First, A Word on Spam Conduits Dave Naylor introduced me to the term Spam Conduit a while ago. The term is basically the description for a page on a high quality domain being used to gain search rankings, thus traffic. Spammers use these doorways to dump traffic from third party sites onto their affiliate sites. This is what allegedly "dumb" spammers are doing when they create submissions on social sites that do not pass link equity. They were never after the link equity.

This post is in reference to SEO services as a business model, however many of the ideas can be juxtaposed to businesses and their utilization of the method for marketing So much gets said about SEO and its relevance or even legitamacy. Most of this is purely linkbait, and the SEO crowd is all to quick to fall into the trap. The arguements fall into three basic camps. 1.The SEO are scumbags camp, of which Derek Powazek became a member and then quickly left. 2.

Last week Asa Dotzler, Mozilla's director of community development, put out a link on his personal blog and stated: Here's how you can easily switch Firefox's search from Google to Bing. It was a pretty shocking move by a member of a company that has seen most of its revenue come from Google . It was a move brought on by concerns over the search giants view on privacy.

The citation method of ranking indexed content is flawed. It is based on human aid, and any technology based on the work of humans is always going to have flaws. Links are the product of what elicits an emotion from website owners, and the link builder that can tap these emotions is going to be able to manipulate the most important element in search rankings.

When Google announced their real time search additions, many were probably left unimpressed. After all, they are jumping on a bandwagon created by the popularity of Twitter's search platform. From an SEO perspective, however, the move excited me. It opens up a whole new world for savvy SEOs looking to compete in the always profitable business of trending search terms. There are several reasons I believe SEOs should be taking note of this addition: 1.

Five members of Search & Social will be in Vegas this week for Pubcon, and we are really psyched to meet SEJ readers and other people we have networked with online this year. The rest of our team will stay back and continue cranking out great content for SEJ and Internet Marketing initiatives for clients. Our team is hoping to start the networking before we even touch down in Vegas, and maybe that can begin in the comments thread of this post. Which five of us are going?

Today Twitter rolled out its retweet function on a limited basis: We've just activated a feature called retweet on a very small percentage of accounts in order to see how it works in the wild. Retweet is a button that makes forwarding a particularly interesting tweet to all your followers very easy. In turn, we hope interesting, newsworthy,

Playing around in Reddit tonight I found several threads being attacked by what appears to be an XSS )cross site scripting( virus. If you go to these threads and view the code being put out by the script, it will take over your commenting and replies for the thread outputing the same code. The best thing to do now if you are a Reddit user is to install No Script for Firefox.

Today Google announced a change to Google Maps called Place Pages . In their words: A Place Page is a webpage for every place in the world, organizing all the relevant information about it. By every place, we really mean *every* place â€" there are Place Pages for businesses, points of interest, transit stations, neighborhoods, landmarks and cities all over the world. You get into the Place Pages by clicking "more info" on a Google Maps search result.

Just an update, it looks as though another Twitter phishing attack is under way. The emails are claiming to have video of you, but send you to a phishing site to harvest your Twitter account info. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal .

I am on a panel today at SES San Jose called Social Media: White Hat vs. Black Hat. The description of the panel is as follows: Black hat techniques have long been criticized in search marketing: "Black hat" practices are now cropping up in social media. This panel takes a hard look at the right and wrong ways to go to market with a social media based marketing component, and how to spot early signs that you may be heading for trouble. Not biased at all.

Lisa Barone wrote a post this week lambasting companies that are too timid to get involved in social media, and rightfully so. The reality is that the conversation is going to happen with or without your engagement, and getting involved only allows you to address issues when they arise. ESPN this week banned sports reporters from using Twitter . Apparently the company is unaware that people are already discussing sports related content and ESPN,

Link building is by far one of the most important and often misunderstood elements of optimizing a site for search. Search & Social deals with clients on a daily basis who understand the need for links in general, but do not understand why they are needed, and definitely not how to evaluate their value or obtain them. Because of this I have decided to write a series of guides to different aspects of link building.

One large issue when running a business on or offline is training staff. The main issue that arises is whether you feel comfortable training your future competition. This is especially true in a service or consultancy based vertical, such as internet marketing. In the end, a well trained staff is an asset, and you cannot control whether your employees become your future competitors. So how do you go about training a competent internet marketing staff?

Brian Chappell of Ignite Social Media tells us how Google Alerts has added new functionality for RSS subscriptions.

I love Halloween. Mostly because its the one day everyone decides not to take themselves so seriously. To celebrate this holiest of holidays IMBroadcast.com has put together a spooky little contest. 1( Create a video of yourself in costume giving a great internet marketing tip. 2( Upload that video to the " Halloween SEO Tips " channel on IMBroadcast.

Search & Socia l announced the launch of the X-Browser SEO Tool last night. Co-Founder of Search & Social Jordan Kasteler and myself are very excited about this tool. X-Browser SEO Tool is a bookmarklet that can be utilized in either Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari or Opera, on both Windows and Mac operating systems, to find information vital to search engine optimization.

People learn in different ways. Our industry offers a plethora of learning and sharing communities based around linguistic learning styles including blogs, forums, Sphinn , and more. Our industry also offers many auditory learning resources in the form of Webmasterradio.fm and podcasts. Furthermore, our industry has also been among the earliest adopters of video, creating vlogs and paid video tutorials. In order to share these videos,

CNET's Stephen Shankland brought us an interesting article today on the projections of search advertising spend. Many have speculated that the weakend economic state could be a boon to the Internet sector, as businesses look for more cost effective marketing, and consumers look for better prices on goods. However some analyists disagree. Cowen analysts Jim Friedland and Kevin Kopelman stated: "We are lowering our estimates on Google, Yahoo, Amazon, VistaPrint, eHealth,