Everyone who is popular gains detractors along the way. And detractors tend to flock together and vote for other people who share their opinions . That trend virtually guarantees any valuable brand will have dirt ranking somewhere in the search results. The more valuable the brand gets the more people who will gun to unearth the dirt. With so much competition for attention, many publishers believe they need to offer bold predictions quickly in order to be remarkable.

Last week I got this via email Hello, How would you like getting a logo's )or( icon's )or( seo report )or(template )or( Banner )or( Article )or( Header designed free of cost for your website. We are giving away these services as a promotional measure for free of cost. In return we need a link at your site for each services at home or internal page)Except link,resources,directory pages(.

After they bid low and lost the C block of wireless spectrum Google has started talking to the media about using unlicensed whitespace. From the WSJ : Google said that the white space, located between channels 2 and 51 on TV that aren't hooked up to satellite or cable, offer a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to provide ubiquitous wireless broadband access to all Americans." In addition,

Idiocracy is a disturbing movie about marketing leading to a dumbing down of society. In many ways, marketing seems to be heading down that path. Using Twitter today made me further appreciate something Nick Carr mentioned, that as we use computers more we begin to think and act like computers. Short bursts. Logical but detached. Devoid of context. Always engaged in something, never fully engaged. Doing whatever is in front of us, etc.

Google's leaked documents defining spam state: Final Notes on Spam When trying to decide if a page is Spam, it is helpful to ask yourself this question: if I remove the scraped )copied( content, the ads, and the links to other pages, is there anything of value left? if the answer is no, the page is probably Spam. Lets take a look at a typical Mahalo page mahalo.

I am nearly complete with a couple big projects I was working on for the last couple months )site re-launch and another secret project(, and wanted to try a fun viral blogging experiment. If you ever wanted to interview me, or wanted me to guest post for your blog now is your chance. You can choose the topic)s( and I will try my best to answer your interview questions or write a post for your site.

The First Rule of Marketing Some people hype transparency as the only effective solution for long-term sustainable marketing success. After they are already successful they can hype such false ideals and get praised for them, which only adds to their misguided notion of marketing. The truth is everyone wants to be influenced, but nobody wants to feel like they were influenced .

John Battelle riffs on how Yahoo!, Microsoft, and AOL are screwing up by following in Google's footsteps trying to create huge ad platforms, while ignoring their brand ad strength. And AdAge asks if we may one day see a web free of push display ads . If traditional ads become less effective, we will still end up trusting ads that are links that look just like content. How to article linkbait, user generated content ,

Michael Arrington, writing about how many blog networks are trying to raise capital, describes the natural state of linking on the web : And now that the big guys in the Gang are being injected with capital, hiring tens of employees and expanding their businesses, they suddenly have a lot more to lose. Linking is never done just because. Rather, links are your political capital that must be expended appropriately.

A couple friends have launched contests offering a chance to win a free 3 month trial of our SEO training program. Learn more about the contests from ChrisG and WinningTheWeb .

Some tools exist because they are valuable and remove market friction. Others exist because they are perceived as being valuable, even if they are actually value destroying, or only valuable in rare circumstances. Valuable Tools of the Trade Outside of paying for a domain name, hosting, site design, and buying a few links you could create )an ad supported( business online virtually free. Blogs are easy to post to, easy to subscribe to, and easy to comment and interact with.

Because I own BlackHatSEO.com and spent literally 1 day building and marketing it, a year ago a reporter writing for The London Times decided to do a feature article about me. Hey I rank #1 and own the exact match URL so I must be the guy, right? Well maybe ) just don't ask Matt! (...but bonus good deal for me on getting the feature, other than some of the regretful out-of-context quotes that were attributed to me. More recently,

Select Distribution I recently mentioned the Sigur Rós Hiema video, which was featured on the YouTube homepage for a day and probably got about a million pageviews. An SEO Book reader named Satish discovered that after the video built up a lot of viral media and link exposure the video was set to private mode . Google video, as a DRM service, failed miserably.

It turns out the Drupal setup for comments per page leaves the maximum at 300, and our original introduction thread exceeded that ...so it is time for a new one. :( Who are you? What do you do?

Some weekend reading... Business Strategy Want a list of the 10,000 most popular subjects on the web? Here is Wikipedia's 10,000 most viewed pages . Courtesy Wiki stats , mentioned in this Search Engine Land article . Hitwise shows plural keywords drive more traffic to shopping sites than singular terms. Perhaps singular versions tend to be more navigational and brand related, whereas plural terms are more informational and transactional in nature.

Have Your Say! Insert your message in the next Brave New Films video for $199 - not that I am saying you should, but 5 or 10 years ago it would have been hard to imagine this level of fan integration into the funding, creation, and promotion of documentaries. Where are we going to be in another 10 years? Will this video get 500,000 views on YouTube? Might this $199 be a cheap ad buy for people looking to appeal to this demographic?

I was not going to leak the document publicly until others did and it was cited by other popular sources, but given that SEL blogged about the remote quality rater document, now is a fine time to mention the best weekend reading any SEO could wish for...here is the 43 page confidential Google document in PDF format. Make sure you download a local archive in case either or both go offline. And if you don't know why the document is so important for SEOs,

A couple days ago I posted asking readers to translate The Blogger's Guide to SEO . So far we already have 5 translations done: In addition to Bulgarian, Dutch, French, Italian, and Slovakian, readers have already volunteered for these languages: Portuguese )Portugal and Brazilian(, Spanish, Russian, Czech, Swedish, Tagalog, Croatian, Japanese, Romanian, Danish, German, simplified & tradisional Chinese, Croatian, Indonesian, Hungarian, and Polish.

[ Update: After I made this post, Google engineers fixed JoeAnt's PageRank. Thanks Google!] I just noticed that JoeAnt is now a PageRank 3. I have submitted hundreds of sites to hundreds of directories. For sites at the lower end of the quality spectrum )lets just call some of my experience academic( I simply would not submit them to JoeAnt, because I knew they would not list them. Many of those same lower quality sites were accepted in other directories like Business.

Big news by Google. After announcing the DoubleClick acquisition ) ~ 60% of the display ad market (, Google announced the launch of Ad Manager , a free ad management tool with built in yield optimization. Ad Manager allows you to sell direct ads, and then backfill with AdSense and/or any other ad networks you choose. Huge for Google for 5 reasons: minimizes the value and risk of competition from larger ad exchanges like Right Media, smaller start ups like the Rubicon project,