Google Links To Competitors Next To YouTube Videos

Google has begun showing links to different video sites and search engines in its search results. The links appear next to YouTube videos — but only on music-related searches.
On a search for u2, for example, Google shows three videos from YouTube, but each video listing now includes additional links that might otherwise have only shown up further down the page or on deeper pages. In the example above, the outbound links point to a mix of video-specific sites (Dailymotion, Metacafe) and search engines (Yahoo, Yandex).
In a late Friday blog post, Google explained where the links come from:

The feature scans the entire web for video content and algorithmically ranks the best sources for each song. Rather than return repetitive links, we group results for the same song together, making it easier to scan and choose the song you’re looking for.

The timing of the new display is interesting, to say the least. There’s a growing chorus of complaints around the world that Google favors its own sites, including a formal EU investigation.
This move seems like an obvious response to those complaints but, not surprisingly, Google doesn’t say anything along those lines in its blog post.
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2010 to 2011; What SEO's Have Seen, Learned And Can Look Forward To

The end of each year calls for reflection, while looking forward and planning for what's ahead. Being in the business of the web and SEO, we find our landscape changing rapidly, sometimes forcing us to make swift alterations from day-to-day. 2010 shook our world with developments and partnerships that will affect the way we all operate in 2011.

As expected, Google played a huge roll in the turn of events of 2010. The 'Mayday' change in the spring altered algorithms, causing some sites to lose their long tail search referrals and see 5%-15% drops in normal long tail traffic. Then last September, Google once again sent the SEO industry into a panic with the introduction of Google Instant. While some people speculated the end of SEO as it we knew it, the new implementations concentrated searches into short head keyword pushing up the cost of those already expensive competitive keywords. Google's response to the mayhem was simple: they noted that "ranking stays the same" and the algorithm stays the same. However, Google emphasized that because of Google
Instant, search behavior may change over time. Meaning that while ranking criteria won't change, people's search habits may be altered.

The last big change in 2010, and the one that wasn't caused by Google, came in October with the Facebook/Bing Partnership. For U.S. companies, this means one thing: get yourself on Facebook, NOW. While Bing is not relevant enough in Europe to make a difference at the moment, we suggest that European companies watch Bing closely. When the search engine's market share breaks 10%, European companies should have an active presence on Facebook.

To those of us in the SEO business, the big story is the potential of Facebook becoming an individual's (and a corporation's) go-to social network hub AND search engine. In general, it seems that Bing (the second challenger to Google in the search industry - but far behind) could have figured out how to leapfrog right over Google and Yahoo! by building this virtual bridge by linking Facebook directly to Bing. If done right and the Facebook/Bing integration is truly successful, it may well push Bing out in front of Google in the near future.
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5 Ways you Can Use Blog Comments to Obtain Organic Links

Anyone whose run a blog knows you get literally hundreds of useless comments from people just looking for a quick link. It's easy to ignore these and many newer versions of WordPress and other blogging platforms do a pretty good job of weeding out those "spammers."

With this in mind, it's almost counterintuitive to think you can obtain organic links through blog comments.

But you can obtain links to your site through commenting on other people's blogs if you do it right. Rather than just passively commenting on someone's blog, good blog comments work to develop a relationship with the blogger on the other side.

Over time, this pays off tremendously since the blogger will see you actually read what they write and find it valuable. Not only will this result in a link to your site, it's also possible for them to get information from your blog to put on theirs, giving you another link right there.

Continue reading for 5 ways you can obtain organic links through commenting on other people's blogs.

If you comment on a blog, read the entire post

It's hard to imagine this but many comments on blogs are obviously from people who never actually read the post in its entirety. Many comments in fact have absolutely nothing to do with the post itself, which is a red flag for "spammy" comments. So if you're going to comment on someone else's blog, be sure you read the entire post and have some substantive to add or a question to ask.

Include your name

One big thing you need to do in order to gain trust with the other blogger is to include your full name in the comment. Most platforms have a field where you enter your name and even website. Many spammers simply place keywords they're trying to get links for in this field. If you must include keywords like this, be sure to include your name first.

Be personal and friendly

Another way to gain trust in someone you're commenting on is to be personal and friendly. Address the blogger by their first name and be sure to thank them for their post. There are other ways too of course but these are a couple of common ones.

Contribute something to the conversation

Don't just say "Great post" or something like that. While that's a good way to start out your comment, you need to add something of value to the conversation. Perhaps you can point out something they may have missed for example. If you disagree with their conclusions, explain why in a courteous, professional tone. In other words, don't be rude about it.

Be sure to come back again and keep in touch

Simply leaving a comment and not coming back again isn't going to get you very far in terms of links. Check in often and leave a comment if you have something to add. Consistent visits and comments will help build the relationship that will eventually get you that link. And if you leave a comment, be sure to subscribe to that particular comment so you will know when they reply or someone else adds something.

No matter your industry, commenting on others' blogs helps build your professional network with like minded people as well as online presence.

Links act as a vote of confidence for the search engines. They signal to the search engines that your site is important and others find it valuable. Remember, the bigger the site that's linking to you is, the bigger the impact a link from them will have on your position.

But in the beginning, start small and work your way up and grow the quantity and quality of your links in unison.
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Google Creates “Source” Meta Tags To Help ID Original News Sources

With the amount of content published online seeming to expand dramatically every year, Google says it’s experimenting with two new meta tags that it hopes will help it identify the original sources of online content. They’re called syndication-source and original-source and here’s a look at what they do and how publishers can use them.
What Is Syndication-Source?

Web sites that syndicate their content to others can use the syndication-source meta tag to give Google a signal that theirs is the one that should be included in Google News. In a perfect world, the tag will be used by both the site that syndicates its content, as well as the site that receives and publishes the syndicated content from another source. The tag looks like this:

    meta name=”syndication-source” content=”http://www.somedomain.com/article1.html”

What Is Original-Source?

The original-source meta tag can be used by publishers wanting to claim their article as the original version. In a sense, it’s somewhat like the rel=”canonical” tag, which can be used to indicate the canonical version of similar web pages (more about the canonical tag below).

Search Engine Land, for example, could use the original-source meta tag on this article (and others) to indicate that ours — not the various sites that scrape our content or reference it in other ways — is the original version.

Similarly, Google says this meta tag can also be used in the same way publishers link to other sites. For example, since this article is also referencing an announcement on the Google News blog, we could use the original-source tag similarly to how we cite them via a link.

In fact, Google says you can cite several different sources with multiple versions of this tag if you want to credit each one that led to the article you’ve published. The tag looks like this:

    meta name=”original-source” content=”http://www.somedomain.com/article1.html”

What About The Canonical Tag?

As mentioned, there’s another tag (technically, an attribute), that Google introduced that seems similar to what today’s new “source” tags do. That’s the canonical tag. See our past coverage about the tag for more background:

    * Google, Yahoo & Microsoft Unite On “Canonical Tag” To Reduce Duplicate Content Clutter
    * Google Supports Cross-Domain ‘Canonical Tag’

Why use these new tags if you’re already using the canonical tag? Simple answer — because you’re a news publisher. These tags only work for within Google News, and they are designed to help Googel News experiment more with source identification and attributions. Google told us:

    We felt the options currently in existence [the canonical tag] addressed different use cases and were insufficient to achieve our goals. The more accurate metadata that’s out there on the web, the better the web will be.

What About Spam?

Meta tags are, in some circles, an invitation to spam. And there’s nothing to stop Joe’s Search Blog from scraping and re-publishing this article, while also using one or both of these tags to claim that his is the original version. Worse, there’s also nothing to stop a high-trust, authoritative site from using — or misusing, to be more accurate — these tags.

Google’s blog post talks about this being an experiment and needing to see how people use these tags “in the wild.” Clearly, they’ll be looking for misuses, too. Google says they may reduce the importance assigned to the metatags on an individual site if they’re being misused, and they also reserve the right to remove sites from Google News altogether if need be.
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