Search Engine Optimization | featured news

Ever since Google released its Penguin update last year, which penalizes sites for being linked to by low quality sites, I’ve been getting a regular stream of link removal requests. (Yeah, I know this implies that my site is low quality, but I’ll let that go.)

Demand Media, a content farm targeted by Google's Panda Update, is shifting focus from text to video. On its flagship site eHow, it's producing less written content and more how-to videos, moving from one ecosystem into another.

Talk about getting its ass-kicked by Google’s Panda Update, Mahalo’s been hit pretty hard. Jason Calacanis, the founder, has never been shy about how his site gets traffic - by paying writers cheaply to crank out content for the top Google keyword searches. In other words, an SEO play - a content farm.

Senh: It's unfortunate, but as soon as Google adds an editorial layer on top of their search engine, it's game over for the company - then you can definitely say there's a bias in their search results. It opens up a whole can of worms. What I don't get is why Rick Santorum couldn't do the same and get his followers to tweet and blog about him to push his official site up to the top of the results.

Senh: Interesting that the one site that Google supposedly targeted with their previous algorithm has almost no effect on the site's traffic.

As I mentioned at the beginning of the year, I've started working for BookTeller.com, a website that offers animated children's books with voice-over narration for a monthly subscription fee. It's a great educational tool for parents and teachers to teach kids how to read.