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,

Izea asked me to moderate a session on blogging tools and plugins this weekend at IzeaFest in Orlando, which turned out to be an awesome conference even though I attended only 2 to 3 hours of it. I drove into Orlando from Tampa on Saturday to run into Brian Clark , ShoeMoney , Loren Feldman and the Unique Blog Designs crew all chillin in the Grand Bohemian Hotel bar. After listening to Loren Feldman totally rock the room, I had the chance to meet John Chow , Tamar Weinberg ,

In one of the largest modern search marketing acquisitions, which does not include the search engines themselves, iProspect has swooped in and acquired Range Online Media, for an undisclosed amount. Range's client roster includes Calvin Klein, Macys.com, Toshiba, The Sundance Channel, Hermes of Paris, Burberry, and Neiman Marcus. From the press release )thanks Afa !

Renewable energy, ecofriendly business or ' going green ' are not new concepts, as companies like outdoor wear manufacturer Patagonia have been successful at balancing capitalism, profitability and responsibility. Since going green seems to be more popular than ever, and companies or individuals can take measures to tap into the natural powers of wind and solar for much cheaper than ever before,

Does using a web browser by a company which tracks user web behavior, archives emails & messenger communications and also serves advertising based upon search and browsing behavior scare you a little about what your total browsing experience will be used for? The notion has some privacy advocates looking for answers, especially exactly how Google will be using this information and incorporating it into their DoubleClick ad serving profile & behaviroal targeting technology.

I was running through some search blogs tonight and came across Cartoon Barry , Barry Schwartz's search marketing and semi-personal blog, and found that Barry is running ads that look very much like Google AdSense. But they are not AdSense, they are powered by MSN and formatted in a really cool fashion! Directly above the Google AdSense ads )thanks to lax TOS(,

After an update to Yahoo Site Explorer's backlink tracking query results, Barry Schwartz reported over at SERoundtable that many webmasters were reporting a drop in their overall backlinks reporting, some with up to 100K backlinks missing. Has Yahoo Site Explorer gone the way of the Googlebird in its backlinks reporting? Not yet,

Google set off the weekend Labor Day hype with a )perhaps well planned( leaked announcement of their new browser , Google Chrome, which hit the news outlets yesterday and is now, after a good 20 hours, finally available for download by those who are just dying to try it out. The Google Chrome browser prides itself on a simple design with minimal browser load and lots user security; which reminds me of the Netscape / Mozilla positioning of the late 90's.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt confirmed yesterday that despite pressure from the US Justice Department, the Google Yahoo advertising partnership will proceed with its scheduled launch of early October. "We are going to move forward," Schmidt said Thursday )as quoted by the Seattle Times (. "We are in the process of talking to the government. They've not indicated one way or the other how they're dealing with us. We always worry a little bit,

Google's Android Developer Challenge is now completed and 10 development teams have won awards of $275,000 for their cutting edge and unique applications for use on the Android mobile platform . 10 other teams also won awards of $100,000. All teams presented overviews of their Android apps, and the technology and coding which was used to put them together.

According to ComScore , MySpace )or Fox Interactive Media( has surpassed Yahoo in terms of displaying advertisements, serving 56.8 billion ads 15.2% of the display ads on the Internet, while Yahoo weighed in at 53.1 billion display ads with a 14.2% share. This is however, a bit of a misleading statistic. Sure it is amazing that MySpace is serving more display ads than Yahoo now, although MySpace advertisements generally are not monetized or targeted as well as Yahoo's,

Google Earth is being credited for a scientific discovery by two German scientists which shows that cows naturally point north, in the same way a compass would, when resting or grazing. The zoologists used Google Earth to study the patterns of over 300 herds of cattle, totally 8,510 cows. Moooo! From VNUnet : Of the 8,510 cows observed on Google, some two thirds had aligned themselves in a direction facing magnetic north when grazing or resting.

BOTW Local Directory, which Eric reviewed on SEJ , is offering a savings of 50% off the Premium Business details page, so instead of their price of $9.95 per month, advertisers can pay only $5 per month. There are only 5 days left in the August promotion, so if you haven't taken advantage of the offer, check out http://local.botw.org/premium .

I really do not do many speaking engagements on SEO and search marketing, but plan to in the immediate future )the next speaking and moderator sessions are planned for the ScarySEO mini-Con in Florida(. Back in June I did have the chance to speak at the South Florida MeetUp on Link Building which was hosted by AgencyWeb . The MeetUp consisted of about 50 search marketing professionals and webmasters who were interested in enhancing their link building.

The long tail session is hitting all of the blended areas of serach, which is in itself Long Tail. Aaron Shear is speaking now about Shopping Search and hitting the longtail search terms in a shopping search engine campaign. Aaron feels that the main "head" search terms, or the money terms, result in a lot of traffic bouncing off the site : meaning they can drive a lot of semi-targeted traffic but not the best in conversions, dependent upon the terms.

Long tail search goes far beyond normal organic SEO and deep into local search. Mary Bowling is speaking at SES San Jose about the long tail of local search. All relevant search to brick and mortar businesses is local search. 30% to 40% of searches have local intent and search engines have to interperate this intent. What is the long term of local search? Even if your main search terms is "denver plumber",

Being a search marketer and avid link builder, yesterday I ran across a blog which was perfect for contributing a quality post to on behalf of client, so I looked around the blog to find their contact information to build a relationship with the blogger. Building a trusted relationship with a blogger; exchanging emails, discussing the world of blogging, giving a little SEO advice and asking to contribute a post,

There must have been a rather large shortage of tech & search news yesterday as it seems a GMail hiccup by Google shut the service down or a little while, and the end result was global coverage of the event . This goes to show how many small to large businesses actually use a webmail application like Google GMail and are totally dependent on a third party free service to handle their secure and urgent company mailings.

Blinkx , the video search engine and video search technology firm, is moving to acquire search advertising and contextual ad firm Miva, which has been hit hard on the stock market. Miva closed at $.78 a share yesterday, and according to Allen Stern at CenterNetworks , Blinkx is offering $1.20 a share in cash for Miva. Miva , which also owns SearchFeed, is well known in the search community as being a rebranded version of FindWhat,

Google has launched a free music downloading service in China which lets users download licensed songs, which will be supplied by music companies in exchange for advertising revenue. How much cooler can you get than Google and free music downloads? Enter NBA star and Chinese National Yao Ming, who cofounded the site Top100.cn , where the downloads will originate from.