On Monday Google announced that it will no longer censor its search results in China. The announcement came after months of speculation that Google would close its China operations all together. As of Monday, Chinese visitors will will routed to a uncensored version of Google China via data centers in Hong Kong. Early reports on Monday suggested that the Chinese government already started censoring Google search results in mainland China.

Google has reached another milestone in integrating all the business units from its DoubleClick Acquisition with the launch of the Google Affiliate Network, a re-branded version of the Performics Ad Network.

From Google’s site:

As an advertiser using Google Affiliate Network, you’ll discover pre-screened publishers who can refer consumer traffic to you. As a publisher, you can market your site to advertisers in the network; if selected to participate in an advertiser’s program, you’ll earn a percent of sales or a referral bounty.

Sounds like any other affiliate network to me. I have yet to log in and check it out but we’ll be doing a thorough review this week to let everyone know how it ranks against the other big players in affiliate networking in the coming days.

For those of you unfamiliar with this tool (http://www.mcdar.net/dance/index.php) it let you search each of Google’s data centers by IP address, letting you see how your rankings are across all the data centers. This can be very interesting to use when you’re working on an important ranking for an SEO or Reputation Management campaign.

Right now it shows that the account is suspended and we’re hoping they get their account reinstated as we really like this tool.

If anyone knows the owner of this site please have him get in touch with us, we’d be happy to host this tool for free for everyone to use. We’ve go plenty of servers so it won’t be a problem for us.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Yahoo will be testing search advertising fed by Google in an effort to stave off Microsoft’s takeover intentions.

The testing period is slated to last two weeks and will affect no more than 3% of Yahoo’s search queries. The goal of this testing period is for the two search giants to test the revenue potential of further outsourcing from Yahoo to Google.

From Google:

“Yahoo will be testing Google’s AdSense for Search service, which will deliver relevant ads alongside Yahoo’s own natural search results,” said Google in a statement. “This is only a limited test and does not necessarily mean that Yahoo will join the AdSense program.”

And from Yahoo:

“The testing does not necessarily mean that Yahoo will join the AdSense for Search program or that any further commercial relationship with Google will result,” Yahoo said in a statement.

In my opinion this partnership would at best offer a short term boost to Yahoo but over time I believe Yahoo would go the way of AOL after they outsourced their search to Google, namely leading to the decline of Yahoo as a major player in search.

Google announced on their official blog today that they will be selling Performics Search Marketing, a company they acquired as part of their DoubleClick acquisition.

Most people saw this coming as it seemed an obvious conflict of interest having the largest search engine owning and operating an SEO/SEM firm.

The announcement was met by great disappointment from the staff at Performics as they’ve been dreaming of all the free food and snacks they were going to eat at the Google Campus.

Sorry guys

Great video on the direction of media and our culture as a whole.

Click here to Watch

Type in “text links”, “buy text links” or “text link ads” in Google and you will notice that there are no longer any ads for companies that offer these services. That’s right, you can no longer bid on these or other related terms through AdWords.

While this move is being praised by some:

This is the first time that Google has actually taken a stand that makes them lose money in their war against text links and I think it is a good move. There is nothing more hypocritical than Google starting a war against a certain industry on one hand and accepting money from them on the other.

I see this argument as fundamentally flawed. This move by Google will actually help them make more money, as people interested in buying text links to drive traffic will have fewer choices, and a large number of them will end up biting the bullet and buying ads through AdWords.

These kinds of anti-competitive business practices show that while Google claims not to be evil, what they really mean is that they’ll spin the motives behind their actions so well that their “evilness” will be praised by the very targets of their ploy.

Update:

Looks like Matt Cutts has confirmed that Google is banning these advertisers in the comments on his blog.

ResourceShelf.com is is reporting that Google has registered a large number of coupon related domains, including the following names:

+ CouponGoogle.com
+ Google-Coupons.com
+ Couponsgoogle.net
++++ Note: CouponsGoogle.com is currently registered to a company in Washington state.
+ Google-Coupons.net
+ GoogleCoupon.net
+ googlecoupon.org
++++ Note: googlecoupon.com registered to a company in PA.
+ Coupongoogle.org
+ Couponsgoogle.org
++++ Note: googlecoupon.com registered to a company in PA.
+ Google-coupons.org

Google started letting site owners submit coupons through Google Maps back in August of 2006, and now it looks like they may have aims on taking a larger slice of the ever growing online coupon marketing field.

Yes, you read that right. According to Google’s recently updated Webmaster’s Guidelines with regards to what Google calls “link schemes.”

Examples of link schemes can include:

Links intended to manipulate PageRank

Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web

Link exchange and reciprocal links schemes (“Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)

Buying or selling links

Now last time I checked swapping links with other websites predates Google. Hell, before we had search engines the only way you could find anything online was following links between sites, and a lot of those were reciprocal links, as that was the only way for website owners to bring in visitors to their sites. I can understand that some people use links to game Google’s results, instead of helping users find good content, but they are hardly the majority, and the outright banning of sites that exchange links is very heavy handed.

IMO Google is going to far here. They present a catch 22 where they recommend:

The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community. The more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it. Before making any single decision, you should ask yourself the question: Is this going to be beneficial for my page’s visitors?

It is not only the number of links you have pointing to your site that matters, but also the quality and relevance of those links. Creating good content pays off: Links are usually editorial votes given by choice, and the buzzing blogger community can be an excellent place to generate interest. In addition, submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

I don’t know about any of you, but I’ve never used DMOZ or the Yahoo Directory when looking for anything. Also, Yahoo sells links in their directory for $299 a year ($600 for adult sites). Is Google recommending I violate their guidelines in an attempt to follow their guidelines?