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.

The homepage is much smaller than before, it does look crisper I do admit.

Once you perform a search you’ll see the following (click to enlarge):

Yesterday Google released their new iPhone browser layout which coincided with the dark grey bar at the top of Google on desktops. For a while now people had noticed URLs being displayed above listing descriptions, this appears to be now live although I’m not 100% if I’m just getting a test from a data center. The left toolbar has now been changed too, everything is now grey/red which is more “serious” looking in my opinion.

A client might be obsessed with one particular ranking or you might have changed some on-site factor that you’re interested to see the results but if we care, we look.

A few weeks ago I started noticing different results on my iPhone 4 to that of my desktop/laptop – the result were actually quite a lot different, showing sites that usually appeared in positions 7-10 moving up to #2-3. I just assumed that the data used to display Google’s results was being taken from a different location – however later that day the results on my laptop changed to MATCH that of the iPhone 4.

I thought it was a little strange but thought nothing of it, however I saw this happen another 3 times over the course of 2 weeks – coincidence? The image you can see below was taken on my digital camera showing the top 2/3 websites for the keyword “car insurance” – with all personalisation turned off (well at least I tried to switch everything I have access too off) – you can clearly see the results are different (left side iPhone 4 results, right side Laptop results, notice the time 15:42 – click to enlarge):

On the iPhone 4 you can see Elephant and Admiral are #2 and #3 – whereas on the laptop it’s Co-Op and LV at #2 and #3. I then waited and checked the results 2 hours later and as you can see (click to enlarge):

Elephant and Admiral moved up +1 position each, so I waited another hour and eventually the search results in Google match that of the iPhone 4 3 hours earlier (click to enlarge):

Clearly there’s something going on here, potentially the data centers used for mobile devices are updated before those on desktops/laptops or perhaps my iPhone 4 really is magic and therefore very valuable – any offers?

Just looks like a normal affiliate banner right? Well if you hover the a mouse over it you get the alt tag “click to flip” appear:

Once you click on the banner it flips over and low and behold there is text and a text link:

I had a look at the code and it seems that it’s a class labelled “sponsor” – does this mean it’s what the site where I found the link has setup or is it something this particular brand has started putting together?

Either way this link is followed and in some respect hidden from users but not search engines – what do you say to that Google?