Google Inc.'s privacy practices are the worst among the Internet's top destinations, according to a watchdog group seeking to intensify the recent focus on how the online search leader handles personal information about its users.

In a report released Saturday, London-based Privacy International assigned Google its lowest possible grade. The category is reserved for companies with "comprehensive consumer surveillance and entrenched hostility to privacy."

None of the 22 other surveyed companies — a group that included Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news), Microsoft Corp. and AOL — sunk to that level, according to Privacy International. While a number of other Internet companies have troubling policies, none comes as close to Google to "achieving status as an endemic threat to privacy," Privacy International said in an explanation of its findings.

In a statement from one of its lawyers, Google said it aggressively protects its users' privacy and stands behind its track record. In its most conspicuous defense of user privacy, Google last year successfully fought a U.S. Justice Department subpoena demanding to review millions of search requests.

"We are disappointed with Privacy International's report, which is based on numerous inaccuracies and misunderstandings about our services," said Nicole Wong, Google's deputy general counsel. "It's a shame that Privacy International decided to publish its report before we had an opportunity to discuss our privacy practices with them."

Privacy International contacted Google earlier this month, but didn't receive a response, said Simon Davies, the group's director. The scathing report is just the latest strike aimed at Google's privacy practices. An independent European panel recently opened an inquiry into whether Google's policies abide by Europe's privacy rules. Meanwhile, three consumer groups in the United States are pressuring the nation's regulators to make Google change some of its privacy policies as part of its proposed $3.1 billion acquisition of online ad service DoubleClick Inc., which also tracks Web surfers' behavior.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is looking into antitrust concerns raised by the DoubleClick deal, but has not indicated if privacy issues will be part of the inquiry. Hoping to placate its critics, Google has pledged to begin erasing the information about users' search requests within 18 to 24 months.

The company says its stockpiles data to help its search engine better understand its users so it can deliver more relevant results and advertisements. As Google becomes more knowledgeable about the people relying on its search engine and other free services, management hopes to develop more tools that recommend activities and other pursuits that might appeal to individual users.

Privacy International is particularly troubled by Google's ability to match data gathered by its search engine with information collected from other services such as e-mail, instant messaging and maps. "Under the microscope, it turns out that Google is doing much more with our data than we ever imagined," Davies said.

Founded in 1990, Privacy International said it reached its preliminary findings after spending the past six months reviewing Internet privacy practices with the help of about 30 professors, mostly in the United States and United Kingdom. The group plans to update the report in September.

Seven of the Internet companies and Web sites included in Privacy International's analysis received the second lowest grade of "substantial and comprehensive privacy threats." This group included: Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, Apple Inc., Facebook.com, Hi5.com, Reunion.com, Microsoft's Windows Live Space and Yahoo. None of the companies or sites received Privacy International's top grade, but five rated as "generally privacy-aware." They were: BBC, eBay Inc., Last.fm, LiveJournal.com and
Wikipedia.com.

Source: news.yahoo.com

Many major SEO firms make it a standard practice to recommend the purchasing of links to their clients. The search engines actively discourage this practice, and do their level best to detect those paid links. Here are 15 things they can use as signals that a link is possibly a paid link:

1. Links Labelled as Advertisements: The search engines can scan for nearby text, such as "Advertisement", "Sponsors", "Our Partners", etc.

2. Site Wides: Site wide linking is unnatural, and should be a rare part of your link mix (purchased or not). The only exception to this is the interlinking of all the sites owned by your company, but this presumes that the search engine will understand that all of your sites are from your same company. In general, site wides are a serious flag.

3. Links are Sold By a Link Agency: Of course, link agencies are knowledgeable about the link detection methods listed here, and do their best to avoid detection with the links they sell.

4. Selling Site has Information on How to Buy a Text Link Ad: Search engines can detect sites that provide information on how to advertise with them. This combined with other clues about links being sold on the site could lead to a review of the site selling the ads, and a discounting of the links.

5. Relevance of Your Link: It's a powerful clue if your link is not really that relevant to the page it's on, or the site it's on.

6. Relevance of Nearby Links: Another clue would be the presence of your link among a group of links that are not tightly themed.

7. Advertising Location Type: The search engine can detect when your link is not part of the main content of the page. For example, it appears in the left or right column of a 3 column site, and the main content is in the middle.

8. Someone Reports Your Site for Buying Links: Who would do this? Your competitor! If your competitor submits an authenticated spam report to Google, it will get looked at, and acted upon.

9. Someone Reports Your Site for Some Other Reason: Perhaps your competitor does not recognize you are buying links, and turns you in for something else. Once this happens, the search engine will take a look at all aspects of your site, not just the reported issue.

10. Someone Reports the Site you Bought Links from for Selling Links: A competitor of yours can do this, or a competitor of the site selling links can do this. Once a search engine figures out that a site is selling links, it’s possible that this could trigger a deeper review of the sites that were buying those links.

11. Someone Reports the Site you Bought Links from for Some Other Reason: As before, this can lead to the search engine discovering that the site is selling links, even though it was not the core subject of the Spam report filed against it.

12. Disgruntled Employee Leaves Your Company, and Reports Your Site: For decades, many companies have had a practice of escorting fired (or laid off) employees out of the building. The reason for this approach is that people get upset when they lose their job. However, even this practice would not prevent such a person from reporting your site in a spam report to a search engine. Even though that may be a violation of the confidentiality agreement you probably have with your employees, you would never know, because there is no transparency in spam reporting.

13. Disgruntled Employee Leaves the Agency Your Used, and Reports Your Site: This same scenario can play out with an employee leaving the link agency you used. This form of disgruntled employee can report either your site directly, or the agency itself.

14. Disgruntled Employee Leaves the Site Your Bought Links from, and Reports Your Site: Finally, it can also happen with someone leaving the company you bought the links from. This type of disgruntled employees can report your site, or the site they used to work for.

15. Internal Human Review: Last, but not least, the search engine can do a human review. In general, search engines don’t do spontaneous reviews of sites, and wait for things detected algorithmically, or a spam report, to trigger a deeper review. But, you could certainly imagine that search engines could make an overt effort to clean up the search results in portions of their index they perceive to be spammy.

Search Engine Courses of Action

In the case of Google, it is known that one of the basic policies is to punish sites who sell text links by terminating that sites ability to pass link juice. This is essentially a first course of action. Once this is done, Google could look more closely at the selling site, and the purchasing sites for other signs of spammy behavior.

The search engines also take stronger actions at times, such as an algorithmic penalty, or banning a site from their index. I don’t know exactly how those determinations are made, but I believe that there are 3 major triggers for such action:

1. It can be the cumulative affect of several signals of poor site quality.

2. The search engine determines that a site has bought links on a large scale.

3. Upon human review, the search engine detects a clear pattern of an intent to deceive them.

Source: Stonetemple.com