In years past Consumer Reports WebWatch studies showed that consumers struggled to differentiate ads from organic search results and that "more than 60 percent of respondents were unaware that search engines accept fees to list some sites more prominently than others in search results." Since those studies Google has changed the background color on top ads from blue to a light yellow color that is hard to notice on some monitors.

I have been spending a lot of time building out other sites, doing interviews, and playing in our member's only forums...this post is a list of some recent interesting links. Google's Scott Huffman highlighted some of the search quality evaluation process at Google . His post )as well as the older leaked search evaluation documents ( should be required reading for all professional SEOs. I did a quick run down of some SEO tools over at Blogoscoped .

Aaron Wall is a search engine optimization consultant at Clientside SEM and the author of the SEO Book blog. Aaron lives in Oakland, California. This time he takes a look at the top SEO tools. The number of internet marketing tools launched over the past couple years has been staggering. Many of them are both free and highly valuable. SEO, which was once considered a bit of a seedy niche, has grown with search to become a mainstream marketing practice, with.

I just came across one of the funnier SEO emails I have ever read. When I shared it with my wife we both laughed out loud, so I thought I would share it with you. Personally identifiable information has been removed to protect the guilty. Hi, _ are looking for sites that would be interested in publishing content on behalf of a number of the UK's major brands, including the likes of _ and _ and _. For a site such as _ we'd be prepared to pay up to £30 per article a month,

Great article in the NYT over the weekend about an ad arbitrage directory named Sourcetool, which Google punted from the AdWords program. A couple quotes: When I pressed Mr. Fox about Sourcetool, he refused to tell me why the algorithm had problems with the site. When I asked him why the business.com site was in the algorithm's good graces but Sourcetool's wasn't, he wouldn't tell me that, either. All I got were platitudes about the user experience.

When was Quintura launched? What gave you the idea to launch it? What problems were you trying to solve by launching it? Quintura was founded in August 2005 and released its first search application in November of that year. One year later, we launched a web-based search. It was based on visual context-based search concepts that the founders had been developing since 1990s. Quintura was founded to solve several fundamental problems inherent with today's search engines.

I recently asked Matt Mullenweg if he would be up for doing an interview via email. He said sure, and here are his answers to the best questions I could come up with. Thanks again for doing the interview Matt! How did you get into web programming? What made you decide to start working on WordPress? I had started off pretty badly with Frontpage and Dreamweaver.

Now that Peter Da Vanzo has joined the site, we have another writer and can spend a bit more time on the blog. In the past some of my most popular blog posts came out of feedback from readers. What topics would you love to see us cover? Nearly any SEO/PPC/blogging/internet marketing questions are fair game )although we won't do site reviews, or explain specifically why site X is ranking or why site Y does not rank(.

When I first started blogging I tried to learn from and emulate 3 of my favorite bloggers: Seth Godin , Peter Da Vanzo , and Steven Berlin Johnson . A large part of the success of this site was learning from those guys. Recently I was lucky enough to hire on Peter Da Vanzo to help do some of the writing on this site. He has been blogging about search since 2002 on Search Engine Blog , which officially makes old school. Please give Peter a warm welcome to the site!

Shoemoney is giving away a free ticket to ThinkTank , a free form gathering about Internet marketing on September 26th through 28th. My wife and I will be attending as well. Check out the official Think Tank site for more information. An SEO Book reader has ported over SEO for Firefox to make an Opera SEO extension . I have not tried it yet, but if you are an Opera fan let me know what you think of it.

Search is the New Operating System People far smarter than I have talked about the web becoming an operating system, and search being at the center of how we access the cloud . What better way for Google to position themselves as the C prompt than to turn the address bar into a search box? I think operating systems are kind of an old way to think of the world. They have become kind of bulky, they have to do lots and lots of different )legacy( things.

IAC recently broke up into 5 separate companies - LendingTree, Interval International, Ticketmaster, Home Shopping Network, and new IAC. Barry Diller thought that splitting up the company would lower uncertainty associated with the company and allow the core company to trade at a richer multiple, but that has not been the case, as noted in this WSJ article : Stripping out $1.3 billion of net cash on the balance sheet,

Sugarrae has a great post on how Google's policing of the web and pushing nofollow are undermining the social network and links that their relevancy algorithms are based upon. Worth reading from start to finish twice, then blogging about it. I would quote it, but a quote wouldn't do it justice. The core issue is that Google places too much weight on domain authority and PageRank. Is The Wall Street Journal easy to trust? Sure.

Brian Clark highlights various levels of reading , and how many bloggers fail to go beyond scratching the surface. Improved data visualization technologies are making it easier to transfer knowledge. I few posts back I mentioned that Amazon's Mechanical Turk would be good for some SEO processes. It looks like people are already using it to spam social media . As sock puppets rise up many of the broad/general social media sites will get polluted by increasing amounts of spam.

Last week Google announced a 3 year extension to their Firefox search distribution deal. This week Google announced Google Chrome, their new open source web browser, by sending an offline comic to Philipp Lenssen. If you are not at Google's scale you probably do not have fan blogs to run public relations through, but this is the sort of marketing big brands should be using to take advantage of their brand.

I recently worked with the fine folks at Wordtracker to create an ebook titled 50 Kick-Ass Keyword Strategies . Coming up with 50 unique and creative keyword research ideas was a bit more work than I thought it would be, but it was great fun to work with the Wordtracker crew - the feedback they gave to improve the content and the formatting they did were phenomenal.

Hope to see you there! Details here .

Recently a SEO working for a lead generation network sent me a letter in the mail alerting me that I could improve my website by linking to their site. They mention some of the large brands they send leads to and state that the link to their site from my site would improve my site's credibility, user experience, and offer our site visitors security since their lead generation form was secure.

Google announced that they are going to implement their Google Suggest search suggestion feature on Google.com. This change will help searchers find popular keywords that other searchers recently searched for. Short Term Search Influence on Search When this search suggest change is coupled with the recent launch of automatic matching and the new quality score update it may consolidate PPC competition against a smaller set of core industry keywords. Some outlier keywords,

A lot of wealth consultants and self help snake oil hucksters, the type who publish books and movies like Rhonda Byrne's The Secret, would like you to believe that if you believe something it will come true. This Amazon.com review sums up The Secret book/DVD nicely: Byrne's book is problematic on many levels. On it's face, it's a manipulative marketing tool meant to flatter, confuse and deceive. It's also pseudoscience at its best,