If Microsoft used their primary product to bundle other free products they were giving away to gain market leverage Google would hoot and/or holler. Google demanded that Chrome be shown as an option in Europe when Microsoft was required to market their competitors via BrowserChoice.eu . Yet if you visit YouTube with an old browser you can see that Google claims it isn't an advertisement, yet somehow Internet Explorer didn't make the short list.

I was looking for information about the nuclear reactor issue in Japan and am glad it did not turn out as bad as it first looked! But in that process of searching for information I kept stumbling into garbage hollow websites. I was cautious not to click on the malware results , but of the mainstream sites covering the issue, one of the most flagrant efforts was from the Huffington Post. AOL recently announced that they were firing 15% to 20% of their staff.

I have long documented Google's preference toward brands , while Google has always stated that they don't really think of brand . While not thinking of brands, someone on the Google UI team later added navigational aids to the search results promoting popular brands - highlighting the list of brands with the label "brands" before the list of links. Take a look at what Matt Cutts shares in the following video,

Google has long maintained that "the algorithm" is what controls rankings, except for sites which are manually demoted for spamming, getting hacked, delivering spyware, and so on. At the SMX conference it was revealed that Google uses white listing : Google and Bing admitted publicly to having 'exception lists' for sites that were hit by algorithms that should not have been hit.

When Google did the Panda update they highlighted that not only did some "low quality" sites get hammered, but that some "high quality" sites got a boost. Matt Cutts said : "we actually came up with a classifier to say, okay, IRS or Wikipedia or New York Times is over on this side, and the low-quality sites are over on this side." Here is the problem with that sort of classification system: doorway pages .

There are so many competitive research tools on the market. We reviewed some of the larger ones here but there are quite a few more on the market today. The truth is that you can really get a lot of good, usable data to give you an idea of what the competition is likely to be by using free tools or the free version of paid tools.

You can't learn great SEO from an e-book. Or buying software tools. Great SEO is built on an understanding. Reducing SEO To Prescription One of the problems with reductive, prescribed SEO approaches - i.e. step one: research keywords, step two: put keyword in title etc can be seen in the recent "Content Farm" update . When Google decide sites are affecting their search quality, they look for a definable, repeated footprint made by the sites they deem to be undesirable.

Google tries to wrestle back index update naming from the pundits, naming the update "Panda" . Named after one of their engineers, apparently. The official Google line - and I'm paraphrasing here - is this: Trust us. We're putting the bad guys on one side, and the good guys on the other I like how Wired didn't let them off the hook. Wired persisted: Wired.com: Some people say you should be transparent,

Shortly after we found out that Google was to purchase Beat That Quote we highlighted how Google purchased a website that was deeply engaged in numerous nefarious black hat SEO practices . A friend just pinged me to confirm that Google has penalized the domain by removing it from the search results. From a competition & market regulation perspective that was a smart move for Google.

It looks like Money.co.uk was right on the money : BeatThatQuote.com today was sold to Google for GBP37.7 million. We think this deal is a tremendous opportunity for our company to develop new and innovative options for personal finance in the UK. Our team is excited about becoming a part of Google. We look forward to working with their engineers to create new tools making it easier for consumers to choose the right financial products.

Clowning Around There is a saying in the bond trading market that if you don't know who the clown in a deal is then look in the mirror because it is probably you. Business is the same way. Almost everyone gets taken for a ride at least once. What is Ignorance? Ignorance is often viewed as a condescending word, but it is how we are all born. It is only through learning and experience we are able to do much more than survive.

If the Google Farmer update doesn't show you the unfortunate amount of low-quality noise in the SEO industry then there is no hope for you young jedi. :( It's not unlike the unbelievable noise that surrounds an upcoming Apple product launch. In the interest of full disclosure I happen to be an Apple-ite but the coverage is even nauseating to me.

How often do you ever hear the phrase worst practices ? Probably never. Everything is a best practice approach, right up until things change. Consider AdSense websites. Hey Look, a Case Study! When you look at some of the biggest losers in the Google content farm update, many of them happened to be premium AdSense publishers which were even used by Google as case studies! For instance, Hub Pages or EzineArticles .

It feels like old times . Google makes a big algorithm change , and all hell breaks loose. Well, some hell, and some jumping for joy, depending on which direction a webmasters rankings went. As I wrote in Content Farms Vs... at the beginning of last month: Put it this way. Any algorithm that takes out Demand Media content is going to take out a lot of SEO content, too. SEO copy-writing? What is that? That's what Demand Media do. As I outlined in the first paragraph,

I'm going to tell you why an SEO Book subscription, for many small businesses, is a much better investment than just hiring a firm or a freelancer. We, as business owners, all realize that we need an online presence and the backbone of that presence is a top-notch SEO campaign. Whether it be straight out SEO services, or help with Google Places, or help with reputation management,

We are now fully open. Our membership area of the site has 2 separate tiers to it. The first gives you access to our tools, training modules, and newsletters, while running at $69 a month. The second level of access gives you access to everything in the first tier and access to our private member forums, while running $300 per month. If you do not have a free/basic account set up yet then you can go here and set up your account and advanced permissions at the same time .

Economics Drive Literally Everything Media is all about profit margins . eHow was originally founded in 1998 & had $36 million in venture capital behind it. But the original cost structure was flawed due to high content costs. The site failed so badly that it was sold in 2004 for $100,000 . The original site owners had GoogleBot blocked. Simply by unblocking GoogleBot and doing basic SEO to existing content the site had a revenue run rate of $4 million Dollars within 2 years,

...too bad Google is not ! Google just did their first content farm update & Mahalo appears to have taken a swan dive in the search results, freeing up space for higher quality websites. Google's Amit Singhal & Matt Cutts wrote : Many of the changes we make are so subtle that very few people notice them. But in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking"a change that noticeably impacts 11.

When I went to sleep last night all was well. When I woke up my inbox was exploded with angry emails about people getting dozens and dozens of emails from us...in some cases perhaps almost 100. Since we put the new design live on the site I think people are more receptive to it. And there are not many Drupal websites which have more registered users than our site does. The combination of improved usability )in some areas, still working on others(, better design,

I'm going to borrow this quote from Seth Godin, who borrowed it from Kevin, who borrowed it from The Count Of Monte Cristo: "I have been told," said the count, "that you do not always yourselves understand the signals you repeat." "That is true, sir, and that is what I like best," said the man, smiling. "Why do you like that best?" "Because then I have no responsibility. I am a machine then, and nothing else, and so long as I work, nothing more is required of me." In SEO,