Serious controversy in SEO land. Google is handing out manual penalties by the truckload, and fellow SEO’s are steamed. SEO’s are like soldiers on the front line, we always get hit first and take unrelenting punishment for pushing the line forward.

Ok Google, we understand that you hate paid links and have waged a battle against text link ads and now paid reviews. The problem that the search engine optimization field has is the unfairness with which we are treated - there definitely is a double standard as we are the most visible crowd online.

Some people go way over the line and spam by placing sitewide footer links, paid links with a greater than 15% ratio, 50% sponsored posts, or scraped duplicate content. The SEO field has savvy users, and people know (even if they refuse to admin) if they are whit, gray or black hat optimizers. Don’t throw the white hats and into the same ditch as the cloaking and spamming crowd, I promise we want to work with you, not against you.

Michael asks the question

Matt, why is this? What is it about these people that you interact with on a regular basis that leads you to trust the decision making process of anonymous Yahoo employees over theirs?

As much as I hate to admit it, a Yahoo directory editor is an unbiased reviewer, and likely has a good understanding of quality websites. Also, they have no personal financial interest in the decision, other than they want to perform well so they can keep their job.

Also, kudos to matt cutts for expressing sincere concern and helping individuals who have been penalized. I have worked with people who were in the Google penalty box and it is not a pleasant situation.

The bottom line is that if SEO’s are going to be held to stricter editorial standards, we need a better line of communication with the Google webspam team and reinclusion team.

I don’t really consider this a war unlike some people but all I ask is for a better way than shooting first and making bloggers come begging for mercy.

Mike Mcdonald did an excellent interview of Google employee Matt Cutts and former Google employee Vanessa Fox. These are two of the most notable figures in the search engine optimization world and they casually reveal important information about the current Google search algorithm.

Great takeaways from this informal conversation:

• Matt explains how paid links can get you into trouble
• Full pagerank update December 2007
• If your rank dropped first, your pagerank was reduced for link selling
• if your pagerank dropped later, inbound links that previously had high pagerank are now greatly devalued
• Vanessa spills the beans on the projects she worked on while employed at Google Webmaster Central: geolocation tools and including multiple languages
• Google is much better at valuing links and has a killer paid link filter
• Subdomains are not what they once were. Logical subdomains are useful for good site architecture, but superfluous sub domains will not get you extra spots in the SERP’s.
• Sites using sub domains likely to be devalued are shopping and e-commerce sites.
• Vanessa Fox explains how to not have your blog hacked
• Notable sites that were hacked: Donald Trump & Al Gore

Read more and see the comments at web pro news.

Tip for WPN - allow embedding of your videos like YouTube. You will get much more exposure by allowing others to post and reference your content.