Search Engine Marketing and SEO have definitely come of age! Up until the last few weeks it’s been unusual to see much mention about Google and other search related matters in the mainstream UK press, other than a smattering of usually badly written and uninformed gibberish by so-called SEO experts that none of us have ever heard of. In the last couple of weeks that seems to have all changed! There has even been a programme on prime time BBC2 television all about Google.

Google has, of course, been in the news with regard to matters relating to China and The White House and, following on from this, Matt Cutts, a Google engineer announced last weekend that it had blacklisted the web sites of both Ricoh, the Japanese photocopier and office equipment manufacturer, and BMW in Germany. You can read Matt Cutt’s blog on this here:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ramping-up-on-international-webspam/

Needless to say, the car giant was not best pleased with Google for making this public. See:

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,20411-2028624,00.html

The Times, amongst other broadsheets has carried the story all this week. In today’s Times (9th February) it reports: ‘Google has allowed BMW’s German website back on to its search engine index after the carmaker removed webpages that had artificially boosted its popularity. The company was accused of using a dummy “doorway” website that persuaded Google’s computers to put BMW high up on its search lists.’

(To us, it looks as though BMW has in fact employed what is known as ‘cloaking’ techniques to boost its web pages.)

Interestingly, The Times reported yesterday that ‘Google is publicising a new weapon that it is about to unleash on the “black hats”.

The company is testing Big Daddy, an all-powerful new computer infrastructure, which promises to weed out attempts to cheat the system … and is expected to be up and running as early as next month’.

I suspect we’ll be hearing more about Big Daddy in the weeks to come!

Search Engine Workshops is in no doubt that both BMW and Ricoh must be ruing the fact that they haven’t attended one of our Search Engine Marketing - SEO Workshops or they could have avoided getting into this mess ;-) However, you’ll be pleased to know there is one place up for grabs on our workshop on Wednesday and Thursday next week. Enrolment finishes by the end of play tomorrow (Friday) so you need to act quickly:

http://www.searchengineworkshops.co.uk/registration.htm