I have been going to SEO conferences for many years, and it seems Neil Patel was at every one of them...always laughing, joking, and having a good time. I went from obscurity to being somewhat well known on the web from 2003 to 2005 and Neil did the same, but started about a year later. In addition to learning so much about social media, Neil shares tips on Pronet Advertising , runs ACS SEO , and created a start up named Crazy Egg .

I was surfing around quite a bit today and came across many great blog posts that seem like they were meant to be more than blog posts. But there is too much content and not enough attention, so nobody cared. A marketer who has studied online marketing for nearly a decade got 0 comments and 0 inbound links for writing an 8 page blog post of quality content. Worse yet, the blog is about using content to build links, and the post shared link building tips.

I do not own too many .info domain names, but a couple of them that I do own have quite solid link profiles. In spite of this, on May 23rd all of my .info websites )including search-marketing.info( disappeared from Google's search results. And then the next day it returned. It may have just been a ranking glitch, but many other webmasters had the same issue... their .info domain names simply disappeared from Google . Why would such a thing happen?

Recently a fake story was highlighted in the mainstream media, and the SEO behind it also mentioned it on their site. The SEO space as a whole began debating the legitimacy of such tactics , and Matt Cutts even commented on the issue : My quick take is that Google's webmaster guidelines allow for cases such as this: "Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here )e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites(.

Michael VanDeMar highlights how one of his clients lost an important page to a new not so important page added to the Google index by Google filling out form boxes. If you have limited PageRank and a Google accessible search box you may want to block them from indexing output URLs via a robots noindex meta tag or your robots.txt file.

Kevin Lee is the CEO of the search engine marketing firm Didit and an engaging speaker at many search conferences. While he loves his PPC, he also sells SEO videos on his personal blog. We recently chatted back and forth via email, and decided it would be a good idea to do an interview. Here are the questions I asked Kevin and his answers. A recent report from a SEM firm highlighted that 55% of their clicks from the search portion of Yahoo!

Since buying out Yahoo! seemed too expensive, Microsoft is back again with another offer. Microsoft's Statement : In light of developments since the withdrawal of the Microsoft proposal to acquire Yahoo! Inc., Microsoft announced that it is continuing to explore and pursue its alternatives to improve and expand its online services and advertising business. Microsoft is considering and has raised with Yahoo! an alternative that would involve a transaction with Yahoo!

Amazon just created MP3 clip widgets that pay 10% payout on MP3 downloads. You can create a list of your favorites as content, while displaying ads. Those who run large communities may be able to make a decent income selling culture. Amazon.com Widgets If you are a member of our community I wrote a post about why I think Google Friend Connect is a bad idea for most web publishers . Andrew Johnson has a good post on why Yahoo! as a content company is a failing strategy .

Most Yahoo! Search Ad Clicks Are NOT From Yahoo! Danny Sullivan mentioned Efficient Frontier research which stated that 55% of Yahoo! Search ad clicks from last week were from syndication partners. Arbitrage Clicks Have Less Value If you normalize the above Yahoo! numbers you will see that search clicks convert nearly twice as well as their syndication traffic does. Imagine how ugly those numbers were before both Google and Yahoo! aggressively fought click arbitrage . Yahoo!

HP can spam the hell out of Google and Google engineers are afraid to do anything about it because they do not want to lose the associated AdWords ad budget. But if you follow HP's strategy it is called spam - and a Google engineer will smile while killing your site. It's just business. Unless you have a well known brand and/or established social relationships with thought leaders it is hard to get lasting quality links for less than a few hundred dollars each.

Roger Montti offers an insightful post on link building for new websites in 2008 . If you have no traction you need to find a way to buy/beg/borrow/steal attention. Use that exposure to spread content that turns people on / gets them excited / evokes an emotional response / ties in with their worldview and identity...and watch the links flow like wine. Debra mentioned how she sometimes has a hard time telling people that their sites will not get links because they are boring .

Google, which has arbitrarily forced its will to use nofollow on the web )and declared link buyers and sellers who do not use the tag as spammers( is buying a PageRank 7 link from SEMPO.org. You would think that if Google wants to set new proprietary standards they would follow them as well. And what better spot to start following them than with a trade organization promoting search engine marketing?

Microsoft decided to walk on the Yahoo! deal . After the sharp Yahoo! stock decline Monday, expect many shareholder lawsuits. The press release contained the following open letter to Jerry Yang. Dear Jerry: After over three months, we have reached the conclusion of the process regarding a possible combination of Microsoft and Yahoo!. I first want to convey my personal thanks to you, your management team, and Yahoo!'s Board of Directors for your consideration of our proposal.

Yahoo! may announce a deal to carry Google ads in the next week, according to the WSJ : While a broad search ad pact would likely attract intense antitrust scrutiny, the options Google and Yahoo are discussing include a nonexclusive arrangement that they believe could satisfy regulators, say the people familiar with the matter.

I just wrote a ~15 page article aimed at helping SEOs estimate how much a top rank in Google is worth . I would appreciate any feedback you have on making it better. If you like it please hook me up with a Del.icio.us or Stumble. Any and all mentions are appreciated.

Mark Glaser recently queried me about improving the SEO of PBS's MediaShift . The tips and advice I gave him apply to most blogging and media websites. The piece was well balanced, with information from Poynter, and he mentioned Joost's great article on Newspaper SEO .

Summize is a conversational search engine which allows you to search Twitter in realtime. Useful for finding customer feedback even when people do not provide it directly to you. For example, I just found out that for some people the Rank Checker Firefox extension stopped working after the last update. So I just reverted the extension and am awaiting another update from the developer.

Welcome to GoogleNet! Hitwise recently mentioned that Google controls over 1/3 of UK web traffic . With that much usage data, if you were Google, would you use usage data in your relevancy algorithms?

Here is a 10 minute and 46 second flash video about how SEO is becoming less mechanical and more social. So far we have about a half dozen members only videos like this one...I am trying to make about one new one each week.

I just read Google and The Value of Web Supremacy , comparing Google to the history of Venice. It is a great blog post well worth a read. Google's position on top of the web allows them to monitor any area of growth, and give themselves the first slot for any area they want to compete in. If they are uncertain of their competitive positioning they can list a couple other competitors alongside until their internal stats show their product is superior.