Ever since internet giants like Wikipedia and Google had shown their stand against SOPA/PIPA, the issues brought about by these two pending legislations has caught the attention of not just those living in the U.S. but also of other internet users across the globe and to the SEO community. Now before you either disregard or dive in to the issue, it is fundamental to have an idea of what these bills are about and its implications to search marketers like us.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) are two bills currently being tackled by the U.S. Congress. Both are targeted to fight, specifically, foreign websites distributing counterfeited goods and copyrighted materials like movies, music and much more. SOPA is similar to the Protect IP Act but is more extensive in some ways.

Below are some of the highlights of the Stop Online Piracy Act.

1. Infringing sites will be blocked.
This bill would allow the Justice Department as well as copyright holders to seek court orders against any infringing websites. The court order could include requiring search engines to remove a site from its index, ISPs to block subscribers’ access and order domain registrars to take down the whole website.

2. Streaming of copyrighted content will lead someone to jail.
The bill would criminalize unauthorized streaming of copyrighted material, with a maximum penalty of five years in prison for incurring ten such acts of violation within a period of six months.

3. Ad Networks can discontinue your campaigns.
Online advertising networks and payment processors will be called to stop doing business with foreign websites accused of facilitating or enabling piracy. Section 102 of the bill states that ISPs, search engines and the other services enforced to stop doing business with an allegedly infringing site cannot be sued for cutting off service to that site.

Also, SOPA gives legal immunity to any service provider, payment network provider, Internet advertising service, advertiser, Internet search engine, domain name registry, or domain name registrar for voluntarily cutting their ties with websites dedicated to infringement.

4. False claims will not be tolerated.
If a copyright holder knowingly misrepresents that a website is dedicated to infringement, or if a respondent to a claim knowingly misrepresents that a site is not dedicated to infringement they can be liable for damages.

Now let’s go to the big question. What are the implications of SOPA/PIPA to a site’s SEO?

The internet that we know today would surely be a different place given that these bills do get passed as formal laws. It is not just your search engine optimization that gets affected but how the internet works in general. But as this is an SEO blog and not a political blog, questions like “what will happen to sites linking to a website that has been taken down?” would be much appropriate.

There are steps webmasters can take to make sure they don’t get caught if the bill were to pass.

- When using stock images, make sure you have the proper permission – for creative commons licensing properly credit your sources.

- Avoid using generic descriptions for products or supplier if you are not certain the original owner is fine with this

-  Don’t duplicate big sections of content from other website – quote and source snippets correctly.

As a rule of thumb to avoid any infringements and to follow SEO best practices, original is always best.

We knew that Google were updating the Advanced Search page but I didn’t realise it meant we would lose the option to show up to 100 search results. This was really useful when searching for a websites listing when outside the top 10. Instead we now have this new layout:

Personally, I preferred the old layout but it looks like this is what we have now. For those of you that would still like to be able to see 100 results on 1 page then just add the following to the end of your search result URL and reload:

&num=100&filter=0

Update: Found it! Check out this post here for details on where Google’s 100 search results per page went

Smart Traffic have gained widespread recognition for their achievements by gaining a respectable 10th position in the Sunday Times Microsoft Tech Track 100 league table.

Andy Birt, CEO and Co-Founder of Smart Traffic says, “We are very proud to have been recognised in this year’s Tech Track listing. In tough economic times for many of our clients and the country as a whole, we have remained focused on delivering a very high return on their digital and search marketing spend, which has enabled them to increase their market share. We have shared in their successes, and this has allowed Smart Traffic to grow rapidly since its birth in 2006.”

In association with the Sunday Times, Fast Track 100 collated data from a variety of sources in order to publish a league table of the top 100 private tech (TMT) companies with the fastest growing sales figures over a fixed period of time. The league table, in which Smart Traffic were placed at number 10 was included as part of a broadsheet supplement in last week’s edition of the Sunday Times.

Andy Birt goes onto say, “I am over the moon that Smart Traffic is included in the Top 10 for the Sunday Times Tech Track 100. This is testament to the hard work of everyone in the Smart Traffic team across the three country offices over the last five and a half years. We hope to use the momentum of previous years to expand our search marketing services further, and provide our clients with the best experience for their money possible.”

Andy Birt concludes by saying, ‘It has been an exciting time for us over the past six years, and we are very proud as a company to have received national recognition for our efforts. We aim to build on our current position and reputation within the SEM Sector to drive us further forward.’

Smart Traffic offer Search Marketing Services to a wide range of different clients, from SMEs to Blue-Chip, and are also widening the scope of their Pay Per Click (PPC) and Social Media Optimisation (SMO) services.

If you would like to talk to us about our inclusion on this league table, or make a general enquiry about how Smart Traffic can help your business achieve success via top Google rankings, please contact: + 44 (0) 1179 346691 or Contact Us here. If you want to see more about the Tech Track league table, please click here.