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There’s very few questions Google has not been able to answer and, equally, there have been very few loopholes that SEOs have not been able to exploit. However, hot on the heels of techcrunch, I have discovered that the latest update from developers in Australia threatens to change all that.

Google’s new MATE technology is designed to view relevancy as an entirely self consistent timeline, rendering link building a thing of the past. It simply wont be possible to exploit the rate of change of inbound links pointing to a site as it’s relevancy will have already been historically determined.

So what is an SEO to do? The only possible way around this will be to implant ’site suggestions’ within cache of sites linking to you. Archive.org would do well to be on hacker watch.

Googlewashing is now the domain of live nude girls.

SEO PR and online reputation management companies officially co-opted the word “Googlewashing” today with the help of KUSA, a Denver NBC TV station. Yesterday the local news affiliate broadcast a story about “cleaning up negative information on the Internet.”

The story on embarassing photos and digital dirt resurrected the googlewash meme. Googlewashing now appears to be the domain of online reputation management companies like ReputationHawk.com, DefendMyName.com and ReputationDefender.com that charge to clean up your digital dirt.

Why else did googlewashing become such a hot topic on the day William F. Buckley Jr. died?

KUSA’s report and Web site video features nude and topless young women (covered by black bars for TV and Web audiences). No doubt that sent viewers racing to the search engines - and spawned follow-up stories at other local TV Web sites and blogs.

Googlewashing started as a threat to free speech and not a solution to personal indiscretions.

Andrew Orlovski of The Register UK coined “googlewash” from the word “greenwash” - a spot of paint that “transforms” something rotten into something new. The reality? Nothing’s changed.

The phrase that spurred Orlovski’s imagination originated almost five years ago to the day (Feb 17, 2003). Patrick Tyler in a front page story in the New York Times wrote that global anti-war protests had become “the second superpower.” Yet within 42 days, a small group of A-List tech bloggers had co-opted the phrase to mean something much more benign, pushing the anti-war slogan in the Times story further down in Google rankings.

That led Orlovski to realize Google had been “gamed” - and, he noted, the English language perverted - by the power of inbound links. The “meaning” of the phrase “second superpowers” had changed almost instantly.

Googlewashing soon morphed into googlebombing. The famous “miserable failure” ranking for President Bush (since eliminated by Google). Marissa Mayer responded to the controversy on the Official Google Blog in September of 2005 in her post “Googlebombing failure.”

Only months later Brian Livingston blogged Googlewashing’ Makes Your Site Invisible.

Livingston changed googlewash to mean the practice of scraping and stealing Web content on another blog. The result? Duplicate content appearing above your own.

He called it an example of “Googlewashing” — a term that combines Google and brainwashing.

In the ultimate irony, former war correspondent Kevin Sites, recently did a report on googlewashing: not for its Orwellian role in the anti-war movement but in a multimedia profile for Yahoo News of paid search advertiser ReputationDefender.com.

In this evolutionary algorithmic age every search marketer charged with boosting rankings on the organic SERPs knows, with fearful certainty, that building inbound links is essential. Utilizing social media communities to do so is a front-and-center tactic for many.

Sure, we’re all aware of mainstream players like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Reddit, Propeller, etc…

However, there are hundreds of social communities other than the biggies. These niche’ player-communities can be terrific venues to engage readers of similar ilk, make friends, drive focused micro-busts of traffic, and build links. Some communities are junk. This post offers niche’ social site examples and provides links to lists which index and profile dozens of useful ones.

Dofollow and Nofollow
A quick word about Do/No follow. Most blogs (and many communities) these days attempt to discourage spam by removing "link-juice" passed on links dropped in discussion threads. That’s called "Nofollow." (Wikipedia is a classic example of Nofollow.) Nofollow links deliver traffic but there’s no SEO benefit. If you view the source code of this page, you’ll see that some of the social site links are Nofollow and therefore do not pass energy.

When evaluating the potential benefit of social community participation, it’s best practice to understand the objective and potential gain. Whenever a site, with decent Pagerank, "forgets" to turn off Dofollow, it’s an opportunity of sorts to build links of varying strength and value. The most important caveat is that gratuitous link dropping, without offering true value to the community, is spam and will likely be treated as such.

Every search marketing professional knows that garnering good quality, relevant, and "natural" inbound links to your site or blog is critical to drive your SEO ranking efforts. Honest participation in niche’ social communities, relevant to your product & services, is the tactic that many savvy SEMs reach for to build their site’s inbound link-profile. In addition to the community site links themselves, “hot” posts can result in feed subscriptions, increased readership, and links from other relevant and valuable sites.

Fark is a social news site in which moderators approve user link-submissions and post them to the homepage. The links are Nofollow but can drive noticeable traffic.

Slashdot is a community where techno-heads hang out and geek-jam. However, users submit stories about entertainment, politics, and other fun stuff. If editors approve a submission and it’s promoted the homepage, measurable traffic can result. Also, links in the body of each post are Dofollow and pass juice.

Metafilter is a moderated community, both by site administers and users, in which participants share interesting web content. Links are Dofollow.

Mixx is widely regarded as an up-and-comer in the social news world. A potentially mainstream Digg replacement site, many SEM folks had early-adopter Mixx profiles for fun and future marketing bang. Oh yes, they forget to turn off Dofollow so the links pass juice.

Hugg is a smaller community engaged in dialog surrounding environmental issues. There’s social exchanges about technology, politics, and science as well. Links are Dofollow.

Sk*rt is a Dofollow PR 5 fashion, food, and technology community, primarily comprised of females.

Stirr’dup is a smaller NoFollow social news site which categorizes news as technology, entertainment, news and politics.

Linkinn is a PR5 site specializing in offbeat video and pictures. Links are DoFollow and pass juice.

Lists of Useful Social Media Sites:

48 Social News Websites: A List of General and Niche Social Media Communities
Tropical SEO: Top 38 Niche Social Media Sites (That Actually Send Traffic)

Respected blogger Sugarrae has posted a serious interview with industry leading link-building experts and is a must-read. Interviews include:
Eric Ward, the Link Moses behind URL Wire
Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz
Roger Montti, the founder and owner of martinibuster.com
Todd Malicoat of Stuntdubl and Clientside
Justilien Gaspard, Link Columnist for SearchEngineWatch.com, his link building blog and course author SEMPO Institute
Aaron Wall of SEO Book and Clientside SEM
Debra Mastaler of Alliance Link and the The Link Spiel
Michael Gray of the Graywolf SEO Blog
Andy Hagans, the lazy SEO of the Tropical SEO Blog
Jim Boykin of We Build Pages and Internet Marketing Ninjas
Rae Hoffman, CEO of Sugarrae and MFE Interactive

Do you have a linkbuilding plan that can be integrated into your comprehensive marketing strategy? In today’s By the Numbers column, “What’s Your Link Building Marketing Mix?,” Eric Enge explains the need to understand the value of inbound links to your Web site, and the need to develop a cohesive strategy for building links.

More: [...]

Google ban on AllJobs. Global blog-hysteria. What’s the real story?
To get the scoop, I turned to Eli Felblum, CEO of global SEO firm RankAbove, after his preso at Dave Burstein’sWeb Video Summit. His take: blogger-brewed brouhaha.
Elie said the whole fervor over the AllJobs.co.il delisting is just another overreaction to two of the oldest [...]

The wild debate about Google’s increasingly hardline stance against paid links looks like Wimbledon, with Matt Cutts taking on Rich Skrenta, while Danny Sullivan volleys against Michael Gray.
Internet Drama, in the form of the ongoing paid links debate, received a couple of new entries to fan the flames. Webmasters see paid links as a way [...]

Since the start of the Internet, people have asked themselves, how do I increase my views?  One guaranteed way to approach this question is to try to boost inbound links.  The more ways that people can be directed to your site, the more eyeballs you will have on your page.

WebProNews wanted to help our readers [...]

Microsoft has begun a beta test of its free Web analytics service, code-named “Project Gatineau.” Invitations have gone out to some U.S. advertisers, and other U.S. advertisers can request an invitation, though the wait is long, according to Ian Thomas, project planner on Gatineau.
“If you’ve requested a beta invite, you’ll be on the list and [...]

In case you haven’t been paying attention over the years, content is king. If you’re just joining us, that means that no amount of technical tweaking or search engine gaming can replace quality content, whether "content" for you means writing, audio, or video. That’s what they come for, that’s what they stay for.
(Our on-scene WebProNews [...]

There’s a lot of blogs out there – a lot – so getting yours noticed could be difficult. The panelists at the SEO Through Blogs & Feeds session at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose have some ideas about how to do that. (Our on-scene WebProNews staff has passed along this latest news [...]