision to use a place on a map as a point of interest instead of tying it to a third party URL may appear to be an error in hindsight. With Google cracking down on paid links you would think there would be an easy way to submit bogus local business listings but apparently Google hasn’t thought that far ahead.

I’ve now come across more than one local business vertical with 8 & 9 bogus listings all with the same phone number even. Why bother with SEO if Google will provide you with an easy shortcut to the top? Simply list all of your business lines as separate corporate locations and you can easily capture a lion’s share of the keyword’s search engine traffic. In theory it will probably also get you penalized, but how are they going to catch you if you don’t even have a website?

Not even two days have passed since Google released their new web browser Chrome and people are already buzzing on the web like crazy. I have to agree i really like this new browser because it’s simple, fast and good looking. This release is far from the final product but we can see Chrome is going to be something huge and will likely bite a big piece out of the market share firefox and IE enjoy at the moment. I’m wondering how people are going to react at this move from Google… We all know that Google has been pouring a lot of money into the Mozilla Foundation and helped them overcome some problems but this time they’re kind of competing with Firefox and this might mean something.

We all know that over the years Mozilla has grew and grew but let’s face it:

1. Chrome is a fast browser from what most people are saying while the latest Firefox is reporting a lot of issues…
2. Chrome is a Google Product thus leaving us to think that Google Apps like Analytics or Maps or whatever will be easier and easier to integrate in the new browser.
3. The new browser is surely not gonna eat hundreds of Mb of Ram from your computer and the overall impression of the Browser is that it’s really light weighted and smooth.
4. Because it’s a Google product it has a lot of exposure and will surely catch on very quick and maybe it will cover the Social Bookmarking sites better (Remember Flock ?).
5. Microsoft is going to have some problems in the future if they don’t do something fast and i mean fast :) What Chrome means for Microsoft.

   It will be interesting to watch the new changes that the web has prepared for us like Cuil or Chrome or God knows what next.

Chrome Reviews over the net : Lifehacker, Techcrunch