Last week, J.C. Penney made the news for plummeting  in Google rankings for everything from “area rugs” to “grommet top curtains”. Turns out the retail site had a number of suspicious links pointing at it that could be traced back to a link network intended to manipulate..

Here’s a roundup of today’s live blogging and coverage of SES London 2011 Day 3. If I missed your site’s coverage, please make sure to leave a note in the comments.

Photographer Tristan Savatier, aka loupiote, posted a thread at the Google Webmaster Help thread saying Google’s new mobile image search makes it way to easy for people to steal your images. He said it is confusing for normal people to not end up stealing your images. Try it out and you will see.

Like “seat guru for hotel rooms,” was my immediate thought; Room 77 is a search engine for hotel rooms.

A new ad rotation setting in AdWords lets you choose to show ads you expect to provide the highest conversions rate, rather than receive the highest click-through rate, Google announced via its Inside AdWords blog. To use the new “optimize for conversions” setting, you must have Conversion Tracking in your account, because Google uses data from that tool “to determine which ad is the most likely to receive conversions.” If Google doesn’t have enough data to make a decision, AdWords will show an ad most likely to receive clicks. Click to read the rest of this post…

Twitter had played an enormous role in the recent protests in Africa. This was evident and a reason for why the Egyptian government shut down Internet services during the Egyption protests . An activist and active Twitterer from Iran has created a Google map of the violence and protests and shared it publicly to chronicle the protest reports on the ground as they happen

I was recently involved with an interesting situation with (yet another) large brand falling out of the good graces with Google.

Overstock.com was enjoying some great rankings earlier this year. Unfortunately for Overstock, Webmaster World began examining why they were seeing such great rankings for numerous common terms, a review which led to yet another mainstream news organization “outing” a major retailer for linking practices. Last night, the Wall Street Journal revealed that Overstock was boosting their rankings by “encouraging websites of colleges and universities to post links to Overstock pages so that students and faculty could receive discounts on the shopping site

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been hesitant on writing this article because I felt that I might end up feeding the ranting mill, but to save you from all the twitching and wincing, I felt that a simple statement will drive my point: “Traditional companies/marketers should stop trying. Period.” Trying to go online that is. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not discouraging traditional businesses from going digital.

Android smart phone owners have been waiting for the Gingerbread, the latest operating system upgrade. Android 2.3 is deploying now and gives users new interface features and better application and power management features.