Google just issued a response to a guy who was claiming that with the negative reviews he receives enough links to rank high in SERPs.

Firstly, I think it is a dumb strategy to try and get more links my negative reviews as there is a big part of potential customers who make a buying decision precisely based on these reviews.

Secondly, I found Google’s response interesting. They’ve admitted the problem and a potential loophole as well as suggested to use nofollow attribute. Some my disagree but recently I been seeing more and more nofollow attribute not having any difference for ranking purposes.

The conclusion from all of this? The guy got high rankings when newspaper wrote about him, instead of doing something bad: do something extremely good, on the edge or controversial.

This video is very good video as it search engines are always developing to combat spammer and help users to find the most relevant information. This video is more an hour long, but I watched it all and here are some highlights if you don’t have time to watch.

Highlights:

• If you have fancy navigation (in flash) make sure that your page is accessible in many ways. Static htmls are the easiest for search engine to crawl
• Alt text on the images is very important. This also correlates with Whiteboard Friday video @ seomoz.org
• Do your keyword research in AdWords you might rank high for a certain word, but there might be a very popular search term in your industry that you are completely missing out on
• Don’t use too much bolding, people can’t read it very well and crawlers might think it is a spam
• Make sure your thumbnails lead to bigger pictures. Google tries to index bigger pictures as this is what users are searching for
• Basic, but make sure your loading time is appropriate. Especially if you want people to access your website from cell phones
• ALWAYS backup your website. Everybody gets hacked, timely back-ups will allow you to quickly restore your website.
• My favourite: best $20 you can spend is by taking a random person, tying your hands behind your back and ask them to use your website
• Before buying a website make sure you check its history. Some urls were owned by spammers, burned to the ground and then put up for sale

Overall great video. It is almost like going for class session on SEO.