Fused Nation - UK SEO Blog

Not really a major post, but I thought a quick recap of stuff of interest from over the past few weeks (cos I was on holiday and thought it was time to review what I missed!).

SEO News Recap - April 2007

Matt Cutts made a few posts the other week about links, particular using CSS to hide links within your body copy and also notes how to effectively report sites that sell paid links.

I think the first point is pretty interesting - lots of sites use CSS to manage the look and feel of their links and if Google now start throwing out new “nets” to catch the folks who are hiding links, then we might find ourselves back circa 2002 where legitimate sites faced penalisation due to mistakes or confusions.

DaveN has some interesting commentary on the issue - “Bigmouthmedia - Matt Cutts is coming” - lol! :)  Funny to see that self proclaimed industry leaders Bigmouthmedia then shit a brick and update their CSS so people could actually see the links were there.  Go go industry leading SEO (don’t want to get banned again guys - one time is embarassing enough!) - get the big fat cheques in from big brand clients then learn about SEO from blogs!  Heh, if only Tesco, Hilton et al knew…

Brian has a pretty good write up of the paid links issues brought up by Matt.  Also worth checking out is Dean’s post on how Google’s algo has changed the shape of the web - not entirely related to the new issue, but a good read all the same.

Some other bits and pieces that caught my attention:

• Google ranked the most powerful brand (SEL).  Surprised to General Electric there - isn’t that a generic keyword, not a brand?
• Aaron wrote a post about his business model basically due to all the crap he gets from wannabes and time wasters.  I’ve got a lot of respect for Aaron - he gives a LOT of information back to the community and has an excellent business mind - IMO he’s long overdue a price increase.
• Todd has a great roundup of SEO resources (just read it).
• SMA UK  is dead it would seem (TW).*

OK so folks (smell the link opportunity…) - what blog posts, news items or forum topics have caught your eye this month?

Scott

*ADDED - it would seem that it was a simple hosting error that caused the SMA UK site to go down, but IMO it still isn’t a great sign that so many key players in the industry don’t know WTF was going on. :)  Says something about the reach and scope of the organisation.