Google Advice Regarding Online Reviews And Link Disavowal
Google Pays Attention To Online Reviews
An update to Google’s spam detection algorithms was announced recently. Apparently this update has been made as part of a bid to ensure the fairness and transparency of Google + business reviews. It will ensure that any reviews posted by companies specialising in reputation management or SEO are removed.
Business owners have been urged to resist the temptation to ask customers if they’d submit reviews from on-site computers and internet enabled devices. The idea is that people will go away and make their own minds up about products and services, rather than being pressurised by staff. Furthermore, Google have said that they will not take down negative reviews at the request of business owners. Nor will they co-operate with any third party companies specialising in the removal of such reviews.
Google Pay High Price To Feature On Apple Devices
A spokesperson for Morgan Stanley has said that Google are expected to pay $1 billion (roughly £640,000) to feature as the main search engine on Apple devices in 2014. It has also been estimated that Google will pay $400 million to for integration with the Mozilla web browser. One of the main reasons for Google’s willingness to spend such amounts is the competition from search engines such as Bing.
It has become clear in recent times that the relationship between Apple and Google is based purely on mutual financial benefit. The level of competition may even intensify before 2014, as Google are planning to release the hotly anticipated X-Phone and X-Tablet devices. Still Apple would be unwise to turn their noses up at the $1 billion.
Matt Cutts Updates The Webmasters
The Google CEO Matt Cutts has taken time out of his busy schedule to produce a couple of new videos, focussing on the link disavowal and the page rank tool bar. Apparently Google are so keen for the webmasters to avoid penalisation that they are planning on publishing examples of unnatural links. The examples are expected to incorporate keyword rich anchor text and be included on the directories that Google would like people to avoid.
A Google user also posed the question of ‘Why don’t you switch off the Page-Rank Toolbar feature?’ The reason according to Matt Cutts is that a large proportion of webmasters still view the toolbar as an important measure of online reputability. However, it was pointed out that there has been a reduction in the number of browsers supporting this feature in recent times.
