FTC expands Google antitrust probe: source

[Little Tich]

Source: Reuters

(Reuters) - U.S. regulators looking at whether Google manipulates its search results to favor its own products have expanded the probe to include Google+, the search giant's new social networking tool, a source familiar with the probe said on Friday.

Google+, which was launched in June, offers many of the capabilities available on Twitter and on Facebook.

Google announced on Tuesday new features aimed at making search results more personalized. As part of the changes, photos and posts from Google+ will increasingly appear within the search results.

A Google spokesman, however, said that the Federal Trade Commission had not asked about Google+ or indicated it was looking into the new social network as of this week.

Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/13/us-google-ftc-idUSTRE80C2JH20120113

[FreakinDJ]

1. To anyone who ever worked on SEO its obvious - "Pay to Play"

You can have a great Website with 1000s of pages of content rich information, 1000s of gratuitous backlinks and page 1 results.

2 weeks before Black-Monday if your not paying - you'll drop off the search results altogether

[boppers]

2. I work SEO. I currently wrangle data for 421,572 websites. You might handle less.

If your content is not original, unique, and valued by others, you will fall.

Most content farms that are being crashed fail those 3 basic tests:
1. Original:
If you say the same thing as another website, you are not original. Synonyms have been busted. Word Order has been busted. Reposting others content has been busted. Reposting somebody else's content, with word order changes, and synonyms? Triple busted.

2. Unique:
This one gets SEO's frazzled. If you type, or enter, or create, a non-unique term, you will fall. If you do it on lots of pages, you will fall more. If you have 30 domains with slight variations on the same content, goodbye.

3. Valued by others:
Backlinks from real sources count now. Backlinks from a link farm? NO. From a popular blog? NO. Look up "Hilltop".

It's not "Pay to Play" anymore than "Pay to be a doctor and learn Medicine" is "Pay to Play". If you don't learn information retrieval, you don't get to be any better at SEO than a person (say, a Boy Scout) learns shock treatment, and decides they're an EMT.

Have some reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_retrieval

[FreakinDJ]

3. Do you work for Google

Honestly - its all I can do not to be insulting.

Your assumptions lack an explanation of 1 fact - Why did my website and 10s of 1000s of other (whom were not paying) fall off the search results

Now before you reply go back and re-read my original post and attempt to formulate an honest reply

[boppers]

5. Okay.....

"Do you work for Google"

No. They pay poorly. Cool benefits, though.

"Why did my website and 10s of 1000s of other (whom were not paying) fall off the search results "

This happens every single day. Every. Single. Day.

Many folks only seem to notice when they're the ones who fall off, but it's not payola, its tuning the search results to filter out lower quality websites and pages. Which is done daily. They announce bigger changes (like, say, Panda), because more sites change ranking than usual, but the churn is constant.

It will feel massive to you if you have a small business, and go from a #1 SERP to # 15, but from a perspective of hundreds of thousands of sites, one change like that is only a blip.

"Now before you reply go back and re-read my original post and attempt to formulate an honest reply "

Okay:
"You can have a great Website with 1000s of pages of content rich information, 1000s of gratuitous backlinks and page 1 results. 2 weeks before Black-Monday if your not paying - you'll drop off the search results altogether"

Well, for one thing, 1000 pages of original content is nothing.

What's the site(s)? I can give it a gander, or you *can* post to google's forums, and they can tell you why you're not ranking well.... but like I said, and to reiterate: "Content-rich" doesn't mean anything, if it's not quality content. Word salad is useless, as is paraphrasing, as is mindless repetition. Backlinks don't count for anything if they're from crappy, or spammy, sites.

[kristenart60]

6. Spam deleted by tjwmason (MIR Team)

[onehandle]

4. Google 2012 = Microsoft 1990s. And ironically, I now use Bing as my search engine. nt