Sometimes people think I am a cynic when I mention things like "avoid Google Analytics," but you never really understand how Google perceives the web until they chose to try to wipe you out. Jay Weintraub recently posted about how he was permanently banned from AdWords because one of his employees accessed his company account AND their personal account from the same IP address. A person who has access to the company's AdWords accounts has their own AdWords account.

You can read a lot about what search engineers want by looking at how the search results change. You can learn a bit more by listening to how they try to guide / influence / manipulate the market while engaging in discourse. And you can learn a lot more by reading their guidelines for how they expect people to rate search quality. The reasons that the internal communication documents are so powerful are they do not discuss search from "in an ideal world" approach,

Reciprocal links really started getting punished after there were tools to automate link exchanges and link exchange hubs developed. Nofollow was a direct response to automated blog comment spam software. Directories really started getting punished after there were tools to automate submissions and there were lists of sites to submit to. Article directories started getting punished after there were tools to automate submissions and there were lists of sites to submit to.

My buddies over at Prospect MX made a cool link building chart . Great article about the rapid rise and fall of Geosign . Rae on why you can't just rely on content quality to do your marketing for you . Search Engine Strategies running a series of advertorial only sessions . Eeek. Wired considered it spamming when Search Engine Land mentioned that people can submit articles to the Wired How-to Wiki. That same Wired now offers a guide on how to 'Google Bomb' an Enemy .

Google Analytics came out with a novel benchmarking feature which compares your site's performance to other websites in your field. You can see this benchmark data ONLY IF you are willing to aggregate your data into the pool of anonymized data. The best sites in your industry probably are not using Google Analytics, and those who do are probably not benchmarking against average,

As free and infinite competition erodes the value of weak connections, a key to sustainably selling art is to reach out to 1,000 true fans : The key challenge is that you have to maintain direct contact with your 1,000 True Fans. They are giving you their support directly. Maybe they come to your house concerts, or they are buying your DVDs from your website, or they order your prints from Pictopia. As much as possible you retain the full amount of their support.

The line between being clever and giving out too much information, can be seen here .

Recent University of Iowa research concluded that blissfully ignorant shoppers are happier with their choices : "We found that once people commit to buying or consuming something, there's a kind of wishful thinking that happens and they want to like what they've bought," said assistant professor of marketing Dhananjay Nayakankuppam. "The less you know about a product, the easier it is to engage in wishful thinking. But the more information you have,

Recently Google's Kevin Marks was interviewed by cNet , where he said: OK, stop and think about your application. Do you really need to be a standalone site? Do you really want to write user registration code, or would you be better off taking your application and bringing these other sites where there are lots of users already and where they have already expressed both their personal information and their connections to other people?

The Federal Reserve is somewhat like a market maker, or at the very least a market influence, on the value of currency. Google acts in a similar value, placing value on and evaluating the value of information and collections of information. Reading this blog post about Ben Bernanke and replace words like credit and inflation with paid links and search spam and you can see )and perhaps even respect( how Google manipulates the press ,

Here are some interesting articles I recently came across. Tapping into unconventional link attributes - tips to evaluate the value of a link, including the fresh boost and the actual lasting value of the link. Beet.tv NYT report - Google traffic to NYT has doubled since unlocking their archives Microsoft Tracking Search and Browsing Behavior to Find Authoritative Pages - even without PageRank you can easily discover authoritative pages largely through tracking usage data.

The Disadvantages of Low End Outsourcing My History of Outsourcing Last year I lost thousands of dollars multiple times outsourcing projects to people who could "do them no problem" until time for showing the results came in, and that capital was simply wasted. At the lower end, where people will take your money and do nothing for you or offer services not worth paying for, there will always be a market where people are glad to take your money.

Yahoo! has guys like Jeremy Zawodny marketing their fresh new search platform , and yet they remain behind the competition. Microsoft jumped into the search field way later than Yahoo! did, so why is it that Microsoft rankings for well promoted sites often roughly track Google rankings, while Yahoo! still has yet to give many of these sites an opportunity to rank? Here are some examples of what I am talking about )with URLs expunged to protect the guilty(.

Naive Excitement When you are new to the field of SEO there is a certain excitement in starting a site from scratch and growing it out into a flourishing enterprise. You ask someone to link to you and when they do you get excited. When you get cited without asking for it you get excited. And when the rankings start to show up you get excited. At some point you may even develop an irrational emotional attachment to some of your websites. I know I have.

One of the biggest things holding back Yahoo! Search is their preference for Yahoo! content. As a shift in strategy, Yahoo! announced they are opening up their search results to third party data integration. Instead of a typical search result, some of the results with third party data may look like this Google has largely been pulling in third party data and doing their best to keep that traffic on the Google network. To appreciate how aggressive this has been,

A normal business practice is to treat symptoms as problems and come up with a wide array of bogus solutions , but content that asks why actually solves problems and creates real value. Once you look at content creation from that perspective, there are a lot of great content ideas that you will not find on many competing sites simply due to limitations tied to their business interests, or their lack of interest in providing real value to the market.

AdWords has become a black box beyond the means of many small advertisers. To help some advertisers automate their accounts tools like free conversion tracking and CPA based bidding have came about. But all the tools that help enhance the perceived value of search ads and the value of conversions does nothing for brand ads or the other ads people see before searching and buying. Content ads, which were relatively expensive when AdSense first came out,

One of the things that a lot of thought leaders do is inspire people. It is easy to believe when they give you something to believe in. I recently stumbled across this page . Although it is just text, to me it seems just as powerful as listening to Barack Obama speak. It is not even the words that matter...it is the underlying tone and enthusiasm. Sometimes I am a bit too cynical for my own good. Far too often I place principal ahead of growth strategies.

Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, announced his next book Free, in a featured Wired article . Speaking of free stuff, Patrick Altoft created a free Wordpress plugin to track which pages on your blog get crawled most frequently. Joost De Valk has a free newsletter dedicated to Wordpress plugins .

I recently finished reading Nicholas Carr's The Big Switch , and as a longtime fan of his Rough Type blog asked if he would be up for doing an interview. He said sure, and here is the interview. What is The Big Switch about? It's about the interplay between technology and economics and how it influences the way people live and work. I look at how the electric grid transformed industry and society a hundred years ago, which is a cool story in itself,