Matt Cutts answered to the question

“How did Interflora turn their ban in 11 days? Can you explain what kind of penalty they had, how they fixed it, as some of us have spent months trying to clean things up after an unclear GWT notification?”

Interflora is a major UK flower site that was hit by a Google penalty early this year, but Google didn’t call out this company publicly, after the reports of penalty came out, the company wrote a blog post warning people not to engage in the “buying and selling of links.”

Matt Cutts proceeds to try and answer the question in more general terms “Google tends to looking at buying and selling links that pass page rank as a violation of our guidelines and if we see that happening multiple times then the action that we take more and more severe. We’re more willing to take stronger action whenever we see repeat violation.”

Cutts says “It’s not something that I would typically recommend for everybody to disavow every link that you’ve gotten for a period of years-but certainly when people start over with completely new websites they have bought-we have seen a few cases where people will disavow every single link because they truly want to get a fresh start.”

In other words, if you’re willing to go to such great lengths and eliminate such a big number of links, Google is going to notice.

If you’ve got links from some very spammy forum or something like that, rather than trying to identify the individual pages, that might be the opportunity to da a ‘domain:’ . So if you’ve got a lot of links that you think are bad from a particular site, just go ahead and do ‘domain:’ and the name of that domain.  Don’t try to pick the individual links because you might be missing a lot

Google said on its blog that its goal with Helpouts is simply to “Help people help each other.” Helpouts can open a new brand new revenue stream for the Mountain View, Calif.-based search company.

Five ways Google can make money of its new Helpout service.

• Charge Experts

Google allows now experts to set a price for their help. When Google tested this service, it took a 20% cut of the paid Helpouts as a platform fee. It should also be noted that Google will not charge medical professionals for health care Helpouts.

• Charges Brand

You can get help from individuals or from brands you already know and trust. Google could promote these Helpouts in search results, similar to how advertising works in Google Maps, it will be another tool Google can add to its ever-growing portfolio of marketing services.

• Bring More small Businesses to Google Service

It will give small businesses a chance to market their expertise for free or cheap and maybe generate a few extra dollars for the company. For Google, it’s another way to get more small businesses involved in its lucrative advertising platform.

• Traffic from About.Com and WikiHow 

Google search is the number one destination for people to answer a question or get help. With Helpouts Google can keep this traffic for itself, as well as the advertising revenue that the traffic generates.

• More users on Google Plus 

Google continues to push its Google plus social network by requiring users to sign up in order to use other services. Gmail accounts, YouTube and Hangouts are all tied to Google plus platforms and Helpouts are no different. Google Helpouts appears to be a service that benefits everyone involved, including users, small businesses, big companies and of course Google.

The beauty of Helpouts is its simplicity and it is a wonderful simple idea, using a webcam to show someone how to do something seems blindingly obvious-but this is the first time it has really been implemented in such a way as to be accessible and workable.

LinkedIn’s mobile site now lets you endorse connections, as well as accept endorsements from your connections and add skills to your profile. New members visiting LinkedIn from a mobile device will now be greeted with a step-by-step guide that explains how to build your network, join groups and follow channels for “professional news.”

It’s finally turned to get dressed up for the iOS 7 party. The new app falls in line with iOS 7’s design changes and LinkedIn says its features “flatter, cleaner and more modern designs” like sharp edges and soft colors. Basically it fits in with iOS 7’s look. You can download the new versions from Apple’s App store: LinkedIn and Pulse.

LinkedIn promises that more mobile updates are on the way and it has been pushing hard to keep its mobile apps fresh. Although updates tend to take a while to arrive, their frequency has certainly increased as of late.

What is Hummingbird and how do you know if it’s affecting your site’s ranking?

Hummingbird is the nickname that’s been assigned to update, 90 % of searches are affected. By comparison, that’s much higher than most of the Google algorithm updates we see from Google.

Google announced the algorithm update at a press event on Thursday along with some other interface and knowledge Graph tweaks. Hummingbird was described as the biggest algorithm change since the caffeine and that it is designed to let Google quickly parse entire questions and complex queries and return relevant answers, as opposed to looking at queries on a keyword-by-keyword basis.

In particular, Google said that “Hummingbird is paying more attention to each word in a query, ensuring that the whole query-the whole sentence or conversation or meaning-is taken into account rather than pages matching just a few words”.

A lot of people are worried about its impact and of course Panda and Penguin which we’ve been talking about all summer and even last year, are those dead? The answer to that seems to be, no, not entirely. They are using elements that they learned through Panda and Penguin in this new Hummingbird update.

This is really just an extension of Google’s ongoing strategy to become less dependent on keywords, which does have implications for SEO, and while webmasters may not have to worry about a major drop-off in rankings like with updates Panda or Penguin this could be more of an ongoing struggle for those competing to get on search results pages.

For now, according to Google (per Sullivan’s report), you don’t need to worry about anything, and Google’s normal SEO guidance remains the same.

If you use any popular keyword research tool you will get excellent information about which keywords were most heavily utilized along with nicely formatted rankings.

What if the search volume for your keywords is falling? Or rising?

What if search volume for your keywords has shifted in the past three years?

So, what tool will? Google Trends.

Google Trends is a keyword research tool that can help you see at glance how many people are searching on Google for the keywords you’re considering. Since Google is far and away the search engine of choice, focusing on Google keywords information provided can prove to be quite helpful.

Google Trends in Action

Let’s do one exercise together. Go to Google trends (google.com/trends) in your browser. Enter the following search terms, separated by comma:

• Internet Marketing
• Online Marketing
• Website Designing
• Social Media Marketing
• Website Development

Several things become apparent from this initial search. Now let’s drill down the data, click the drop down that says “All Years” and select “Last 12 months”, select country and relevant category, you can see the moving trends in more details.

 If you used Google Trends to see that one keyword was gaining searches over time while the other was losing its’ steam, you’d want to emphasize the keyword with the rising trend in your copy. If you have to make a choice between keywords, Google Trends becomes even more important in making that decision.

Google Keyword tool Vs. Google Trends

Both tools rely on and present historical data I reaction to the criteria you set. But there is marked difference.

Take the term ‘Olympics’ as an example. Google’s Keyword Tool estimates that there are a massive 30,400,000 monthly searches per month for that term, based on the activity over the last 12 months. Of course we know that last year’s event will skew the results and that until the next event interest will fade. But imagine that we didn’t have that knowledge. We might pursue this keyword traffic based on an estimate that is inaccurate and potentially a waste of resource.

Google Trends is a fantastic stand-alone tool that can help to understand market demand and search trends; and its use is not limited to SEO alone. The information it provides is highly valuable and a business can use it to make decisions about market strategy.