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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