Was Expedia Penalized By Google? SearchMetrics Says So.

Yesterday morning Patrick Altoft tweeted to me that SearchMetrics is reporting Expedia lost about 25% of their Google traffic overnight.

SearchMetric is indeed reporting this and I confirmed it with Marcus Tober from SearchMetrics via email. I posted the story on the traffic drop at Search Engine Land and asked if it was related to the link buying allegations Expedia was surrounded with last month.

A Hacker News thread, that I've been following for the past couple weeks has more details about how Expedia may have been involved in link schemes and may have received an unnatural link penalty by Google. Google has not yet responded to my inquiries about the penalty. So I have no confirmation from Google or Expedia about it.

SEM Rush shows no drop off in traffic:

Keep Writing Quality Content: SEO Bloggers React To Matt Cutts’ Claim “Guest Blogging Is Dead”

Google’s head of webspam, Matt Cutts, caused an uproar in the SEO community yesterday when he published a blog post on his personal blog claiming guest blogging for SEO purposes is dead.

In his post, Cutts offered a history of how guest blogging has moved from being a reliable source of high-quality content to now being overrun with spam.

“Guest blogging is done; it’s just gotten too spammy,” wrote Cutts. “In general I wouldn’t recommend accepting a guest blog post unless you are willing to vouch for someone personally or know them well.”

As Cutts’ words spread across the web, many SEO bloggers took to their own blogs to offer their take on the demise of guest blogging.

With so much being said on the topic, we’ve put together a round-up of industry reactions, summarizing comments from a selection of popular SEO bloggers.