Bluepost Digital’s tech guru Ken De Pauw takes you through this week’s good, bad and the geeky in the digital world.

The UK Police are seeking the power to be able to shut down domains that feel might be engaged in criminal activity without a warrant, sparking fear in the world of online retailing.
http://bit.ly/gzuivH

SEOMoz CEO Rank Fishkin takes a closer look at Danny Sullivan’s interview about what social signals the two major search engines, Google and Bing take into account for in their ranking algorithms.
http://bit.ly/f8oTbb

Another post by Rand Fishkin about how tired he is of over-manipulated top search results on Google and the gaming methods of gaining links that aren’t naturally produced.

He has put together his recommendations to the Webspam team of Google to make the results be more “organic”.

Of course this won’t happen but it’s an interesting read anyway as a “what if” scenario in case Rand ever replaced Matt Cutts at Google!
http://bit.ly/i8W2NJ

Google has taken their motto “Don’t be evil” and inserted it into their ranking algorithm.

Some of you may remember the article about the business man who was actively being aggressive and unhelpful to his customers in order to gain bad reviews and complaints as a way of getting links and hence going up in the rankings.

Google have answered and added in extra metric to their ranking algorithm that now looks at merchant sites and reviews. As always, no hard details have been provided but interesting nonetheless that user reviews and how you respond to them can affect your rank.

Official Google statement – http://bit.ly/hsoRaX
Some further research by Danny Sullivan – http://selnd.com/g3k5lX

Seems the EU wants to push a law through that users must now consent to a cookie being placed on their computers. A bit silly as a vast majority of websites are dropping cookies on your computer all the time. If this comes into effect it could mean disaster for online advertisers, social media and general tracking purposes.

Either a new way of tracking needs to be invented or we all click countless windows saying yes/no to accepting cookies.
http://bit.ly/39WJf5

The good old Belgians (well the European Commission – yes I’m Belgian…) are launching an investigation into Google’s business practices after it is being accused of abusing its monopoly position, and could face a fine of up to 10% of revenue, which could mean a £1.54bn fine.

Reminds me of Microsoft and its old age battles with the likes of Netscape and the monopoly lawsuits over its Explorer browser (which ironically seems to now be a browser that is seeing a steady decline in users). Is Google becoming the new Microsoft pushing around the little guys?
http://bit.ly/gmtCcZ

And just for fun, if our browsers were celebrities, who would they be?
http://bit.ly/g7eo7z