In its quarterly Authority Report, Parse.ly looked at referral traffic to the 100 top news sites, as ranked by comScore and Alexa. From May through July, 43 percent of the referral traffic came from social and 38 percent from search. Google sites – including Google.ca and Google News – and Facebook accounted for nearly three-quarters of that. By comparison, Yahoo and Twitter, numbers three and four, made up a combined total of 9.3 percent of the referral traffic.

Though Google traditionally made up the lion’s share of the referral traffic, the search giant peaked in the fall of 2013, when Facebook steadily started to increase. Other than a brief dip around October, Google has always been dominant, until last quarter. Facebook’s referral traffic share is stronger than it’s ever been, making up 38.3 percent, to Google’s 35.8 percent.

“Google is not a slouch of a referrer. It’s still very close to Facebook as a proprietor of traffic and as you can see, the next referrers are miles away from Facebook and Google as a pair, so it’s not like this is a huge tectonic shift for Facebook,” says Andrew Montalenti, co-founder and chief technology officer at Parse.ly. “Facebook overtaking Google may not be a huge surprise on its own, but I think I’m surprised to see the degree to which Google plateaued.”

Montalenti refers to a trend he’s seeing of news finding you, rather than you searching for news. With that in mind, he thinks publishers have been focused on social content more than SEO, and Facebook was there to capitalize on that and work with publishers, rather than just treat it like any other website.

In October, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt said the company’s biggest competition is Amazon, not fellow search engines Yahoo and Bing. But recent research points out that the search giant’s most fierce competitor is actually Facebook.

Last month, cloud-based marketing solution IgnitionOne found that Facebook’s display growth is up 48 percent year-over-year, while Google’s is down 9 percent. Facebook is also a formidable opponent to YouTube; not even a year after making its algorithm more video-friendly, the social media powerhouse reached 4 billion daily video views.

“I think [Facebook] executed Google’s playbook in its own vertical-focused way, in social. We sort of saw, pre-[initial public offering], it was all about user growth and acquisition. Post IPO, it was about turning on the revenue engine and paid traffic,” Montalenti says. “For a long time, Google had a moat built around search and built up its position around its strength in search. Search is this very powerful thing, but I think its realizing that social is also a really powerful thing that has something search doesn’t.”

The confession came as Schmidt denied claims that Google enjoys an unparalleled dominance of the online search industry.

“Many people think our main competition is Bing or Yahoo. But, really, our biggest search competitor is Amazon,” Schmidt said in a speech in Berlin.

Amazon is the world’s largest online retailer, and has revealed several announcements in the past few months that demonstrate a focus beyond its core e-commerce business.

Amazon completed its acquisition of games console video broadcasting firm Twitch for $970 million last month, the biggest in its 20-year history.

Twitch allows gamers to stream action, guides, and other related content to share with other players, and has been something of a games console darling since its launch. Microsoft and Sony have promoted the service on their hardware.

Schmidt said that competition in the online world “isn’t always like-for-like.”

“People don’t think of Amazon as search, but if you are looking for something to buy you are more often than not looking for it on Amazon,” he said.

“They are obviously more focused on the commerce side of the equation, but, at their roots, they are answering users‘ questions and searches just as we are.”

The Interbrand Best Global Brands 2014 ranking tables published last week valued Google at more than $100 billion.

The firm has been in second position for two years, boasting a $107.5 billion value, up by 15 percent on last year. Apple is in first position.

However, even though Google is dominant in the online search market, accounting for more than 90 percent of all searches, Schmidt said he is still wary of the “next Google.”

“Someone, somewhere in a garage is gunning for us. I know, because not long ago we were in that garage. Change comes from where you least expect it,” he said.

Schmidt’s confession comes hot on the heels of a recent move by Google to revamp some of its shopping features to make it easier for consumers to do research in the lead-up to purchasing products.

This article was originally published on the Inquirer.

There are some shady dealings going on behind the scenes at YouTube regarding its new streaming music service.

YouTube is having difficulty getting independent music labels to sign on to its new service due to “highly unfavorable and non-negotiable terms,” The Guardian reported. In response, the video search engine is flexing its Google-backed muscle, threatening to take down videos from acts like Adele, Arctic Monkeys, and Vampire Weekend if their labels won’t agree to license their content to YouTube for the new music subscription service.

If this turns out to be true, users searching for music on YouTube, the world’s second largest search engine, may not find content from their some of their favorite independent artists. This is blatant censorship from Google, designed to pressure small independent labels to sign unfavorable deals with YouTube.

Let’s unpack this a bit.

The Background

Late last year, rumors began swirling about YouTube’s soon-to-be-released streaming music service, believed to be named “Music Pass.” The service mimics established players such as Spotify, Apple-owned Beats Music, and the recently announced Amazon Prime Music. These services allow users to listen to an unlimited amount of music for a monthly subscription fee.

YouTube has an incredible amount of music content thanks to its music video library, which is fueled by both major and independent record labels.

In preparation for the Music Pass service, YouTube has been working with these labels to sign contracts which allow YouTube to license the content for sale through its subscription service, rather than an ad-based one, which is how YouTube currently operates.

YouTube has managed to ink contracts with major labels like Sony, Warner, and Universal, but has run into trouble with some of the independent labels due to what the labels feel are unfair terms. If the labels refuse to sign, YouTube threatens to block their content from YouTube, according to “termination” letters sent to some of these labels. This is according to WIN, a company that represents independent labels worldwide.

This Is Crazy

Big corporations bully smaller businesses all the time, but it’s hard to believe that YouTube would risk angering its user base by blocking popular content in order to strong-arm a licensing deal.

It’s similar to a mob boss, who already “taxes” neighborhood businesses, then goes into a shop and threatens to burn the place down if they don’t pay the boss more money. The problem is if the mobster burns down too many stores, there won’t be any shop owners left, and the mob boss has lost the revenue he had to start with.

If YouTube pushes these independent labels too hard, and they block too much of their content, YouTube will actually lose out on the revenue it would have made running ads on the existing content. Licensing agency Merlin estimates that collectively, independent labels account for more than 32 percent of market share of the music industry’s sales and streams.

Not to mention that users expect a video search engine to return relevant results for an artist’s name, which YouTube can’t do if it’s busy blocking the artist’s content as a negotiating tactic with their label.

Why Would YouTube Risk This?

According to Billboard, it’s in the best interest of YouTube’s users if the content was taken down:

YouTube executives argue that they cannot offer music on the free service without it also being available on the paid service as this would disappoint its subscribers. The solution? To take down songs that can’t be available on both services.

The Precedent

We don’t yet know how things will ultimately shake out, but if the independent labels’ fears about their content being taken down come true, we have an unsettling precedent for search engines to censor content as a punishment for being uncooperative.

This isn’t a manual penalty that removes content from search results due to guideline violations or copyright violations. This sounds like a straight-up, “Give us your content on our terms or we’ll cut you off from YouTube” play. It’s a bully tactic plain and simple.

Could This Bullying Set a Precedent That Might Seep Into the Non-Music-Based World?

Might Google one day require you to build an Android version of your iOS app, else your company website disappears from the organic search results?

Could Google require ecommerce stores to offer Google Wallet as a payment option or their products will be blocked from Google Shopping?

Is the day coming when Google will force content creators to create a Google+ account and verify their content in order to compete in organic search?

Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance. – Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, “The New Digital Age”

Seemingly small situations like how YouTube is dealing these independent labels not only makes it harder to find content from artists we love on YouTube, but may be a gateway for Google to pressure other types of content creators and brands in ways that directly affect our businesses and our livelihoods.

Whose Side Are You On?

Is YouTube abusing their power, or is it really best for users? Do you think they’ll block all of these artists’ content, or are the independent labels blowing this out of proportion? Is this just a one-time thing, or is it an indicator of where Google is going with all content creators?

Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Google plans to place an alert at the bottom of each page where it has removed links, after the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled last month that users can request that “inadequate, irrelevant, or no longer relevant” links be taken down, according to The Guardian.

It’s unclear exactly how this will look, but the report claimed that Google might flag results similar to the way it does illegal content, such as copyright infringing material.

“For example, a Google search for ‘Adele MP3’ shows that it has removed a number of results from that page after receiving complaints under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act,” The Guardian noted.

Jodie Ginsberg, chief executive of Index on Censorship, said that while flagging search results is all well and good, it does nothing to fix the legal issues surrounding the recent ECJ ruling.

“The fact that Google plans to add ‘flags’ to search links it has removed does nothing to tackle the fundamental problem with the ‘right to be forgotten’ ruling – which is the complete absence of legal oversight in this process,” she said. “We remain deeply concerned about a ruling that opens the door to a censoring of the past without any proper checks and balances.”

This isn’t the only negative reaction the ECJ ruling has received. The Article 29 European watchdog admitted last week that it doesn’t know yet how to handle complaints related to the ruling, with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) also admitting that it needs more time to figure it out.

Google chairman Eric Schmidt isn’t pleased about it, either, slamming the “right to be forgotten” ruling as “wrong.”

Google reportedly received 12,000 completed takedown forms on the day it published its response to the ECJ’s “right to be forgotten” ruling, and as of last week had racked up a total of 41,000.

This article was originally published on the Inquirer.

This is a significant achievement – particularly since Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, once said hell would freeze over before the company advertised on television. Then, the day before “Parisian Love” ran during Super Bowl 2010, Schmidt said in a tweet, “Hell has indeed frozen over.”

Ace Metrix has also awarded a Brand of the Year title to 19 other brands in some of the most competitive categories of 2013. The winning brands earned the highest average Ace Score within their category based on their entire portfolio of national television advertisements in 2013.

“Google’s emergence as a storytelling force is not a recent phenomenon – they have produced outstanding creative for several years now – but 2013 represented a watershed moment for the brand,” said Peter Daboll, Ace Metrix CEO. “Their achievements over the last 12 months are a testament to Google’s ability to personalize technology and create an emotional connection to simple tasks such as search. In the process, Google’s television advertising reminds us that their technology doesn’t just connect us to the world around us; it makes us feel more a part of it.”

Ad of the Year: Google “Here’s to 2013”

Google’s “Here’s to 2013” (Ace Score of 663) outperformed every other ad in its category by 46 percent, the most of any other brand across every qualifying category.

“Here’s to 2013” debuted on Christmas day and is a reflective, inspirational look at the events of 2013 through the lens of Google search. The 90-second spot is signature Google – emotional and moving, yet manages to showcase their products from voice to Earth and from video to search.

With towering scores across all components, what stands out is the Relevance score – 49 percent above the Websites category norm. The 706 Relevance score is also fourth highest overall among the more than 6,400 ads scored by Ace Metrix.

Google also earned the overall Brand of the Year award based on its 2013 portfolio of work which achieved an average Ace Score of 570, 24 percent above the category norm – the largest gap of any other brand compared to its category average.

Advertisers which achieved Brand of the Year status delivered a portfolio of work that set them apart from their peers – a remarkable achievement considering the number of world-class marketers contributing creative for consideration. Nearly 750 brands competed for 20 category titles, from over 5,000 creative executions. In the last year, Ace Metrix scored more than 6,400 ads from over 1,200 brands. Liberty Mutual was the only brand to return to the winner’s list from 2012.

Brands of the Year, 2013 – Listed Alphabetically by Category

Stunning Tech and Telecom Developments

In the technology categories, simplicity was the key theme on display with Vizio beating out category rivals Samsung, Microsoft, and Intel with a series of television ads elegantly displaying their commitment to simplify the increasingly complex television experience.

Kindle’s customer service-centric ads disrupted the highly competitive Mobile Devices category swiping the top spot from previous winners Samsung and Apple – notably ranked fourth and fifth, respectively.

Xbox topped the Video Games and Consoles category with ads that introduced the Xbox One and successfully captured the more elusive female demographic.

Netflix stunned the Telecom Services category by outperforming all the telcos and wireless carriers with a portfolio of ads showcasing their evolving subscription offering and content choices.

Brand of the Year Qualifications

Ace Metrix scores every nationally airing television ad across 24 industries and 93 categories, putting it in a good position to report a brand’s overall effectiveness across the entire video advertising industry’s body of work over a year, as well as year-over-year. To qualify for Ace Metrix Brand of the Year, brands must have debuted five or more unique pieces of creative within a category containing more than 100 pieces of creative and five qualifying brands.

And who would have predicted that Google would be the top brand of 2013. “Hell has indeed frozen over.”

The recommendation came as part of a rare and lengthy Google+ post by Schmidt over the weekend giving the Apple community a comprehensive guide on to how to flee to his company’s products.

“The latest high-end phones […] have better screens, are faster, and have a much more intuitive interface,” Schmidt wrote. “They are a great Christmas present to an iPhone user!”

He then gave iPhone users instructions on how to transfer data.

His advice included always using two-step verification and switching the web browser to Chrome.

The post is unprecedented. Schmidt isn’t known for his active participation in his company’s social network, and this sudden lengthy post seems carefully constructed with step-by-step instructions for not only joining the Android ecosystem, but also exporting data from iCloud.

“Many of my iPhone friends are converting to Android,” he wrote. That sounds fine and dandy, but we might ask, how many of those iPhone owning friends have ever bothered to read a post on Google+?

We’re hoping that this is the beginning of a whole range of “How To” guides from Eric Schmidt. Some we’d love to see are, “Eric Schmidt’s Guide To Throwing Pots”, “Eric Schmidt’s Guide To Survival In The Wilderness”, “Eric Schmidt’s Guide To Choosing Spectacles To Drive The Ladies Wild”, and most especially, “Eric Schmidt’s Guide To Opting Out Of Google+”.

This article was originally published on the Inquirer.

Most sites that are big brands rank well because they meet so many points on Google algorithm – everything from authority, to quality score, to links, to social signals.

If you see Wikipedia everywhere, as annoying as it may be, it positions so well because it has tons of content and more links pointed at it than stars in a desert sky. This doesn’t mean Google prefers brands; it means the site is algorithmically awesome.

OK, so “algorithmically awesome” isn’t really an SEO term, but it might as well be. If you naturally meet more points on the algorithm than any of your competitors, then your gift from Google will be to occupy a higher position in the search results. It just kind of works that way.

Wait, What About Google’s Vince Update?

Yes, there was an algorithmic update called Vince in 2009 that threw big brands some special algo points.

That same year, there was “brand affinity.” This quote from Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO at the time, probably said it best:

“Brands are the solution, not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool. Brand affinity is clearly hard wired. It is so fundamental to human existence that it’s not going away. It must have a genetic component.”

So big brands were wired into the algorithm with Vince, then even more so with Panda. Yet, Google’s Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts said big brands “can’t do whatever they want” and are subject to the algorithm just like regular sites. What is an SEO to believe? Which is it?

Well, it’s really all of the above. You don’t automatically get to the top by just being a big brand. If you have a poor website and are in general not doing well on the algorithm, you might do well for a few terms sure, but overall, no.

Big Brands and Search

Being a big brand naturally helps you with some algorithmic factors, including perceived site authority and quality. You also have the one thing most mom and pops don’t: brand affinity.

One sentence of the Search Quality Rating Guidelines is telling: “Would you recognize this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name?” Brands are more well known to users by simply being a brand, so the user intent is more likely to be Target the store then say target the bullseye.

Wikipedia ranks well everywherebecause, frankly it should. That said, you don’t always position well just because you are a brand.

I once sat in a site clinic in which one of the largest ecommerce sites on the web didn’t understand why it couldn’t position for selling television sets. The problem? There were no signals from the site that it deserved to position to sell television sets. While the site did position well for things related to its core brand, it just didn’t for things that weren’t.

So where is the benefit for big brands outside of having a bit more ability to extract authority, quality, and large value points on links and social and rank for being a known brand?

Well mostly it seems limited to penalties.

Penalties and Big Brands

Many big brands have a direct connection at Google, which means someone at Google that will tell them when they crossed a line or at least one to Cutts to answer a question or two. And if you’re really big, Cutts will warn you himself (see Mozilla)

Big brands also more likely to survive a Google penalty than a small- or medium-sized business (SMB) site, partially because they are stronger sites, partially because their penalties do seem to have much more limited damage.

Seriously, when was the last time you heard of a big brand being removed entirely from Google’s index? Sure they get hit with penalties all the time, I know Cutts isn’t misleading us about that. But the damage is much more focused and much more limited.

Remember JCPenney and Overstock? They lost keyword traffic, not their entire website.

Go to Google forums see how many SMBs can say the same.

Now some theorize that it is because Google gives these sites leniency – in the hey – they were at #1 they could not rank any higher, so those link buys didn’t actually help them. Others believe it is just a strict brand preference.

Personally, my SEO brain has settled on it is a set of algorithmic factors, I like to term “the expectancy factor” or the “should be there factor” (this is just an easy way to say algorithmic factors combined with the fact that the sites are just stronger and the brands are given leniency and limited penalties).

‘Should Be There’ Status

Some sites should be in Google’s index – not just because Google thinks it should be there, but because searches by end users have indicated to Google that they expect it to be there.

If one of these “should be there” sites didn’t show up in Google’s results, then the searcher might think Google has a pretty lousy product.

So Google protects its product by making sure to limit the effect of penalties on big brands by warning them directly and by helping certain ones recover quickly if a penalty is more damaging. Whichever it is, big brands are like a naval carrier in the middle of a penalty storm; your SMB is a Tiki raft.

Google Penalties – Big Brand Leniency

So how does it work in the real world when you have “should be there” status?

While a standard SMB site might receive one penalty and find itself without a homepage in the Google index (and many have), a big brand might look like this:

This is the manual action viewer of a big brand site.

Under each of these penalties, except for one, in the manual action viewer were approximately 1,000 pages (the maximum the viewer can handle). These penalties were on the subdomain, but the main domain was also penalized.

Both the main domain and the subdomain lost key terms in the search engine and key placements, but it did continue to position for new, highly trafficked terms though less relevant and longer tail, didn’t cause enough damage that its core business functions were threatened.

Now what happens if you’re a company that doesn’t have “should be there” algorithmic triggers? And you receive even one of these manual actions on your site over a multitude of pages or even just a percentage of them?

You would have probably woken up to this:

But this big brand site never saw this graph. This site hardly noticed the blip. Partially because it creates new pages all the time, which were positioning (well enough), which helped cover up the loss, but mostly because the penalties were isolated and not cross sectional.

Penalty Removal: Big Brand vs. SMB

These penalties were there for quite some time. So, if your site was not expected to be in the index, if you did not have site authority, site strength and your site was not a big brand, you would probably expect the road back would be pretty tough (noting that you would at most be dealing with one or two of these penalties as no small site would survive more than that without getting their homepage kicked out of the index along with the rest of their site).

Here’s what the site looked like after one reconsideration request and one penalty removal.

Within a few days they regained 100 percent of their impressions, or 2 million (on average). This change shows that their site was repositioned into key terms and their new content was likely being shown highly in the search results.

We did a hand-check and yes, they regained key category terms and they were now positioning for relevant, highly competitive terms, even highly competitive phrases with short life expectancy (terms that would live only a few days).

If you aren’t a big brand, you site isn’t likely to work the same way. At the same time as this big brand site was recovering, we helped an SMB recover.

Instead of days, the SMB site took three months, three requests (one rewrite for depth and breadth), and a complete site rebuild. Only then did the homepage just start to show for their own name on the fifth page of Google.

This is more likely the outcome for an SMB. If you recover at all.

So Why do You Care About What Big Brands do?

Maybe that big brand corporation site is getting away with some black hat tactic, and your (clueless) boss, marketing team, board of advisors, or some other stakeholder knows about it.

“If they can do it, well we can, too!” they say.

No. You can’t.

Unless you have algorithmic awesomeness, authority, and expectancy (and that expectancy is the key) you will much more likely end up losing your position, your pages or your homepage if you buy links or engage in other practices that violate Google’s guidelines.

What Else Can You Learn From Big Brands?

Acting like a big brand is your best method for achieving success. Big brands send out strong signals to Google that tell Google there is a company and people behind them. These signals tell Google that the site is taken care of, that the company is awake at the helm, and that the site is going to be a good product.

Now not all big brands put out great websites, in fact a lot of them put out horrible websites, which is where expectancy (brand) can save them and where you can beat them.

Google has provided some guidance on building high-quality sites, in the form of these 23 questions. Follow these concepts, check your site. Does it meet the criteria of what Google (not you) considers a high-quality site? You don’t have to hit every point, but the more signals you send Google the better.

Be a Big Brand in the Making

Get your site to send out big brand signals. If you mimic all the good things a brand does well, Google will give you some of those authority and quality points:

• Create content.
• Build a natural link profile.
• Use social.
• Create more content (and more content).
• Have a blog.
• Make sure your site is technically sound, fast, visually appealing, and easy for users (and search engines to navigate).
• Utilize experts in the industry to audit your site and tell you what you’re not doing well, so you can do it better.

You aren’t likely to get those valuable expectancy signals unless you have offline indicators as well, but that’s OK. If you build a better site, with authority and meet more brand points on the algorithm, you don’t need that to compete.

Brands do have leeway, but that is a much stronger case when it comes to penalties. Being a brand just means they need to be there and found, not found in the top position except for their name and a few core key terms.

Expectancy, being a brand, having authority doesn’t get you automatic position; it just gets you some advantages in the game.

I suggest that understanding Vince is perhaps the most important way to get your SEO programs on track.

Google’s Vince Update: What Happened?

When Vince was first announced, Matt Cutts of Google called it a “minor change”. Many smart folks in our industry discounted that assertion.

The first discussion on Vince began on WebmasterWorld. A member had posed the question as to whether others had noticed more preference toward “big brands” in Google’s search results.

The first respondent was, not surprisingly, Ted “Tedster” Ulle (who sadly passed away on June 28 – you can read a “tribute” that I had written for him here). Here’s what Ulle wrote in 2009:

I also have the sense that there is a change in this direction. In 2008 Eric Schmidt made some comments that brands were more important. My only question is whether the influence is from offline or possible some other factor – such as unlinked brand mentions, or social media buzz.

Aaron Wall wrote a great post on Vince shortly thereafter.

The truth is, big brands already had a lot of the “good stuff” baked into their web presence that others would have to fight like hell to achieve. The challenge had been that many of those big brands had no idea how to build a search engine friendly website.

Google has done a pretty good job of getting around those hurdles, as I had written about in my 2009 series on American Express and “credit cards” rankings on Google.

Check out the rankings for “credit cards” on Google, now. More brands. Less affiliates. Not at all surprising.

What Vince Taught Us

You must try and build a brand online, just like you – in the “old days” had to build a brand – by marketing the business using multiple channels.

Coca-Cola didn’t just buy television ads to become one of the world’s best-known brands. They used a multi-channel approach.

Some way to build a brand online could include:

• Video
• Public relations
• Blog content that goes viral
• Infographics.

Once you’ve built a brand, you’ve established “trust” (with your target audience, as well as the search engines). Again, this isn’t achieved simply by writing some title tags and buying some links. Those days are, gladly, done and over.

Google may be trying to evolve past a (mostly) link-based algorithm. It’s pretty safe to assume that they can monitor for any mentions of your brand in social media (and elsewhere) and that they can probably attribute value to mentions of your domain/URL, even when it isn’t hyperlinked.

Once you have trust, you can get away with a lot more than other websites may be able to get away with.

Links Still Matter (For Now?)

If you represent a brand new website, it takes a lot of time and effort to build this trust (whether that be link equity, or what have you). In fact, if you employ some of the SEO tactics that I still see today from large brands, you could be in for a world of hurt.

Case in point – as I write this, I’m finalizing a proposal for a large brand. They had given me a couple of competitors who were “kicking their butts” in a few categories.

Within a 15-minute review, I easily determined some of the spammy techniques that one of their competitors was employing. For one specific keyword, this competitor had eight websites linking to them with an exact anchor text match through methods such as creating fictitious profiles on “awesome” sites such as http://besttourtravels.com/ and http://mysocial.ws and http://wiki.oziosi.org – plus some good old-fashioned blog comment spam. Here’s a sample of that “nice little piece of work”:

Wow that was unusual. I just wrote an incredibly long comment but after I clicked submit my comment didn’t show up. Grrrr… well I’m not writing all that over again. Anyway, just wanted to say superb blog!

And the user’s name for this blog comment? “Keyword”.

The really scary thing about this is that this blog comment spam was posted 19 weeks ago. This is current stuff. And this is a big company. And, this company is “kicking my (hopefully soon-to-be) client’s butt” in this category.

So, if you were a “common SEO”, you might say to said client, “well, we know that this works for your competitor. We believe you should do this, too!”

Which reminds me, once again, it’s not what you do in SEO, it’s how you do it. If you simply take a “what works for them will work for us” approach, you can often find yourself in hot water. Here’s a list of some outdated SEO tactics that you might not want to employ any longer.

Summary

You must realize that for this competitor, eight links represents a very small fraction of their total link profile. They have earned (mostly “earned”) their trust, links, and brand. If you represent that company that’s smaller, doing something like this could have disastrous effects.

Do the diligent work to build up all of these other trust signals, and perhaps you – too – could get away with (for now) some aggressive activity. Otherwise, now is when you can start talking about Penguin.

Google has been hit by accusations in the past that it has acted in an “immoral” way by dodging much of its corporation tax, taking advantage of tax loopholes. The same charge that has been leveled at numerous corporations such as Starbucks and Amazon.

The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) claimed Google paid just £6 million in corporation from revenues of £396 million in a report on the issue published in December 2012. Last week Google reported a rise in revenue of 31 percent to almost $14 billion.

However, speaking on the BBC World at One show, Schmidt said that questions around the firm’s taxes missed the wider pictures of the impact of Google on the UK economy and the fact the way corporation tax is paid is no different to anywhere else in the world.

“Britain has been a very good market for us. We empower literally billions of pounds of start-ups through our advertising network and so forth. And we’re a key part of the electronic commerce expansion of Britain which is driving a lot of economic growth for the country,” he said.

“So from our perspective, I think you have to look at it in totality. You’re describing the way taxes work globally. And the fact of the matter is these are the way taxes are done globally. The same is true for British firms operating in the US, for example.”

Schmidt added that nothing Google does is illegal and it would always operate above board.

“I think the most important thing to say about our taxes is that we fully comply with the law and obviously, should the law change, we’ll comply with that as well,” he said.

Google has also been accused of other tax issues in the past. A report in December last year alleged that the firm shifted $9.8 billion in revenue to Bermuda in order to avoid paying $2 billion in global taxes.

This article was originally published on V3.

We shrugged in confusion too. We too think that flying a small plane with spying equipment over anyone’s house is a bad idea. But a neighbor? Well, it would be pretty hard to disguise what you were doing.

“You’re having a dispute with your neighbor,” he told The Guardian in an interview printed in the paper this weekend. “How would you feel if your neighbor went over and bought a commercial observation drone that they can launch from their backyard. It just flies over your house all day. How would you feel about it?”

We have one word for any neighbor of ours that flies a drone over our house, and that is “catapult.”

Drones are a hot topic at the moment, and the potential weaponization of them is something that both intrigues and terrifies people in equal measure.

Schmidt, who is a confidant of President Obama, a man with whom he has exchanged friendly nods since 2007, didn’t want to get political about it though.

“I’m not going to pass judgment on whether armies should exist, but I would prefer to not spread and democratise the ability to fight war to every single human being,” he said, according to a BBC report. “It’s got to be regulated… It’s one thing for governments, who have some legitimacy in what they’re doing, but have other people doing it… it’s not going to happen.”

No doubt Schmidt won’t have any issues when neighbors spy on each other with Google Glass.

This article was originally published on the Inquirer.