Shashib, Network Solutions Social Media Swami, just worked with several contacts to build a Black Friday Shopping widget. There are offers out there – and now you can see a consolidation of a number of them in one helpful spot. Check out the widget below, and learn about how this came about at the Network Solutions blog.

Google seems to have just launched new functionality for people who are logged into their accounts – you can “promote” or “demote” specific natural search results with a click – and you can even comment on different search results! Comments seem to be “public” comments – I have only seen a couple of examples where there are comments from others – maybe Google is rolling out the public part of commenting slowly – since it isn’t in my account yet.

Question – does this informal “voting” for sites have an affect on natural search results seen by people who are NOT logged into their accounts? Does this commenting show up? If so, Google will need to consider that there are a lot of people who will quickly figure out how to game this system… User generated content (UGC) cuts both ways – and adding it into the search algorithm, even if it is minor, could have a significant affect on the way that natural search results are accessed and optimized for. According to an interview in the Wall Street Journal, Google will not “initially” base search results on voting or comments – however with all of that great data at their disposal, will it not be really tempting to have it influence ranking to some degree?

Interesting addition – but I am really concerned about whether people will “game” this system (seems like the Black Hat Killer App!).

Here is a screen capture of how the votes and comments appear when you are signed into your Google account.

So, I was away on vacation the first week of November. About this time of year, Tom and I go to someplace warm, sandy and new to both of us. This year, we went to Curacao. Just north of the coast of Venezuela, this island of the Dutch Antilles has some tourist attractions, but is primarily a haven of divers and outdoor activities. Although I don’t dive, I am an addicted snorkeler and underwater photographer.

So I took this opportunity to do some SEO/SMO testing with my photographs. I’ve uploaded them to my Flickr account. To further optimize the images, I have labelled all of them with “Curacao” and then something descriptive. Additionally, I added a link to the website for the hotel where we stayed. My test is that I am going to do some targeted searches to see whether my images are picked up by Google image search, and also see if the link has been picked up by doing a links command in Yahoo (there is rel=nofollow on the link, so I doubt it would ever show up in Google).

In any event, the vacation was wonderful! The week back has been a very busy one, but filled with interesting projects and planning for 2009 media and SEO projects. Cool stuff on the horizon.

11/17/08 update: Google Link command does not show my link to the resort yet. Also, image searches do not yet show my images. More to come…

11/21/08 update: Images still not in Google index. No links showing up from Flickr. Ok – experiment over (for now).