Fionn Downhill – Digital Shenanigans

Finally, Finally, Finally that is all I can say. As the victim of a false, malicious online defamation attack on me personally and my business this is good news indeed. When people post lies and defamation about you online until this case the odds have been stacked against the victim. The courts seem to have been confused by online defamation and the laws for online defamation have been too difficult to navigate.  This deterred people from  from pursuing an expensive legal option, whihc usually ended up in a black hole. I wrote a case study on the malicious attack on us and covered my take on the legal issues at the time here.

People cry “freedom of speech on the Internet could be affected by this”.  Good, because there is a huge difference between freedom of speech and defamation and slander and hopefully the courts are finally getting the hang of that.

You can read a full report here in the daily mail.

For all you webmasters reeling from the shock of the Google update they have been very even handed and no longer rank www.google.com for the ‘search engine’. So what do you think they penalized themselves for, bad links, no canonical, duplicate content, doorway pages, the plot thickens!!

Yesterday Google started rolling out its WebSpam update originally called the over optimization update.  So far its not good and the easiest way to show just how bad it is for some keywords is to give an example.  Over at Searchengineland on a thread created by Danny Sullivan one of the contributors pointed our this example.  Search for “make money online”  Note almost 2 billion pages competing.

And the site which is the #1 result!!

Seriously Google this is getting rid of WebSpam. How could your spiders have even found this and considered it a result for search with almost 2 billion pages competing.

Make Money Online how?

This is not an isolated incident either it is just an example.  There are several examples on this thread of ridiculous results http://searchengineland.com/google-launches-update-targeting-webspam-in-search-results-119295.  Searches for “viagra’ show hijacked sites and its just as bad for ‘paypal france”.

For everybody who remembers the infamous Florida update this all feels very familar and its clear Google may have to backtrack this update because the quality of some of its results will almost certainly send searchers away in confusion.

Rank Fiskin has produced an great list of OOP tips to avoid getting penalized in the Google OOP update (whenever that is). Of couse as Rand knows it may be none of these or all of these or something completely new. We will have to wait and see.

Is is me or is Rand Fiskin getting younger looking. Baby Face Fiskin, has been in SEO a long time he should be old and grey now not getting younger looking. I think he should give up SEO and focus on selling his secrets of eternal youth.