Search Engine News

Posted by randfish

I rarely spend more than 10 minutes reading an article on the web, but New York Magazine’s article - Kids, the Internet, and the End of Privacy: The Greatest Generation Gap Since Rock and Roll - was well worth the 8 pages and 20 minutes. The crux of the piece centers on how the desire for celebrity has eclipsed the issue of privacy in my generation and those behind me:

… Younger people, one could point out, are the only ones for whom it seems to have sunk in that the idea of a truly private life is already an illusion. Every street in New York has a surveillance camera. Each time you swipe your debit card at Duane Reade or use your MetroCard, that transaction is tracked. Your employer owns your e-mails. The NSA owns your phone calls. Your life is being lived in public whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.

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Posted by Oatmeal

I’ve just put the finishing touches on something new that I think is a killer addition to our current arsenal of SEO tools.  It’s basically a tricked-out version of the “Where’s it Rank?” PHP script that I offered up for free (source code) several months back.  The tool is pretty straightforward: you enter a URL, keyword, and what search engine you’d like to search and it will automatically check your rankings and report back. Rank Checker

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Matt Cutts’ Search Engine Optimization Predictions (And My Surprise)Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Sunday, 9 of March , 2008 at 6:20 am

Matt Cutts finally got around to making his predictions for 2008. Aside from the disclaimer, I thought they were pretty interesting. Here’s what Matt Cutts think will happen this year:

2008 will be the year that hacking and search engine optimization (SEO) collide in a major way. By the end of the year, a nontrivial fraction of blackhat Search Engine Optimization will involve illegally hacking sites for links or landing pages. One webhost will get a significant black eye as hundreds or thousands of customers’ websites are hacked. The growth of illegal-blackhat Search Engine Optimization will leave traditional blackhats with a difficult choice: risk doing something illegal or sit out.

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These days Google announced that the product Referrals 2.0 will become available to the most of their publishers. Yesterday I got the chance to have a first look on this new product. The first thing I noticed is that its very easy to use, just like the other Adsense products.

The old Referral product screen is extended with a number of categories where the publisher can choose multiple categories for his ad publishing campaign. From every category it’s possible to preview the advertisers. At this point there was the first “scary” thing! SPAM!

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Posted by rebecca

Stick with me here, because this post relates to SEO…I promise…

I went snowboarding for the first time last year. Despite growing up in Michigan, where I could have driven up to the UP (that’s Upper Peninsula to you folks who don’t point out your hometown on your hand) to hit the slopes, I had never snowboarded or skied before.

The first time I tried snowboarding, I went whizzing down the bunny hill (called the Daisy Hill to not-so-subtly hint at how girly and not EX-TREME it is) because I didn’t know how to stop. And, naturally, I fell. A lot. My boyfriend recommended I stay on the bunny hill because I sucked. After a few runs down, however, I steadily improved to the point where my bf (who, as a more experienced boarder, was growing increasingly impatient at having to wait for his balance-deficient girlfriend to wobble down a short hill) convinced me to go on an intermediate run. Being the foolish, trusting person that I am, I went down the steeper hill. And I fell down most of it. By the end of the run, I was sore, cold, and pissed off because I wasn’t ready to go down the hill, even though someone made me think that I was. (Thanks, Jason.)

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Blogging, email, IM, and telephone make it easy to keep in touch with your real friends. Social networks are hyped, but tend to have low value traffic because they don’t effectively separate signal from noise. The only people who have time for them are people hawking crap, people looking to waste time, and spam bots.

Sure Google owns Orkut, but they don’t need it. Google already is a social network, and became one by targeting and partnering with the power users and influencers, but few people think of them as a social network.

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Stop Words Can Make Or Break A Search QueryWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Monday, 29 of October , 2007 at 10:33 am

For some time now the search engines have discounted what they call “stop words.” These are words like “the,” “and,” “a,” and “an,” which do not have any real significance for most searches. For instance, if I am searching the mating habits of wild Australian kangaroos then I might search for the phrase:

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Negative SEO To Save One’s ReputationWriting by Nick on Tuesday, 3 of July , 2007 at 11:57 pm

Negative SEO is back in the news again. I found the following paragraph on the Marketing Pilgrim blog this afternoon:

This begs the moral question here too — who is right and who is wrong? What is misinformation and what is not? Is it right to force others down in search engine rankings because you do not agree with their stance or believe they are incorrect?

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Are You Making These Blogging Mistakes?Writing by Nick on Saturday, 14 of July , 2007 at 10:12 am

I wasn’t going to write on blogging this morning (have you noticed that I’ve been harping on that a lot lately?). But I found this excellent article on mistakes that new bloggers make. I thought you all might benefit. Written by Rose DesRochers for SiteProNews. Here’s what Rose says are the top 10 blogging mistakes that new bloggers make:

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Google - King of Communications?Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Friday, 21 of September , 2007 at 4:48 pm

(Source) Google’s plans to build its own data network are now rumored to include communications cable under the Pacific Ocean.

The project to lay cable, called “Unity,” would involve several other telecommunications companies who would aim to have it operational by 2009.

What are the implications of Google’s desire to build trans-Pacific cable? Let’s count ‘em:

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