If Google is smarter than humans, we must accept that it should be able to help us answer the difficult questions about life that are vital toward making humans reach their full potential, such that we may help computers become smarter, so that we may reach the singularity. Sure some folks who took some funding are trying hard to build real communities around niches , but they are doing it all wrong. The folks who are doing it right seem to have the answer to everything.

I already mentioned this to our subscribers & affiliates, but we are pausing the ability to subscribe to our membership site so we can perform upgrades. We want to update Drupal, launch the new site design, and switch out the membership management software from what has become sorta big and hairy to a platform that is pre-packaged & thus more manageable. Doing this will allow us to accept payments on-site, offer a couple different tiers of access,

According to Matt Cutts, speaking at a recent PubCon, Google will be looking at why exact domain matches rank so well . For example, if you have a site at blue-widgets.com it may rank a bit too well for the keyword phrase [blue widgets]. Curious. Don't Google know? ;( More likely, Matt would not make a concrete statement, one way or the other. "Yes, exact Match domains rank better!", is not something Matt is likely to say. Secondly,

Interesting little snippet from Mr Cutts: "Matt recommends SEOs do not "chase the algorithm" and instead try to predict where Google will be going in the future". Matt was addressing PubCon . Good advice, methinks. Trying to predict where Google is going is something we do a lot of at SEOBook.com. Whilst no one has a crystal ball, it's good practice to keep one eye on the search horizon. So, where do we think Google might be heading?

Ben Edelman did it again :( This time he highlighted how Google hard codes their search results : [When] we roll[ed] out Google Finance, we did put the Google link first. It seems only fair right, we do all the work for the search page and all these other things, so we do put it first... That has actually been our policy, since then, because of Finance. So for Google Maps again, it's the first link.

On the 22nd of October Google had an indexing issue and a separate algorithmic change . Some of the sites associated with the indexing glitch quickly came back, whereas others seemed like they were hosed for weeks and headed toward the path of perpetual obscurity. To give a visual of how dire this situation was for some webmasters, consider the following graphic. The blue line is Google search traffic and the gray is total unique visitors.

Not that long ago I highlighted how infographics were largely being destroyed as a link building tool by some unscrupulous folks who were offering to pay people to host the infographics to their sites - in a sense making the word infographic seem & feel like spam, just like paid links. :D After killing that source of links, the folks behind that work are proudly moving on to fake non-profits and awards for bloggers ,

Worth a click,

The little guy often loses. As market niches get saturated, the winners are typically those with the deepest pockets. Up until the last few years, the little guy has been able to prosper with SEO. The little guy didn't face much competition from big companies, because the big companies didn't get SEO. However, Google's current algorithmns and corporate strategy often have the side effect of benefiting large companies. According to Google CEO Eric Schmidt,

* If you think otherwise, do you care to debate the following video? "Perhaps the only lessons learned by the banks in the crisis is that the rules don't apply to them." Ain't that the truth. The video is completely accurate : Richard M. Bowen, former chief underwriter for Citigroup's consumer-lending group, said he warned his superiors of concerns that some types of loans in securities didn't conform with representations and warranties in 2006 and 2007. "In mid-2006,

When you get to *really* competitive keywords the results typically tend to be fairly stable because the cost of entry into the game is so high & many of the top players keep building additional signals of quality. You might get minor fluctuations from time to time, but large fluctuations on highly competitive keywords are fairly rare. Over the last day or 2 Google has done yet another algorithm change )the 3rd or 4th noticeable one in 2 weeks(,

When Bing launched, one of the interesting things they did to make the organic search results appear more relevant was to use link anchor text to augment page titles )where relevant(. This would mean if people searched for a phrase that was mostly in your title )but maybe your page title was missing a word or 2 from the search( then Bing might insert those words into the page title area of your listing if they were in some of the link anchor text pointing into your page.

Rich Skrenta has been at the core of search longer than I have been in the SEO market. He is famous for launching sites like DMOZ and Topix . His most recent project is a search engine called blekko , and I recently had a chance to chat with him about blekko, the web, and marketing. Blekko just launched publicly today . Be sure to check out their search engine , all their SEO features , and the Blekko toolbar . Most start ups fail.

Local is Huge Google's US ad revenue is roughly 15 billion & the size of the US Yellow Pages market is roughly 14 billion . Most of that money is still in print , but that shift is only accelerating with Google's push into local. Further, cell phones are location aware, can incorporate location into search suggest , and on the last quarterly conference call Google's Jonathan Rosenberg highlighted that mobile ads were already a billion Dollar market for Google.

Some of you may have been hit by Google's 20 October algorithm change. And some of you wouldn't have noticed any difference. On 20 October, a number of sites got trashed. Rankings, and traffic, plummeted through the floor. The webmaster forums lit up. Aaron noticed it . I noticed it. Yet, other webmasters wondered what all the fuss was about. As many of you know, there is not just one ranking algothimn. There are many algorithms. What affects one site may not affect another.

If you're considering getting some SEO work done, but working to a tight budget, here's a look at the key issues, and trouble-spots to look out for. Buying Professional SEO Services If you're short on time, or SEO skills, or inclination, then you may be looking at getting an eternal supplier to undertake SEO work. Like anything in life, you get what you pay for, and SEO is no exception. There is also a danger you could get a whole lot less, of course. Like any profession,

Marin software manages about 5% of Google AdWords spend for clients, and they noticed that since Google Instant was unveiled, AdWords ad clicks are up 5% . Since the launch Google's Jonathan Rosenberg has mentioned that the impact on AdWords was "not material." I found the repeated use of those exact words suspicious and diversionary, and, as it turned out, with good reason!

Mike Mindel from Wordtracker has put together some nice free SEO overview videos for beginners in the industry.

Are exact match domains "too" powerful ? Not in my humble opinion. :( Sure across the entire web exact match domains can rank for a wide variety of keywords, but there are a couple things to think about when stating that... those rankings are spread across many different domains the bonus any domain gets is only relevant to their 1 exact match phrase Many domains are seen as exact match, but the keyword is popular precisely because the keyword is a brand )like eBay, Amazon.

Some sites have seen pretty drastic drops in Google search traffic recently, related to indexing issues. Google maintains that it is a glitch: Just to be clear, the issues from this thread, which I have reviewed in detail, are not due to changes in our policies or changes in our algorithms; they is due to a technical issue on our side that will be visibly resolved as soon as possible )it may take up to a few days to be visible for all sites though(.