So what’s changed in the search results? (click on the image to expand)

• You can see there are new pins being displayed in the organic search results
• The appearance of the local results have now changed and take up even more of the organic landscape
• The Map has changed shape
• When you hover over locations on the map the pin lights up in the search results (see below)

If you’re logged in you can expand the local listing which then pushes PPC ad’s right down and displays everything on one page – pretty smooth looking (click on the image to expand):

Previously video listings from YouTube had looked like the screen shot below:

However this is what I’ve started to see:

This is something that i’ve seen for a long time but for generic terms I’ve not seen videos displayed this way – potential Google test?

When I typed in my blog name “seounique” in Google I saw underneath the 6 extended sitelinks an extra site result. This extra site listing rotated per different search;

A different result on the same query:

See the screen grab below with the links and placement:

The result being shown in Google was an archive page for a blog and was ranking number 1 so perhaps there’s a filter on these types of pages when in prominent positions?

When you hover the mouse on the listing the following popup is shown:

Quite interesting that Google are pushing more people to be signed in – supports their drive for +1′s over the recent months.

** Update – I managed to replicate this for all sites now. Simply click on any website in Google and click “back” in your browser within a short time period and the addition to the results for that website will be shown. This does NOT happen if you stay on the site for over a minute.

If anyone else has seen something similar I’d be interested to hear.

Here is a snippet from Google on paid links:

Google works hard to ensure that it fully discounts links intended to manipulate search engine results, such excessive link exchanges and purchased links that pass PageRank

Pretty clear to most people that this is something that Google must surely invest heavily into if there is a way to effectively ”game” SEO and deliver results to users that may not be the best results. The debate of paid links is by no means something that is new – it’s been going on for many years – most often with Matt Cutts taking his hard line explanation (i.e. don’t buy links), see some of the videos on YouTube:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_r2vp4x-JtU
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-nX2i-y2Es
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmoHmfy5AcQ

So who has actually been Penalised by Google?

This is a question that’s come up in recent weeks quite a lot – well here’s the big ones that have been very publicly handed a penalty for buying paid links:

• JC Penny (Feb 2011)
• Overstock (Feb 2011)
• GoCompare.com (Jan 2008)
• Forbes (Jan 2011)
• Google Japan (Jan 2009)
• Ripoff Report (Mar 2010)
• GourmetGiftBaskets.com (Sept 2010)
• 1800Flowers.com (May 2011)

This is the extent of the list I could find on big brands over the span of 4 years – not too many “big” sites in the grand scheme of things, of course there are likely to be many more than this just smaller websites which don’t make the “big news”. In each of these instances the companies have undoubtedly lost thousands and in some cases millions of pounds because of buying links which would be disastrous to any business – in most cases this is a big enough deterrent not to buy links but in the UK at this current point it is NOT a big enough deterrent.

Are people still buying links?

The very short answer is yes – in fact it seems to be more buoyant than ever before, well in the UK anyway. How do I know this? – well working in some of the most competitive verticals working on completely “white hat” strategies and  it’s hard not to come across a competitor who doesn’t buy links. Anyone can use either Majestic or Open Site Explorer to pull off a list of backlinks that point to any website, from which certain filters can be added to identify the culprits. Now I have for a long time been providing Google with detailed reports on what I’ve found and who’s buying links using their suggested method of reporting and in some instances I see positive results i.e. that competitor will drop rankings within a few days but this is less than consistent unfortunately.

Buying links has changed – but has Google’s algorithm adapted enough?

Buying links use to be a simple process of either using a broker (such as text-link-ads.com) or just by going onto a forum like Digital Point and asking what’s available – there are literally hundreds of people buying + selling links on that forum. Times have changed, a few months ago I wrote about a new method used by one UK site that seems to used on a mass scale and gone completely un-noticed to Google and in February I listed a range of other paid linking methods which also seem to still work. With such strong evidence against so many websites you have to ask the question why doesn’t Google penalise more sites that buy links to get better SEO rankings? It could be for a number of reasons:

• Google’s algorithm simply isn’t picking up these new methods of paid links? – With all Google’s billions and assets at their disposal there should be no reason why they can’t see the paid links I can. Although saying that Google has been investing in other areas for a while and possibly this area has been neglected in recent months
• Google will not penalise sites unless there is an overwhelming amount of evidence – it’s a possibility that a certain amount of spam reports need to be submitted before Google “investigates” but this would be a very dated way of approaching such a big problem
• Google does penalise against paid links but the negative value is significantly less than we thought it would be and are represented in simply dropping 1/2 positions in SERPS – Too few websites are actually removed from Google for buying links in my opnion and we know many many sites buy links so perhaps there’s some truth in this
• Google cannot penalise all sites that buy links as a lot of the big brands and house hold names actually buy links and by doing so would render Google results sub-standard – I would like to think this couldn’t be true and technically this shouldn’t happen but you do have to wonder that if Google did remove all sites who bought links then we’d have very little “big names” left in the results.

These are of course my own opinions and we may never know why Google chooses to ignore some of the brands online who continue to abuse the guidelines. We have seen signs that Google may be about to cause a big upset to a lot of companies by recently updating their spam reporting system:

Anyway, hopefully Google will start rewarding sites that produce good social/linkable content as they say they do and start penalising sites which clearly break the guidelines.

There is a poll over at SEOptimise on what your stance on link buying is here

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So this morning I logged in and saw the following:

The position of the author image has moved from the far right to inside the organic listings – this will undoubtedly increase CTR’s considerably – especially on search results where there are currently no other authors using the correct markup. As you can see in this screen grab, my site is currently loosing the battle against all these other pretty listings i.e. Rand, Matt Cutts and Mr Sullivan!

Although I have now set this up, thanks to My Blogger Tricks:

Click to expand:

What’s interesting is where the data is being pulled from, you’ll see in the screenshot below that Google takes “Facts from 7 websites including en.wikipedia.org, gb.kompass.com and linkedin.com”. This is quite a powerful addition to any brand listing having this appear and supports the need for brands to have positioning on those areas.

Now I’m still looking at why some brands are showing these and some are not, I’m confident that a number of big brands which I’ve checked have more link value and authority than this blog so there must be another deciding factor – or alternatively it’s still being tested on different queries/geographical locations.

Another interesting point is that will sites now need to optimise more for the first 30/40 characters to avoid poor descriptions on the sitelinks? – maybe.

Either way it looks that this will be a more standard roll-out of organic sitelinks which will certainly help brands retain visitors and make it that little bit harder for competitors and affiliates.

**Update 11/07

I’ve been looking at potential triggers that sets off the extended sitelinks, I looked at most of the big brands online and got a mixed bag.

Search Query: “Lloyds” (http://www.lloydstsb.com/)

Search Query “Confused Car Insurance” (http://www.confused.com/)

Search Query(misspelling): “deisel” (http://www.diesel.com/)

So from looking at these various brands that have triggered expanded links we know that:

• Misspellings work
• Brand name can trigger them
• Number of links are not always 12 but sometimes can be 8
• It is working with brand + generic terms

I built a site targeting the keywords “Tinto Brass Films” – Tinto Brass is an Italian film Director who makes adult movies (not porn) – think 70′s style arty films. I’ve got a number of other movie affiliate sites and have a particular model that I know works for affiliate sales and Google Adsense – that’s why I chose the keyword/theme.

Progress was made as expected whereby I was in the top 3 in Google for my target keyword, however one day, out of the blue the homepage dropped from Google. I tried everything to get the homepage re-ranking but had little success, I even put the question out to the Twitter community. The website was in a strange position whereby it would randomly rank (at #3) for a day or two every month or so and then bury itself into the depths of Google the rest of the time.

The behaviour of the site had all the tale tale signs of a penalty but I’d done nothing wrong, in fact I’d checked just about everything twice to make sure. You can see in the image below the visits over about 1 year (click to enlarge):

The green line would have been roughly the expected traffic level from the rankings of the site, the red line is the actual average performance.

Then about a month ago the website was back in Google ranking very strongly and delivering the kind of levels of visitors I would expect. One thing I noticed which was different on the site was that Google Adsense was no longer showing on the site. I first thought I’d changed the code by mistake during one of my many on-site tweaks, however after installing the code a number of times across the whole site it just wasn’t showing. I looked for advice from Google as to why my Adsense ads were not showing up and realised it was because of the content I had could be considered as “porn” therefore it wouldn’t work.

There is no adult content on the site although “technically” I am selling adult movies which could constitute as breaching Google Adsense’s acceptance.

Anyway it looks to me that for the 9 months where Adsense WAS showing on the site but it WASN’T ranking for the target keyword Google obviously hadn’t categorised the site properly – or at least didn’t know what to do with it. There must be a filter that Google uses which detects through content whether or not a site has “adult” content, nothing new there – however it seems clear to me that on this instance Google had trouble trying to figure it out.

If anyone has had a similar experience I’d love to hear it!

Google have been changing their look a lot recently and this is just one of many within the last month, it certainly helps the listings stand out when you look for time sensitive material.