Another friend sent me a message today: "just got a whole swathe of non-interlinked microsites torched today. Bastard! Just watching the rank reports coming in..." I haven't seen his sites, but based on how he described them "whole swathe" I wouldn't guess the quality to be super high. One thing you could say for them was that they were unique.

I recently got put in a test bucket for Google's new layout with a "search results" bar near the top of the page. Generally this impacts the search results in a couple ways: First off, it is a much better looking design. In the past when the search results would move up and down with Google Instant it really felt like a hack rather than something you would see on the leading internet company's main website.

In the past doorway pages could be loosely defined as "low-quality pages designed to rank for highly targeted search queries, typically designed to redirect searchers to a page with other advertisements." The reason they are disliked is a click circus impact they have on web users as they keep clicking in an infinite loop of ads. This would be a perfect example of that type of website: However, ever since Google started to eat their "organic" search results ,

The "Best" of Big Media Large publishers who lobbied Google hard for a ranking boost got it when Panda launched: "A private understanding was reached between the OPA and Google," an office assistant with e-mail evidence told Politically Illustrated. "The organization is responsible for coordinating legal and legislative matters that impact our members, and one of the issues was applying pressure to Google to get them to adjust their search algorithm to favor our members.

"The future is already here " it's just not very evenly distributed." - William Gibson Any Google search engineer care to have a public debate as to the legitimacy of this search result set? Not only do they monetize via AdWords, but Google has 6 listings in the "organic" search results. If an SEO gets half of the search results )for anything other than his own brand( he is an overt spammer.

Is there such a thing as "passive" income? Generally no. A person can cash out existing brand equity and exposure, but if they cash out too aggressively and/or do not reinvest enough then they are ultimately cashing out their market position and will eventually fade. Does Google Make "Passive" Income? Online there are some network effects that are hard to beat. MySpace had them over Facebook & only lost due to years of systematic incompetence & mismanagement .

Is Paid Search Incremental or Cannibalistic? Earlier this month Google referenced a "study" they did which showed that 89% of AdWords ad clicks were incremental )meaning that they were clicks that the website would not have received if they relied on organic search results alone(. As part of that "study" they stated that "indirect navigation to the advertiser site is not considered." Why did they chose to exclude that segment of traffic?

Smart SEOs have been preaching brand for years and years now )& so has Google if you read between the lines(. For some time Google has appended prior search queries in AdWords. In some cases they also show ads for related search queries, append your location to the search query for localization, spell-correct search results based on common search trends, and )as the Vince update showed( they can also use search query chains & brand related searches as a signal.

Have you ever seen a naked robot? If not, you can at least hear one, as the Salty Droid tells all in a 57 minute interview. ;( Topics discussed include get rich quick, get poor quick, marketing, community building, .info domain names )s'rsly?(, the wrath of robots, and a few surprises. Download the MP3 here Like reading more than listening? Transcription below. An Interview of the Salty Droid Interviewer: Today we're going to interview not a person, so much as a robot,

Why Analytics Are So Important With SEO the most important thing to track is performance. Of course the bank account )& its growth rate( is a high level tracking mechanism, but it is the result of the combination of many ideas & efforts, the combination of multiple marketing strategies & traffic streams. To dig in further on what's working web analytics are your bread and butter. They don't give you aggregate data or could be data,

The Big Portals Can't Grow Ad Revenues In spite of the transitioning of print Dollars to digital dimes for print media, TV advertising remains healthy and robust . Much like the decline of print media, the flow of brand ad Dollars online is skipping over even some of the largest players, leaving them out of the growth from the shift to online media. While Yahoo!

Affiliates Are a Dying Breed Being an ecommerce affiliate keeps getting harder & harder unless you have a strong brand and/or are selling things with a complex sales cycle. Portable air conditioners is a pretty niche category, but when I look at it I simply don't see any opportunity on the SEO front unless you take on the significant risk of carrying inventory & drop hundreds of thousands to millions of Dollars on branding. The Corporate,

"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it." - Frederic Bastiat Business Ethics vs Sustainability The concept of business ethics is usually a self-serving approach to marketing. Some people would rather make money dishonestly than honestly, getting satisfaction out of screwing people over )hi Andy(,

We live in a culture where it is far more profitable to solve symptoms than it is to solve problems. As such, the disappearance of ripoffreport.com from Google's index probably has retainer-based reputation management firms like reputation.com singing the blues. Ed Magedson, the owner of Rip Off Report, has been charged with RICO in the past and managed to come through unscathed, but he has never tackled an opponent as media savvy or powerful as Google.

Not many spy tools out there do what MixRank does. MixRank is a tool that gives you the ability to peek into the contextual and display ad campaigns of sites advertising with Google AdSense. Uncovering successful advertising on the AdSense network can give you all sorts of ideas on how to increase your site's profitability.

Bing's Webmaster Tools recently got a nice refresh and update. There is a lot you can do inside of the tools so we figured you'd want to know all about it :( Also, we've included some free advertising coupons at the end of this guide to help get you started. Account Dashboard Bing's webmaster tools are fairly easy to use and the interface is quite clean. On the main account dashboard page you can select whatever site you want, in your account,

We recently interviewed Branko Rihtman. He started working in the industry in 2001, doing SEO for clients and properties in a variety of competitive niches. Over that time, he realized the importance of properly done research and experimentation and started publishing findings and experiments at http://www.seo-scientist.com . How did you get into the SEO space? Completely by accident. When I was done with my compulsory army service,

I was just checking out the ongoing strategic meltdown in the value of the Dollar & noticed an AdWords ad with an extended headline & a 150 character ad description. Currently I believe the above extended description is a limited beta test, but if Google starts mixing that in with Google Advisor ads & ad sitelinks there might not be a single organic result above the fold on commercial keywords. The above image is even uglier when Google Instant is extended.

Yet another problem with Google's brand first approach to search: parasitic hosting . The .co.cc subdomain was removed from the Google index due to excessive malware and spam. Since .co.cc wasn't a brand the spam on the domain was too much. But as Google keeps dialing up the "brand" piece of the algorithm there is a lot of stuff on sites like Facebook or even my.Opera that is really flat out junk. And it is dominating the search results category after category.

You need links to rank, period. We can talk all we want about great content, social signals, brand signals, and all that jazz but quite a bit of that is subjective. If you practice SEO, and have success with it, then you are well aware that a claim of "you need links to rank" is an objective, true statement without a bunch of false positives. The gray areas come in to play when we talk about things like anchor text, quality, volume,