Archive for May, 2009

Paid Link Reporting and the Fall of the Machine

Friday, May 29th, 2009

When Google introduced paid link reporting via Webmaster Tools in 2007, in marked the second time human informants were solicited to help the search engine.  The first - less contentious - invitation a year earlier was the spam report, by which conscientious website owners (or their minions) could report such things as sneaky JavaScript redirects, doorway pages and even "misleading or repeated words."  These share with paid links the characteristic that they are potentially hard to detect, and indicate that the machines crunching through all those web pages are still occasionally outsmarted by some upstart human.
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SEO Perspectives on the 2009 Webware 100 Awards

Friday, May 22nd, 2009

I just came across posts by both Ask and Live Search bragging how they were 2009 Webware 100 winners.  I decided to take a peak to verify what I guessed, that all the major search engines were on the list.  Here are the award winners in the "Search & Reference Category":
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Review Content in Rich Snippets and Microformats

Thursday, May 21st, 2009

I've been looking for sites that either support the reviews microformats recently specified by Google, sites that support the existing hReview microformat, or simply snippets that show ratings information in Google SERPs.  I finally encountered a snippet by Googling earrings plaza, and here are the results.

Earrings Plaza Google Result

And here are the components of the snippet.

Main Review Data in Snippet

Are any of these components using either review microformat?  Actually, in part they are.
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