There’s been quite a lot of news this week about Google and privacy so I thought I’d break out some of the links from tomorrow’s This Week In SEO post and devote tonight to a post about Google and privacy. I’ll toss in some of my own thoughts as a bonus.
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Over the weekend Matt Cutts updated his now infamous post on reporting paid links with a Q&A session. The update was designed to shed more light on what links to report as well as alleviate some of the concerns webmasters might have. While most of Matt’s answers do shed some light and alleviate fears I think the answer to the most important question was missing.
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Tamar linked to an interesting WebmasterWorld thread, Todays Webmaster & Their Relationship with Google, this week. The original poster makes some good points about how we’ve fallen under Google’s spell, spend too much of our energy focused on Google, think that Google’s guidelines are what define ethical seo, and give Google access to more data than we should. I agree, though not completely with most of the points and think they make for an interesting discussion.
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On Friday I mentioned that privacy advocates are becoming even more concerned with how much information Google knows and will know about us. Two recent events are causing the uproar. First is Google’s proposed acquisition of DoubleClick, which would come with a large amounts of user data the ad company has collected over the years. Second is the slightly more recent expansion of search history to web history within Google’s personalized search. Both will give Google more information about our surfing and searching habits than any company has ever had.
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Over the weekend Matt Cutts published three posts that had sent the seo community into a frenzy by Monday morning. The main theme of the posts causing all the chaos was paid links. The first post Hidden links, mentions paid links almost in passing, but seems to tie them into the manipulative practice of hiding links. The second post simply agrees with and points to one by Matt Mullenweg On Sponsored Themes discussing the practice of paying to have your link included in a free blog theme. Both of these posts might have passed without much fanfare had it not been for the third post, How to report paid links.
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The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Google Earth are teaming up to raise awareness and hopefully promote social change in the Darfur region of Sudan.
The online mapping initiative. Crisis in Darfur enables more than 200 million Google Earth users worldwide to visualize and better understand the genocide currently unfolding in Darfur, Sudan.
Say good bye to the plain old search box on a white background. If you want to say good bye that is. Google added custom themes to your personal home page today. You’re still welcome to keep the old standard, but I’ve already got a new theme.
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Yesterday Google took a step in the right direction when it comes to protecting our privacy. Expected to be implemented before the end of the year Google will begin anonymizing the search data it collects so it can no longer be identified with any individual user, after 18-24 months. This is a good step, but does it go far enough?
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Aaron Wall reported earlier today that there might be a potential algorithm update underway at Google. He thought calling it an update might be a little strong, but he noticed that the results for some keywords he follows were showing less authority sites and more smaller niche sites in the SERPs. Naturally I was interested in knowing more and found a few other places discussing a possible change.
Here’s what I found during my search.
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Late last week Google began rolling out personalized search. While I have no doubt that the new system will lead to more relevant results for the majority of searches I have some strong reservations about personalized search, a few specific to Google and a few about personalizing search in general.
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