60 Minutes:
Google on 60 Minutes

Search Google Ads:
Widget Ads - you can search Google for ads only.

What is Google Smoking?
Bongs in the search results - I randomly searched for Chong at Google. On my good old handy dandy FireFox some Google searches are showing images.

Why would a company so textually driven want to place those images prominently above search results? They are probably going to be easy to spam, increase page load time, and IMHO detract from Google a huge amount. I suppose they know a bit more than me about that sort of stuff, but so far I do not like it.

Search Marketing Association:
North American brother of the EU and UK to launch

Renting Links:
I met Patrick Gavin of Text Link Ads in Las Vegas and have been working a bit with him. I recently interviewed Patrick about link buying, how he got into the web, and where he would start if he started on the web today.

Blog Happenings:
Six Apart is the company that created the blogging software that runs this site. They are going to purchase LiveJournal, which will drastically expand their userbase, though most LiveJournal customers are not paying customers. A ton of consolidation in this space will likely occur throughout the year between some of the platforms, tracking, and search sites. (found on ThreadWatch)

The Future of Journalism:
Dan Gillmore starts his blog.

Free Answer Engine:
GuruNet becomes Answers.com and drops subscription fee.

PPC Keyword Research Software:
TheDowser is a new (to me at least) keyword research tool which combines some of the features from the Overture search term suggestion tool and the Google Keyword Sandbox tool (as well as having some other features). I did not use it a ton, but downloaded the trial and played with it a bit. If you run a bunch of PPC campaigns it only needs to help you save a little time or find a few new keywords to pay for itself.

Interesting:

• UseIt: Fat Links

• Change This - seems like there is something good here every few days.
• Does the open source model apply beyond software?
• Speaking using a unique and honest voice. (link may be offensive to those who are easily offended)
  
• Economics & Sociology White Papers (found on Ross Mayfield's blog)

• US tax dollar breakdown
  
• what is social security "reform"?...more info...ever wonder why so many politicians and news outlets portray everything as a crisis? The answer is simple...it is. If they don't do something to distract you and keep your attention then you might actually have time to learn how to change their world.

My Way or the Highway...
Dave Hawley (who is on my ignore list) recently created a thread to prove that signature links do not count. Given limited sets of data and a desired goal one can, after all, prove just about anything.

DaveN cites the thread stating that he thinks all links will help some, but that he is seeing more theming at play in Google today.

Questionable:
When you know people manipulate information systems and you need to research you should become a Skeptical Business Searcher

New Library:
Internet Archive's Text Archive project will challenge the recently launched Google library.

Search a Bunch of Sites:
GigaBlast allows you to create a custom topic search engine which searches up to two hundred of your favorite domains.

Taking Bets:
Sebastian reviews 2004, and bets that SEO firms will drop like flies in 2005. I have grown to know a good number of SEOs over the past year or so (and chat with many daily). Many come from bright business backgrounds, but it also seems to me that many of us also had exceptionally low points in our lives and looked to the web for something to do when other things did not make sense (I am definentally part of that second group).

I would not bet against the resiliency of internet marketers, especially with how fast and cheaply the web provides feedback. No matter how much search advances people will still make money off SEO services. Some SEOs will always be able to manipulate most any search results, while others will move on to other business roles.

I think niche SEO services (knowing everything about an industry or link building or directory registration or keyword research), more sophisticated SEO services (those who can instantly rank anything or know how to get around any technical problem), and more personalized SEO services (working exceptionally closely with just a few clients) will spread.

General broad SEO services for some random set fee to tons of clients will be a business model that provides less and less value as time passes and search advances.

More clients means more data, but understanding social networks and finding the key things that various web based businesses need to do to succeed longterm is not something that can scale out to work well with thousands and thousands of clients. Most base level salary workers can not do the deep analytical stuff and there is only so much that you can automate or mass produce before it loses value.

Some of the best SEOs work for a limited number of clients and share profit with companies that they help make successful. In the long run it is much more valuable to forge a few strong relationships than to spread too thin. From my experiences usually those who demand the cheapest rates also are the most likely to be bad customers in many many many other areas.

If customer SEO fees and service structure are not customly designed around what their sites need then they are:

• paying for a package they may or may not need; &

• probably are not getting the individual attention their business needs to succeed longterm.

Even selling things like directory registration or consulting I have fees listed on my website, but in my mind the numbers are arbitrary guidelines to qualify prospects...really nothing more. In my opinion no legit service price can be given for full quality SEO services without first extensively chatting and feeling each other out.

SEO in and of itself will not go away anytime soon, though many of the people doing it may create interesting new business models and ideas or have job positions that go by some other official name.

Then again I could be wrong ;-)

Do you think SEO is going away anytime soon? How will it evolve? Will customers learn to pay in jars of peanut butter?

Content SEO:
When I moved my other site the DNS propigated through amazingly fast (before I even had the site up - oops). My site was not up when Google crawled it and it still ranked at #6 for search engine marketing. Also here is the cache copy of the page. For competitive terms the actual page copy does not usually matter that much IMHO.

Google UK:
Google.com was 302 redirecting to Google.co.uk for some people in the UK. You can override the cookie by using the no cookie redirect link: http://www.google.com/ncr (found on DaveN's SEO Spam Blog)

May the Smartest Search Win:
Google Sued Over Scholar... Have you sued Google for something or another yet? If not, why? ;)

For the Egotist in the Room:
PubSub link rank...kinda like Alexa + PageRank for blogs...it measures blog citation and the lower your number the better. My PubSub is brutally high, please link to me to help make the world a better place <-- desperate plea for help :)

NickW:
has a baby (actually it was his wife who had the baby) congrats Nick :)

Directory Owners Friend:
I will be doing lots of site submissions to lots of directories pretty soon. If you have a decent directory which:

• gets indexed by major search engines

• and has enough link popularity to get well indexed;
• has some quality standards;
• and provides static links...

make sure you are listed in my Directory Archives site...if you are not please submit :)

Also if you want to offer submission deals for lots of submissions I am all for that and would probably be more inclined to submit...

Spamming Google 101:
DaveN has created a new SEO blog. The early posts already have a few blog spam and page hijacking tips, and DaveN has comments open for all.

Google's Search Suggestion Tool:
Earlier Google released a search term suggestion tool which has already been reverse engineered.

Some people have discovered suggestion data via links like
http://www.google.com/complete/search?hl=en&js=true&qu=google
which DaveN stated should be used as a proxy.

JasonD offered many helpful reverse engineering tips to asstute webmasters throughout the ThreadWatch comments.

A couple more tools which have came out from the Threadwatch thread...

• Suggest Getter Example

• Reverse Engineering Google Suggest

Slashdot has a good long thread about Google Suggest as well.

Problems with the Google Search Suggest Tool:
If this tool ever made default it would help users search with longer queries (and thus more targeted searches), but it would artifically condense traffic patterns...thus making top keywords more expensive and static on both the free and advertising side of Google. The drop in ad supply would cause prices to shot up and encourage lots of click fraud. The other obvious problem with the Google search suggestion tool is that it suggests Eric Rice is a child molester, which is obviously uncool for Eric...

Amazing Posts 101:
NFFC asks what is the Best put down line in a forum setting....

My personal favorite is "I don't think there are any medications for being "honesty impaired", but that's something hes going to have to own up to."

The Ruling Class:
NFFC is the David Beckham of SEO?

Auctions Expert...
knows how to make bank from click fraud, says Google.

While We are Selling...
google founders selling stock

Give it away, give it away, give it away now
Perfect 10 is in a sea of distress,
unimpressed by Googles information access.
porn is free
porn for me
say hell yes :)

Google Scholar:
New Google Scholar Search. Andrew Goodman has an interesting post about Google Scholar.

Toolbar
for your site. free and customizable.

Deskbar:
Google Deskbar API

The Best SEO Secrets:
are kept secret...says Nick W

MSN + Overture:
Partner up for another year.

Link Building Info:
Andy Hagans has a new site offering link building tips.

Scoop:
A while ago a sketchy self proclaimed "white hat page generator" (www.metawebs.com) hit the market. I do not know a ton of programming, but Dan Thies, one of my well respected SEO friends sent me an email stating:

It took me about 15 minutes to write a Google API app with PHP to fish these out of the SERPs, using a very small list of seed terms (<20 words). I stopped it after a while, but it's like shooting fish in a barrel to find these "unfootprintable" pages. It will get even easier as these sites get indexed, because it increases the odds of a "hit" when searching for them.