9/21/09 Google officially announces that meta keywords don’t impact ranking in Google

Matt Cutts just officially stated that Google does not use meta keywords to impact web sites’ rankings in Google. It has been widely known for a long time that meta keywords did next to nothing, if anything in Google. Cutts decided to make it official. I have always recommended to not use meta keyword tags on web sites because they are a waste of time and competitors can then see what keywords you are targeting. Purposely using meta keywords to trick your competitors into thinking you are targeting certain keywords is still an option I guess, but that seems like a waste of time as well. Any good competitor will be able to figure out the truth anyway, especially with tools like compete.com around.

9/17/09 Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz changes stance on paid links

After a lengthy period of pushing paid link services all over the SEOMoz web site, Rand Fishkin has decided to change his stance on paid links. That is, of course, paid links that are not properly deemed as advertisements and actually pass along PageRank. John Chow’s blog was targeted by Google for this practice awhile ago. As a result, he did not rank for his own name in Google for a long period of time. Google received a lot a negative response for this move from well-known bloggers and recently removed the punishment, allowing Chow to rank for his own name again.

Aaron Wall of SEOBook had some interesting thoughts on this move by Fishkin. Wall recently stated on his blog “If you philosophically didn’t believe in buying links then why would you spend $1,000,000+ building a web graph of link data? What good is researching all the link data if you take link buying off the table as one of the options? Most of the competing links that you can replicate will require some level of payment.”

7/29/09 Yahoo gives up on search, makes deal with Bing

While most of you already know about this, it is a major news item for the SEO industry in particular. This means no longer trying to rank in Google, Yahoo! and Bing. Now there are only two major search engine you have to focus your SEO efforts on. I do not know how to feel about this at this time. I am curious however, to see what kind of market share Bing has in a year or so.

QuadsZilla at SEO Black Hat seems to be very excited about Bing. He recently wrote a post stating “We want Bing to succeed: we need a real challenger to Google’s monopoly” and even goes as far as to get a contact at Bing in order to “negotiate a deal to bring upwards of 10,000,000 new searchers per year to Bing.com.”