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By Chris Crum

WebmasterWorld founder Says They Devalued Forum Links
There is an interesting thread going on at the WebmasterWorld forum looking at whether or not Google favors forums in search results. Matt Cutts tells me that he can neither confirm nor deny this. The thread is started by someone with the handle “bouncybunny,” who posts:

Once it was directories, then blogs, now forums… maybe.

I have no empirical evidence for this, but it seems to me that Google is increasingly returning results from forum posts…

The thread did provoke a few responses of note. For example, SEO consultant Jaan Kanellis says, “It is normal for Google to favor forum threads for certain queries. Naturally websites do not optimize themselves for long-tail queries that forums are automatically optimized for by way of user-generated content.”

WebmasterWorld founder Brett Tabke himself chimed in, “Since Google clearly devalued links from blogs last year, they devalued forums as well. It has been my experience that most inbound links on forums come from blogs. The top 30 forums last year all lost 1 to 2 pr points on the green fairy dust bar.”

When it comes down to it, webmasters will probably do well to not harp on things like this too much, and put more effort into the user experience of their own sites. As discussed repeatedly, traditional SEO tactics aren’t necessarily as likely to be as helpful moving forward as simply improving your site’s quality.

By Jason Lee Miller

Google Japan Busted For Paid Links
Go ahead and laugh, because it is funny. Google Japan’s probably too embarrassed too laugh, though, and someone somewhere is likely to resemble the spittle-drenched apologist from the movie Gung Ho.

Google Japan, according to its apology, was apparently unaware of the company’s own terms of service. Paying a Japanese pay-per-post promotion company to pimp its new Hot Keywords blog widget caused the website to be busted down from PR 9 to PR 5.

Many thanks goes out to blogger Akky Akimoto for discovery and English translation of what might described as a big, corporate party foul. When searching for (in Japanese) Google Hot Keywords Ranking  + “Blog Widget” + “CyberBuzz,” Akimoto found over 30 posts writing about the widget, all of them acknowledging being paid by CyberBuzz.

Akimoto says CyberBuzz pays pretty handsomely for blog posts—up to $100 per post. Small ads were present at the bottom as well.

The apology issued from Google Japan is priceless since it suggests Google Japan is just now learning of Google’s search guidelines:

“Google Japan is running several promotional activities to let people know more about our products.

“It turns out that using blogs on the part of the promotional activities violates Google’s search guidelines, so we have ended the promotion. We would like to apologize to the people concerned and to our users, and are making an effort to make our communications more transparent in order to prevent the recurrence of such an incident.”

Hopefully no form of seppuku will be required and a simple gomenasai (or, if you’re a real Samurai: katajiganai on all fours with head bowed low) and Matt Cutts tweeted policy of treating all sites the same will suffice. Cutts tweets that he expects Google Japan’s new PR5 to remain as is for a while.

By Jason Lee Miller

“The top position is no longer winner-take-all,” Bryan Horling, a Google software engineer in charge of Personalized Search, told the SMX West audience in Santa Clara California. After a decade of trying to claim that prize, that may or may not be good news to some.

(Coverage of SMX West continues at WebProNews Videos.  Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)

Horling spoke to a crowd looking to get a better understanding of Google’s SearchWiki, launched last November, which allows users to customize and comment on Google search results. When logged into their personal accounts, users can move results up or down or remove them altogether.

That’s potentially bad news for webmasters who’ve earned or gamed their way to the top of the results, and probably very good news for those unable to crack the result that gets the vast majority of click-throughs and visibility.

The reasoning behind the feature is fairly obvious: Not one result works for everybody. This SMX session was opened with a Google search for “smx,” a prime example of the ambiguity associated with search. Results bring back the conference at the top of course—this is an SEO/SEM conference—and even the second result, but some users may be looking for the Santa Maria Airport (SMX on their ticket), or for Smithway Motor Xpress for freight trucking.

Corey Anderson

SearchWiki manager Corey Anderson says there are other reasons Google was interested in personalized search. SearchWiki allows the search giant to conduct user studies in the field and crunch user feedback. After a few months of operation, Google has discovered that a large fraction of users are attempting to re-find websites previously visited, Anderson said. They also discovered users liked the ability to add, delete, re-rank and comment on search results.

“Many searches are inherently ambiguous,” added Horling. “Getting the right results sometimes calls for information about the user.”

There are positive and negative aspects of SearchWiki for the search engine marketing industry. On the negative side, personalized search makes it harder to collect metrics—personalized results are password protected, after all.

On the positive side, it makes it easier for users to find websites they like and match their intent. And that’s good for return business/visits, and, presumably, for conversions.