My SEO pal Jim Boykin, of We Build Pages, just started an SEO blog.

Already he is talking about not needing links (never EVER thought I would hear Jim say that), and flink.

Whatever happened to flink? Sorta funny that Google got ahead by processing links better and now they do anything and everything possible to run away & hide their ball.

I was talking to NFFC at SEO Roadshow and he said for a long time AltaVista was king. Everyone was using it, and then overnight NOBODY searched at AltaVista. Some stated that AltaVista went so far that they took out many pages which had a blue line in them, while others questioned their paid inclusion relevancy. Search engines are screwed when they care more about how sites got to the top than the quality of the results. Just a few steps down that path and it can't be undone.

Google is sitting at $312 a share with an 87 billion dollar market cap just prior to their secondary public offering. It will be interesting to see if they learn from the mistakes AltaVista made. Recently hiring Louis Monier, AltaVista's founder, surely must help. Matt Cutts just admited that occassionally relevancy does improve when they remove some of the scoring factors. Bring back the flink!