There have two developments in Google search which have bearing for SEO in 2011 : first is improved spam detection and the second is PageRank changes.
Battling Content Spam
On 21 January 2011, Google announced a redesigned document-level classifier to detect web spam. This will detect pages with scraped content using bots or software, or manual spam content, such as repeated keywords words which occur in junk, automated, self-promoting blog comments, or sites created for link exchange. This will affect primarily sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content.
Google also claims to target “content farms,” which generate content for SEO based on keywords. These employ low-paid content creators, who scrape content from high ranking sites. However, certain sites generate high revenues from Adsense for Google, and experts doubt if Google will black list sites like eHow, LiveStrong.com. AOL, with Seed.com and Yahoo, with its Associated Content , are also in the content farm business.
Content scraping, and pingback spam are some of the biggest threats a genuine site faces in 2011. There are tools for pingback spamming and content scraping. Solutions are: check pingbacks before approving them; you can report any scraped content to Google, Yahoo and Bing. Auto blog pingback spam is now so bad that many blogs are refusing to accept any pingbacks at all. This is due to many unethical sites that create blogs using packages of WordPress plugins that copy content from other blogs or article publishing sites, and send pingbacks to many blogs to try to get backlinks and traffic.
PageRank Update
Under the patent filing granted in May 2010, how much value might a link on a page pass along in a link-based ranking system like PageRank and search results ranking will be based upon a large number of factors, such as where the link is located on a page, whether the link is a different color or font style than other links, how many words are used in the anchor text for the link, whether the link text used is commercial or not, what the topic of the page is that the link appears upon and the topic of the page pointed to by the link, and many others.
Previously, each link on a page passed the same amount of authority to the target page. Now, every link is weighted according to how likely a “reasonable surfer” would be to click on that link.
We at Ananya SEO Company have always followed organic natural link building. These developments make it clear that SEO methods like Forum posting and blog commenting, Bulk link exchange, link exchange with link farms with small text links in page footers, stuffed sidebars, link exchange pages and automatic directory submission will not work any more.
PageRank that you see in tool bar is only an indication and one of 200 factors considered by Google. Google probably no longer uses it and advises webmasters not to worry about it. Yet PageRank has a mythical status and revered by webmasters. The latest PageRank update occurred around 20 Jan 2011.
