cNet recently covered a new Microsoft Search research paper on BrowseRank [PDF] . The theory behind the concept of BrowseRank is that rather than using links )PageRank( as the backbone of a relevancy algorithm, you could look at actual usage data from hundreds of millions of users. Since there are more web users than webmasters BrowseRank would be a more democratic system, but many users are mislead and/or easily influenced by social media, public relations,

Like so many pursuits in life, it is easy for blogs to get stuck in an intermediate rut. I know, because I've been there. My site, Herbivoracious.com , has hit several plateaus in its first year of life. Each time the visits started to level out, I debated whether it was worth the effort to keep writing if only a few people were going to read it. Naturally I wondered what it would take to get more exposure for my site.

I gave my mom my old weight loss blog a few years back. In spite of publishing it on its own domain )smart( I was still using Blogger )dumb( when I gave it to her. It is not that Blogger is bad, but that Wordpress offers so many customization options that allow you to effectively rank for a wider array of keywords, and thus earn more per word. These are the steps I did to help move her blog over from Blogger to Wordpress.

Many businesses are still stuck around the concept of working on weekdays while working little on weekends. I actually like working weekends and then try to take some time off during the work week. Why? Many companies time news that they do not want discussed. For instance, at 1:02AM this morning the WSJ published an article titled Two More Banks Fail . During the weekday it is hard to beat others to the scoop, but it is much easier to do on weekends.

Squidoo, Mahalo, eHow, EzineArticles, etc etc etc just got validation for their business models and competition for the ad network that helps them monetize their sites. Google today launched their Knol project: The key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author )or group of authors( who put their name behind their content. It's their knol, their voice, their opinion. We expect that there will be multiple knols on the same subject,

Squidoo, Mahalo, eHow, EzineArticles, etc etc etc just got validation for their business models and competition for the ad network that helps them monetize their sites. Google today launched their Knol project: The key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author )or group of authors( who put their name behind their content. It's their knol, their voice, their opinion. We expect that there will be multiple knols on the same subject,

James from Semvironment created a plug in to automatically email webmasters you link to from within Wordpress blog posts. When he launched it, the opening post sent me an email Hi! We linked to your website in our post: Link Builder for Wordpress - Download it Now! . Please stop by and check it out, subscribe to our blog and if you find something useful on our site or blog - we would welcome a link back anytime .

I recently had a useful web based service built but kept forgetting to use it on a daily basis. I set my IE homepage to that tool so I would remember to use it. Since then it has helped up make some great business decisions )as well as add context showing how good or bad some past decisions were(. I recently added support suite software to this site,

Afilias had submitted a proposal to ICANN for the .INFO gTLD that would allow them to shut down domain names at will if they consider them abusive. The proposal was approved . The problem they have is not going to be solved by this strategy. The value of high end .info domains was just diminished because now the registry can take them away from you for anything that they consider abusive,

We recently compiled a 6 page robots.txt primer and added a robots.txt generator and robots.txt analyzer to our suite of free SEO tools .

Edward Lewis runs SEOConsultants.com , one of the more well known and trusted directories in the SEO space. When I first started learning SEO about 5 years back Edward sent me an email letting me know that something I wrote was incorrect. He was right and I made sure I fixed the issue, but he was also quite abrasive. When Traffic Power was spreading their slime through the SEO industry, Edward Lewis was one of the main people helping to fight them off.

Rich Schefren recently interviewed Dan Ariely . The recording is freely available online here . In the call Dan highlights how companies can increase perceived value and get their customers to spend more by creating a decoy offer, which is discussed in the first chapter of his Predictibly Irrational book. The decoy marketing offer introduces false choices to make another choice look more appealing. We have a hard time valuing offers,

One of the easiest ways to scale a business model is to rely on user generated content. This effectively turns readers into writers )free content( and marketers )brand evangelists promoting their own work(. But at the same time it makes it hard for readers to keep reading all the content produced from those sources. We subscribe to personalities and known shared biases. I read everything that John Andrews writes. I read everything Barry Ritholtz writes.

The SEO market is flush with free information, but many times the free information is factually incorrect, which can cost a lot of money to anyone building a business based on such information. The cost is not immediately readily transparent, but eventually it appears. By the time it does many people who lost money from it may not be aware of what happened, as their attention is already elsewhere.

Just as it is good to invest in structural change it is good to invest in restructuring debates and reframing ideas . When we consume media one of the biases we often overlook is our own. When NPR created their Budget Hero commentors quicky stated things like "it's too liberal" and "they used right wing think tank as a *credible* source." Such statements reveal as much or more about the reader as they do about the media.

6 fundamental laws for online publishing Most popular free online content contains factual errors, but it is still popular due to an affinity readers have for the author, and/or the ease of understanding what they are writing. The more you know the easier it is for you to denounce someone who knows less than you in your field, though doing so will rarely build brand loyalty, and often attracts the wrong kinds of customers. Call this phenomena the Threadwatch effect.

A bunch of goodies recently. I still have about 5 pages worth of links saved up, but figured it was a good time to share some of the new and the old. Rather than pounding out 10 blog posts I figured it would be easier to write a nice list of attention worthy items. The Google AdWords Keyword Tool now displays numerical estimates for search volumes , rather than range bars that they showed in the past. Eric Enge recently interviewed Yahoo! Search's Priyank Garg .

I recently won a great domain name at an auction. Spent the money, waited a few days, and got the domain management details. I logged into my domain management account, and searched around the site...no details on how to transfer a domain name away from their site - no transfer authorization code anywhere. The only article I found was one on ICANN rules, stating that you could email them if you needed help locking or unlocking your domain names - but nothing about auth codes.

This is a guest post by John Hargaden from wevolution.ie , which is a follow up to our post on selling SEO consulting services . a chip in the sugar Try not to look like a country bug. Blend. Blend in. - Flik, A Bug's Life The complexity of SEO, the forensic nature of parsing words and matching lines, is a hard sell. How do you describe it without sounding like Lou Grant, as opposed to a can-do service provider? PPC is transparent, measureable, a better market to focus on.

Why Traditional SEO Consulting Usually Sucks I do not like doing much traditional SEO client work, and see the business model as having limited longterm value for most SEO consultants. The best consultants could usually make more promoting their own sites and brands than they would working for clients. Most prospective SEO customers are not ranked well because their businesses are unremarkable and have little to no competitive advantage. Worse yet,