PR of the linking page is more important than the PR of the linking domain. This is because your site will get the PR of linking page and not that of the root domain. Even if the linking page has no PR it can still be targeted provided it is frequently crawled and indexed.
http://forums.seochat.com/google-optimization-7/assessing-the-pr-of-a-backlink-286523.html

A true SEO is creative. They think outside the box. They always have a plan and goal for how they want things to turn out. They don’t conform to one way of marketing a website or blog, they do things their own way. They know what works and what doesn’t. A true SEO doesn’t start out an expert. They learn from trial and error.
http://www.simplefuzz.com/how-to-become-a-true-seo-and-serve-your-clients-better/366/

SEO isn’t about stuffing your pages with keywords and it’s not about worrying about linking to the same sites often or deliberately not making changes to your content. We know this – it comes naturally to us as SEOs, but it’s surprising to see that other people do believe it.
http://sharkseo.com/nohat/what-seo-isnt/

A comment in a forum says Google’s use of breadcrumbs in the SERPS can help the user as well as remove relevant signals of allowing the user to see the actual page name. Eye-tracking studies show that 24% of people viewing SERP snippets look at the URL. Now that breadcrumbs are part of the snippet, this “signal” is the key.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/breadcrumbs/15022/

As expected the Google Caffeine index is now live on one Google data center. Note, it will not be added to more Google data centers until after the holidays. Again, Caffeine is live on a single data center which is currently accessible about 50% of the time on 209.85.225.103.
http://searchengineland.com/google-caffeine-now-live-on-one-google-data-center-30697

A number of companies provide “yellow pages in a box” solutions complete with monetization. Services like Local.com’s PremierGuide, MojoPages and ShowMeLocal can get you up and running in minutes with well-SEO’d yellow pages solutions.
http://searchengineland.com/news-media-dont-give-google-the-noindex-finger-30555

Bing has certainly increased its share since its launched. From 7.5% to almost 10% in 6 months and has launched loads of new features including Twitter Tweets, Wolfram Alpha Answers, Freebase Quick Answers, Visual Search etc – all these are not in Google so far. So it’s giving Google a tough challenge. Partnership with Yahoo will surely give them a good boost and scale to move on.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1416695&page=4

Quality inbound links are an essential element of web site marketing and search engine optimization programs to increase traffic and online sales. The greater the number of relevant and authoritative links to a web page, the greater the potential for higher search engine rankings and qualified traffic.
http://www.toprankblog.com/2009/11/1-seo-tools-for-tracking-inbound-links/

A comment in a forum says some search engines rank new sites high in SERPs for sometime. People call it the New Content Boost. This boost can make sites rank high in SERPs but this boost is temporary. Bing however, do put quite some weight on site age.
http://www.bing.com/community/forums/t/651807.aspx

There are a variety of ways in which a social campaign can contribute to your performance in search engines, regardless of what these recent deals might produce. Like Lee Odden of Top Rank Online Marketing recently discussed with WebProNews, you can optimize your social content.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/11/20/if-you-care-about-search-you-must-care-about-social-media

Most SEOs and their companies / clients will automatically focus on driving large volumes by optimizing their site for relevant keywords with the highest search frequency, when this really isn’t usually the best approach.
http://searchengineland.com/analytics-ppc-seo-so-happy-together-30510

Comment spammers are often trying to improve their site’s organic search ranking by creating dubious inbound links to their site. Google has an understanding of the link graph of the web, and has algorithmic ways of discovering those alterations and tackling them.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/11/hard-facts-about-comment-spam.html

Bing’s FAQs state that you should do the following on-site seo to rank well in their search engine: target no more than two keywords per page, use unique title tags on each page, use unique meta description tags on each page, use H1 tags, use text navigation links, create content for your human visitors, not the Bing web crawler, and incorporate keywords into URL strings.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1583311

According to a forum, every page should have it’s own unique set of keyword phrases you optimize it for. Don’t think of just one phrase per page, but 3-5 different phrases. While you may have some overlap between pages, it won’t do you much good to optimize your entire site for just a few keyword phrases.
http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=42314

Yahoo conducted a survey of small business online retailers to find out how they think they’ll perform this upcoming holiday season compared to previous years. “Surprisingly, based on the current economic landscape, the results show an optimistic outlook, with over 60 percent of the Yahoo! merchants surveyed expecting sales to be the same as most years or even stronger,” a representative for Yahoo tells WebProNews.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/11/24/yahoo-survey-finds-optimism-for-holiday-online-retail

With Pixelsilk content management system we have yet another benefit: easily optimize your website for search engines. No, it is not about SEO automation like you may think: this is about creating clean, SEO-friendly websites – it’s about making the process easier and clearer (even for an absolute newbie), not about automating it.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/pixelsilk-seo-cms/14743/

Microsoft has a bad anti-competitive reputation. It’s also in the middle of trying to convince regulators both in the US and Europe that it should be allowed to purchase Yahoo’s search technology and effectively end Yahoo’s role as a search provider, leaving the space to just Google and Microsoft.
http://searchengineland.com/thoughts-on-bing-news-corp-opec-for-news-30307

Conventional wisdom in the world of landing page optimization is that “less is more.”  Keep the visitor focused on the conversion action typically a contact form in B2B marketing -  by stripping out content and navigation.
http://searchengineland.com/b2b-landing-page-strategies-more-might-really-be-more-effective-30526

According to a comment in DigitalPoint forum, buying traffic from traffic brokers for an adsense site is a risky business. First, 99% of the traffic brokers will send you bot generated traffic that will just increase your impression and not giving you any click. Second, you will risk your adsense account getting banned for artificially inflating the adsense stat.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1585886

During the past two weeks, the Bing team has been hard at work rolling out new features, which followed the adCenter release of several new features including search query reports. As we head into the holidays, it is important to understand the differences between natural search results compared to sponsored sites (pay-per-click ads) and where they appear on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
http://community.microsoftadvertising.com/blogs/advertiser/archive/2009/11/25/beginner-s-guide-to-sem-natural-versus-paid-search.aspx

Online advertising revenues in the U.S. seem to be stabilizing. The online advertising revenues of the four largest Web advertising companies (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL) increased 1.2 percent in the fourth quarter. Google accounted for all of that growth, however, so we are still waiting for display advertising to find its footing. It is likely that in the U.S. alone, search advertising is also leading the recovery. But now that Google is mixing more visual elements into search ads, perhaps display ads will see a boost as well.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/25/online-advertising-third-quarter-2009-iab/

Forget PageRank, at least if you’re a news publisher looking to do well in Google News. Google’s news service doesn’t rely on the same algorithm used by “regular” Google, of which PageRank is a part of. Instead, Google News taps into its own unique ranking signals, which include user clicks, the estimated authority of a publication in a particular topic, freshness, geography and more.
http://searchengineland.com/google-news-ranking-stories-30424

As announced last Friday on the Bing blog, many Bing Shopping retailers are increasing their Cashback offers up to 35% starting on Black Friday, November 27th, and will run the additional cashback offers for a limited time. The increase in Bing Cashback offers was somewhat expected to return for the 2009 holiday shopping season, after Bing Shopping traffic grew as a result of the Double Cashback period during the Back-to-School shopping season.
http://searchengineland.com/black-friday-2009-bing-cashback-bumps-users-searching-for-deals-30546

Online stores are probably raving right now with the current traffic spikes that their sites are getting this Thanksgiving week. According to Hitwise, online traffic for Black Friday sales websites increased by 4% as compared to the same week in 2008.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/black-friday-traffic/14956/

Microsoft is not afraid to buy search market share, which is what it’s doing with the Yahoo search deal and even its Cashback program. But with these latest talks, it is literally trying to buy the news, or at least exclusive access to the news. Bing can’t buy all the news, it can only buy certain brands.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/22/bing-tries-to-buy-the-news/

Title is the most important on-page ranking factor. Each page on your site should be targeting a different keyword phrase. Therefore, the title of each page should be different and contain that page’s specific targeted keyword phrase.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1586573

Microsoft has launched a new site for Bing, where users can go to find out the latest features that have been implemented into the search engine. The site’s called Behind Bing. “You can see each feature in action though a screencast, see me talk about why we did it the way we did (for those who like to geek out), and get some drill-down details,” says Bing’s Stefan Weitz.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/11/20/microsoft-takes-users-behind-bing

Google’s Matt Cutts discussed how the search engine handles sites that that are “in the cloud” with regards to how listings are affected. He says if your site is talking to the cloud behind the scenes, there is now way for any search engine or bot to know about that.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/11/20/google-doesnt-know-if-your-site-is-in-the-cloud

The Google Blog formally announced the new search ad formats Google has been showing in the search results. The new ads include the relatively old AdWords video ad, AdWords Sitelinks, local AdWords, product AdWords, comparison ads and more. The product ads are now available to all U.S. advertisers.
http://searchengineland.com/googles-new-search-ad-formats-30474

Yahoo has announced a new set of features for its Search Assist service that makes the Yahoo search box a lot smarter. Perhaps the main innovation here is the inclusion of content and information right inside the Search Assist dropdown.
http://searchengineland.com/yahoos-search-box-gets-smarter-30428

A lot of questions still exist about the Meta robots tag and robots.txt despite the popularity of these terms with any search engine optimization professional. Indexing is when the crawled pages (pages fetched during the crawling process) are actually placed in the search engine index, ready to be shown any time on the search engine result pages when a relevant query matches that document.
http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Search-Engine-Optimization-Help/How-Search-Engines-Handle-the-Meta-Robots-Tag-and-Robotstxt/

Google’s ability to crawl Flash files is still evolving, so building a site entirely in Flash isn’t best practice. While Flash, Ajax and JavaScript offer enticing user experience, they continue to offer a less than ideal experience for search engine crawlers.
http://www.toprankblog.com/2009/11/seo-for-flash-tips/

Like Google, Bing places great emphasis on quality links to determine its rankings. “Just don’t make the mistake of believing it will result in instant gratification. Successful link building efforts require a long-term commitment, not an overnight or turnkey solution,” says DeJarnette. “You need to continually invest in link building efforts with creativity and time.”
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/11/23/link-building-for-bing-rankings-dos-and-donts

Google recently shared a few important tips for making sure your mobile site is being indexed in Google’s Mobile Search. When a mobile user or crawler (like Googlebot-Mobile) accesses the desktop version of a URL, you can redirect them to the corresponding mobile version of the same page,” explains Mukai. “Google notices the relationship between the two versions of the URL and displays the standard version for searches from desktops and the mobile version for mobile searches.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/11/23/ensuring-your-site-is-indexed-in-googles-mobile-search

Retailers have spent 47% more on search ads on Bing in Q4 this year than during this same time period in 2008, with Bing now accounting for 8% of all US retailer search spend, compared with only 6% in the first half of Q4 2008. Average order values on Bing are 21% higher than across all engines, which could account for the spend growth.
http://searchengineland.com/reports-bing-gains-among-retailers-at-local-level-too-30326

Google is buying ads to explain why an offensive image of the First Lady is back in its index and ranking so highly on searches for Michelle Obama in Google Image Search. Search engines are a reflection of the content and information that is available on the Internet. A site’s ranking in Google’s search results relies heavily on computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page’s relevance to a given query.
http://searchengineland.com/offensive-michelle-obama-image-returns-google-buys-ad-30381

In a perfect world, your well-written, useful and refreshingly original blog would rank well in search engine results just because it’s good. But that’s not reality. Great content is the foundation of a good blog, but it doesn’t guarantee high rankings. There are some search engine optimization (SEO) things you simply must do to increase the chances that your blog will be found – and read.
http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/blog/2009/11/seo-for-blogs.html

Yahoo Search is now including a new Twitter feature in search results for select topics that are in the news. For example, if you search for “health care reform,” or “obama,” you will get a section for news results, which contains tabs for news, photos, videos, and Twitter.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/11/19/yahoo-showing-tweets-for-news-results

To make sure a URL isn’t really indexed, use your traffic analytics tool to see if there are no Google search referrals to this page. If the page is ranked, there should be nothing wrong with it.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/your-site-is-badly-indexed-what-can-this-mean/14704/

Natural search is a marketing funnel: at the top are your supply of pages which get crawled. Some percentage of those get indexed. A percentage of the pages indexed get ranked. A percentage of those get clicked, etc. So an important way to baseline current performance is to map your search traffic against the pages that drive the traffic.
http://searchengineland.com/jedi-metrics-how-to-prepare-for-seo-growth-29974

A lawsuit in Wisconsin is bringing a fresh challenge to the practice of paying for keywords on Google and other search engines to boost one company’s link over a rival’s. The practice has occasionally prompted a rival to file legal challenges alleging trademark infringement. Now a Wisconsin law firm is trying a new angle — accusing its competitor of violating privacy laws.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hnqI2aij9Ux408IS_iA621J9LNigD9C2TCO80

In July, Google upgraded AdWords to allow advertisers to add the full address to their search ads through location extensions. It appears that they are now testing a new ad layout similar to the one developed for Local Listing Ads.
http://blumenthals.com/blog/2009/11/20/is-google-adwords-testing-a-new-local-adwords-display-type/

Meta elements have zero effect at Google on rankings and little impact if any at other search engines (it depends on the engine). However, meta description elements are still important and should be optimized to get them to show often as snippets in the Google SERPs.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1580644

According to Stevie’s comment in SEOChat Matt Cutts says, “Having lots of sites isn’t automatically bad, and having PPC sites isn’t automatically bad, and having whois privacy turned on isn’t automatically bad, but once you get several of these factors all together, you’re often talking about a very different type of webmaster than the fellow who just has a single site or so.” Meaning, if you have a single site with whois privacy, it’s no big deal.
http://forums.seochat.com/google-optimization-7/is-google-able-read-who-is-info-if-we-hide-it-284474.html

Bing appears to be either testing or rolling out a new feature for news sites in its search results. The feature brings up a few of the most recent posts from a news source, when that source itself is the query. As TC’s Erick Schonfeld notes, “It’s part of Bing’s obsession with providing realtime results.” This obsession should be amplified soon (with Google also) as the results from the deals with Facebook and Twitter begin to surface.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/11/19/some-bing-users-seeing-latest-posts-on-publisher-searches

Leapfish is a new social and real-time search engine. In their own words: There is more content, more variety and more services that are all very valuable to us. LeapFish searches the traditional, multimedia and social web and providers results from all over the Internet from major authorities in their respective spaces. Here are some of the database and parts of the web we search; Google, Yahoo, Bing, YouTube, Twitter, Image Authorities, Blog Authorities, Wikipedia, Yelp, Digg, CyberHomes, Yahoo Answers, Amazon and many others from a growing list of providers.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/leapfish/14779/

According to the most recent comScore search market share data, the combined reach of MicroHoo search would be 27.9% vs. Google’s 65.4%. Assuming the deal goes through up next for Microsoft would be a decision about whether to attempt to buy Ask, which IAC’s Barry Diller is open to selling, and whether to bid for AOL’s search-ad business when that deal comes up for renewal in 2010.
http://searchengineland.com/microsoft-yahoo-search-deal-on-track-for-completion-30134

Yahoo has enhanced its News shortcut with real-time feeds and updates. The idea is to make the News Shortcut more current and more social with Twitter content in the form of videos, photos and tweets.
http://searchengineland.com/yahoo-brings-real-time-updates-to-news-shortcut-30177

Clients can easily become obsessed with on-page SEO, constantly tweaking title tags, headings, and on-page content. While these activities are important at the right place and time, people shouldn’t get obsessed with it. Tweaking on-page content on existing pages quickly begins to offer you diminishing returns. In addition, you probably have limited resources for SEO.
http://searchenginewatch.com/3635670

People search Google for domains/URLs rather than typing in to address bar. Few people link out to other sites and when they do, there are keywords. So, if you link out to lots of relevant sites using the URL as the anchor, you will appear high in the SERPs.
http://www.cre8asiteforums.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=73830

Mark in a forum says that the most challenging part of SEO is the frustration of cases where Google refuses to rank you for a certain keyword, no matter how hard you work at content and backlinking. Yet, you’ll hit Yahoo & Bing page 1 for that keyword and you’ll see garbage sites getting page 1 of Google for that keyword.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1578583

According to the moderator of a forum, optimizing for Yahoo is the same as Google but without the need for so many backlinks. Yahoo relies more on on-page factors than Google.
http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=42266

Behavioral targeting (BT) has been the buzzword of the year for the last two years in the web analytics field. Onsite behavioral targeting is a technique that uses visitor behavior to target certain content that is proved to be more relevant to a segment of visitors. Offsite behavioral targeting is technique used by advertising networks to increase advertisement targeting.
http://searchengineland.com/behavioral-targeting-creating-a-unique-experience-for-each-visitor-30015

Ask.com is doing and trying a lot of things to keep users and redefine its role in this new, contracting or consolidating search landscape. Most recently it made a major push into shopping with “deals search.” Another major initiative to soon gain more momentum and visibility is something of a return to Ask’s roots as a “Q&A” engine.
http://searchengineland.com/ask-making-a-bigger-bet-on-social-search-or-qa-30077

A study from a couple of NYU Stern professors has found that organic search engine results can play a direct role in whether or not a paid listing is clicked. Basically, if this research is any indication, if your business has both a paid result and an organic result appear at the same time, you have a better chance of your paid result getting clicked than if the organic result had not appeared.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/11/16/does-an-organic-search-presence-help-paid-result-performance

If you’re paying attention to the green URLs which Google appends at the bottom of each results, you may have noticed something different recently. Google is currently enhancing this URLs to give not just the plain generic URLs but replacing it with hierarchical links that show the precision location of the page on a particular website. Google then takes these site navigational tool when indexing the site and use it as the links provided on individual search result links.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-displays-site-hierarchies-in-search-results/14773/

The online world is going mobile, and everyone’s getting involved with the popular trend. Mobile SEO is often treated like a very different animal when it’s compared to the more standard SEO practices we’ve come to accept when creating online content.
http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Search-Engine-Optimization-Help/What-is-Mobile-SEO/

Six Sigma is a principle of quality improvement, business management strategy, originally developed by Motorola, Inc. and popularly implemented by the manufacturing industry (e.g. in the electronics and automobile sectors). It provides a standard method of defining/analyzing a problem and then coming up with improvement plans, all the way down to monitoring and assessing the results.
http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Search-Engine-Optimization-Help/Introducing-Six-Sigma-Methodology-for-SEO/

Purist SEOs may not see conversion factors as the most important in recommending which steps a client should take. However, users read URLs in the search engine results and that it has a direct impact on how many of them click on links.
http://searchengineland.com/6-ways-local-domains-crush-dot-coms-in-international-seo-29898

Google will begin permanently banning advertisers at an increased rate. The bans will not be at the site level, but rather the account level. In the past, Google banned specific sites from advertising in AdWords. Now, if an advertiser is permanently banned, their account and any new account will be banned from participating in AdWords.
http://searchengineland.com/google-adwords-to-step-up-account-disabling-improve-communication-process-29997

Google always tries to display the relevant websites when anyone searches for specific keywords. So if your website is hosted on UK servers and your site is co.uk site, then Google will give your more value or relevancy against .com sites if anyone is searching in UK because google will think that since your website is UK based it will be more useful for UK visitors than a .com site from US.

http://forums.seochat.com/search-engine-optimization-28/co-uk-vs-com-and-uk-vs-us-datacenter-283792.html

Online retail websites face a unique set of obstacles when it comes to improving sales through better search engine visibility.  Repetitive product descriptions, a lack of content and frequent churn of products can all be hurdles to overcome.
http://www.toprankblog.com/2009/11/5-tips-for-retail-seo/

There is a balance that must be reached with SEO – the balance between doing what’s right for users and what is right for SEO. If you spam pages with keywords just to get it to rank and someone does manage to find your page, when they click on it and start reading if you don’t have good content they are going to hit the back button and never return.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1570864

According to a comment on DigitalPoint, there is no such thing as a duplicate content “penalty”. Penalties prevent you from ranking well no matter what you do. A penalty will prevent you from ranking on page 1 even if you get a gazillion backlinks from high PR, highly relevant, highly authoritative, and highly trusted domains.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1575945

Google has massively ramped up where and how it shows ads over the past year. As the company continues to grow, it also has people without a firm history of knowing why ads are separated from search results and why certain words have been used to indicate what’s an ad and what’s not. Calling something “Promoted” that’s an ad in one part of Google while it’s “Sponsored” in another isn’t consistent and generates confusion.
http://searchengineland.com/google-experiments-with-paid-inclusion-29931

According to Search Engine Journal site, there are SEO browsers to evaluate on-Page SEO – Domaintools SEO browser, Spiderview and SEO Browser. SEO browsers are designed to highlight features of a web page pertinent to the work of SEO. This way, it helps you browse sites the way an SEO should or possibly the way that Google would.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-browsers/14722/

In case you were not aware, Google “reserves the right” to change the titles of your pages in search results. Google’s Matt Cutts has released a video discussing why and how they go about doing this. Cutts says Google wants to show the titles that it thinks are most useful. “For example, suppose the title of your page is ‘Untitled’ or if there is no title.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/11/11/google-may-change-your-page-titles

According to Spencer Jackson in a forum, it’s a refreshing change that Bing provides different serps to the other major search engines. He thinks that it’s also a bit early to get a real handle on what Bing wants to see. The fact that some SEOs have figured out the Google’s and Yahoo’s makes them a little spammy.
http://www.bing.com/community/forums/t/650601.aspx

As for Bing specifically, you need to continue as you normally would with Google (good clean website design that follows all the usual rules) but ensure that you have specified where your site is located in your meta-tags as it’s not great at ascertaining a location unless it’s clear from your domain ending (i.e if its a .com, .org etc) and make sure you have keywords in your backlinks. There’s no quick fix, no tricks just effort and patience.
http://www.bing.com/community/forums/t/648533.aspx?PageIndex=2

Google Analytics has just added AdSense for Feeds and Google Feedburner data to the items it monitors and analyzes. So, if you are using either of the two tools for feed advertising, you can now see how far your ad implementation are doing in terms of item clicks.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-analytics-now-tracks-feed-item-clicks/14679/

Results must relevant when you’re dealing with information that has both timeliness and localness dimensions, the potential for irrelevance increases. ‘Regular’ search engines use ranking algorithms to display results in some order of relevance, but what is the algorithm that determines relevance when you introduce the new dimensions of timeliness and localness (perhaps OneRiot has at least part of the answer).
http://searchengineland.com/why-im-not-drinking-the-%E2%80%9Creal-time-local-search%E2%80%9D-kool-aid-29289

At PubCon, Matt Cutts from Google said there is strong lobbying in Google to introduce a new ranking factor into the algorithm. The new ranking factor has to do with how fast a site or page loads.
http://searchengineland.com/site-speed-googles-next-ranking-factor-29793

Companies with static, brochure-like web sites probably don’t get visited too often, so the search engines would be slower to pick up changes. As a retail site, you may get crawled more often — if so, that’s a good thing. The sooner the spiders crawl and index your new, optimized pages, the better.
http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/sbs-mailbag-is-it-too-late-for-holiday-seo/2446/

Ad copy is important because it delivers that crucial first impression potential customers are going to have of your business; it’s what will make or break their decision to click on your ad and visit your site. The more targeted and specific your ad copy is, the better results you should expect in terms of click-through rate (CTR) and conversions. Advertisers should know exactly what they’re going to find on the landing page of the ad they clicked on based on your ad copy.
http://community.microsoftadvertising.com/blogs/advertiser/archive/2009/11/04/sem-beginner-series-ad-copy.aspx

Randy in a forum says that Google runs several data centers. This spreads the load of all of those users and can offer them a better, faster experience. A data center is simply a building with lots of computers in it running Google’s search services. They’ve got a bunch of these. When they release an algorithm update it typically takes a week or two for it to show up in every data center when it goes live. And yes many times they’ll test the updates in a single data center prior to releasing it live to all of them.
http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=41715

Each day, many users come to Google.com to research products and find where to buy them. To better serve these users, Google has been testing a new feature of AdWords called Product Listing Ads. Product Listing Ads works with an advertiser’s Google Merchant Center account to serve highly targeted ads that include richer product information directly in the ad itself – including product image, price, and merchant name.

http://adwords.blogspot.com/2009/11/announcing-product-listing-ads.html

Google has announced an upgrade to the Keywords report that’s available in Webmaster Tools. The report now features a daily update of the most common keywords that Google found while crawling a web site.
http://searchengineland.com/google-upgrades-keywords-report-in-webmaster-tools-29663

Publishers can have Google News index the entire text of their articles but NOT show the full story to visitors who come from Google (for Google’s web search, that’s not an option — but you can provide summary pages). They can also, if they choose, have only a small summary of their content indexed. These aren’t special hidden features that News Corp wouldn’t know about. Both are explained in Google’s public help files.
http://searchengineland.com/would-someone-please-explain-to-news-corp-how-google-works-29718

Online ads might be working well for news sites, but YouTube is always looking for a bigger piece of the online video advertising pie. As of today, Google is testing skippable ads on YouTube, as part of its ongoing search for the “right” way to monetize the most popular video site on the web.
http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2009/11/google-testing-skippable-ads-in-youtube-videos.html

According to a comment on DigitalPoint, the reason the high rank sites have bad code is because the sites were made a long time ago. Google take the code over content ratio into account. The less code the easier it is for the search engines to find the content. Cleaner code brings structure to a website.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1569696

The Lynx browser displays web pages in very much the same way a search engine spider would see them. One of the most important objectives in search engine optimization is to ensure that the text content as intended to be shown to the readers is the same as seen by search engine bots. When search engine bots crawl text content which is not seen by normal visitors, this comprises what is called “hidden text.
http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Search-Engine-Optimization-Help/Mastering-Lynx-Open-Source-Text-Browser-for-Search-Engine-Optimization/

Microsoft is rolling out the new Bing Videos site aimed at bringing a new unified online video destination.  The new Bing Video site combines Bing’s video search engine and MSN video site.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/bing-integrates-msn-videos-and-video-search/14604/

As SEO rapidly becomes a core task for local business owners, there’s a new temptation to build advertising messages or tracking mechanisms into business listings on the web. Typically, this might mean adding a slogan or campaign tagline to a business name or changing an office address to appear local to more customers. Unfortunately, this misguided enthusiasm can negatively impact the way search engines rank local business listings based on variations in company name, address and phone number (NAP, for short).
http://searchengineland.com/business-owners-are-you-sabotaging-your-own-local-listings-29333

There’s a lot of news today coming out of Bing headquarters, perhaps most notably that the long-rumored partnership with Wolfram Alpha is finally coming to fruition. Bing’s announcement today explains that the collaboration will cover two specific areas: nutritional information and mathematics.
http://searchengineland.com/bing-launches-wolfram-alpha-collaboration-new-search-features-29639

A useful indicator of SEO success is the number of unique keyphrases that send traffic to a website. An increase in this number is a reflection of increased trust in the site by search-engines.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/charting-unique-keyphrases-using-advanced-segments

PPC is always a good way to get instant ranking results. But you have to spend money for that. Landing page performance is always measurable for SEO and you have to create strong landing page. Once visitors landed on your page from search engine & spend more time, it will give you good & quicker results.
http://forums.seochat.com/search-engine-optimization-28/any-new-technique-to-getting-se-ranking-fast-281463-2.html

According to a comment on DigitalPoint, submitting 1 article or 10 different articles will be measured on how natural your SEO campaign will be, it all depends on you and your budget. If you willing to pay for 10 articles then you will enjoy more natural campaign, making your site/blog more important and natural to Google.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1568031

Search engines want to rank web sites that have shown a commitment to being in business for a while, and not just a fly-by-night. They want to rank trusted, authoritative web sites. Renewing this domain for 10 years would show commitment.
http://searchenginewatch.com/3635609

Google AdWords announced two updates including new alerts and place pages in performance reports. The new alerts are designed to help you stay on top of your campaigns. In addition to the billing alerts, they added alerts for new keyword and budget ideas in the Opportunities tab.
http://searchengineland.com/google-adwords-adds-new-alerts-place-pages-performance-reports-29486

Google’s got a present for searchers and site owners. The long anticipated new Google Caffeine search index will go live soon, just after the holidays. The Google Caffeine Sandbox, where people have been invited since the summer to test Google’s next generation search infrastructure, has been closed.
http://searchengineland.com/google-to-deliver-caffeine-after-holidays-29479

Google have changed the way they treat the nofollow attribute. If you have 10 links on a page and one is nofollow each of the links take 1 10th of the juice. The only difference is the nofollow wont pass it to the destination url. Either way you limit the juice flowing around your site.
http://forums.seochat.com/google-optimization-7/nofollow-in-homepage-282411.html

According to a comment in DigitalPoint forum, lyrics pages are notorious for being considered duplicated content. There are tons of other websites on the internet with the same content and it’s common to have indexing issues with sites related to music lyrics.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1566090

SITE: operator is one of Google’s advanced search commands. It has always been a good way to tell how many URLs (approximately) are in Google’s index, to diagnose some on-site SEO issue as well as identify a penalty. There have been more and more people recently who are complaining about how inaccurate SITE: command actually is.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-site-operator-inaccurate/14519/

Google has a bidding methodology called Budget Optimizer that attempts to maximize the traffic you receive for the keywords in a campaign. This is useful for early buying cycle keywords. However, every keyword should be reaching some goal regardless of where it falls into the buying cycle. It was difficult to track the effectiveness of these campaigns until recently when Google made some changes to Google Analytics.
http://searchengineland.com/how-to-bid-profitably-on-nonconverting-keywords-29028

On November 9, 2009 Google announced an agreement to acquire AdMob, a mobile display ad technology provider, for $750 million. This acquisition will enhance Google’s existing expertise and technology in mobile advertising, while also giving advertisers and publishers more choice in this growing new area.
http://www.google.com/press/admob/

The holiday season offers a huge opportunity for online retailers to capture sales and new customers, even in a tough economy. Website testing, monitoring, and performance measuring are the keys to unlocking a successful user experience for customers and successful conversion rates for retailers.
http://searchengineland.com/five-ways-to-amp-up-holiday-shopping-season-results-29411

The number of internal links pointing to various pages won’t help much in terms of ranking. What interlinking does is helping the search engines and visitors find internal pages. Using keywords in the anchor text of internal links helps the search engines identify what page they are about to see.
http://forums.seochat.com/search-engine-optimization-28/on-site-seo-help-building-internal-links-282355.html

The visible Pagerank value that we see in Google Toolbar or via Pagerank check scripts or programs is only updated every 3 to 5 months; however, Pagerank behind the scenes is actually updating real-time, we just don’t know what the “now” value is. The visible Pagerank value is the “past” value of the last “public update”.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1564334

According to a forum, sharing links with your competitor to add value to your visitors experience is fine, but don’t do it to try and game your way up SERPs. In the long run it can get you pushed out of SERPs completely.
http://www.webmasterworld.com/link_development/4005325.htm

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on Thursday suggested that the software giant’s search deal with Yahoo is a global one and not just confined to the U.S. and Europe. The revelation came during the Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) chief’s press conference in Tokyo during a swing through Southeast Asia.
http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3847246/Ballmer+Yahoo+Bing+Deal+Will+Be+Global.htm

The Google AdWords blog announced they have made it easier for advertisers to add and track the conversions for their search ads. Google has added to the AdWords interface sections for (1) Conversions, (2) Webpages, and (3) Code.
http://searchengineland.com/google-adwords-makes-conversion-tracking-easier-29350

The Twitter Blog has a short blog post mentioning that they have added technology “to show higher quality results for trend queries by returning tweets that are more useful.” Clearly, this is Twitter’s first step in improving Twitter Search by adding relevancy and search quality factors to the search algorithm.
http://searchengineland.com/twitter-finally-begins-adding-search-relevancy-features-29352

Search Engine Journal’s Ann Smarty believes Bing’s algorithm prefers web pages from large sites and gives more weight to keywords in URLs and capitalized terms. Search engine optimization for Bing requires understand of Bing’s search algorithm which differs from Google’s and Yahoo’s algorithms.
http://www.gordonchoi.com/bing-search-algorithm-20091103

Google unveiled a privacy dashboard to provide a snapshot of the data associated with a user’s account across more than 20 Google products, such as YouTube, Picasa and Gmail. Later today, the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI), a coalition of more than three dozen online ad networks, including Google, is set to release a browser plug-in that will create a persistent method for opting out of data collection across the sites where its members serve ads.
http://www.internetnews.com/security/article.php/3847181/Google+Ad+Networks+Tighten+Privacy+Controls.htm

Having a high PR profile page on twitter is not that hard and the fact that the links from it are no-follow. Jessie in DigitalPoint doesn’t think it will give any benefits on a site when it comes to SEO. Well, on the other side, in traffic, twitter is really powerful, especially if you know how to use this microblogging tool properly.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1557454

Big news for publishers in the Google News index. Inbal from Google announced in a Google News Help thread that in six months, Google will stop supporting the old News Sitemaps format and require you to switch over to the new format.
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/021120.html

Google especially likes to see business information match up across the web, because it increases their confidence that their algorithm is returning a relevant, accurate result. This means no keyword stuffing in your business title, either at Google or at the other data providers, and making sure that your phone number and address information matches up everywhere your business is mentioned.
http://searchengineland.com/blocking-and-tackling-10-fundamentals-of-local-seo-29115

Google has just announced a new enterprise search service called Commerce Search. The name might remind you of Froogle, but this is not that kind of commerce/product search. With Commerce Search, Google has created what is essentially a shopping cart solution for online retailers.
http://searchengineland.com/google-commerce-search-shopping-cart-29241

Writing an online press release (PR) is a quick way to drive traffic to your website, build links and raise awareness. A good online PR will also help you to make more sales by raising awareness and desire amongst the target demographic.
http://www.searchmarketingstandard.com/write-perfect-online-pr

The snippet in a SERP is produced by an algorithm and may differ from the description. The exact snippet in any case will be influenced by the keywords the searcher used. You may not be able to influence what actually appears in any given case.
http://www.cre8asiteforums.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=73643

Paid Links can work just fine in rankings. It’s all about ROI. If you do buy links you have to be prepared for the fact that they can be devalued at any time.
http://forums.seochat.com/google-optimization-7/paid-links-work-in-ranking-281793.html

According to a comment in DigitalPoint, Yahoo traffic is the best and very organic. These days many people are concentrating on Google, but Google is keep on changing algorithm.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1399697&page=9

According to the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo will run a test “in the coming days” with OneRiot, a real-time search engine that focuses on links and content from Twitter and other social media sources. PaidContent reports that Yahoo will also be running real-time search tests with other players, too.
http://searchengineland.com/yahoo-confirms-real-time-search-test-29107

MSN, which Microsoft says now has 600 million users globally (which would make it larger than Yahoo), is a huge asset for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that it drives roughly 45% of Bing’s queries.
http://searchengineland.com/msn-introduces-dramatically-improved-redesign-portal-drives-nearly-50-of-bing-queries-29118

In order to maintain sites in the cloud, Yahoo uses Traffic Server, a piece of software initially acquired via Inktomi, to support this massive amount of traffic. Traffic Server enables the session management, authentication, configuration management, load balancing, and routing for an entire cloud computing stack. Yahoo says that with the open source version of Traffic Server, organizations can benefit from access to cached online content.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/02/yahoo-open-sources-traffic-server/

According to a comment in DigitalPoint forum, PR updates constantly. We only get shown an estimate of PR across the last 3 months. So a week after the update, your PR is useless but it wont be the end of link sales. It only takes longer to value links.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1557979

ReachLocal supposedly an authorized reseller of Google’s AdWords does not have an effect on SEO. It uses both a robots.txt file that blocks out the spiders for their ad serving sites as well as a Meta No Index, No Follow Meta Element which serves the same purpose.
http://forums.seochat.com/google-news-46/google-and-reach-local-200007.html

Setting goals for SEO distinct from Social Media is an important first step to creating a Social SEO strategy.  SEO on it’s own can drive sales. SEO can also help grow social networks via discovery through search. Optimizing content for search within social networks improves discovery in places where Google and other search engines can’t reach.
http://www.toprankblog.com/2009/11/social-seo-services/

Google allows you to specify within Webmaster Central which geographic region you would like your “.com” to be targeted at. Links within some countries can help the whole site perform better globally whereas other countries may be easier to target locally—but will add less to the global link juice.
http://searchengineland.com/the-new-rules-of-international-link-building-28954

Back in 2006, Google had a product named related links, which showed related sites on the internet based on your content. Google just recently relaunched related links at relatedlinks.googlelabs.com. The major difference between the old related links and the new one is that the new one only shows related content from within your site, whereas the old one took away visitors from your site.
http://searchengineland.com/google-tries-related-links-again-29041

Ad Sitelinks is a new AdWords feature that allows you to extend the value of your existing AdWords ads by providing additional links to content deep within your sites. Rather than sending all users to the same landing page, Ad Sitelinks will display up to 4 additional Destination URLs on your search-based text ad for users to choose from.
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2009/11/increasing-choice-and-relevancy-in.html

According to a forum, All In One SEO is a horrible plug-in. It will disallow/nofollow all sorts of stuff. You’d be better off to just delete it and use Wordpress in an unadulterated state.
http://www.cre8asiteforums.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=73631

As far as having keywords in your URL or domain, you likely won’t see many benefits unless they are low competition terms. Using keywords in your sub folders does help visitors better understand where they are on your site.
http://forums.seochat.com/search-engine-optimization-28/how-much-importance-is-weighed-on-having-your-keywords-in-280552.html

According to a forum, Google has just started to read Javascript codes but not very good at it. It will take lot of time for Google to completely understand javascript.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1556201

Google AdWords is the biggest pay-per-click platform in the world. It made Google’s founders billionaires. It has also made significant money for those who use it — or at least, those who have used it properly. This multi-part guide can help you make the most of AdWords.
Many search marketing professionals will tell you that Google AdWords is the only PPC platform worth putting money into, since it reaches the highest number of users and delivers the highest conversion rate.
http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Google-Optimization-Help/Google-Adwords-Guide/