Iran has decided to block access to Google search and Gmail service. This is supposedly part of a “clampdown on material deemed to be offensive” as reported by the Mehr news agency.
Hamid Shahriari, secretary of Iran’s National Council of Information said, ”I can confirm these sites have been filtered.”
Similar to China, Iran has very tough censorship laws banning websites that promote sexual and politically sensitive content. Iran also censors sites discussing women’s rights.
Iran’s latest censorship laws are part of an ongoing clampdown on an internet-savvy society attempting to embrace western ideals and habits.
Will it last? Maybe for a while, but this is exactly what will inevitably bring down the current leadership… but lets wait and see…
Yahoo! and Bebo, the UK’s largest social network, have forged an exclusive strategic partnership. As a result, Yahoo! will sell the majority of Bebo’s display advertising in the UK and Ireland. This is Yahoo!’s first agreement of its kind with a social networking site, which will substantially increase the inventory available to it.
This partnership will enable Bebo’s sales team to continue and to deepen its focus on offering sponsorship and engagement marketing solutions, including brand integration in its groundbreaking entertainment properties such as the online drama, Kate Modern and the recently announced, Sofia’s Diary.
The partnership also brings Bebo users the power of Yahoo! Answers - a community-driven knowledge service that has grown to a global audience of 90 million and 250 million answers. Yahoo! Answers will be integrated into Bebo’s website, allowing users to ask and answer questions posed by other users within the Bebo community and beyond.
Yahoo! and Bebo have also announced the development of a new Bebo Toolbar that will enable Bebo users to monitor their social network even when they are not on the Bebo website.
This exclusive partnership is the next step of our ongoing strategy to build the largest and most effective online advertising network. Bebo joins our existing partners, Eurosport and Vodafone as part of that ad network, which also includes the BlueLithium publisher network and advanced targeting tools, and the Right Media ad exchange. Working with Bebo gives advertisers the opportunity to reach the important 13-24 year-old age group.
Yahoo! and Bebo will begin to roll out the initiatives outlined in the agreement during the 4th quarter of this year. Yahoo! began providing search on Bebo in May this year in a previous deal, which is extended under this new agreement
I was asked to look at a website today that had suddenly dropped in Google’s search results. Now when I say dropped, I mean DROPPED… from page 1 to page 950!
My first though was they’ve been penalised by Google with the dreaded 950 penalty, that’s the penalty used for sites who’re penalised for obtaining paid links for SEO purposes (950 refers to the last page of the Google results pages).
My first SEO instinct was to check the backlinks of the said website and to see where it had obtained these links and to also check the anchor text used for these links. My suspicions were confirmed. It seems that the site had agreed with an owner of a blog network to purchase links using highly competitive keywords as anchor text, Google found out and penalised the site using the 950 penalty.
My advise to the site owner… remove the links and wait a week or two till Google realises that the links have been removed, most likely, the 950 penalty will then be removed by Google.
In another controversial move, Facebook has decided to make its members’ profiles public, meaning that search engines are now free to index the site and list the millions of profiles in its database and available for search engines users.
However, Facebook did give its users the option to block search engines from indexing their profile.
This controversial move on the part of Facebook comes at a time when it’s feverishly trying to expand its user base to compete with rivals such as My Space.
Opening up its profiles to search engines will see it achieve enormous amounts of natural search traffic over the coming few month and therefor achieving that goal.
Could this be Mark’s ace card just before he sells the company to the likes of Yahoo? I think so but only time will tell…
Iran has decided to block access to Google search and Gmail service. This is supposedly part of a “clampdown on material deemed to be offensive” as reported by the Mehr news agency. 
