Two years ago this week John Chow stopped ranking on Google for his own name and according to Shoemoney he’s now gone “legit” by creating a cloaked redirect diverting Googlebot from johnchow.com to johnchow.ca.

Apparently the site will be “100% Google compliant” so it will be interesting to see if Google agrees with this. I seem to remember it wasn’t just the paid posts and link selling that Google objected to.

The problem with John’s strategy is that wherever a 301 redirect goes a penalty normally follows – you can’t just move to a new domain and expect Google to ignore the fact the previous domain had a penalty. There are a few tricks you can do to get penalties removed with 301’s but that’s beyond the scope of this post.

Looking at the rankings for keywords such as “john chow” it looks like the penalty has already moved across because the new site has dropped to the same position as the old one.

Keep an eye on this one.

Anybody who thought it was a good idea to register a .yu domain is going to be regretting that decision as nic.yu announces all these domains will be permanently deleted in September.

Pretty bad news for .yu domain owners.

Maintaining the .yu domain register and propagating information on .yu domains on the Internet will cease on 30 September 2009, regardless of the renewal date. On the very day, all .yu domains will stop functioning on the Internet!

Google has released some information suggesting webmasters go through all their links one by one and contact the webmaster to get the link updated. Google also suggests getting a 301 redirect in place now so that the domains trust can be fully passed by the end of September.

It’s an interesting case and should have been a good way for Google to show off the new Change of address feature in Webmaster Central but they seem to have missed that out of the blog post.

PageRank sculpting was quite a straightforward topic until recently – you just needed to add the nofollow tag to links pointing at “useless” pages such as shopping baskets and login forms and your rankings for long tail keywords magically jumped up.

I’ve heard people talking about 70% traffic increases across large websites purely using this method.

Matt Cutts has tried (and failed, in my opinion) to clarify the issue with a new PageRank sculpting post. The comments are excellent, a mixture of people who don’t understand SEO blindly saying “great post” and the usual knowledgeable people actually questioning things.

Here are some quotes that have me confused. Read more >>

Hacking websites to insert malware and links to other websites isn’t a new practice but thanks to the negligent actions of many schools, universities and government departments it’s becoming more widespread.

Websites using outdated software are full of gaping holes which, once found, can be exploited across dozens of different sites. The latest study finds that hundreds of school, government and university sites have been affected with schools blindly linking to viagra sites from their homepages.

How to see the hacked pages

You can see some of the hundreds of sites by performing the following search queries similar to the ones below on Google.

• inurl:.ac.uk buy cialis
• inurl:.gov.uk buy viagra
• inurl:.sch.uk lesbian porn

The hackers quite often make the text invisible on the page so you may need to click on the “Cached” link offered in the Google results and then the “Text-only version” of the cached page. An example is here.

Thanks Ritchie from Online Backup Technology for the tip.

A Dutch website has lost a lawsuit over the words appearing in the snippet of text appearing in Googles search results, despite the fact that Google generated the snippet.

Apparently the snippet gave the incorrect impression that a local car dealer (Zwartepoorte) had gone backrupt despite the fact that the snippet only appeared when you searched for “zwartepoorte failliet” (failliet means bankrupt in Dutch). The offending page has now been taken down. Read more >>

Last week Google made a few announcements at the Google I/O conference and one major one seems to have gone unnoticed.

A lot of people have suspected that Google is crawling JavaScript for some time but due to the random nature of it nobody has done extensive testing to prove either way. Testing this sort of thing is a waste of time because Google has different crawling rules for different sites and whatever is true today probably won’t be true tomorrow. Read more >>

The Guardian today is asking whether comment links are a form of spam after a London based SEO agency was apparently caught leaving spam comments linking to a clients website on the Guardian journalist Michael Pollitts’ personal blog. Read more >>

Have you ever seen a website with a “Back to search results” button or something similar? These links normally take you from a product or destination page back to the search results or category page where you came from. Here’s one for you to try. Read more >>

Ever since Google launched the AdWords program there has been huge disparity between the amount of money businesses are willing to spend every month on PPC compared to organic SEO. Although quite understandable (every business likes guaranteed ROI) it’s also extremely frustrating because organic search has the potential to send so much more traffic at a much lower cost.

This week it seems like the balance of power might finally be turning away from PPC as data released from both Hitwise & Comscore shows a decline in the number of paid clicks compared to organic clicks. Read more >>