Even as most companies have yet to fully evaluate the impact of Google Instant on their organic search traffic, Google has unleashed yet another game-changer called Place Search. You can activate this feature by manually clicking on the red pin on the left drop-down menu as illustrated above.
There was an article recently in The Straits Times about how a big public-listed company in Singapore engaged a PR firm to offset the negative comments about a new hire in Google’s search results, and replace them with more …errr… “favourable” news and articles. Melvin Yuan of Waggener Edstrom call it a band-aid solution, while others have given it a worse term in the past - ”shilling” for example.
Most average SEOs shudder at the mere mention of “Blackhat SEO”. The major concensus is that it will get your website banned by Google Almighty and company. But what if you have played all your whitehat cards and yet your rankings are “stucked” at a certain position? Or you happen to be in a popular niche like health and finance, where many Internet Marketers are also vying for the top spots to make a couple of bucks from Adsense?
Did you know that a website that ranks #1 on Google receives more traffic than the websites on positions #2 to #4 combined? Chitika, an advertising network that I used to use back in 2006, recently did a study on the effect of Google rankings on organic traffic, which re-affirms past findings about heat maps, etc.
