Wow...this is pretty...um...transparent.
According to this post, Google was caught scraping Mocality, calling the listed businesses, soliciting that they move to Google "Get Your Business Online", disparaged the directory they were scraping in the client call, and then lied about having the permission of the directory they were scraping to try to con businesses into working with Google.
A few select quotes:
There are absolutely no costs, and this will be agreed on before it’s put on… No one will come and tell you like Mocality used to do, someone tells you it’s free and then they come to ask for money. Full story...
Local citations are a critical part of a local SEO campaign. In looking at David Mihm's Local Search Ranking Factors you can see that a majority of the top 10 factors focus on business information structure and links.
Maybe something like this...
...or this...
A bunch more here, with cut & paste code near your favorites.
I am already getting fake webmaster tool notification messages using the above subject line & the following message:
Hello dear managers of http://www.
Just about any independent SEO worth their weight who publishes a number of websites has at least once hit a snag & been filtered or penalized.
Before I get any drops of jupiter hate on the following...I was typing in training.seobook.com & somehow accidentally hit enter after typing train & when the URL completion didn't work I got the following SERP.
Google recently launched their webspam Penguin update. While they claim it only impacted about 3.
Sergey Brin recently said:
You have to play by their rules, which are really restrictive.
For the following study, we asked "Does this search result have ads on it? " to 1,000 searchers, per search results.
Which do you trust most as a source of advice on important issues?
People tend to trust friends & family and the mainstream media far more than they trust websites & search engines.
When you search, how did you pick your primary search engine?
Most people use the search engine which they believe has the best relevancy, whatever their computer came with, or what a friend recommended.