For years Google has championed the concept of an open web. Some took it as an altruistic sign, while others thought it was a convenient angle to commoditize complimentary business models . Google pushed for net neutrality but made wireless connections an exception . Why would they do that? Could it be they are invested in disrupting that market elsewhere ?

Google is growing *far* more complex. Page x can rank based primarily on the criteria for page y from that same site. So if you analyze the data behind the page which is showing up in the search results, in some cases you will be looking at the wrong data sets ! Google has typically displayed page titles in the search results. However there are now numerous exceptions to that . Google has aggressively pushed into regionalization and localization,

You need to be from the United States )or have access to a US IP address( to see this ad, but Yahoo! is testing monetizing their organic search results. An ad in the "organic" results? A sponsored shortcut? Say it ain't so . And that is *before* Google releases their vouchers program & other ad options which will frequently extend AdWords ads and further push down the organic search results. A bit of home cooking for the fellow IAC company.

The Golden Rule The golden rule: If you don't have something nice to say... don't say anything at all. What the Golden Rule Misses That is a guiding rule which generally helps people prevent themselves from wasting time and/or causing an issue by offending someone. But there are a couple things that are missed by that rule: It is easy to tell someone not to internalize stuff,

If Google is smarter than humans, we must accept that it should be able to help us answer the difficult questions about life that are vital toward making humans reach their full potential, such that we may help computers become smarter, so that we may reach the singularity. Sure some folks who took some funding are trying hard to build real communities around niches , but they are doing it all wrong. The folks who are doing it right seem to have the answer to everything.

I already mentioned this to our subscribers & affiliates, but we are pausing the ability to subscribe to our membership site so we can perform upgrades. We want to update Drupal, launch the new site design, and switch out the membership management software from what has become sorta big and hairy to a platform that is pre-packaged & thus more manageable. Doing this will allow us to accept payments on-site, offer a couple different tiers of access,

Ben Edelman did it again :( This time he highlighted how Google hard codes their search results : [When] we roll[ed] out Google Finance, we did put the Google link first. It seems only fair right, we do all the work for the search page and all these other things, so we do put it first... That has actually been our policy, since then, because of Finance. So for Google Maps again, it's the first link.

On the 22nd of October Google had an indexing issue and a separate algorithmic change . Some of the sites associated with the indexing glitch quickly came back, whereas others seemed like they were hosed for weeks and headed toward the path of perpetual obscurity. To give a visual of how dire this situation was for some webmasters, consider the following graphic. The blue line is Google search traffic and the gray is total unique visitors.

Not that long ago I highlighted how infographics were largely being destroyed as a link building tool by some unscrupulous folks who were offering to pay people to host the infographics to their sites - in a sense making the word infographic seem & feel like spam, just like paid links. :D After killing that source of links, the folks behind that work are proudly moving on to fake non-profits and awards for bloggers ,

Worth a click,

* If you think otherwise, do you care to debate the following video? "Perhaps the only lessons learned by the banks in the crisis is that the rules don't apply to them." Ain't that the truth. The video is completely accurate : Richard M. Bowen, former chief underwriter for Citigroup's consumer-lending group, said he warned his superiors of concerns that some types of loans in securities didn't conform with representations and warranties in 2006 and 2007. "In mid-2006,

When you get to *really* competitive keywords the results typically tend to be fairly stable because the cost of entry into the game is so high & many of the top players keep building additional signals of quality. You might get minor fluctuations from time to time, but large fluctuations on highly competitive keywords are fairly rare. Over the last day or 2 Google has done yet another algorithm change )the 3rd or 4th noticeable one in 2 weeks(,

When Bing launched, one of the interesting things they did to make the organic search results appear more relevant was to use link anchor text to augment page titles )where relevant(. This would mean if people searched for a phrase that was mostly in your title )but maybe your page title was missing a word or 2 from the search( then Bing might insert those words into the page title area of your listing if they were in some of the link anchor text pointing into your page.

Rich Skrenta has been at the core of search longer than I have been in the SEO market. He is famous for launching sites like DMOZ and Topix . His most recent project is a search engine called blekko , and I recently had a chance to chat with him about blekko, the web, and marketing. Blekko just launched publicly today . Be sure to check out their search engine , all their SEO features , and the Blekko toolbar . Most start ups fail.

Local is Huge Google's US ad revenue is roughly 15 billion & the size of the US Yellow Pages market is roughly 14 billion . Most of that money is still in print , but that shift is only accelerating with Google's push into local. Further, cell phones are location aware, can incorporate location into search suggest , and on the last quarterly conference call Google's Jonathan Rosenberg highlighted that mobile ads were already a billion Dollar market for Google.

Marin software manages about 5% of Google AdWords spend for clients, and they noticed that since Google Instant was unveiled, AdWords ad clicks are up 5% . Since the launch Google's Jonathan Rosenberg has mentioned that the impact on AdWords was "not material." I found the repeated use of those exact words suspicious and diversionary, and, as it turned out, with good reason!

Mike Mindel from Wordtracker has put together some nice free SEO overview videos for beginners in the industry.

Are exact match domains "too" powerful ? Not in my humble opinion. :( Sure across the entire web exact match domains can rank for a wide variety of keywords, but there are a couple things to think about when stating that... those rankings are spread across many different domains the bonus any domain gets is only relevant to their 1 exact match phrase Many domains are seen as exact match, but the keyword is popular precisely because the keyword is a brand )like eBay, Amazon.

Some sites have seen pretty drastic drops in Google search traffic recently, related to indexing issues. Google maintains that it is a glitch: Just to be clear, the issues from this thread, which I have reviewed in detail, are not due to changes in our policies or changes in our algorithms; they is due to a technical issue on our side that will be visibly resolved as soon as possible )it may take up to a few days to be visible for all sites though(.

or: How Shit my Dad Happens An online definition of Shit My Dad Says states, "In 2009, Justin Halpern , an aspiring comedy writer, was dumped by his girlfriend and moved back in with his parents. He began using Twitter as a way of keeping track of the brutally funny, off-color things his father said around the house." The popularity of Halpern's Twitter feed spread quickly. Soon, he had hundreds of thousands of followers. Today,