Google’s online feed reader now allows you to track changes on any page – even those that don’t feature an RSS feed. There are a number of other sites that also allow you to track when something changes on a site. ChangeDetection.com, for example, is a popular online service that will alert you whenever a page changes. Unlike Google Reader’s new feature, ChangeDetection.com also gives you a very detailed overview of of what exactly changed and what the page looked like before. The service also offers an RSS feed of these changes.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_reader_can_now_track_changes_on_any_web_pag.php

Pinging sites send out pings to a list of different sites which basically tells them that you’ve updated your site, it’s a great thing to do after every update. Pingler and pingomatic are the best according to Pompei’s comment on DigitalPoint.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1676587

Google has introduced a new feature for its mobile Image Search offering. The feature is “Popular Images,” and lets Android and iPhone users browse popular images (go figure). The Popular Images feature comes in the form of a link just under the search box on the Google Image Search page. When clicked, it brings up a categorized list of image searches and corresponding images. The queries are categorized automatically with an algorithm, which Google says will continue to improve over time.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/01/29/google-gives-mobile-users-a-link-to-popular-images

If people were already seeing different search results from one another before, that is really going to be true now, now that Google is plugging results based on the individual’s social circle into any given SERP. This is one of the many ways SEO is changing, and it would appear that any business looking to get some play in Google search, would do well to have as many connections established as possible, via various social networking sites and tools.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/01/27/google-makes-social-even-more-of-a-search-factor

Bing is making steady incremental progress in its bid to gain search marketshare. But the going is slow. The company has inked big “default search” deals with HP, Dell and other PC makers, and with Verizon in mobile. Yet so far Bing has not affected Google’s leadership position in PC search (or mobile search for that matter). There are widely reported rumors that Apple and Microsoft are discussing replacing Google as the default search engine on the iPhone with Bing.
http://searchengineland.com/microsoft-earnings-beat-estimates-online-services-post-loss-more-on-bing-and-the-iphone-34696

Historically, search engines have had trouble accessing AJAX-based content and this proposal would enable Google (and presumably other search engines that adopted the standard) to index more of the web. The standard SEO advice for AJAX implementations has traditionally been to follow accessibility best practices. With Google’s proposal, an AJAX-generated URL that contains a hash mark (#) would also be replaced with a URL that uses #! in place of #.
http://searchengineland.com/googles-proposal-for-crawling-ajax-may-be-live-34411

Though there was a big difference between SEO and SEM but it’s just in a matter of divisions. SEM is the common use of marketing methods designed to create a website more visible to Google and other search engines. These methods include paid search methods, such as pay-per-click advertising. SEO, however, is an organic search marketing method used to make a website rank higher. Organic search in a sense that once you search for a word on a search engine it is what simply comes up.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1672163

Blogs at the most basic level are straightforward or “easy” to start. But the real question is whether they deliver on the SEO promise so many blog marketers make. Community building for content/links promotion and Increase crawl rate/frequency were also indicated as important SEO benefits from blogging. 54% of respondents start to see SEO benefits from blogging very quickly. This short time frame should be very encouraging to those hoping to use blog published content to gain better search engine visibility.
http://www.toprankblog.com/2010/01/survey-seo-blogging/

Some people argue that real-time search is the next type that will emerge as a growth industry for the search market. Others point to social search and that kind of amalgamation could throw our search vs. social networking equation entirely.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_facebook_social_networking_search.php

Search engine firm Startpage, and its E.U. brand, Ixquick, has released a new proxy service that allows Internet users to surf the web in privacy. The proxy lets users browse websites anonymously, without sharing any private, personally identifiable information to the websites they view.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/01/28/privacy-search-engine-offers-anonymous-web-browsing

Bing has announced a new “Stocks and Funds page” that offers in-depth information for users following or doing research related to stocks and finances. Searching on Bing for a company’s or fund’s ticker symbol prompts a new link called “Investor Data” on Bing’s main search results page.
http://searchengineland.com/bing-debuts-in-depth-stock-pages-34626

Today Google is formally launching functionality that enables a “clickable local phone number” to appear in mobile ads.  In other words a phone number appears as part of the ad copy and consumer-users can simply tap the number to initiate a call.
http://searchengineland.com/google-formally-introduces-clickable-phone-numbers-in-mobile-search-ads-34608

Based from Randy’s experience, local results are driven by the keyword phrase being entered. For one phrase, local results will appear in the general SERPs, but for another similar phrase they don’t appear in the general SERPs.
http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=42827

Google PageRank algorithm counts both incoming and outgoing links unless they are nofollow. Google also weighs links based on PageRank of page in question and other factors (such as niche relevance).
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1670649

Blued of DigitalPoint forum, says that base from his experience in the UK, if you have a site which ends .org.uk vs a site which ends .co.uk with the same number of backlinks with the same anchor text, then the .co.uk will appear above it for that associated search term.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1670199

Thanks to a new deal, Bing’s results for local businesses should soon get much better.  A report’s indicated that Localeze, which specializes in local search, is going to provide something like 14 million business listings for Bing Local and Bing 411 to use.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/01/27/bing-gets-localeze-to-augment-local-business-listings

Starting in 2010, conversion optimization is the new SEO. SEO is still important and still evolving. There are still plenty of companies that need to adopt its best practices. SEO isn’t dead. But among the giants of SEO, there is a growing restlessness for the next mountain to conquer.
http://searchengineland.com/conversion-optimization-is-the-new-seo-32839

Google has begun the rollout of its Social Search product, a way of seeing customized search results based upon the people in your social network. Social Search has been an opt-in Google Labs experiment since its debut in October, but will be available as a beta product in the “next few days” to all users on Google.com.
http://searchengineland.com/google-social-search-goes-live-adds-new-features-34487

Content management systems, e-commerce stores, and dynamic sites in general, used to be big on adding variables to URLs as a way to construct search queries on content or to track visitors. Then along came advice from the search engines that said they see each URL as a unique if it has different variables. That little improvement caused a duplicate content mess.
http://www.toprankblog.com/2010/01/search-engines-url-variables/

Speed has been emphasized a significant amount in Caffeine discussion, and Cutts told us that page speed would likely become a ranking factor. Regardless of whether or not you are witnessing Caffeine in action yet, rest assured that it will be here sooner or later, and any edge you can give yourself in the meantime is for the good of your own site’s performance. Speed will not only supposedly help you in search going forward, but it just makes for a better user experience.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/01/26/has-google-begun-changing-how-it-indexes-the-web

Feeds make it easy to follow updates to all kinds of webpages, from blogs to news sites to Craigslist queries, but unfortunately not all pages on the web have feeds. Today, Google is rolling out a change in Google Reader that lets you create a custom feed to track changes on pages that don’t have their own feed.
http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2010/01/follow-changes-to-any-website.html

As SEO is constantly changing and people are releasing new tools on an almost daily basis, it’s always good to share new discoveries and methods with a group of people very quickly. Another benefit of this kind of interaction is that there will be a history of news and updates across an organisation that can be filtered into one view.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/5-ways-to-increase-the-efficiency-of-your-seo-team/16698/

Collecta has announced the availability of a new widget that allows any webmaster/blogger to show real-time search results on a web page. The widget builder is available now at widget.collecta.com, and includes several customization options including widget title, header background image, and even use of an external CSS file.
http://searchengineland.com/collecta-widget-brings-real-time-search-results-to-any-site-34408

Many of the not-yet-international US sites that select a new market to target seem to choose the UK. This makes sense, of course. Despite what George Bernard Shaw said (”England and America are two countries separated by a common language,”) the UK is closer in culture and language to the US than many others (except of course that we drive on the correct side of the road). It is also wise to enter a market via a nation that you pretty much understand (sic). You would also expect SEO requirements for the UK to be pretty much the same as the US—apart from having to change some “z’s” to “s” of course.
http://searchengineland.com/duplicate-content-the-biggest-challenge-to-successful-international-seo-34319

YouTube just announced that it will begin supporting HTML5 video players this evening across many of the videos on the site. The feature isn’t live yet but is expected to be within the next hour or two. If this test goes live site-wide, it will be a good thing for the web.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/youtube_begins_to_support_html5.php

Google has a post up on the Google News blog today talking a little bit about how it recrawls news content in order to provide the most up to date content and eliminate dead links. Google has implemented a recrawl feature that lets it focus on getting the newest content, while displaying the most current version of older content. After Google News discovers an article, it will continue to crawl it repeatedly to look for changes.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/01/25/google-explains-recrawling-for-updated-news

Microformats should be one of those development trends that are going to change SEO as we know it. Therefore it is a must that you start learning them and implementing them now.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/3-tools-to-export-microformats/16647/

Building just one or two types of links may work for a while, but what if all you have been doing is article marketing and some directories and Google all of the sudden discounts all of the directories that you had been building? You can surely expect to see a dramatic change in your search engine ranking positions. This is why it is crucial for you to build different kinds of links and make sure to vary the anchor text you are using for your links.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/building-a-well-rounded-backlink-portfolio/16744/

In Google, algorithms on the search side and the content side work very differently. On the search side, Google attempts to match keywords in your account to queries users are searching for. On the content side, Google’s semantic technology tries to match the intent of the advertiser with the potential intent of the reader.
http://searchengineland.com/five-quick-tips-for-success-on-googles-content-network-34300

Five years ago, few people paid any attention to conversion rate optimization. Today, everyone is jumping on the conversion optimization bandwagon. Conversion optimization projects require clients to invest time and resources to make modifications to their websites. While some optimization companies try to get around this issue by implementing changes themselves, this approach does not scale.
http://searchengineland.com/things-to-consider-before-starting-your-next-conversion-rate-optimization-project-33842

According to a comment in SEOChat, the linkwheel technique as it is known is not effective anymore. The reason is that it creates a footprint which is easy to follow. This method has been devalued by Google and no longer gives the results it once did.
http://forums.seochat.com/google-optimization-7/what-is-linkwheel-technique-295386.html

The U.S. remains the largest search market worldwide, while Google holds on to a commanding position in the global search market, according to a new study from comScore. Google sites were the top search property worldwide with 87.8 billion searches in December, or 66.8 percent of the global search market. Google sites saw a 58 percent increase in search query volume over the past year. Yahoo sites ranked second globally with 9.4 billion searches (up 13%), followed by Chinese search engine Baidu with 8.5 billion searches (up 7%).
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/01/22/google-still-rules-the-global-search-market

Google says it is experimenting with markup for business and location data, but it doesn’t currently display this information, unless the business or organization is part of a review. But when review information is marked up in the body of a web page, Google can identify it and may make it available in search results.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/01/22/a-markup-that-could-have-big-implications-for-seo

Google has been rolling out local results on Statewide searches for some time. State results are only the beginning of Google’s quest to display local content and can foresee the day where searches based on landmark, neighborhood, city, county, state, or even nation will display the best of the best businesses around.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-now-showing-local-results-for-state-wide-searches/16510/

PageRank sculpting in general has and will continue to be an important aspect of onsite search engine optimization despite Google’s change in its NoFollow policy. Consider the meaning of “PageRank sculpting.” PageRank sculpting is the application of rules regarding the quantity, prioritization and relevance of links on pages throughout a site to efficiently distribute PageRank.
http://searchengineland.com/pagerank-sculpting-leaves-nofollowed-tags-behind-34120

Google has announced a pair of changes to its search results pages that make its search results pages more informational and give searchers information they’re looking for without having to click away from Google.com. Google has also announced plans to add more answers and information into its search results.
http://searchengineland.com/google-adds-more-answers-info-to-search-results-34221

Landing Page Optimization mainly comes into play in PPC situations. When you have placed an ad say with Google AdWords, the ad description and your web page where you wish the visitor to land (landing page) has some sort of synchronization with keywords and the page content.
http://forums.seochat.com/search-engine-optimization-28/landing-page-optimization-294279.html

The No. 3 search player adopts a more privacy-friendly data-retention policy that one-ups even archrival Google. In a nod to persistent concerns about online privacy, Microsoft has committed to delete the Internet Protocol addresses associated with users’ queries on its Bing search engine after six months. Like the other major search engines, Microsoft has come under pressure from privacy advocates and government regulators to purge its server logs of information such as IP addresses that could be used to identify individual users.
http://www.internetnews.com/search/article.php/3859281/Microsoft+Reduces+Bings+Hold+on+User+Data.htm

Frequency of changes in the search marketing sector seemed to be occurring in ever increasing doses it seems. This does not mean that SEO is dead or anything similar, but rather maturing into another phase of its life cycle where the complexities of SEO seed a growing number of multi-channel optimisation specialists that consider integrated optimisation at the root of what they do.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/big-seo-needs-to-get-bigger-multi-channel-optimisation/16520/

Google’s purpose in its declared goal of making the web faster goes well beyond increasing general user retention but in its end goal of dominating the surging growth in mobile searches done principally on the iPhone, Blackberry, Palm, & Android phones. There is no declared page load standard but a general rule is no more than a 5 second page load time which can be affirmed via page speed tools or within Google Webmaster Tools.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-caffeine-for-mobile/16579/

When it comes to SEO, folks tend to think of it as super-tactical. Strategic thinking forces you to step back and look at the bigger picture; it keeps you from the trap of treating SEO as merely a collection of tactics.
http://searchengineland.com/in-the-seo-game-its-all-about-strategies-and-systems-34039

Bing is now giving special placement to recipes in response to some food-related searches. Bing pulls from a number of popular recipe websites (delish.com, MyRecipes.com, epicurious.com.com, etc.) to bring you correlating recipes that you can sift through by holiday, meals, ratings, and my personal favorite, convenience (with a 10 month old at home, quick is key) and much more.
http://searchengineland.com/whats-for-dinner-bing-now-shows-recipes-on-serp-34083

Redirected URL will probably not give you any point for PR and ranking for when Google crawl where your site is posted with shortened url, they will account the domain of the url. If your site has dynamic URL then learn how to convert them into static with shorter url and with keywords in them.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1659006

Microsoft has improved its autosuggest feature on Bing to provide more timely results. On the Bing Search Blog the company says that its research found 45 percent of search queries result either in a user conducting an immediate re-query, or quitting the page altogether.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/01/20/bing-improves-its-autosuggest-feature

Google’s use of breadcrumbs in search results is the focus of a recently submitted question to the Google Webmaster Central team. The question was, “Google is showing breadcrumb URLs in SERPs now. Does the kind of delimiter matter? Is there any best practice? What character to use is best? Matt says you should have a set of delimited links on your site that accurately reflect your site’s hierarchy. He also notes, however, that it is still in the “early days” for breadcrumbs.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/01/20/how-do-you-get-breadcrumbs-in-google-results

Adwords Product Extensions is a new feature that allows Adwords advertisers the ability to display multiple products from their Google Merchant Center (formerly Google Base) as part of one ad on Google.com search results. Product extensions will display relevant products along with your text ad on relevant user queries. (Note: Ads do not display on Search Partner sites or Google’s Content network).
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/beyond-google-ppc-ads-in-2010/16498/

The Google AdWords blog announced new targeting and ad features for the mobile search ad product. In addition, Google is now allowing advertisers to automatically market their apps as direct downloads in the iTunes App Store or Android Market via AdWords.
http://searchengineland.com/google-adwords-allows-advanced-mobile-targeting-app-downloads-33971

The Wall Street Journal noted that Google has purchased search ads for queries done on Google.com for “Google Leaves China” or “Google vs. Baidu.” Clearly, Google wants people to read their position on the recent move for them ending the censorship of Google China.
http://searchengineland.com/google-buys-search-ad-in-response-to-the-china-decision-33976

A year ago Aol trumpeted the launch of MediaGlow, a new business unit led by exec Bill Wilson. Sometime recently, though, the MediaGlow website, at MediaGlow.com, vanished. The unit included all of Aol’s content sites, including the aol.com home page and dozens of sub brands like Engadget and TMZ. All those sites are still there, of course, but Aol seems to be killing off the MediaGlow brand itself.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/18/aols-mediaglow-site-mysteriously-vanishes/

According to a comment on SERoundtable, using both the new domain and the original domain and putting the exact turning point from the original name to the new domain name is worth-it if you’re going to change a domain name.
http://forums.seroundtable.com/showthread.php?t=5394

Reuters is reporting that Google is now investigating the possibility that one or more Google employees could have been involved in the recent attack in China, but is not offering comment on any details. Local media, citing unnamed sources, reported that some Google China employees were denied access to internal networks after January 13, while some staff were put on leave and others transferred to different offices in Google’s Asia Pacific operations.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/01/18/were-googlers-involved-in-chinese-cyber-attack

“Personalized search is the big, nasty monster in the room. It’s affected SEO, obviously. But personalized search is going to have a huge impact on how people use the web, and I don’t think it’ll be a good one.” says Ian Lurie the speaker at SearchFest 2010 which will take place March 9th in Portland, Oregon.

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/im-portent-seo%C2%A0my-interview-with-ian-lurie/16158/

In order to increase the volume and coverage of reviews on its Place Pages, Google is now apparently looking beyond the range of traditional review sources to new, non-traditional sites (e.g., blogs, articles, etc.). Particular “hyper-local” blogs or sites may gain significant influence if they’re heavily relied upon by Google.
http://searchengineland.com/google-now-collecting-local-reviews-from-non-traditional-sources-33717

As real-time searches for information on the Haiti earthquake disaster have bombarded Twitter, Facebook, as well as mainstream media websites and the search engines themselves, each of the major search engines have responded by linking information about disaster relief efforts from their homepages. Google has created the Google Crisis Response page, on which they pledged: “Google will also donate $1 million to help organizations provide relief.”
http://searchengineland.com/google-pledges-1-million-to-haiti-relief-efforts-bing-yahoo-add-donation-info-33592

Everyone is getting into the URL shortening game these days. Google, YouTube, and Facebook are just a few joining the likes of the established players such as Bit.ly. And now Microsoft is jumping in. But there’s something weird about their URL. As the UK blog My Microsoft Life noticed, some of Microsoft’s Bing employees have begun publicly tweeting with the binged.it URL. But the odd thing about binged.it is that it’s actually one character longer than Bing’s own domain, complete with the .com part.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/15/bing-url-shortener/

Yahoo has made some improvements to its Finance Search interface. Yahoo Finance Search is now including results from the web, and can uncover details on companies and executives, find info on private companies, and help determine what companies are associated with topics, Yahoo says.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/01/15/yahoo-upgrades-yahoo-finance-search

Google styles its advertising as ‘pay per click’, promising advertisers that ‘You’re charged only if someone clicks your ad,’” says Edelman. “But here, the video and packet log clearly confirm that the Google click link was invoked without a user even seeing a Google ad link, not to mention clicking it. Advertisers paying high Google prices deserve high-quality ad placements, not spyware popups and click fraud.”
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/01/14/google-ppc-click-fraud-getting-harder-to-detect

Real-time search engine OneRiot announced a new “real-time ad network” today. It’s called RiotWise, and the company says its designed to help developers monetize their apps.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/01/15/with-real-time-search-comes-real-time-advertising

An analyst at Goldman Sachs has now upgraded IAC to “buy” in part because of the possibility that Ask could be sold. But who would be the buyer? Microsoft is the logical candidate but it’s uncertain whether such a transaction could pass regulatory muster. Meanwhile Ask.com’s search market share continues to slowly erode.
http://searchengineland.com/ask-com-sale-speculation-returns-new-comscore-search-numbers-33605

Google is making its intentions in the real estate vertical more clear. Speaking this week at Inman Real Estate Connect, an industry conference, Google’s Sam Sebastian reportedly said: “We’re actively looking to acquire one to two small real estate companies a month.”
http://searchengineland.com/google-plans-to-buy-its-way-into-real-estate-33652

Matt says Google treats links the same whether they are from Facebook or Twitter, as they would if they were from any other site. It’s just an extension of the pagerank formula, where it’s not the amount of links, but how reputable those links are (the company uses a similar strategy for ranking Tweets themselves in real-time search).
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/01/14/how-google-rates-links-from-facebook-and-twitter

According to a comment on DigitalPoint forum, SEO is like a salesperson who gets you/your website knocking on Windows (Computer screens) for search terms rather like the way a salesperson knocks on doors. You pay an offline salesperson a commission and perhaps a wage, you should look at SEO the same way. The big difference is a good SEO is like a salesperson who can sense when someone is in the house and can see beyond the outer facade and knows when a sale can be made.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1650799&page=2

Scrapebox helps you find high PR sites that you can comment on. It’s not just crap PR sites. You can edit the lists as needed and only post to the ones you want or use it for research.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1536792

Linguistic difference is vital to success when reaching a specific country or culture.  Anyone who knows anything about providing SEO for international clients understands this.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-now-corrupting-lingual-identity/16322/

Taking a page from Facebook or Twitter, Google is putting a bit of real-time functionality on local business Place Pages. Google is promoting the idea that small businesses can use their Place Pages to promote time-sensitive (real-time) events.
http://searchengineland.com/google-integrates-real-time-messages-into-place-pages-makes-blackberry-mobile-app-more-useful-33550

After about a quarter of Yahoo Search Marketing not announcing any major product updates, Yahoo has announced two new features to the search ad product. The first feature is named Network Distribution and allows advertisers to select if they want to advertiser on Yahoo’s entire network or if they want to advertise just on either the Yahoo Search network or Yahoo Search Partner network. The second feature is a new, improved way to import Google AdWords or Yahoo Search Marketing campaigns into the system.
http://searchengineland.com/yahoo-search-marketing-adds-network-distribution-improved-importing-33504

According to a comment on DigitalPoint forum, Google doesn’t treat .com and .info any differently from a ranking perspective. But users and other webmasters often see .info sites as far less legitimate. It means that getting inbound links naturally from other webmasters is going to be much harder with a .info than with a similar .com domain.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1651755

Mobile search is an area of the Internet that is finally heating up which is supported by predictions made by eMarketer. Some marketers are putting a lot of stock into mobile marketing as cell phones and smart phones become more widespread and offer more capabilities. The best way to ensure you are found on mobile devices is to make sure your site is in all the local search directories with full and accurate profiles. Places like Google Local and Yahoo local probably receive more traffic from users who want to find business in a certain area.
http://www.toprankblog.com/2010/01/is-your-website-ready-for-the-mobile-web/

For many marketers involved in SEO, the three letter acronym CMS can sometimes be more like a four letter word.  Depending on the CMS and the implementation, there are some serious problems that can impact your SEO efforts.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/cms-paid-search-problems/16220/

Google has issued an official statement regarding its business operations in China, specifically its Chinese search portal – Google.cn. Google told Chinese authorities that it will stop censoring search results on the Chinese Google site. And depending on how things will turn out, Google might later be forced to shut down Google.cn.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-will-stop-censoring-search-results-in-china/16282/

Google is going mobile in a big way. Following the announcement of Nexus One, the official Google phone, and the acquisition of adMob, Google is ready to make some serious moves on the small screen.
http://searchengineland.com/how-to-optimize-a-mobile-adwords-campaign-33250

The Technology Review magazine has an article named How Google Ranks Tweets. They interviewed Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow, who led development of Google’s real-time search, on the topic. Amit explained that in the social context, the number of people following someone is similar to the number of links pointing to a page.
http://searchengineland.com/google-ranks-real-time-tweets-based-on-followers-33439

According to a comment on DigitalPoint forum, Google is penalizing domains that nears expiration. But some says that Google cannot penalize the domain on expiration because a domain name can be registered for one year.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1649281

Google just launched an updated version of Google Flu Trends, a service that predicts flu trends by tracking flu related queries on the company’s search engine. Until now, Google only showed aggregate data for states in the United States. Starting today, Flu Trends will show data down to the city level for 121 cities. As Google notes in today’s announcement, this update was timed to coincide with the National Influenza Vaccination Week.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_launches_flu_trends_city_level.php

The search engine landscape is ever changing. To a very drastic extent, Google drives how the search engine marketing industry operates. With Google holding such a dominant share of the search market, it’s not hard to figure out why. While some may tell you it’s not the most productive use of your marketing time, businesses who hope to find success in driving people to their website (or even brick and mortar store) often hang on every word Google says and every change Google makes to its search engine and/or search results.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/01/12/can-search-engine-optimization-survive-google

The Iranian Cyber Army has done it again. Their clever team of hackers has taken hostage of Baidu.com, China’s largest search engine. Baidu, pronounced “Bidu” is to China what Google is to the rest of the English-speaking world. The breaking news comes after the “Iranian cyber Army” (aka Google hackers) successfully hacked Twitter last week. So who’s next?
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/baidu-hacked/16254/

Interviewing others—especially group interviews—has the potential to earn many links but far fewer leads. Getting interviewed earns you one link but many leads. If you’re newer in a space, build your community and reputation by interviewing others. If you’ve been in the space longer this does not give you the “right” to be interviewed, but you will have a better chance of landing interviews through outreach.
http://searchengineland.com/link-building-with-interviews-how-thought-leadership-builds-links-leads-33149

Bing announced that they have added new content partners for health and medical related queries. The health related queries are related to sicknesses, medicine, medical facilities, in addition to more generic health and fitness related queries.
http://searchengineland.com/bing-adds-more-health-data-to-search-33379

Blogs have better navigational structure than websites in general. Blogs rank better because of its web 2.0 functionality where people can add comments on a blog post that adds fresh content on the blog and google loves fresh content.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1648716

Google is used to coming under fire from different groups when it comes to its Google Books project. Most recently, the fire has come from the China Writers Association, which has over 8,000 members. The operator of the world’s biggest Internet search engine has boosted Chinese content, including to its Google Books digital library, as it seeks to catch Baidu in a market with more Internet users than the U.S. population.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/01/11/google-bows-to-chinese-authors-on-book-scanning

Keywords, and their results, make up the terrain of search marketing. Your real advantage comes from looking in places where your competitors aren’t to identify “under the radar” keywords.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/7-overlooked-sources-of-keyword-data/16186/

Link Building in regards to Search Engine Optimization is not going away anytime soon, and for this very reason if you don’t have a strategy it will be very hard for you to rank for the keywords/phrases that you so desire. These items are not the only steps you need to take (there are hundreds – even thousands) but they will tell you what actions you need to take today to start your Link Building campaign. A.C.T. stands for Ask, Content, and Timing. You must A.C.T. to build links effectively.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/link-building-strategies-time-to-act/16165/

Many variables affecting paid and organic search traffic—search volume, page layout, keyword bids and rankings—prevent us from doing any rigorous scientific testing around the paid/organic dynamic. It’s simply impossible to isolate all the variables necessary to completely understand what’s going on. However, there are some terrific ways that you can at least gather some meaningful data that can be interpreted and analyzed, and from which we can actually draw very useful and actionable conclusions.
http://searchengineland.com/paid-vs-organic-search-understanding-the-dynamics-33155

Relatively quietly Yahoo has decided to outsource most of Yahoo Shopping to PriceGrabber. This is analogous to what Yahoo is doing with Microsoft-Bing in search — just not with Microsoft. Merchant listings will now come from PriceGrabber and e-commerce sellers will only be able to get into Yahoo Shopping via PriceGrabber or Yahoo Search (Bing).
http://searchengineland.com/the-end-of-yahoo-shopping-company-substantially-outsourcing-to-pricegrabber-33251

According to a comment on DigitalPoint forum, H1 and H2 tags are meant for the search engines, not people. The h1 tag is meant to define a major heading similar to the name of a chapter in a book. The H2 would be a sub paragraph to tell the search engines that this is another section, and is related to the H1, but is slightly less important. This is a way to help the search engines.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1646561&page=2

Yahoo has partnered with Ben Silverman’s production company Electus, in which Electus will develop and produce premium content for Yahoo and its advertisers. The partnership is aimed at driving creativity in online programming. Electus will develop a number of original video concepts for Yahoo in partnership with advertisers.  The specific types of projects were not announced.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/01/08/yahoo-partners-with-electus-on-original-content

Google’s cache has been around in the search results for a long time. In fact, Google’s cache is often ignored in SEO strategy and analysis. But using it can provide you with a lot of information that can increase leads, sales, user satisfaction and even offer clues to existing problems with your website.
http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Google-Optimization-Help/Getting-SEO-Information-from-Googles-Cache/

With SEO efforts, it’s easy to get caught up in one goal: getting found via the search engines. But ranking in the search results is only half the story. If potential customers aren’t clicking through to your web page – or other piece of digital content – the ranking doesn’t mean much.
http://www.toprankblog.com/2010/01/online-marketing-efforts-resolutions/

Google recently applied for approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for the right to purchase and monetize energy, just like the utility companies you are already familiar with do. Google has said that its actions had more to do with the enormous amount of energy it consumes itself (consider all of the machinery and equipment it takes to keep a company like Google running at its current pace on a daily basis).
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/01/08/google-could-sell-energy

A number of articles appeared that speculate about or discuss ads on Google Maps (PC and mobile) now and in the future. Google Maps is one of Google’s most successful and valuable properties — arguably even more so in mobile — and the company is going to be both careful and thoughtful about how it expands ads on Maps. Ads already exist on Google Maps today online and in mobile.
http://searchengineland.com/google-mulling-several-ways-to-integrate-ads-on-maps-33127

A post by Ashim Chhabra from the Yahoo Boss team in the Tech Group adds some details to how Yahoo BOSS will survive under the Yahoo-Microsoft deal. It appears that Yahoo is allowed to continue operating BOSS under the Microsoft deal. Some of the results will be powered by Yahoo, while the search results in BOSS will be powered from Microsoft Bing.
http://searchengineland.com/yahoo-to-keep-boss-in-microsoft-deal-may-charge-in-future-33123

Millions of businesses have jumped on the social media express train over the last 12 months, but many of them do not know why they have a Facebook account or why it is so important that they have a presence on Twitter. Even those companies that have dedicated personnel in-house to work on their social media presence often struggle to justify the investment -– all they know for sure is that they ought to be participating in social media, often as part of their SEO efforts.
http://www.searchmarketingstandard.com/develop-social-media-strategy-2010

Bing, Yahoo, and Google are different in their algorithm. Bing prefers w3c validated pages for “re-indexing”. Generally, Bing indexes your homepage and in second crawling if your site is W3C validated it will keep your site indexed.
http://www.bing.com/community/forums/t/647152.aspx?PageIndex=4

With each update Google finds more pages and with each increase, the “average” number of links required in order to maintain any given PR level grows. So even without losing links, if you don’t continue to “grow” your backlinks at the same (proportional) speed as the web grows, your PR will gradually dwindle away.
http://forums.seochat.com/google-optimization-7/pr-update-shift-down-to-twitter-feed-293167.html

A forum poster have been hearing that directory submission will be less important in search engine optimization yet a lot of people are still submitting their sites to directories. He thinks that people will still do directory submission even if Google Caffeine comes in to the scene.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1641176

According to reports, it took Google about six minutes to gather it’s “real-time” search results for a San Franciso earthquake. Google has only recently begun showing “real-time” results in its search results, pulling tweets from Twitter, updates from Facebook fan pages, blogs, news, outlets, etc. The idea behind Google showing such results, is that people can find the freshest info possible that relates to their query.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/12/21/just-how-real-time-is-googles-real-time-search

The engines rewards ads that have high CTRs with low CPCs [via high Quality Score/Index]. But having a high CTR does not always yield high conversion rates. Finding a balance between optimizing for CTR to get lower CPCs and having ad copy that better qualifies the user is an art and should be of primary importance in order to maximize ROI.
http://searchengineland.com/searching-for-ppc-success-in-a-down-economy-32952

AOL’s CEO: Google To Get 1st Shot At New Search Deal from the Wall Street Journal reports AOL’s CEO, Tim Armstrong saying that Google will get “first dibs” at a search deal. Armstrong said this at Citi’s annual entertainment, media and telecommunications conference today. This was prompted by a question about possibly using Microsoft Bing as a search partner at the end of this year, when the Google deal expires. Armstrong added that a new search deal, under the new independent AOL, will be financially good for them.
http://searchengineland.com/armstrong-google-gets-first-dibs-at-aol-search-deal-33066

According to a comment on SEOChat, the biggest danger of AJAX for SEO is that, while Google might understand some javascript by now, AJAX is a fetching behaviour. Search Engines like (dynamically generated) static HTML.
http://forums.seochat.com/google-optimization-7/seo-ajax-292987.html

Blogs have long been promoted as an SEO tool. Despite plenty of optimism about blogging, there’s still a lot of mis-information, mis-perceptions and lack of awareness about effective, productive blogging for business.
http://www.toprankblog.com/2010/01/best-blog-seo-survey/

Searching for Profit founder Amanda Watlington recently discussed some arising trends in the search industry and how education of clients is of vital importance. One example of change is the possible inclusion of site speed as a ranking factor in Google. Matt Cutts dropped that bomb a couple months ago, and while many welcome it, a lot are dreading it.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/01/06/educating-stubborn-clients-about-critical-seo-practices

Rule #1 in every paid search campaign (PPC) is Identify and Track a Measurable Conversion. For 95% of campaigns this is a must, but there is a new breed of paid search campaign: the branding campaign. These are based on traffic to a site only and intentionally do not rely on traditional tracked metrics (sales, forms) for results.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-to-measure-branding-ppc-campaigns/15993/

Prioritizing conversion optimization efforts is a step sometimes fraught with politics and misconceptions, and really deserves at least one full article devoted to it. In a perfect world, our clients and our companies would make these decisions pragmatically and rationally, based on the numbers.
http://searchengineland.com/4-steps-to-setting-better-conversion-optimization-goals-32964

PPC Hero has details about a new Google AdWords beta named contact form extensions. Contact form extensions provides a contact form directly in the search ad, which a searcher can fill out and the advertiser can then use in the future to contact that lead.
http://searchengineland.com/google-adwords-testing-lead-capture-forms-contact-form-extensions-32971

As Matt McGee mentions in a Search Engine Land piece, even a query like “candy” without any geographical indicator will bring up a seven-pack of local results, but a query for “seo” or “web design” or even something as specific as “web design vancouver” will bring up no local listings whatsoever. Search engine optimization and web design are both services after all, and just about every other type of service you can think of will yield local listings in a Google search.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/01/04/google-ditches-local-listings-for-seos-and-designers

The U.S. online advertising industry will shake off the recession’s effects and have an excellent time of it in 2010, according to one expert. J.P. Morgan’s Imran Khan has predicted that just about every aspect of the sphere should experience significant growth this year. Then an even more dramatic uptick will occur with respect to search advertising, if Khan’s forecast is correct: spending should jump from $14.6 billion in 2009 to $16.6 billion, an increase of 13.2 percent. This spells good news for Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft (along with their shareholders). Finally, it’s possible that anything and everything with ties to mobile advertising will make money this year.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/01/05/across-the-board-growth-expected-in-internet-industry

Black holes – a term for sites that get links without giving them in return. Sure, it will not really damage your SEO, but it does not get you anything. Be wary of sites with no outbounds, or only “no follow” outbound links. One of the biggest in that category is Twitter, which does all links as no follow, as well as some major news sites. Yes, Twitter has a lot of great uses, but SEO is not one of them.
http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Search-Engine-Optimization-Help/SEO-Strategies-A-Guide-to-Which-Ideas-Work-and-Which-Ones-Dont/

Google sent out notification to its AdWords advertisers that this month “your location-specific business phone number will display alongside your destination url in ads that appear on high-end mobile devices. Users will be able to click-to-call your business just as easily as they click to visit your website. You’ll be charged for clicks to call, same as you are for clicks to visit your website.”
http://searchengineland.com/google-to-introduce-click-to-call-billing-in-ads-on-mobile-devices-32831

While optimization is a science to be executed by professionals appropriately leveraging content and ensuring technical elements are not a hindrance to search engines’ ability to rank content, building trust is time consuming and labor intensive. Anyone involved in the process of optimization for a site will need to make the distinction between SEO and trust building activities.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/you-can%E2%80%99t-optimize-cardboard/15929/

Admob just released a new metrics showing a significant spike on ad impressions for Google Android. AdMob’s report was based on the ad requests received from AdMob network’s mobile sites and applications.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/admob-metrics-show-surge-on-android-ad-impressions/16009/

Picking the right goals is key to the success of any SEO effort. A surprising number of companies focus on what they think are the right goals, but end up being dead wrong. When the wrong goal is selected, SEO energy gets invested in the wrong ways and the ROI on the SEO project ends up being lower.
http://searchenginewatch.com/3635924

Correct use of alt-tags and images will do very much for adding semantics and value to your content. For on-page SEO it is still a major Ranking contributing factor. Maybe not directly, but certainly indirectly.
http://forums.seochat.com/google-optimization-7/how-useful-are-alt-tags-on-your-website-292415.html

Irrelevant backlinks are from crap sites like porn or warez then Google penalizes the site which is being referred. You need to be careful even when you submit your website to directory submissions as most of the submissions happen automatically, the sites are submitted to link farms which are actually blacklisted by Google.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1581706

Matt Cutts states in his blog that Google processed billion of documents per day for their real time search. Google has really improved significantly in speeding up the crawling and indexing process, which is exceptional despite the already-enormous and increasing size of the web.
http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Search-Engine-News/Google-RealTime-Search-a-Review/

One of the most powerful link building tactics is to create great content to give to third party web sites and requiring an attribution link back to your site. Many web site publishers are constantly looking for quality content. If you want to syndicate a full copy of the article, The NoIndex meta tag might be the ticket for you. By requiring the publisher who is republishing your content to place a NoIndex meta tag on each of the pages they take from you, you also avoid the duplicate content problem.
http://searchengineland.com/four-ways-to-safely-syndicate-content-32483

Google’s recent introduction of Place Pages within Maps came in sync with some key adjustments in the factors used to rank local search content. The combination of changes has resulted in Wikipedia abruptly emerging as a major influence on local search rankings.
http://searchengineland.com/a-new-behemoth-emerges-in-google-maps-wikipedia-32593

A comment in SearchEngineGuide.com says, “Creating a web culture that is dependent upon the SEO industry might not be what they are trying to do, but is in fact, exactly what the search engine companies are accomplishing with their continuous changes and methods. Google’s policies creating a need for businesses to have SEOs on board, just to keep up with the changes that happen.”
http://www.searchengineguide.com/miriam-ellis/google-shoves-their-liaisons-off-maps.php

“Rankings of web pages are determined not only by inlinks but also by content. Also even a few inlinks that are not-nofollowed may give a little extra boost to a web page,” says Bwelford of Cre8asiteforums.
http://www.cre8asiteforums.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=74205

Google doesn’t penalize sites for what other people can do to them as much as what you are doing on your own site. If you are redirecting pages on your site, cloaking text, etc. that can definitely get you banned, according to a comment on SEOChat.

http://forums.seochat.com/google-optimization-7/link-wheel-question-290874.html