A Return to Stupidland: Ten Years After the Dotcom Boom - http://goo.gl/0kbLq

40 New Digital Media Resources You May Have Missed http://mashable.com/2011/02/19/digital-media-resources-3/

Get Your FREE Google Places Tutorial

http://exoon.com ~ Head over to our site to claim your FREE Google Places Tutorial. Contact us if we can help you to optimize your Local Search listings.

J.C. Penney BlackHat Link Scheme Causes Huge Loss of Rankings in Google

A couple of days ago the New York times ran an article on how J.C. Penney had been rumbled for gaming the organic search engine listings on Google. To do this they hired someone who is familiar with search engines and SEO. During this investigation they turned up thousands of totally unrelated sites linking in to category pages of J.C. Penney. Most if not all of these links had highly optimized anchor text and it looked to the analyzer that these links had been places in order for the store to gain top rankings in Google.

After presenting the findings to Matt Cutts of Google the head of the web spam division he confirmed to them that these practices were against the terms of Googles webmaster guidlines and soon after this the J.C. Penney started to drop out of the search results.

Take this as a warning to all that are doing SEO for clients or clients that are looking to hire SEO professionals. Make sure you know where your SEO people are placing your links and make sure that the places that they are getting placed are relevant to your brand and products.

Later Matt Cutts tweeted that “Google’s algorithms had started to work; manual action also taken”.

For a more WhiteHat approach to SEO get in touch with us here: Local Search Optimization

The SEOBook guys have changed their WordPress Template and they have decided to give the old WordPress Theme away FREE. http://goo.gl/HmxsJ

Last week Trey Smith sent out 3 videos showing
how he's making tons of money right now selling
Software. See them here: http://goo.gl/TC3h9

Here's an extensive list of UK Local Search Optimization Citations. Use them to give your Website listings a boost. http://goo.gl/Zgiu9

Local Search Gets New Tools With Google Hotpot

Seeing place recommendations based on your tastes and those of your friends across more Google searches will make results more relevant to you and maybe lead you to discover a new gem. If you don’t have Hotpot friends yet, you can invite them to share all the places they love with you by using the “Friends” tab on google.com/hotpot.

But Hotpot will only be half the fun if you can’t share it with all your international friends. So starting today, we’re making Hotpot available in 38 new languages—including Chinese, French, German, Italian, Korean, Polish, Russian and Spanish—allowing people to share their favorite places in their native language.

Start rating and sharing recommendations with Hotpot everywhere, anytime: at google.com/hotpot, on Google Maps, using Google Maps for Android with an easy widget, and on our new iPhone app.

 

Interesting new addition to Google's growing suite of Local Search and rating tools. Would suggest you check this one out to see what's in your area.

http://www.google.com/hotpot