Web buzzed yesterday with talk about Google Buzz. A lot of people I know have already got Google Buzz. If you haven’t, check out this write up by RWW.

Google Buzz has a feature called ‘image viewer’. In the demo it was showed that the image viewer fetches image from external sources Picasa and Flickr and display the images in full size within Google Buzz. I with others was concerned that Google might be pulling off images from ANY webpage instead of just Picasa and Flickr. This would not help websites with a lot of images as Google will ‘steal’ their traffic. I tested this with a few different websites and found that this is not the case with websites other than Picasa and Flickr.

Another thing I noticed that there are 2 ways to add links to GBuzz. One of the way is better than the other because it provides leverage with the anchor text. Surprisingly I did not see ‘nofollow’ attribute on Google profiles for the links shared using Google Buzz. I haven’t looked deep into it but if it is true, it will be helpful with SEO. Checkout the video below for a demo of how to add the link.

We get this question a lot. A lot of webmasters and marketing managers are generally confused about getting links from paid directories. Does Google see it as a paid link? Why do so many people add links to paid directories? Here is the answer from Google’s Matt Cutts in a video:

Think before choosing a paid directory. There are a few professional paid directories which can help you get backlinks and add up to your page rank. At the same time there are several paid directories which may harm your rankings than helping you out with them.