The Core

This is a strange one...

I have plenty of EMDs they are VERY low quality, I'm talking 1 page of spun content and 4 pages of dupe content. All with the same theme too.. they are 99% ranking either the same or better today than yesterday. Ages of these are no more than 6 months

Now I have 1 site with a keywordkeyword.org.uk domain with 90 pages of unique helpful content, it's not even that keyworded... It's dropped 2000+ places over night. Age of the site is around 1.5years

Another site has around 9 pages of good content. Gone.

In one market I operate all the 2 page crap keywordhq.com etc sites are still ranking..


Side note. People have been saying EMDs are going to get hit for years and years, why has it taken so long for G to actually do something about the issue? IMO they're a big slow company and the best strategy at the moment is spam.

So had an interesting email last night from Google...


Hello AdWords Advertiser,

We wanted to alert you that one of your sites violates our Advertising Policies and as a result we aren't displaying ads for any URLs on that site. Please note that any new ads pointing to that site will also be disapproved.

If this is an error, we want to get your ads back up and running as quickly as possible, and your Google team is here to help. Here's the account and URL:

     Customer ID: REMOVED
     Display URL: REMOVED


     The name of the policy is: Spam techniques
     More information about this policy, including how to correct problems: http://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/bin/static.py?hl=en_GB&topic=1310879&guide=1308243&page=guide.cs&answer=50424



Following the link the part I have violated is

"Ad spam techniques – exploiting online advertising systems, like AdWords, for financial gain"

Err hang-on, everyone using Adwords is using it to make a financial gain!

And anyway, this site was approved after a few weeks of discussions with Adwords and adding loads of lines of useless text to please them.  We are basically providing people with a 0% loan on a regulated investment which complies with all the rules.  And it's explained fully throughout the site.

Wankers.

Hi

Looking for a lead management option for my online leads which require a bit more work than just passing to my client.  Been looking at http://flg360.co.uk , anyone have any opinions or experience of them?

Thanks

Andy

Hi

I've had a VA scraping blog domains for a month now and now I need a way to scrape their emails.  SB can do this but only scrapes the page in the list and doesn't export in a format with email and site in the same row.  Ideally the scrape will find a contact us page and get an address from there.

Any recommendations??

Ok.  So I've been trolling the SEL comments over the last couple of days and having discussions with people about paid guest posts.  To me a link gained through offering anything is a paid link, now that could be with money, beer or free content, A is bartering with B to gain C. 
While arguing the point I ran some of these guys sites and clients through ahrefs and find they all have keyworded dofollow footer links on their clients sites.  SURELY this is advertising, surely this should be nofollow... Damn hypocrites. 

ARGH.

Some peoples nerve heh!

http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/02/search-quality-highlights-40-changes.html

Interesting read, I had noticed some increase rankings in Google Places (annoyingly) but the interesting part is at the very begining and at the end:


Most of the updates rolled out earlier this month, and a handful are actually rolling out today and tomorrow

Link evaluation. We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often rearchitect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.  <<  Some people are saying PR, some are saying Anchor Text... Any ideas?

Spam update. In the process of investigating some potential spam, we found and fixed some weaknesses in our spam protections. << Any bets on this... I'm thinking since HPBL and some blog networks seem to have been hit, it all about OBL, maybe relevance of them and quantity...


I haven't seen any ranking changes to be honest, I have noticed a longer than normal lag in adding new links and ranking changes.  Will be an interested few days.