Internet marketer Erik Baemlisberger spotted in a change (via Search Engine Land) in what little wording there is, however, and it’s actually somewhat noteworthy.

As you can see, the wording use to be: “In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.”

Now, it says, “In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by creating high-quality sites that users will want to use and share.”

Google has removed he word “link,” presumably to play down the importance of links in its algorithm. This doesn’t mean that links are less important. High quality links are likely still a major signal, but by de-emphasizing the word link (or removing it altogether), Google probably hopes to cut down on people engaging in link schemes and paid links – things Google has been cracking down on more than ever over the past year or so.

A representative from the organization posted in a Google Webmaster Help forum (as noticed by Search Engine Roundtable):

My URL is: www.bbc.co.uk

I am a representative of the BBC site and on Saturday we got a ‘notice of detected unnatural links’.

Given the BBC site is so huge, with so many independently run sub sections, with literally thousands or agents and authors, can you give us a little clue as to where we might look for these ‘unnatural links’.

Later in the thread, he adds:

Yeah the problem is that the site is so big, and has so many agents, that something stupid might have been done, but without being given a clue to what or where, it is kind of hard to track the culprits down and ‘advise them to be a better web citizen’. I have certainly been involved previously is stopping people before they do something ‘unwise’ in relation to the site.

Of course, I’m not saying someone connected with the site has done something naughty, just that it is a possibility.

He says he sent a reconsideration request, and explained the situation to Google.

At SMX West, earlier this week, Google’s Matt Cutts made a point of saying that big brands are penalized often. Of course, we recently saw UK flower site Interflora get penalized, though that didn’t last long.

Should news sites, bloggers and other sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google pay for the privilege of including snippets and links to news stories? Also, should YouTube or sites that include embedded videos of movie/TV clips pay every time somebody views them?

Give us your thoughts on this important topic that goes to the heart of the internet in the comments below.

Weinstein said, “Journalists don’t benefit when their stories are taken, and given a link. It would be like me launching a newspaper–call it Link—where I can have the greatest journalists in the world working for me without paying them. It’s inconceivable. If BMI and ASCAP can monitor the music business, we need a BMI and an ASCAP to monitor these businesses. This will be the one legislation for our industry that I’ll press.”

This would be part of a broader law that where a monitoring organization would also monitor the web for video clips and require websites like YouTube to pay this organization a fee for each view of a clip of a movie or television show.

As the publisher of WebProNews and a long-time advocate of the right to link, in my opinion Weinstein’s idea would destroy the internet as we know it today. The internet is based on the idea of linking, that’s why it was originally referred to as the World Wide Web! If you make publications, blogs, Google, Twitter and Facebook pay for linking to a news story, how many of them would still do it. The answer is none.

Weinstein may think he’s only talking about making news linking giants like Google News pay, but laws against free linking could not just apply to them. His proposed legislation would also have to apply to Reddit, Stumbleupon, Facebook, Twitter and news publishers and bloggers who routinely republish snippets of news articles with links to the original. Many of these sites also inbed video clips as well.

Weinstein challenges the assertion by publishers that linking and taking small snippets of articles is not stealing content but is actually promoting the content. Weinstein equates linking and publishing as one and the same. Weinstein also told Deadline, “When it comes to journalists and journalism, I’m with you. It is important they get paid for good work, and wrong that others just take it, with a link.”.

Since most articles have numerous social buttons encouraging “sharing” their articles via social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, you would think it would be obvious to Weinstein that publishers and journalists want their stories to be linked to. The definition of going viral is mass sharing on social media sites which pushes huge numbers of people to a journalist article if he is so lucky. Linking drives traffic to an article which theoretically can then be monitized by the publisher. If the publisher doesn’t want the traffic he can put up a firewall login and charge visitors to read the sites content.

If a news site like Deadline doesn’t want its articles linked to then it shouldn’t publish them on a linking platform called the Web. Weinstein may be surprised to learn that Deadline and most news sites are quite happy that their articles get free traffic driven by links!

Just like the music industry, which has in the past sued the parents of kids who downloaded music without paying for it, Weinstein proposes that those linking to content should also have to pay up. He wants to do it a bit more tactifully than the RIAA, but still wants to collect nonetheless. His idea I presume is to first change the definition of fair use which is permitted per U.S. and many international copyright laws, where a website can take snippets of content and reuse it to a certain extent.

Theoretically, considering Weinstein’s personal connection with Obama, he could persuade the President to tighten this definition via some minor changes in regulations and rules and bypass Congress. The definition of fair use as written in U.S. copyright laws is vague and could easily be redefined via regulation. This is a scary proposition considering that linking and discussing news articles is integral to free speech.

Once fair use is redefined to allow copyright holders the ability to charge websites a retroactive fee for each time a visitor viewed a news summary and link, that’s when a new organization similar to BMI would emerge to ensure that journalists are paid for their work. BMI has people going into businesses, such as bars and restaurants, all around the country looking to see if music is being played without their license. When it catches a business playing unauthorized music it forces them to pay based on a variety of factors such as number of seats in a restaurant and number of songs played.

If a bar doesn’t join BMI and agree to pay a monthly fee up front, then often BMI will sue for huge amounts. For instance, one restaurant in North Carolina was order by a court to pay the BMI $30,450 for playing just four unauthorized songs.

This is what Weinstein wants for publishers and writers of news content! If you are a blogger that makes a small amount of money from ads and you include a snippet from a news article in your story you could be sued if you didn’t already agree to a monthly payment.

For Facebook, Google and Twitter the ramifications of this kind of heavy handed legislation could be huge. They are the YouTube of written content since so many of us share snippets and links via them. If sites like these need to license links with a BMI type organization, it’s likely that they would just eliminate news links and snippets altogether which would change the web forever… don’t you think?

As we’ve seen, a lot of people have gone on link removal request rampages, greatly overreacting, and seeking the takedown of legitimate links out of fear that Google might not like them.

In the latest Webmaster Help video, Google’s Matt Cutts discusses how to figure out which links to get removed. The video is a response to this user-submitted question:

Google Webmaster Tools says I have “unnatural links,” but gives little help as to which specific links are bad. Since I have never purchased links, I don’t know which ones to have removed, and I’m scared of removing good ones, which will hurt my traffic. Suggestions?

“We’ve tried to become more transparent, and when we were saying, ‘Links were affecting the reputation of an entire site,’ we would tell people about that,” says Cutts. “And more recently we’ve been telling people, and opening up and saying, ‘Hey, we still like your site. Your site, overall, might be good, but maybe there’s some individual links to your site that we don’t trust.’ Now, the problem is that we weren’t, at that time, giving specific examples. So one feature that we rolled out is the ability to sort by recent, discovery of links, so you can actually get the date of when we discovered a link. So if you sort that way, you can look for the recent links. But a feature that we are working on – we are in the process or rolling out – is that we will actually – we will basically give you examples.”

“So it’s a…you know, as we’re building the incident whenever a webmaster analyst or something like that is saying, ‘Okay, these are links not to trust,’ they’ll include an example link,” continues Cutts. “You might get one, you might get two, you might get three, depending, but basically it will give you an idea of the sorts of links that we are no longer trusting. Now, it’s not exhaustive. It’s not comprehensive, but it should give you a flavor, you know. Is it a bunch of widget links? Were you doing a bunch of keyword-rich anchor text in article bank or article marketing type stuff? Maybe you weren’t trying to do paid links, but maybe you hired an agency, and it turns out they were doing paid links, and you didn’t realize it.”

“I would look in the text of the messages,” concludes. “Over time, we’re working really hard on trying to include an example or two link, so that when you get that message, you have an idea of exactly where to look.”

Google agreed to create a €60 million fund called the DIgital Publishing Innovation Fund to “help support transformative digital publishing initiatives for French readers.” Google says it will also “deepen” its partnership with French publishers to help increase their online revenues using Google’s ad technology.

Though Google has indicated that it hopes to reach similar agreements with publishers in other countries, it doesn’t look like those in Germany are going for it. Germany’s The Local reports that German newspapers have rejected the idea of copying the agreement Google made with French publishers:

The German association of newspaper publishers (BDZV) said the French agreement did have some positive points. The major of these was that it was established and accepted “that the aggregation of content from third parties as a business model costs them money,” said Anja Pasquay, BDZV spokeswoman on Sunday.

But she said a drawback was that the French solution only referred to Google. “The publishers there have no legal recourse against other aggregators who operate in the same fashion – or those who will do so in the future,” she said.

Back in December, Google made a deal with publishers in Belgium. While not exactly the same as the one it made in France, it seems that German publishers would take similar issue with such a deal.

Google and publishers in France have not been seeing eye to eye for quite some time. In October, the company spoke out about a proposal by French lawmakers, backed by publishers, which would seek for search engines to license content in order to have the privilege of linking to it.

At the time, Google’s Director of Public Policy in France said, “The web has led to an explosion of content creation, by both professional and citizen journalists. So it’s not a secret that we think a law like the one proposed in France and Germany would be very damaging to the internet. We have said so publicly for three years.”

“In order to shed light on the reasons that lead us to believe that this law is detrimental to French users, innovation on the Internet and ultimately to the news publishers themselves, we decided to post the note in its entirety,” he said. “We have always been and remain committed to collaborate with French Publishers associations as they experiment and develop sustainable economic models on the Internet.”

On Friday, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, announced with President Francois Hollande, two initiatives to “help stimulate innovation and increase revenues” for French publishers.

Reuters reports it as “a deal on payment of media links,” as described by a Reuters journalist present at the signing.

Google has agreed to create a €60 million fund called the DIgital Publishing Innovation Fund to “help support transformative digital publishing initiatives for French readers.” Google says it will also “deepen” its partnership with French publishers to help increase their online revenues using Google’s ad technology.

“This exciting announcement builds on the commitments we made in 2011 to increase our investment in France—including our Cultural Institute in Paris to help preserve amazing cultural treasures such as the Dead Sea Scrolls,” said Schmidt. “These agreements show that through business and technology partnerships we can help stimulate digital innovation for the benefit of consumers, our partners and the wider web.”

The announcement follows a similar one Google made in December, when it reached an agreement with publishers in Belgium after six years of litigation, which saw publishers sue Google claiming that it violated their copyrights by displaying snippets in Google News and linking to cached copies of their pages in Google search.

As part of the agreement in Belgium, Google said it would advertise its services on publishers’ media, and publishers would optimize their use of AdWords. Google would also work with Belgian French-language publishers to “help increase publishers’ revenue,” collaborating on ways to make money with Paywalls and subscriptions, and with AdSense and the Ad Exchange. Google would also work with Belgian publishers to implement Google+ social tools and launch YouTube channels.

At the time, Google had indicated it would like to come to similar terms with publishers around the world, and it looks like today’s announcement is the next step in that.

It’s going to be quite interesting to see how Google deals with the rest of the countries with publishers who have voiced similar concerns as those in France.

Should Internet data be taxed anywhere? Let us know what you think.

Eric Pfanner at The New York Times explains:

The report published Friday said a tax on data collection was justified on grounds that users of services like Google and Facebook are, in effect, working for these companies without pay by providing the personal information that lets them sell advertising.

The report says tax rates would be based on the number of users an Internet firm tracked, to be verified by outside auditors. The authors did not recommend tax rates or estimate how much money such a levy could raise.

Obviously the idea has been controversial, and has drawn a great deal of criticism. For example, Nicholas Carlson at Business Insider says the “French view of the Internet will make you want to pull your hair out,” adding, “Users are not, ‘in effect’ or otherwise, ‘working for these companies without pay by providing the personal information that lets them sell advertising. They are using products for free! NO ONE IS MAKING THEM USE FACEBOOK OR GOOGLE, SHEESH.”

Google is reportedly reviewing the report. Perhaps we’ll see a blog post about it from Google in the future.

France has been looking at Google’s tax practices for a couple years now, as the French government has accused the company (and others) of playing the tax system by placing their European operations in places like Ireland or Luxembourg, where tax rates are lower.

On Thursday, French Industry Minister Arnaud Montebourg said France has decided to go after all big Internet firms “curbing legal tax avoidance,” as Reuters puts it, to collect payment of back taxes. Reporter Brian Love writes:

The government had decided, Montebourg said on France 2 television, “to launch tax retrieval procedures covering all of the Internet giants”.

He did not elaborate and it was not clear whether the comment, made in a wide-ranging interview about French industry, referred specifically to existing tax investigations of the Internet search engine and retail giants Google (GOOG) and Amazon (AMZN), or was suggesting a broader campaign.

Amazon received a $252 million back tax bill from the French government in November.

Meanwhile, talks between Google and publishers in France over payments for links are at a stand-still, according to ZDNet, which cites French newspaper Le Monde. We reported on this situation last fall, when Google prepared a note about a link tax proposal by French lawmakers (backed by the publishers).

Google’s Director of Public Policy in France, Oliver Esper, said at the time, “The web has led to an explosion of content creation, by both professional and citizen journalists. So it’s not a secret that we think a law like the one proposed in France and Germany would be very damaging to the internet. We have said so publicly for three years.”

He later added, “We have always been and remain committed to collaborate with French Publishers associations as they experiment and develop sustainable economic models on the Internet.”

Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt met with Hollande back in the fall to discuss the proposal, and the parties involved were supposed to resolve their issues by the end of the year (at least as far as the president was concerned), but so far, it sounds like little has been resolved.

As far as Internet taxes go, while French regulators’ plans may be designed to go after big companies like Google, where are the lines drawn? Will smaller players be affected as well? The very nature of the Internet is global, and that includes France.

Is this a good idea on France’s part? Let us know what you think.

There is some great content out there, but is there any that is so good that you would pay just to link to it? Keep in mind, we’re not talking about republishing that content and linking to the original source. We’re not talking about writing a blog post, maybe pulling a quote or two, and linking to the original source. We’re not even talking about pulling snippets and linking to content in Google fashion (which has certainly been a controversial topic in the publishing world for years). No, we’re just talking about a simple link.

Would you ever pay to link to any piece of content? If so, in what kind of scenario would payment for links be justified? Share your thoughts in the comments.

There was a bit of an uproar last week (understandably), when a story made the rounds, claiming that the National Newspapers of Ireland, a group representing 16 national daily, Sunday and weekly newspapers and 25 local and regional newspapers, is enforcing a policy requiring any site linking to one of its member publicationsto pay at least 300 Euros (and more than that for multiple links).

Lawyer Simon McGarr posted an article about attempts from the organization to get money from one of his clients, a domestic violence charity, for linking to newspaper content. McGarr wrote:

This year the Irish newspaper industry asserted, first tentatively and then without any equivocation, that links -just bare links like this one- belonged to them. They said that they had the right to be paid to be linked to. They said they had the right to set the rates for those links, as they had set rates in the past for other forms of licensing of their intellectual property. And then they started a campaign to lobby for unauthorised linking to be outlawed.

These assertions were not merely academic positions. The Newspaper Industry (all these newspapers) had its agent write out demanding money. They wrote to Women’s Aid, (amongst others) who became our clients when they received letters, emails and phone calls asserting that they needed to buy a licence because they had linked to articles in newspapers carrying positive stories about their fundraising efforts. These are the prices for linking they were supplied with:

1 – 5 €300.00
6 – 10 €500.00
11 – 15 €700.00
16 – 25 €950.00
26 – 50 €1,350.00
50 + Negotiable

McGarr’s story was picked up by Slashdot, and was referenced by media industry analysts like Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen, and Matthew Ingram, who wrote a good piece about the situation.

McGarr called the whole thing: “2012: The year Irish newspapers tried to destroy the web.” He has since followed it up with some Twitter reaction, and an update about the policy from Newspaper Licensing Ireland (a group set up by the Newspapers of Ireland), who issued a statement on Friday.

He quotes the group as saying, “For personal use: NLI never requires or requests a licence for personal use of newspaper content.For commercial use: NLI does not require a licence from any organisation which only displays or transmits links to newspaper content. A licence is required when there is other reproduction of the newspaper content, such as display of PDFs or text extracts.”

So, apparently still no quoting, commonly considered to be fair use (within reason).

“Of more general social value, the damaging assertion that permission was required (and could be refused) to link to another website has been abandoned,” wrote McGarr. “For the sake of the country’s free exchange of views, this is a significant development.”

The group put out a much longer press release on the matter. Here’s what that says under “Our Position on Linking”:

Some of the discussion over the last few days has been around whether a hyperlink from one website to another, in itself and without any more, constitutes copyright infringement. That exact issue was in fact one raised a number of months ago in the Consultation Paper issued by the Copyright Review Committee appointed by the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation to review existing copyright legislation. In the Consultation Paper, the Committee expressly requested that submissions would be made by any interested parties on the issue and as to whether our existing copyright law should be changed so as to specifically include a positive statement to the effect that linking in itself, without more, does not constitute an infringement of copyright legislation. This request for submissions was made by the Committee in the context where the Committee itself states in its Consultation Paper that there are “divided” views from Courts as to whether the display of links in itself is an infringement of copyright. The Consultation Paper was made publicly available and anyone was free to make a submission on it.

NNI made a submission to the effect that our view of existing legislation is that the display and transmission of links does constitute an infringement of copyright and our existing copyright law should not be amended in the manner discussed in the Consultation Paper. We understand that some people do not agree with that interpretation of the law. Equally, there are others who do agree with it. As already indicated, the Committee itself acknowledged that there are divided views on this. We await, in due course, the final report from the Copyright Review Committee and await sight of whatever they might say or recommend on the point.

It is important, in fairness to us and our members, to specifically note here that the submission made on behalf of NNI to the Copyright Review Committee also expressly recognised that there is a distinction between the sending and receipt of links for personal use on the one hand and the sending and receipt of links for commercial purposes on the other (despite the fact that the same legal principles apply to both). NNI specifically stated that its members accept that linking for personal use is part of how individuals communicate on-line and that our members have no issue with that. Emphasis ours.

As Ingram points out, the statement from the group “confirms that it is lobbying to have Irish copyright laws define links as copyright infringement.”

As far as the distinction between personal and commercial use, where exactly is that distinction in today’s online world of social media, blogging, citizen journalism, and content creation and curation?

The whole thing is kind of ironic, because even many of the major media corporations of the world, would like to see more linking to their own properties. Look at this case from last year where a guy had to go to court for linking to copyright infringing content.

The argument about links has been going on for many years now. In the end, there is always the question, do links not drive traffic to the content in question? There are many publications on the web who would love to be linked to more (You can count us among them. By all means, link.). Why is the newspaper industry so resistant to the way of the web, even as the industry embraces it as a platform? Is it just that their content is so good that online-only publications could never match the quality? I’ve seen plenty of original reporting and breaking news coming from online-only outlets. I can’t think of too many who would try to charge for a link, or even a link and a snippet or quote or “text extract” within the bounds of ethical fair use.

What content is so good that people should pay for the right to link to it? Tell us what you think.

Now, when you’re composing a tweet, links (anything that’s clickable on the site) will appear blue – even before you hit send. That means hashtags, @ mentions, and even links to outside sites.

Before, you had to actually send your tweet in order to make your hyperlinks look like hyperlinks.

Although the highlighted links aren’t clickable, you can right-click and open them up in a new tab or window. This allows you to quickly glance at the other conversation surrounding a hashtag, or glance at the profile of someone you’re tweeting at before you hit the send button and make it final.

As of now, the new link highlighting is only live on desktop.

[via L.A. Times]

TorrentFreak reports that Google has quietly rolled out a new feature in its transparency reports that details how many false DMCA takedown requests it receives from copyright holders. Google details these false requests in a newly updated FAQ:

From time to time, we may receive inaccurate or unjustified copyright removal requests for search results that clearly do not link to infringing content. An independent, third-party analysis of how frequently improper and abusive removal requests are submitted was conducted in 2006.

Google then lists a number of examples of where copyright holders submitted false DMCA takedown requests. Here’s some of the better ones:

A U.S. reporting organization working on behalf of a major movie studio requested removal of a movie review on a major newspaper website twice.

An individual in the U.S. requested the removal of search results that link to court proceedings referencing her first and last name on the ground that her name was copyrightable.

A driving school in the U.K. requested the removal of a competitor’s homepage from Search, on the grounds that the competitor had copied an alphabetized list of cities and regions where instruction was offered.

None of these scenarios fell under DMCA regulations, and therefore Google did not remove them. These are just examples, but Google still receives erroneous DMCA takedown requests. Our own Web site, WebProNews.com, was subject to two false takedown requests at the hands of AMC over our coverage of The Walking Dead season 3 premier. Of course, the link was non-infringing as it linked to AMC’s own stream of the premier.

The takedown request levied at our site, and others, was most likely fueled by AMC looking for links that mentioned “The Walking Dead” and “free.” There’s no thought put into the suggestion that there may be legitimate free sources to watch these episodes. Strangely enough, none of the links were removed despite some links offering illegitimate copies of The Walking Dead.

This latest offering from Google serves to make the DMCA takedown process more transparent, but it probably won’t have any effect on the amount of takedown requests sent by rightsholders. Current laws don’t enforce repercussions for those who send false takedown requests so there’s no reason for rightsholders to use caution. If laws ever do change, it’s almost guaranteed that the amount of takedown requests would drop to the few hundred thousand a month it was at in 2011.