Big Brother’s Watching You: Are Search Engines Invading Your Privacy?

You might think that seeing only advertising that you’re actually interested in doesn’t sound all bad, but the way that Google obtains the information they use for targeting their ads has a lot of web users up in arms. It might make more sense to place ads, such as the best women’s golf clubs, that are relevant to that site’s content, but Google doesn’t see it that way… instead, they sniff out your web browsing habits, and use those to show you the ads that they think you’ll want, regardless of what site you’re actually on.

So, what gives? How is Google able to invade your privacy to begin with, and what can you do to protect yourself?

Google and Your Inbox

One of the things that Google does that has privacy experts up in arms is email scanning. The sensible solution might seem to be to simply not use Google’s email service, but that won’t save you- not only is Google capable of scanning the emails of its Gmail users, it scans the emails that their non-Google-using friends send them, too. Emails are scanned for certain keywords, and advertising is placed depending on those keywords. Send an email to your mother about the wonderful juice fountain you just purchased, and chances are your sidebars will be clogged with ads for juice machines.

If you ask Google why they do this, they’ll tell you it’s only to glean information that they can use to integrate their products better, that they don’t store the data beyond a sixty day period, and that they don’t cross reference their information with cookies.

There’s only one problem with this- there’s nothing stopping them from doing any of those things. Google may say that they don’t store or cross reference data, but there’s no reason why they can’t. Do you want to trust the word of a company that’s going through your private emails?

Google Knows Your Friends, Too

Do you remember “Google Buzz?” Google Buzz was a Gmail-integrated social networking service that was supposed to be the next big thing. The trouble was, Google automatically made Google Buzz users’ email contacts visible to the entire internet, by adding them as Google Buzz friends and making them visible to all of your other Google Buzz friends. Google tried to cover their tracks by claiming that users could adjust their privacy settings, but it turned out to be too little, too late. By the time most Google Buzz users knew to make their contacts private, thousands upon thousands of them had already been made visible. The backlash against it was so severe; it prompted Google to shut the service down entirely.

The dismal failure of Google Buzz didn’t spell the end of Google’s social networking involvement, though.

Now, Google has “Google Plus”, a service designed to compete with the likes of Facebook.

One of the features of Google Plus is that it’s fully integrated with Gmail, so Google Plus users may find that they sign up for the service, and all of their email contacts are there, just waiting to be added as friends.

This might seem easy and convenient, but there’s one problem- not all of those email contacts are really Google Plus users. Instead, all Google Plus does is pull the names of the people you chat or email with, and suggest them to you as Google Plus friends. If you go to add people who aren’t signed up for Google Plus, they are sent spam asking them to sign up for the service.

Google’s Terms of Use claim that they record information about your “activity” in order to help improve the way that their products and services work. Some companies would pay top dollar to know what Gmail and Google Plus users are doing. What is Google doing to protect their users’ privacy? If the Google Buzz disaster and early stages of Google Plus are any indication, the answer is “Not much.”

Cookies Sell Your Attention

“Cookies” is a term you come across pretty frequently on the internet. They’re useful little widgets that store things like the usernames and passwords you use on your favorite websites, so you don’t have to re-enter them with every visit.

Deleting cookies means having to go through the hassle of not having this information stored for you, so many people are hesitant to get rid of them entirely. Besides, they expire after a set period of time anyway, so what’s the harm? If you’ve ever gotten a box that’s asked you if you want to save your username and password for a site you’ve visited, you’ve been given the chance to have a cookie saved on your computer.

Cookies are usually not harmful, and are created to help you, not hurt you. The trouble is, there’s one major problem with this- if all cookies stored was simple login data that would be one thing. Unfortunately, some cookies, called “tracking cookies”, store a lot more than that, and never, ever expire.

Some websites have exploited the fact that most cookies are harmless and created things capable of monitoring and recording your web browsing habits over months, or even years. Some of these cookies compile their data into a whole advertising profile that tells companies about the kind of sites you visit, which allows them to target their ads based on the things you do online.

These profiles are worth a lot of money to the right people.

Second Verse, Same as the First

One thing that all of the backlash against Google’s privacy invasion has in common is the company’s response. Every time anyone has gotten up in arms about Google’s actions, they are essentially told that their invaded privacy is their own fault. After all, it isn’t Google’s problem that Google Buzz users didn’t adjust their privacy settings, right? Google also says that they track what you do right in their Terms of Use for services like Google Plus.

While Google could technically make the argument that they haven’t done anything legally wrong, the fact that users were never explicitly warned about these privacy issues makes Google’s excuses look shaky, at best. Nowhere is this more evident than in their actions with Google Maps.

Google Maps is a useful service used by people the world over for navigation and research. The thing is, the information for Google’s “Street View” feature was obtained by unmarked vans that drove around and took pictures. This happened regardless of what was going on at the time. As a result, there were pictures of whatever people happened to be doing outdoors while Google’s vans were driving by… Sunbathing topless, breaking the law, picking your nose, it didn’t matter. It could be preserved for posterity by some stranger in an unmarked van.

When people flipped out about this fact, did Google stop their creepy stalker vans? Of course not. Legally, it was ruled that taking the photographs was an invasion of privacy, but not actually against the law. So, Google simply told their violated users that they always had the option to report content that they felt was objectionable, and went right on snapping photos. So, users have to flag the photos they didn’t like, then sit back and wait until if and when Google felt like deleting it. In the meantime, the photos stay up, and the rest of the world gets to see them.

Keep Big Brother from Watching You

Short of staying off of the internet and never leaving your house when there’s an unmarked van in the neighborhood, the easiest way to get Google off of your back is to avoid using their services. Unfortunately, as has been mentioned above, this is hardly foolproof. No matter where you go on the internet, or what you do, you leave behind electronic traces that companies like Google can use to track you whether you’re subscribed to them or not.

Accessing websites through a proxy can help put another wall between you and the prying eyes of Google. Many websites don’t allow the use of proxies, but it can help keep your visits anonymous to those that do.

Vigilantly clearing your browser history and deleting cookies can help protect you, too. You can manually delete them under “Settings” in your browser, or instruct your browser to never save them to begin with.

What do you do to help protect your online privacy?

Image © Ariwasabi , NatUlrich, Anton Prado Fotolia.com

Learn more about what can hurt your blog and how to do good link building.

Google Panda provides a huge incentive to produce good content

Google Panda Infographic

Via: Single Grain – A Digital Marketing Agency

A very interesting thing is Google will penalize the entire site if there is too much space used to display ads, especially above the fold.

Matt Cutts actually took two yellow stickies and put them on the top of a standard 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper and indicated that even if this space was just one big ad it is too much and could be impacted by Google’s new algorithm change.

Now that you know it’s not about the quantity of advertisements

Take it easy here!

This doesn’t mean you can display a lot of ads on your site, no one will recommend this for you. But, here is something strange… Google contacted me this week and asked me to add more spots on this blog because they indicate I am only showing two ad spots. I am sure many of you are getting the same advice from Google!

So, the question here is, should you go and add more ads on your blog?

Increase your revenue by deciding the best way to display your ads

Focus on content visibility, structure, layout, and navigation of your site or blog, be careful when choosing placement of ads.

Here is a video by Google that may help you increase your revenue by deciding the best way to display your ads on the page.

How you will respond to Google’s Above the Fold update?

Previously, marketers had assumptions about how Google ranks the content, and with the introduction of Google+, the process has become more complicated and more ambiguous.

The Google Patent Application:

The Google Patent Application was published in May of 2008; this application gives some hints about how Google might rank the content in search engine results. A few of the hints are:

• The content originally furnished on a particular web page
• Responses and forum posts also affect the ranking of the content
• Comments and blog posts are also a contributor to the ranking of content
• The content shared on social media networks, also affects the ranking of original content

This kind of patent filing is aimed at working with websites where people are not allowed to interact without any kind of identification (mostly, via secure and personalized log-in procedure). This type of interaction (be it via posting comments or sharing some other type of content) is then vouched for being weighed and credential scores for each user are allocated accordingly, relative to those interactions. The lines below further explain about that.

The System of Patent Application:

The patent filing system works on the sites that allow a user to create content, interact with each other, and share thoughts. But for the creation of the content the users are required to register or fill in some information forms.

Credential Scores:

The patent filing system can be measured, by weighing the level of interactions that take place between users. This weighing of interactions assigns credential scores to the users. The factors that are weighed in assigning credential scores are:

• The quality of the content shared
• The replies received for a post
• The answers given to a question
• The rating given to a video or an image

The Constituents of Credential Score:

The posts or comments, which one sees in response to a search query, appear based on their credential score. In other words, credential score is synonymous to author rank. The two key constituents of credential score are given below:

1. Authority Score:

The authority score will be based upon the quality of responses you make on social networking websites, and the contributiveness score held by the person who shared the content responded.

2. Contributiveness Score:

The contributiveness score consists of the quality of the content person shares, along with the authority score of the people who respond to the content shared by the person.

Applying Credential Score on Google+:

Social media marketing companies need to find out how will Google+ affect the credential score, and how can they analyze the credential score on Google+. Applying credential score on Google+ Circles:

• When a person shares some content, the contributiveness score of that person will be calculated on the basis of authority score of the people who responded to the post.
• When someone responds to a post in Google+ Circles, his/her authority score will be calculated on the quality of response the person provides, and the contributiveness score of the person who originally shared the content.

The Implications of Credential Score:

In terms of the appearance of content of user in search engine results, there can be three implications of the credential score:

• The users who have higher contribution score will be able to see their comments or posts in the search results.
• The users with high quality input can be rewarded
• Those users who have low credential score, may be restricted from appearing in search engine results, and depending on the quality of their content can be regarded as spammers.

Conclusion:

The crux of the matter is that, the level of interactions and the quality of interactions that take place among users on different networks, directly affects the appearance and ranking of content in search engine results. For any internet marketing agency trying to play ahead of their competitors, staying abreast with such critical information is the key to success.

There are two ways to do this, the hard way and the easy way!

The hard way where you have to code and style to implement hreview in your WordPress theme, and the easy way where you simply install a plugin that gives you that power. So let me make things easy for you.

I’ve announced the under development product reviews plugin for Thesis Themes at ThesisAwesome.com blog, it’s a simple plugin that allow you to easily insert Google Rich Snippets for reviews and ratings to your posts and show rating stars in search results.

I call it the Thesis Theme Review Plugin.

Reviews examples

Here are a few examples of reviews I’ve made on the blog recently, and also some other reviews that I’ve updated from the past, you may look at them or search for them in Google and see how things looks like in the search results:

• Revenue Engine
• CommentLuv Premium
• PopUp Domination
• Engagement From Scratch
• Headway 3.0
• CurationSoft
• Market Samurai
• Gravity Forms

Also, notice the sidebar widget which has a list of recent reviews that I made especially for the plugin.

The future of Thesis Theme Review Plugin

As you can see from its name, the Thesis Theme Review Plugin works only with Thesis Themes, and it will be released as part of my ThesisAwesome.com membership site, this means if you are already a member and you did purchase any of my Thesis Child Themes, then you will have access to download the plugin for a very affordable price, plus the freedom to install it on any of your blogs. However, you also can purchase the plugin individually at a good low price.

Note: I don’t sell you a bunch of codes and files, I sell you my support, which means my time, so you are not actually paying me to download the plugin, but to get support and upgrades.

I will be updating you more on prices and when the plugin will be released for the public, this should’t take a lot of time. But for now I need beta testers, so keep reading.

Become a beta tester

I’ve already tested out the Thesis Theme Review Plugin here on the blog and some other blogs, I need to do more testing before releasing it, I need beta testers who are willing to provide feedback and help me out to test the plugin on different blogs with different layouts, this is great for the development process and your help should make it a better plugin.

I am going to accept only 5 -10 beta testers, so if you are willing to install and use the plugin on your blog help me test it out, and provide feedback, it might be yours for free.

Want to be a beta tester? contact me now.

One last thing, it’s a good idea to join my affiliate program before releasing the plugin, this may help you make extra money.

You will only see these results if you are signed in to your Google+ account. I thinks it’s super cool, and I am sure that many people are going to simply love it and appreciate it.

I mean what’s better than results from people you know and follow?

Watch the Search plus Your World Video

I think that…

Search now is better? (do you like it?)

As an SEO consultant, I find it necessary to keep up to date with modern SEO practices and techniques and below are some of the modern SEO practices and techniques that I have found useful.

Local SEO

If you look at Google’s search results (and even Bing’s) you will see they are showing the local businesses on top of their search results.

For example if you type in Los Angeles Bail Bonds, you will notice that all bail bonds locations in Los Angeles are shown first, then the other websites that are ranked organically below them. That shows the importance of local SEO. I wrote a post earlier on how you can rank for local SEO by making a lot of noise and getting a lot of good citations for your business using both online and offline marketing.

Social Media

Twitter, Facebook public pages, and now Google+ are influencing the search results. Google and Bing both have admitted they use social media links and content in their search results.

Content for Users First, then Search Engines

When creating content, make sure it is for the users first. Search engines are now looking for user signals such as bounce rate etc. in order to evaluate content. In other words, how users react to your content determines how good your content is therefore search engines rank it accordingly.

For example if  you have a Pizza shop and someone types in Pizza, lands on your website but spends very little time on your website and then clicks on the back button to leave your website, that could be a negative point for your website for key term pizza.

Content Freshness

In addition in writing quality content, Google is sending more organic traffic to sites with fresh quality content. This is where a lot of small businesses miss out because they have static pages with minimal content about their business and their products and services.

A good solution is to have a blog for your website.

Blogs are good for multiple reasons. You can write quality content on them about your products, services, company news, and even allow guests posts, helping you become popular in your market.

HTML5 and Microformats

Search engines rely on crawlers and robots to understand the content of your website. And while they are getting really good at it, you can help them understand the content of your website better by implementing microformats.

Google and Bing have worked together to develop Schema.org which is a website that contains a set of microformat standards that help search engines understand your content better.

Google Webmaster Tools (And Analytic)

Pay close attention to all the messages and data you get on Google Webmaster Tools. Google is attempting to communicate to you how they view your website, how many errors they see, what keywords they find relevant to your website, how many links coming to your website etc. Familiar yourself with Google webmaster tools and how you can use it effectively.

In addition to Google Webmaster tools, you should also be looking at your Google Analytics data (or any other analytic software you use). The difference between Google webmaster tools and Google analytics is that Google webmaster tools is how Google sees your website and Google Analytic shows you public data about your website.

Both are essential to your SEO success.

Be Creative

Be creative and do something unique. The more creative and unique you are, the more chance people will talk about you and link to you, hence you improve your ranking.  A Google example is San Diego Storage directory.  After creating a self storage directory, they decided to add all self storage in San Diego for free, giving them premium listing long enough for them to get noticed.  That helped them get a lot attention from the webmasters of these websites and quite a few of them ended up linking back to the site hence it helped them with SEO.

Why? Because it violates Google’s guidelines against paid links!

So funny!

Do you imagine what could happen if Google the dictator meets Google the marketer?

Ok!

Google Can’t Keep Track of its Own Rules

Some interesting stuff has been going… Danny Sullivan was wondering:

“if Google can’t keep track of its own rules, what hope is there that third parties are supposed to figure it all out?”

Matt Cutts said in response to Danny Sullivan‘s question:

Google was trying to buy video ads about Chrome, and these sponsored posts were an inadvertent result of that. If you investigated the two dozen or so sponsored posts (as the webspam team immediately did), the posts typically showed a Google Chrome video but didn’t actually link to Google Chrome. We double-checked, and the video players weren’t flowing PageRank to Google either.

However, we did find one sponsored post that linked to www.google.com/chrome in a way that flowed PageRank. Even though the intent of the campaign was to get people to watch videos–not link to Google–and even though we only found a single sponsored post that actually linked to Google’s Chrome page and passed PageRank, that’s still a violation of our quality guidelines.

In response, the webspam team has taken manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome for at least 60 days. After that, someone on the Chrome side can submit a reconsideration request documenting their clean-up just like any other company would. During the 60 days, the PageRank of www.google.com/chrome will also be lowered to reflect the fact that we also won’t trust outgoing links from that page.

Find more on this Google+ post by Matt.

Google’s Getting More Respect!

Some people said that this action added another layer of respect to Google, they think it’s really cool!

While others have a second opinion, especially SEOs, they see it differently!

And, if you ask me what I personally think about this? My answer would be, mm.. ah.. well, I don’t know! Anyways, my personal opinion is not that important, what’s more important is your opinion!

So, you tell me what you think if you discover that Google itself is buying reviews, backlinks or what ever, then they had to punish their own product “Chrome” not to look guilty, maybe to gain respect,  or to absorb the anger of SEOs, internet marketers and small business owners!

It is obvious that a new algorithm of calculating CPC has been developed by specialists of Pay per Click advertising service in Google.

In fact, there are many factors which influence Cost per Click, and I would like to draw the attention of readers to the most important ones only. First of all, I would like to talk about Smart Pricing. Let’s try to understand what this term means.

Google Ad Sense Smart Pricing

If you have ever used the service of Pay per Click advertising you will probably agree that it is very important for online advertisers to get high quality targeted traffic for the money they pay. This means the following:

• It is necessary to place advertisements on high quality platforms only, which have the authority and a lot of targeted users;
• People generated to a website of an advertiser from Google Ad Sense block, would be interested in the product offered and agree to purchase it in the end;
• Users don’t have to be deceived. They have to understand that they are clicking on an advertisement link;
• An online advertiser doesn’t have to pay just for clicks;
• An online marketer has to optimize an advertising budget and convert paid traffic into sales effectively.

Smart Pricing can be considered as an attempt by Google to help online marketers optimize their budgets effectively and protect them from low quality traffic. The specialists of Google Ad Sense realize the fact that there is a great deal of webmasters who place their advertisement on low quality platforms, which don’t attract targeted audience to an online business. It should be noted that clicks generated by such web pages bring no value to internet advertisers.

Smart Pricing takes into consideration a lot of factors and set Cost per Click for each type of online advertising. Let’s consider these factors.

Factors Influencing Cost per Click

Talking about important factors which have an impact on Cost per Click, special attention of webmasters should be paid to the relevancy of a website. Webmasters will definitely have higher Cost per Click if all pages of their web resource are dedicated to the same topic.

The number of impressions is also a very significant parameter. If, for example, a website is very popular and generates a high amount of targeted traffic it means that this online resource has good authority among its users. Size of a website also matters. The rule is quite simple, the more web pages an online resource contains – the better.

As it is known, Page Rank and the age of a domain is one of the main identifiers of website quality. Therefore, the older the domain name and higher its Page Rank is – the better Cost per Click is. There is another important parameter that determines Cost per Click and it is relevancy of incoming links.

So, it is good if a great deal of topic related online resources refer to your website. It is especially good if the text of incoming links includes keywords which you target. There is an opinion that CTR also has an impact on Cost per Click.

Recommendations to Increase Google Ad Sense Earnings

Content is king!

As you can see, it is a fixed expression of webmasters. It means that the main task of website owners is to provide users with interesting and informative content. Thus, improve content of your websites, attract targeted audience and do the best to provide website visitors with valuable information. Results of your work will not keep you waiting for long. You will see improvements in Google AdSense earnings within a short period of time.

Interesting content is considered to be one of the most effective ways to attract a targeted audience to an online resource and convert it into website revenue. It is not a surprise that CPC in Google AdSense depends on the theme of a website significantly. Thus, if you work in a highly competitive business sector you will have high cost per click. But you should also take into account the fact that the higher level of completion is – the more time and work will be required to achieve SEO improvement. Thus, do the best to find the golden mean between the profitability and competition of a website theme.

Selecting the right theme and key phrases for your MFA (Made for AdSense) website and you will be able to provide it with high cost per click from the very beginning.

If you use your Google AdSense account for several advertising platforms make sure that these platforms are high quality websites. The point is that low quality sites will decrease your average rate in Google AdSense. Therefore, track the efficiency of your online resources and choose the best MFA sites only.

If you enjoyed reading this post, make sure to leave a comment below and share this with your friends and followers.

In His Grip <><

COO in Global Strategic Consultants and Internet Marketing entrepreneur

For sure, I don’t want to ignore SEO, this makes me think of WordPress posts vs pages for SEO!

So, I’ve tried to discover the real difference between post and page regarding search engines optimization, and which one has more SEO privileges.

A quick look into WordPress Posts VS Pages

Before we start, let’s assume that we have two sites, both have exact everything, and they are equal in terms of content, plugins, theme, and other search engine optimization stuff like (titles, URLs, structure, keyword research, backlinks, etc.).

A very interesting thing to mention is that any WordPress site built primarily with posts will perform much better in search engines than one built mostly with pages, of course assuming that both sites has the exact everything and they are equal. This is not imagining, it’s based on my personal experience.

If you look at the WordPress post vs page comparison at WordPress.com support, you will find out some differences like…

WordPress blog posts

Posts are entries listed in reverse chronological order on the blog home page or on the posts page if you have set one in Settings > Reading. If you have created any sticky posts, those will appear before the other posts. Posts can be found in the Archives, Categories, Recent Posts, and other widgets. Posts are also displayed in the RSS feed of the blog. You can control how many posts are displayed at a time in the Reading Settings. Read more about posts.

WordPress blog pages

Pages are static and are not listed by date. Pages do not use tags or categories. An About page is the classic example. Pages can be displayed in the sidebar using the Pages widget, and some themes display pages in tabs at the top of the blog. If you have 50 pages and you use the Pages widget, then all pages will be listed all the time. Read more about pages.

Additional information

The description of posts and pages above is very short and general as they just made this information available for WordPress.com users, and it has nothing about SEO, but I have an important comment here…

They say Pages are static. This is not really the way it is. You must know that every single piece of content presented by WordPress is -in fact- a web page. that has been created dynamically. The term “static” was used here to presents the meaning of “static content” or “content is not changing often”, this is confusing, but it’s not hard to understand! Let me explain it more…

Every WP page is dynamic, as WP pulls content from database, so basically WP Page is just another virtual page that doesn’t really exists till someone call it (a visitor jumped on the page url)!

So, back to the explanation of “static page”, this means the content of pages are not likely to be changed or edited for long time. (You don’t edit your About page every day, don’t you?!)

Here are a few other things to consider while comparing posts and pages:

• WordPress posts and pages both pings other sites when they created or updated (both should be indexed well).
• Both has same SEO options.
• Pages do not cycle through by date, but this doesn’t mean it has no publishing date. (I wonder how Google will deal with it regarding microdata)
• Pages are not included in RSS feed, but this plugin can include WordPress pages in RSS feed.
• Pages has nothing to do with the blog, it’s not hanged to anything (only sub pages) It’s an awesome flying piece of content!
• Use pages to for content you want people to see every time they visit your blog.

Check out this quick example that I’ve created to explain the very basic WordPress blog structure, this may help to see how your blog looks like:

Now, you think about it!

You can easily get all posts on the blog plus other pages to link to a particular page simply by adding a link to that page in the blog navigation menu. However, you can do the same thing for posts, but it’s not a perfect idea. In my opinion, navigation should only link to pages and categories! Mainly put links to the stuff you would like your visitors to see all the time!

Technically speaking, both pages and posts are stored exactly the same way in WordPress database, in the same table, The only difference is the post_type field which is set to page for pages, and post for posts, and basically bot have same data saved, including SEO data.

Pages or Posts for better SEO ?

I don’t know, but I think the question is wrong; I am just not comfortable with it, maybe because every wrong question is likely to have a wrong answer!

I think Google won’t care that much whither you publish a post or page, but probably Google prefers posts, that’s why Google still considering how you tagged your blog posts.

Considering that most WordPress sites link to their Pages from every other url within their site, we could came up with a nice conclusion, Pages are more important for SEO.

Wait a minute!

Ana, wrote a nice post on SEO-Group.net sharing some SEO trick! But hey…

Please don’t tell me that you will turn your posts into pages for better SEO or ranking!

Why?

The right answer (for the wrong question) is you must have both -posts and pages- on your blog to actually rank well, they both work together some how! Pages are used to define your main focus, important information, and what’s your blog is about. It’s for your main keywords, while Posts are the publishing platform, it’s what you should use to ping search engines and get a RSS!

But, turning your blog posts into pages? I think this isn’t right, especially if your post got already some comments and shares!.

I won’t be turning a blog post into a page just to rank it higher, I would do this only to include this post into the core of my blog, but I don’t see this as a useful SEO practice. The way I see it right is to create a custom post type for product reviews.

P.S. What’s you’ve read above presents my personal opinion!  (I respect the experiment, I appreciate it when someone take the time to share good stuff).

Why Should I use Custom Post Types

Before we get to answer this question, we probably need to understand types of content we can have in WordPress, and what are custom post types, so take a look here to understand posts types.

1. Posts: the main type used by the blog.
2. Pages: are like posts, but lives outside the normal time based structure of posts.
3. Attachments: a special post that holds information about files uploaded through the Media upload system.
4. Revisions: hold draft posts as well as any past revisions of existing posts or pages.
5. Nav Menus: holds information about a single item in the Navigation Menu system.
6. Custom Post Types: allow you to define the post type and how it operates within WordPress.

As you see, WordPress have a few post types and more than one way to deliver content, since WordPress 3.0 version, you’ve got the capability to add your own custom post types and to use them in different ways, for example: products, events, people, testimonials, podcasts, reviews, ratings, movies, cars, offers, places, etc.

The cool thing I see about custom posts types is the ability to add  microdata and rich snippets, this will allow Google and other search engines to get to know your content better. Also, you can have RSS feed for your custom post types and feed it to Google, here is a post on how to create custom post type feed that is really useful.

Finally, I’ve got stars

I’ve succeeded on getting the stars for my reviews in Google results, check out this screenshot of my ThirstyAffiliates review:

It looks pretty cool, ha?

But it took me several weeks of coding and playing around till finally I’ve got it to work, but this is not the important thing, really! The important thing to me is the knowledge of how to write power reviews and get them indexed with stars in Google. I finally got it, but it’s horribly coded in my Thesis theme I am using on this blog.

Now that I know how it works, I will be able to start over and re-code the whole thing into a custom post type!

Conclusion

Pages and Posts has the same exact SEO features, but I think Google will look more seriously into blogs that are implementing microdata and rich snippets.

I wish I could go back in time and re-structure my blog.

I recommend custom post type for reviewing products.