by Mike Moran Some of you might know that I like to take Augusts off. While not completely off the grid (I still clean out my e-mailalthough I don't reply muchand I still moderate comments on my blog), I don't write any blog posts (on my blog or here at Search Engine Guide), and I stay off Twitter. I also don't read any blog posts or check out what others are saying on Twitterit's a social media fast. Each year, it's interesting to find myself picking up a newspaper again.

We're making Search more intuitive by taking user context and applying it to the search experience. Today we are introducing an enhanced Yahoo! Search Assist, providing suggestions geographically closer to you as you type your query. Sitting here in our Yahoo! headquarters at Sunnyvale, if I type "santa" from Yahoo! headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, I get "santa clara county" as the first suggestion.

Twitter's link service, t.co, is designed to make shortened links easier to read and safer to follow. Initial tests have gone well, too. But an announcement that Twitter will start tracking every t.co link users click has caused a bit of a stir. Twitter sent an email to users last night that in part stated, "In the coming weeks, we will be expanding the roll-out of our link wrapping service t.co , which wraps links in Tweets with a new, simplified link. . . .

The Associated Press has revealed some new guidelines for its reporters with regards to credit and attribution. The guidelines come in the form of a letter from AP Senior Managing Editor Mike Oreskes . The guidelines apply to AP reports in print, broadcast, and online news, and stress the importance of giving proper attribution to other publications that break stories. "We should provide attribution whether the other organization is a newspaper, website,

Remember back in 2001, during the good old days (of the internet) when you could actually use Google Adwords as a means to drive quality traffic to your website, at an extremely low investment to the advertiser? Back when niche keywords cost .05 - .20 per click and if you really wanted to open up your pockets and bid on broader terms, you would pay .25 - .75 per click. Now days you would be so lucky to find a niche where you can pay under $1.00/click.

After almost a decade of being in a search partnership, Google and AOL have announced this morning that they have come to a five-year contract renewal and expansion agreement. With this partnership, Google will continue to power AOL's searches in addition to providing mobile search. Also, YouTube has agreed to to bring AOL videos to its site as part of the expansion. This renewal can definitely be seen as a win in Google's column,

AOL said today it has signed a five-year search advertising deal with Google renewing its partnership with the search company that dates back to 2002. Under the terms of the deal Google will provide search services to AOLs content network and properties, in exchange for a revenue-sharing arrangement between the two companies which will be expanded to include mobile search and YouTube. Today is another important step in the turnaround of AOL, said Tim Armstrong,

Because it is our nature to do such things, most of the world has moved on from the anger or whatever was experienced during the BP Deepwater Horizon oil mess in the Gulf of Mexico. There are still pockets of activism but the mainstream has started to flush that story out of its faulty and extremely short-termed memory and is moving on to something that is deemed more current and important like maybe politics (Oh, please God help us!).

by Stoney deGeyter Much like life, websites have to adapt over time. When they don't, they risk becoming stagnant, outdated, stale, and boring. As times change, so should your content. Content that was once relevant becomes irrelevant or in need of an update, old products get dumped in favor of new products, and data becomes outdated and needs to be replaced. There are any number of reasons why content needs to be changed, freshened up, or removed altogether. But rarely,

PeopleBrowsr shared a rather interesting report with us this week, looking at privacy related tweets during the center of this year's Facebook "privacy storm." The firm studied the public's reaction to Facebook's open graph-related announcements that set off the majority of the Facebook privacy controversy back in April. Are you concerned for your privacy as a Facebook user? Let us know .

For any organisation targeting a Russian audience, knowing and understanding Yandex is key to success in the country. The homegrown search engine is the clear market leader in Russia, and is showing little sign of relinquishing any of this share to Google, or any other competitors. Eugene Lomize, Head of Advertising Technologies at Yandex will be speaking at the International Search Summit in both Seattle and London , where he will talk about the online market in Russia,

Search Marketing isn't all that different than traditional marketing. And, just like the physical market, you have a plethora of vehicles from which to choose. Optimizing your efforts can get a little confusing, so look to the traditional Marketing Mix to help a bit. P Number 1: Product The end-result. In the Internet world, we'll call this the user's interaction with the website being promoted. I want to look at it this way for sake of including all types of websites,

A couple of weeks ago I took a look at some examples of how brands collect and leverage Tweeted feedback - which has a positive effect: This creates favorable social media context around the brand (and thus makes it "friendlier"); This engages users to promote the company social media profiles (by adding them to friends, sharing, etc) This makes the brand more trust-worthy (as Twitter testimonials are easier confirmed and verified).

Twitter has launched its official iPad app . There's a bit more to this than the standard mobile Twitter app. "Twitter for iPad takes advantage of the iPad's fluid touch interface, letting you move lots of information around smoothly and quickly without needing to open and close windows or click buttons," says Twitter's Leland Rechis. When you tap a tweet in this app, it opens a pane, and depending on the content of that tweet, you can open videos, photos, articles, etc.

Yesterday, Steve Jobs announced Apple's foray into the world of social networks with the iTunes centric Ping service. Maybe I am experiencing some social network fatigue, but despite this probably being a good idea, I am not sure just how people will jump in even if the "water is fine". The picture below hits the highlights of the service in that now familiar Apple announcement / press event look. TechCrunch reports It's like "Facebook and Twitter meet iTunes,

Aaron Goldman is an accomplished digital marketer that I know through MediaPost's Search Insider Summit conference. He reached out to me while writing his new book, "Everything I Know About Marketing I Learned from Google", and asked if I'd like to contribute. Such a request is a great honor to me but unfortunately, I never did end up sending anything to Aaron even though he was incredibly patient and went out of his way to make it easy.

At Apple's music event yesterday, where the company launched a new version of iOS, a new version of iTunes with a new social network (Ping), a new line of iPods, and a new version of Apple TV, Steve Jobs took a shot at Google involving numbers of smartphone activations. Last month, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that Android gets over 200,000 devices a day. "People throw out a lot of numbers about how many devices they're activating per day," Jobs is quoted as saying.

Posted by randfish It's been a wild few weeks at the mozplex. Today wrapped up the amazing mozinar with our half-day tools training just in time to launch the new version of SEOmoz. Should we slow down this crazy pace? Nah. If you're feeling a sense of deja vu, don't worry; it's perfectly normal. We're the same old moz, but with a new look, faster loading pages and a surprising amount of new functionality. Let's walk through it together, shall we?

Texting may be the most popular mode of communication between men, but for men under forty, Facebook beats out phone, Twitter and even email. The result comes from "The Great Male Survey," a study conducted by Ipsos OTX for AskMen.com. eMarketer boiled the responses down into a nice chart that shows Facebook gaining on texting as you move from young teens up to the 20 somethings. By thirty, Facebook becomes just as important as texting and incredibly,

The way the search engines operate is almost always changing. Sometimes the changes happen while we sleep and sometimes we are given a heads up way in advance so that we can prepare for the blow. Regardless building links is always going to be an integral part of building up a business online. In a recent blog post Google gives their advice on some ways to build up nice quality links pointing to your website in order to get on Google's good side.