Just read through all of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and noticed there was no mention of avoiding paid links. Hmmm… Do you think they simply forgot to mention this in their popular guidelines for webmasters? This is the page they tell webmasters to read if they are having ranking problems or for those who have been banned. Seems like it would be logical to mention linking practices that they definitely don’t agree with.

It seems a bit strage that I can’t find much in all of Google’s official documentation against BUYING paid links. It’s more geared towards those sites SELLING and how they should make sure they don’t pass “link juice” to sites that are buying advertising. Here’s some evidence of that…

“Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:

• Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the <a> tag
• Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

Google works hard to ensure that it fully discounts links intended to manipulate search engine results, such excessive link exchanges and purchased links that pass PageRank.”

Another thing to mention is that if your site gets reported for paid links, there is very little chance that it will get banned manually. In fact, the following quote from Google’s own website further demonstrates that they are trying to deal with the problem algorithmically which would mean there would be major ranking changes for many sites all at one time should they ever find a way to fix the issue.

“If you see a site that is buying or selling links that pass PageRank, let us know. We’ll use your information to improve our algorithmic detection of such links”.

Even so, there’s still no evidence that they would penalize the buyer since that would mean that any competitor can purchase a bunch of shady links pointing to your site and get you banned. They would be more likely to devalue the links or penalize the seller.

In their ongoing quest to dominate the universe, Google has announced that they are coming out with their own web browser called Chrome. Interesting news considering they were so “in bed” with Firefox before. It was a win win relationship for Google and Firefox but now it doesn’t look like that relationship will continue much longer. It sort of makes sense that Google would come out with their own browser. I guarantee that over the past 5 years or so, as FireFox has steadily grown in popularity, they have also grown a backbone and don’t bend to Google’s will as easily as they used to. I was actually kind of surprised that Google didn’t just buy Firefox a long time ago considering they have bought their way into so many other markets. If Google dominates the browser market they can control which search engine a lot of people use since many people use the default search engine that comes installed in their browser.

I just downloaded Chrome and started testing it out. I have to say it is definitely a lot faster. I tested it out on gmail which always runs really slow for me in Firefox and Chrome runs like 5 times faster. Pretty cool… I’m sure they still have a few bugs to figure out but it looks like this might mean trouble for Internet Explorer which still dominates around 80% of the browser market. I also like that when i open a new tab or a new window they show my most visited sites for easier access:

I’m still going to continue to use Firefox because of all of the plugins that I have installed but as soon as we start seeing some plugins for Chrome I might take the leap!

With all the buzz going around about the new up and coming search engine, Cuil (pronouced “cool”) we obviously had to kick the tires a bit to see how this bad boy would drive. As CNN reports, Cuil was created by ex-Google engineers, and who better in the business to drive the technology behind a search engine than those that helped to create the current market share leader.

While Cuil claims that the advantage of the new search engine over other engines like Google is that the results will be displayed and ordered based on the content of the site more so than the quality of the site and the links pointing to it, it also appears that they took a stab at a new visual layout as well. Unlike search engines that have come before it, Cuil definitely has a different way of showing results with the top 3 (or 1, 4 and 7 in the search results - it doesn’t really say) results spanning the first row of the results with the rest down below. On smaller monitors, this definitely gives a much larger advantage to those that appear in that first row.

Cuil also appears to grab random images from the site and displays them next to the result. Some are appropriate, some probably detract but by displaying pictures next to the result it gives even further advantage to those that are shown with better pictures than those without pictures, regardless of the value of the page itself.

The one advantage that I do think that is visible in its current state is the ability to navigate through similar subjects and categories with ease. Sure, other engines employ this subject fairly readily, especially Yahoo, but Cuil does it without overpowering the page and with fairly simplistic functionality and use.

Cuil also seems to claim over 120 billion indexed pages, which far surpasses that of Google. I only seem to get results half of the time though when searching for things and am greeted by the following page:

Really, 120 billion pages indexed and nothing about call tracking? Clicking search a second time found results, but a 50% success rate at even showing any results is nothing to write home about. Google killer, definitely not. Overtaking Hotbot, a fair possibility.