It’s time for another ‘7 Days of Search and Social‘. Conference season is well and truly in swing now and so the blogging world seems to slow down, though there’s lot’s of ‘live blogging’, something we don’t tend to cover here. Other than that, the whole Google Places shake-up seems to have had the most buzz last week.

Let’s see what else what happening;

Lead Story

Duplicate content Is NOT a penalty

Over the years, among the many misconceptions that irk me, the whole ‘duplicate content penalty’ one has to be up there on my list. A lot of times folks confuse a filter with a penalty, and that’s the case here. Fortunately Barry was reporting on a thread that helps clear this up;

Google Says "Don’t Be Afraid" Of Duplicate Content

Yes my friends, it is only a penalty if it is a self imposed one where you screwed things up so badly that Google can’t sort out which is the original/proper page for something. There is no actual penalty beacuse you HAVE duplicate content. That’s not the case and never has been (although it might be used to profile a potentially spammy site).

Ok? Great… let’s get on with this week’s news.

Quick Nav Links – Talk of the Town – Geek Central – Social Search – Going Vertical – Videos – Tools – Patents -

Talk of the Town

Google Makes Major Change and Destroys Their Own Search Engine- Melissa was among the many that were LOSING IT over the Google Places changes which saw them dominating the local SERPs.

If You’re Reading This, Google Hates You- was a fun little (tongue in cheek?) ride from one of the analysts at Bruce Clay. Seriously, this guy should write there more often, I enjoyed this one.

Find the Question to your Yahoo Answers! – is a great post that uses a technique you should be considering if you aren’t already. Knowing what questions users are going to ask (a search engine) is half the battle. This is a great way to get ahead on that.

How To Clean Up Your Link Profile- Julie was on a rampage (over 4 months) to clean up some 600 bad links. Tune it to find out how it went.

Google Offers First US-Based Online Site Clinic- Google get’s into the SEO clinic game? Huh. I wonder if Hell froze over too?

Google: Different Algorithms Can Apply To Different Sites At Different Times- also, like the lead story, from the ‘no brainer’ category. But worth mentioning because far too many SEOs refer to it as ‘the algo’ when in fact there are many. Read it. Know it. Stop spreading mis-information.

Creating and Using an SEO Editorial Calendar – we don’t really see the Wolf (Michael Gray) here too often, but this post was a good one and most certainly worth sharing – almost put it into the tools section, but felt it was worth highlighting.

How Not to Sully Infographics with Drunkenness: Lessons in Link Building- yuppers, this one is actually as much fun as it sounds. While I think infographics are over-done at this point, the post itself was deffo a fun read.

What’s Google Suggest Telling You About Your Site – What are You Doing About It?- good to see Jim back writing again. This time out he’s looking at Google suggest and it’s worth noting that there is every chance personalization plays into GS, but a great post none-the-less.

The Dangers in Proclaiming the Demise of SEO – Barry Adams was giving out some stern warnings about the downside of playing the ‘SEO is Dead’ game. It’s far more than just link bait, it can hurt the entire industry.

How to See Google Search Results for Other Locations- and last but not least, this post helps the geeky among us that haven’t spent time sorting out the referrer strings in Google – very handy, bookmark it.