Today in court Google won out over Viacom’s $1 Billion lawsuit, essentially showing that the court has decided that YouTube is protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) against claims of copyright infringement.

Viacom had sued YouTube over copyright infringement relating to the many video clips of various Viacom owned programming posted to the video sharing site. While Google has won a “motion for summary judgment” Viacom can still appeal if they choose to do so.

You can read more about this win over at the Official Google Blog and also at Search Engine Land.

The following are the rough Bing vs Google search engine optimization notes from the SEO 101 Internet radio show that aired today which I co-host with John Carcutt; listen to the archived show in podcast format. These notes were compiled during my attendance at the SMX Advanced conference in Seattle the previous week.

Bing vs Google:

• Bing does not currently allow video or news xml sitemaps. Update from after show: I also can’t find evidence of support for image sitemaps at Bing; anyone know otherwise? Reference link.
• Bing’s results seem to have more immediate content with local connotations that can be acted upon without leaving the page. i.e. movie names may bring up full show times for all local theatres based on your location. Another example showed typing in the word “snow” would show snow reports for local mountains. The same goes for weather forecasts which Google has similar results for but only shows one source vs a scattering of weather sources for a local area.
• Sitelinks can be edited in Google but not Bing.

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Over at the Google Webmaster Central Blog, Kaspar Szymanski has published a post about quality links.  One of the most popular questions Google tends to receive is what are the best practices for organic link building. In this post Kaspar explains Googles viewpoint on the issue.

There are no breakthrough techniques listed in the Google post, but every little bit of insight can certainly add up.e sure to check out the full post, but here are some of the main points covered. Read more…

Thanks to confirmation from a post today by Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Journal I can now state that what we are seeing at StepForth is not an aberration; there is a toolbar PageRank (PR) update happening.

What does this mean for you? Nothing, unless your site’s toolbar PR drops to zero for over a week and you see negative ranking fluctuations; then and only then should you consider your site may be in some hot water.  Read more…

Last month Google announced the launch of a secure beta version to help all of those searchers out there who are uber-concerned with security and privacy. The secure version currently only works for standard searches and has not yet been rolled out to image search and other features.

For those who are deep into their analytics, this may have an impact on the data you are analyzing. Today you will likely see little to no evidence of this, but in the future it just may have an impact and start to confuse the heck out of you. Read more…

Today, Matt Cutts posted a new Google Webmaster Video addressing (finally!) the issues surrounding the many changes in long tail search engine results. Here is the video:

To recap, the Mayday update (as most are calling it) was a purposeful and permanent shift in how Google determines which sites should be ranked under long tail searches (i.e. short tail = “victoria bc hotel“, and long tail = “victoria bc pet friendly hotel“). According to Matt, the changes are not based on specific offending websites but a quality enhancement to the entire Google algorithm with the most affect being on long tail rankings. Read more…

I found this rather interesting bug over at Google today.

When doing a search for “Victoria BC Lawyer”, in the Local Business results I found that only one of the seven results were actually for law offices! The remaining 6 were for doctors as well as a government publishing office.

One would think that Google has been doing this long enough to not make such a big error – 1 out of 7 results relevant to the search?  That’s pretty poor if you ask me.

Do you have a suggestion for Google on how to improve Google Places (once called Google Local Business Center)? If you do, then Google is asking for your suggestions and I suggest we all take advantage of this rare opportunity.

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If you have a blog or a website with a RSS (real simple syndication) feed and you haven’t heard of the new PuSH protocol then I have a treat for you. A little while back, Google announced a new open source protocol quirkily called PubSubHubbub, or PuSH for short. In Google’s own words PuSH is “a simple, open, server-to-server web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol as an extension to Atom and RSS.”

And now, without further adieu, here it is in English:
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Well it’s official. Google is now incorporating site load speed into its ranking algorithm according to a Webmaster Central Blog post earlier this morning.

There has been chatter about this addition being in the works for some time, and if you ask me, its one that will significantly help to improve the overall quality of search results and end user experience. Read more…