• An example of a site that does not need to be buying links:
  • Only a few key industries warrant the purchasing of links and I cannot help but think this is NOT one of them. I could go to town all day about why this site needs to stop spending time with link buying and work on site content, structure, and basic on page tactics.

• This just might be the best job posting EVAR and this might be one of the worst. When the company wants you to do everything, and asks you to have expierence with the google toolbar, it might be a sign it’s not where you want to be.

• Google gets outed for selling pagerank, then blocks it. Thanks Matt
  • Matt Cutts quoted – “Hey, just to avoid even the appearance of problem, we added a redirect to these links through a robot.txt’ed page so that these links don’t pass PageRank.”

• Mashable is wrong, again ! Little trigger happy with their posts as of late. They covered the new look of google analytics, stating basically that there is a new built in report that allows users to have side by side stats of their competition and compare it to their site (similar to searchanalytics.compete.com ). Well they were wrong, its a site only comparison. They inevitably got called out (I initially posted on mpilgrim they were wrong), then removed the statements from the original post on their site, and didn’t even acknowledge it. Tsk tsk. If you want to be found as a credible source Mashable, then don’t post incorrect information. Did they actually think google would let you do that??!

• Sphinn should probably work on their 404 page don’t yah think? I dunno maybe something crazy like the email address to send the error reports to??!!

photo credit: PPDIGITAL

• Fitting pic of google and their stock price as of closing on Monday.

• google has a digg like clone in the experimental stage. Users vote on pages similar to how digg works. Apparently this will only affect personalized search. We know how much google thrives off of data, however, I wouldn’t be surprised if this data works its way into the algo’s in some form or fashion down the road.

• This jack face gives a bad name to all the seo’s in the world

• google is STILL selling links on this page, buy a google mini, get a link. WTF is the difference in this and buying real estate on a page, on a site, that is absolutely RELEVANT, to your site?! Hypocrits, I assumed they would have nofollowed those links by now. Especially after all the hoopla lately.

• What kind of pay do top notch SEOS get in this industry? Check out what it costs to get T Malicoat, Aaron Wall and Scott Smith on your side.

• MSN’s backlink results are working again with one small modification, you must use a “+” sign in front of the query. Worth noting MSN is better for checking backlinks that use the NOFOLLOW tag than Yahoo. MSN actually shows more results.
• This is a great post for the folks who have a solid understanding of organic ranking in google (not exactly for the beginnner SEO be warned) titled “common google seo myths”.
• Google has decided to decrease the clickable Adsense area. This move will surely decrease the amount of misclicks that used to occur. Win for the advertisees, lose for the content providers.

• Google has decided to mandate that the market cannot promote and do what they wish via selling advertising. They are really walking a thin line. They are now stating that they will penalize your site if you are selling ads that are not nofollowed. Stating that engineers are now manually going through and demoting sites that they feel are selling pagerank. I could go on and on about this topic, but I would simply be beating a dead horse. I cant stomach reading them anymore let alone writing a long, drawn out post on how I truly feel about this matter.

• Great how-to post on utilizeing CSS image replacement, which is a search friendly way to display text in place of images where applicable; oh yea and its screen reader friendly in case a disability stricken individual is perusing your site.

• Check out Brian Chappell at gooruze.com the newest social marketing platform for fellow internet marketers to share news, stories, articles and blog posts. Very fascinating ranking system and a great harmony that has enticed some exquisite posts so far. Definitely worth checking out. BrianChappell.gooruze.com

• Is Opensocial the Facebook killer? Google love’s to be in control don’t they? However I have to admit this is a great idea, centralizing the creation of social widgets!

• Yahoo weather update, their blog is stating that they have rolled out new crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms.

Here is the 2nd addition of the Thank God its Fridays (TGIF) link recap.

• According to compete.com Yahoo is the most fullfilling search engine when compared to Google and MSN. The websidestory study showed MSN at the top. However this study by compete shows Yahoo as #1 with 75% of searches returing a refferal, Google at #2, with 65% and MSN at #3 with 59%.

• So last week we noticed Yahoo rolling out a “so called” new algo update. A weather update as they call it. This week they roll out a new UI with some other new features along with it. Not sure if people will actually use these things or if this is a lame attempt by them to do something Google isn’t doing. It is also worth noting MSN, wheter announced or not, is seeing a good amount of movement on their end as well.

• Mark Barrera was the lucky marketing pilgrim reader sent off to SMX local/mobile. He encaptured some notes for the rest of us who wern’t fortunate enough to make it out there. I have paraphrased some short snippets worth noting:
  • Have a ’skip to content’ link near the top.
  • Goog 411 uses top 8 results not top 10
  • Be XHTML compliant
  • Use ‘tel’ tags on phone numbers to enable click to call and make sure to use the full 10 digit number, not a 7 digit number.
  • Use CSS & div tags to put navigation below your content
  • Submit a mobile sitemap

• Another fine example of the double talk google portrays with the paid link debacle. Its a never ending circle of, increaseing shareholder wealth, and protecting googles bottom line. Please Matt Cutts, don’t try to muddy the watters with keeping down the “biggest pocketbook” jibberish.

• Bill Slawski, the king of patent research, points out that a potential advertising realm down the road will be rooftop banners via google maps. An interesting idea to say the least, however I could see this turning into a clutter fest pretty quickly.

I am going to start something new. I watch a lot of blogs every day, so why not keep track of those posts with a once a week blog post, summing them up? Well see how long this lasts, but here goes.

• Internet marketing mindmap by Aaron Wall, maps out online marketing in a visual tree. He has great example’s for each niche, and links specific posts that help explain certain sections. Impressive to say the least.
• Digg ADDS clicks to get the same job done as before. Have these guys heard of usability? I would expect better from a site with the kind of resources Digg has. It is never wise to do a revamp that adds actual page loads to the user process. Duh!
• Which 4 factors does Rand Fishkin think dominate the equation 90% of the time? Well nothing too surprising here.
  - Keyword Usage & Content Relevance
  - Link juice
  - Anchor Text Weight
  - Domain Authority / Trust
  A good read, with some great comments by the peanut gallery.
• Yahoo has a new algo update and MSN hops on the universal boat. We’ll see if this actually does anything to their market share over the coming months.