In a recent blog entry, Matt Cutts discusses a common response of sites that have been delisted or had their SERP position drop. Webmasters say that there’s nothing wrong with their site, that they haven’t been engaged in any shady link-building strategies, and Google is unfairly punishing them. Cutts responds that in many of these cases the reason for the penalty is that sites have been hacked and infected with malicious software without webmaster being aware.

Hacking a site is one of a number of Negative SEO strategies that a site’s competitors can engage in to damage search rankings and reputations. Today we’ll be having a look at hacking and a couple of other Negative SEO tactics, so that you can be aware of possible vectors of attack for your sites, and what you can do about them.

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As we noted in our previous article, personalization in the major search engines is changing the SERP landscape. Indeed, each individual gets a search landscape. This landscape is shaped uniquely. It is shaped to meet their needs. Google spends a lot of money on research and development. This is to bring relevant search results to its users. They have more or less bet the farm on socially directed, personalized search results. Some people find this to be a wonderful advance, and Google’s recent iteration for search on mobile — Google Now — is  the logical extension of this approach, and has found favor in many corners.

Many sites around the web have taken a hit with their traffic numbers because of Google’s recent Panda and Penguin updates, and it would be hard to argue that this is in any way positive. But, if we put these causes for traffic loss aside, there is another factor that is of concern to SEOs and webmasters.

Even if algorithm changes haven’t caused traffic drops, things have changed. Google’s recent push to personalize search results has made something almost impossible. It’s now very hard to predict what a specific user’s SERP will look like with any certainty.

All the SEO in the world won’t help drive traffic. This is true if Google decides something. They might use a user’s browsing, search, and social media data. Based on this, they might think a user wants something unrelated to your site. This could happen even if the user enters seemingly relevant search terms.

However, in theory, SERP personalization reduces traffic in one way. It reduces false positives. Google considers web history. It also considers search history and social media signals. By doing this, Google tries to reduce the ambiguity of search keywords. Consequently, it aims to refer only interested visitors. These are visitors who will likely be interested in a site’s content. Therefore, even if overall traffic decreases, conversion rates should stay the same. They might even increase as a percentage of visits.

Ever since Eric Schmidt confirmed at LeWeb last year that social signals were being taken into consideration for SERPs, the SEO world has been rife with speculation and conjecture about the relative merits of social signals as compared to links. Some of the more excitable members of the industry even went so far as to declare the death of link-building as an SEO tool.

In a recent interview,

Google’s chief spam slayer, Matt Cutts, has attempted to dampen down the more extreme prognostications about the ascendency of social signals. Yes, social signals are being used to some extent, but the humble link still leads the way when it comes to determining SERP rankings, and it will for some years to come.

In recent months Yahoo have been hitting the headlines more for their boardroom drama and patent trolling than their innovations and services. But with the recent introduction of the Yahoo! Marketing Dashboard, they have created a product that many small and medium businesses and startups who lack the resources to invest in more pricey web site analytics should definitely take a look at.

Yahoo! already offer a host of services for small businesses, including Yahoo! Finance and Mail. With the Marketing Dashboard they aim to provide a way for businesses to track the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns and discover new opportunities for growth.

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Google’s awkwardly-named new results page has been stirring quite a lot of attention this past week. Rather than go in-depth explaining the change, we’ll first let one of Google’s pretty product videos do the talking:

For those that still aren’t seeing the new results page consistently (a lot of people still, according to SEOmoz’s Rand Fishkin), Google’s Matt Cutts posted this blog, talking about how he’d used the new feature.

Power of Social Media

It’s not surprising that social media is increasingly integrated into search results. However, for many, including us, the new results seem different. They make Google function more like a social network’s internal search box. This feels unlike the neutral, organic search engine crawling that people have come to appreciate from Google.

Using an SEO hosting company that is up-to-date with the latest information is extremely important. As a case in point, Google recently announced that their new search algorithm will affect approximately 35 percent of all searches. This means that if your SEO hosting company does not accommodate for the changes, you may be losing out to your competition.