The Russian Federal Antimonopoly Service has blocked the $140 million acquisition of Begun , Russia's biggest contextual ad service. The FAS has fears that Google would dominate the Russian Internet advertising world. The Russian Federal Antimonopoly Service claims that Google has not submitted the proper and complete info on all the company employees working in Russia. Not having this info, according to the FAS,

For those of you who are not logged in yet, Google's third online webmaster chat is starting right now : Google Webmaster Chat : Tricks and Treats Enjoy :( [Yes,

Friday will mark the first Scary SEO event, a mini-conference which will be held at Deerfield Beach / Boca Raton, Florida and focus on an intimate setting of 50 attendees speaking, teaching and learning about SEO and Search Marketing. Scary SEO will begin on Friday with an opening keynote by Jeff Quipp of SearchEnginePeople , followed by the first panel on SEO Coding and Design featuring Jordan Kasteler and Carolyn Shelby . Following lunch,

Yahoo's NFL Shortcuts, which I wrote about last year, serves the latest stats and fantasy information for NFL players such as Tony Romo and T-Sizzle Terrell Suggs . Today however I tried doing a search for Tampa Bay Buccaneer running back Earnest Graham , and look at this, nothing!

Google is doing their share to encourage voter turnout for the 2008 US Presidential Elections )and other elections on that day( with a message to its AdWords users, reminding them to vote on November 4th.

Google, I am a very lucky American who is living the dream of owning or being a partner in several small businesses. Each of these businesses utilize Google's GMail and Google Docs, in an effort to cut down on infrastructure costs and keep an open line stream of communication between all employees, contractors and clients. Since Google has decided to take my account away from me,

Google GMail outages were reported last week, with a massive outage on Thursday which took Google 24 hours to recover. Today I am trying to log into my GMail account, which I use for about everything apps, docs, and GMail related, and am receiving this message : Sorry, your account has been disabled. Google will not let me recover my GMail account. They are not letting me go through a series of captchas like their Google Accounts Help page says they will. Instead,

Call them Google versions of business cards, Geocities 2.0 or call them what you will, I consider Google Profiles to be the building block to the foundation of Google's social map in the interactive Internet world, weaving basic user information which the user chooses to share within Google results; whehter that info be LinkedIn style business information or family & friend stlye photo sharing. Google Profiles , whatever they will morph into,

After Yahoo UK opened itself up to UK licensed gambling ads about a month ago, and MSN UK doing the same, Google UK has felt the pressure to allow gambling ads in the UK, where online and offline casino, sports betting and other forms of gambling is legal and tolerated. Google UK is now allowing advertising in their AdWords for gambling associated ads by online gambling companies in what is marking a major change in Google's global anti-gambling stance,

Taking interactive online advertising to a whole new level, the Obama campaign is now running online ads in Xbox 360 video games such as Madden NFL 09 and other male targeted EA Sports games such as "Burnout Paradise," "NASCAR 09," "NHL 09," "NBA Live 08," "Need For Speed: Carbon," "Need For Speed: ProStreet," "NFL Tour," and "Skate." The ads are geotargeted to specific swing states including Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Indiana, Montana,

Over at SEOmoz , Rand gives us a wrap up of the Search Engineers session from SMX East which includes the fact that all of the search engine engineers agreed with Sean Suchter of Yahoo that if affiliate links come from relevant and trust worth sources, then those links may assist with the passing of link juice which has a direct effect on search engine rankings. 'In no uncertain terms, that if affiliate links came from valuable, relevant,

Google News is testing a new vertical format which seems to be reminiscent of Yahoo One Search and more of a mobile device driven format than the usual Newspaper style spread Google News usually delivers on the PC. Ugly as sin as this Google News layout is, there may be some reasons behind it.

If you have shot off emails to old girlfriends at 2 am after coming home from the bar or in a rage of anger to your boss, GMail Engineer Jon Perlow has developed the perfect drunk email filter at Google Labs with GMail Mail Goggles )which counteract the power of Beer Goggles(. [ No, this does not seem to be an April Fools joke .] Gmail can't always prevent you from sending messages you might later regret,

When a search engine that has an incredibly miniscule percentage of the search market share fails, does anyone listen? Over the weekend Accoona, the same China backed search engine that had Bill Clinton speak at its launch party and was giving away cars left and right as recent as a year ago, has closed its doors. Dear Accoona search users, Due to an overwhelmingly competitive search market, Accoona.com and Accoona.cn will no longer be active.

Yesterday I covered some of the buzz on the rumor that Yahoo may be selling off some of its properties, which includes Yahoo Answers , as part of the [possibly upcoming] AOL merger agreements. A Yahoo spokesperson wrote me this morning to let me know that on the record, Yahoo has no plans to sell Yahoo Answers. " I saw your article on Y! Answers last night and wanted to let you know " on the record " that we are not selling Yahoo! Answers .

Yahoo is in the process of opening talks with Time Warner on merger and other partnership opportunities with AOL according to the Financial Times and numerous media outlets, some of which are discussing Yahoo selling off what are considered to be its non-core assets. TechCrunch posted last week that one of those assets may in fact be Yahoo Answers, which opened its doors in 2005 and has become Yahoo's flagship social property,

Google is officially celebrating its 10th birthday today, marking a decade that Google has been serving search results )and 13 years since their concept was first launched, dubbed BackRub(. To celebrate, Google is using the above logo on its worldwide search engines while also launching a really cool and interactive Google Timeline . Thanks Google, and Happy Birthday, its been a great 10 years!

I've been playing around with Shoemoney Tools a bit after Jeremy was telling me a little about his new robust selection of tools which include valued domain research tools, backlink analyzers and keyword research & ppc copy tools. )I've already bought a few targeted domains with some nice backlinks( Shoemoney Tools is pretty cool, and I'm hoping to gain more knowledge of his tools suite after using the products a bit more. What's funny,

I was wondering why I was getting so many followers to my Twitter account today :( Thanks Twitter!

Yesterday I was reviewing the statistics behind one of our link building campaigns which consists of contacting sites & publishers for links in their resource pages, articles or linking areas and the approval to denial ratio based upon responses from those publishers. Surprisingly, almost as many publishers responded with a no or sorry message as responded with a positive message. Now, it may be easy to just forget those publishers who responded to say no,