By: Mike Sachoff | Source: webpronews.com

Google is testing a new service called Click-to-Call. It allows users to be connected to businesses they are searching for on the results page. When you click on a business you then enter your phone number. Google then connects you to that business.

The business will not see your phone number on their caller ID. The users caller ID will display the business phone number for future reference. The issue becomes what if someone does not enter his or her own phone number but someone else’s number as a prank?

Google’s response from their Click-to Call FAQ page reads, "Google takes fraud and spamming very seriously. We use technical methods to prevent future prank calls from the same user within a reasonable period of time. You won’t be charged for any such calls."

The vague statement about preventing future prank calls from occurring in a reasonable period of time is not very reassuring. Why Google would want to test this service with such a large potential for abuse?

Google’s explanation for this caller-ID manipulation is that it would be handy to have the called business number in your caller-ID for future calls. That may be true, but the abuse potential is way too high. Caller-ID should never be falsified.

However, there is indeed a simple solution in this case. If the caller-ID delivered to both sides of the bridged calls is set to indicate the true source of the calls (i.e., Google) the problem goes away. In fact, caller-ID could be used to further enhance the service by providing a true full point of contact.

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Source: seoresearcher.com

High placement in a search engine is critical for the success of any online business. Pages appearing higher in the search engine results to queries relevant to a site’s business will get higher targeted traffic. To get this kind of competitive advantage Internet companies employ various SEO techniques in order to optimize certain factors used by search engines to rank results. In the best case SEO specialists create relevant well-structured keyword rich pages, which not only please the eyes of a search engine crawler but also have value to the human visitor. Unfortunately it takes months for this strategic approach to produce feasible results, and many search engine optimizers use so-called “black-hat” SEO.

“Black-hat” SEO is responsible for the immense amount of search engine spam — pages and links created solely to mislead search engines and boost rankings for client web sites. To weed out the web spam search engines can use statistical methods that allow computing distributions for a variety of page properties. The outlier values in these distributions can be associated with web spam. The ability to identify web spam is extremely valuable to search engine not just because it allows excluding spam pages from their indices but also using them to train more sophisticated machine learning algorithms capable to battle web spam with higher precision.

Read full article at seoresearcher.com

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By: Sharon Housley | Source: sitepronews.com

According to Matt Cutts, there are over 100 factors that affect search engine ranking. For those of you who don’t know, Matt is a Google guy guru, he is employed by Google but writes an independent blog and shares information related to Google and search engine optimization. Unfortunately, of those 100 items that account for search engine ranking, there are only a few that webmasters can actually control.

Unless you are a interested in an exercise of futility, it is important to only focus on those ranking factors that you, as a webmaster, can control and influence.

What Search Engine Factors Do Webmasters Control?

Outside of the obvious (webpage title and description) those items over which the webmaster has the most control are: PageRank, TrustRank, Anchor Text, Keyword Density, Domain Age, URL, and Relevant Links.

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