I've just read a post over at Search Engine Journal about statistics from Hitwise UK suggesting British users are increasingly using browser toolbars to search for domains they know already like tesco.com rather than typing them directly into their browser address bar.

I use this technique a lot because I frequently misspell a domain name or get the wrong domain extension for a website. When this happens more-often-than-not you get a holding page, cyber-squatter site, or worst still a site that attempts to mimic the intended destination in order to "phish" log-in details.
When you use a search toolbar to navigate to a domain the top search result is most likely going to to be the real domain.

Google's Webmaster Help Center explains Google's policy on paid links and encourages people to report them to Google. Here's a snippet from Google's statement:

"Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google's webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results.

Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such."

Google essentially want websites to designate paid links with rel="nofollow" anchor tags, so link juice or PageRank is not passed on to the website who bought the link. The use of rel="nofollow" anchor tag was originally conceived to stop comment SPAM on blogs and discussion boards, but its use has now spread to the policing of paid links.

I understand the difficulties Google and the other search engines must have in determining when to pass link juice between websites, but leaving the webmaster in control of this is like asking Google to start ranking sites by meta keywords again.

I'm beginning to believe the future of web search lies in the democratic nature of the StumbleUpon, Digg and other social bookmarking methods like (del.icio.us and my favourite ma.gnolia), whereby users vote, tag and bookmark sites. Surely a combination of popularity and search algorithm is the way forward?

Updated: Shortly after I posted this blog entry, Google has been spotted testing Digg-style voting buttons on their results pages!

Updated: Matt Cutts and Maile Ohye posted on The Official Google Webmaster Central blog on 1 Dec 2007 a post that intends to clarify Google's stance on paid links.

When I read about the new Google Adsense feature "Allowed Sites" a couple of weeks ago, I thought I'd set it up on my account just to make sure no sites were displaying my Adsense code on their own sites, which could end up getting my account banned or flagged as suspicious due to factors outside my control.
Let's face it, if they're displaying my Adsense code, they've probably scraped or copied my site content without my consent, so who knows what else they may be up to!

Anyway I logged into Adsense recently and decided to check out the Allowed Sites page, and this is what I read...

There are unauthorized sites that have displayed ads using your AdSense publisher ID within the last week. Please click here to view them.

So I did click here, but all I got were some IP addresses:

A little intrigued to what these IP addresses were, I decided to investigate further by issuing a trace route command to glean some more information.

C:\Documents and Settings\Nik>tracert 64.233.183.104

The trace route results resolved the IP addresses all to Google. I'm guessing that these are in my list because of people viewing my sites in Google's cached pages; So panic over!
Would be good if Google could filter out it's own IP addresses from the list though, so I don't have to check out each IP individually.

Google have added an "Allowed Sites" feature in the Adsense console to stem a problem that has been talked about for a while.
Lots publishers have had their site content stolen and re-purposed in an almost identical fashion on another domain, specifically to earn the criminal money from advertising without spending time and effort writing content themselves.
In some cases the HTML contained the victim's Adsense code, which when uploaded to a "junk" domain with other duplicate content, essentially associated the original publisher with a bad site in Google's eyes.
To protect Google's Adsense publishers from being associated with this crime and having their Adsense accounts potentially banned, Google has developed the "Allowed Sites" feature which allows the Adsense publisher to tell Google which domains it publishes to.

What this won't do is stop people stealing your content and code, nor will it stop people hacking into your web server and changing the Adsense account ID in the Adsense Javascript to the criminals Adsense ID, but this is definitely a step in the right direction.

Another day another ludicrous allegation about cyberspace. Apparently..."The vast majority of blogs on top social websites contain potentially offensive material."

This was the conclusion of a ScanSafe commissioned report, which claims sites such as MySpace, YouTube and Blogger which are a "hit" among children can hold porn or adult language. According to the report 1 in 20 blogs contains a virus or some sort of malicious spyware.

The Problem?

User generated content is to blame of course; because of the nature of how the content is built and edited it makes it very difficult to control and regulate.

Even if you were to monitor every post on a website as part of your process, how would you clarify whether a particular portion of text, or Photoshopped image has violated anyone's copyright or intellectual property?

This is a problem the big search engines have as well. With so many SPAM sites scrapping content from other sites, then republishing the resulting mashed content as their own work in order to cash-in on affiliate income generated from SERPS. Is Google working on a solution to stem this SPAM?

EU Intellectual Property Ruling

Another potential blow to websites which rely on user generated content is the European Union ruling on intellectual property which is making its way through the ratification process. This could see ISP's and website owners being charged for copyright infringements even if the data was posted by users of the site.