"Reviews are only valuable when they are honest and unbiased … Don't offer money or product to others to write reviews for your business or write negative reviews about a competitor. We also discourage specialized review stations or kiosks set up at your place of business for the sole purpose of soliciting reviews." These are the review sites you've probably heard of, but may have lolly-gagged to get on. If you want to give your business a quick online reputation audit, checking out how your business fares on these sites (and setting up profiles if you haven't already) is a great...

Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, recently announced that Google has crashed one more 'link network' in the line - 'Buzzea'; a French network.  He  confi rmed this on Twitter. Google has taken this action on Buzzea, for not following Google's quality guidelines                 . The addition to this announcement was that the next target for call out by Google would be German link networks! Matt hinted this upcoming action on Twitter - “today France; Germany soon."   This is the latest call out in a long number of link n...

Google has rolled out the old manual action viewer in Google Webmaster Tools. There are reports of the new manual action alert - 'image mismatch'!   This manual action is for those images on your site that appear differently - on your site and in Google search engine pages. When the images on your Website do not match what Google is displaying and indexing on the search result pages, the 'image mismatch' manual action comes into picture.   Manual actions are nothing but the penalties from a human reviewer at Google - who has determined certain Websites violating Google's guidelines a...

A number of advertisers have been advertising by adding certain visual informative elements to the search ads along with the features such as product listing ads, media ads, and image extensions; that appear only in response to some branded product queries. Google has now announced its experiment with enormous banner advertisements associated with brands. Introduction of banner advertisements is a significant change for the company and such ads may lead to generate more traffic to the respective advertisers compared to that through traditional advertising. However, this would take the desired ...

Google uses PageRank, an algorithm to rank various websites in Google web search engine results. It’s a great way that measures the importance of Web pages and used to occur at the interval of three months since 2009. However, it has been eight months after the last update occurred; Google Toolbar PageRank Update is not seen. According to Google, there won't be any more Google Toolbar PageRank update this year.   Matt Cutts, the head of Google search spam, declared on Twitter about not pushing out the new Google Toolbar Update this time.   In late 2011, Google users observed an update to the q...

Google keeps changing its search algorithm every year and this change could be approximately 500-600 times. However, most of these changes are minor. Google also calls out the major update that seems to significantly affect the search engine results. One of these major updates is Google Penguin which was very first announced on April 24, 2012 (Penguin 1). All those Websites that seem to violate the rules and regulations of Google Webmaster have to face significant drops in their search engine rankings after this Penguin update.   Here is when the immediate next Penguin updates were releas...