Update: The below coupon code no longer works, but we have found a couple new 2011 Business.com coupons. :)

In a recent interview Jessica Bowman offered the following Business.com coupon code: AVIVA, which is good for 20% off Business.com directory listings. Inclusion typically costs $299 a year, so with the coupon you would pay $239 for your submission.

Another nugget from the interview:

We currently have five editors and one editorial manager out of a total staff of nearly 100 employees, and all Business.com listings, whether pay-per-click Featured Listings or internet directory Standard Listings, are reviewed by a member of our Editorial Team.

Not bad margins on that business model if all the listings are wrapped in Google PPC ads and it only takes 6 editors to review it.

Frank pointed at this subliminal advertising video, which goes to show the power of Google's preferences in a SERP full of personalized recommendations, and a web of automated and personalized ads posing as standard text links.

A friend named Brent sent me a link to the Cyc project page on Wikipedia and a background video on Google Video. Cyc is an AI project which aims to enable AI applications to perform human-like reasoning.

What happens to the value of your content when search engines get better at providing answers directly in the search results? Is your site the type of site they would like to cite, or does it fall further down the list on another category of queries? What can you do to make them more likely to want to source your site? Does your site have enough perceived trust and value to draw clicks after they put your content directly in the search results?

As search engines work harder at things like universal search, search personalization, and cyc any sites which are only facts and filler won't get much exposure.

Question: A client of mine wanted to target high traffic terms in his industry. His industry was not very competitive, and some of the target terms were competing trademarks. We rank top 5 for them in Google, and now legal troubles are occurring. We removed all references to the competing trademark on our site, but still have some rogue inbound links that we can't get removed that have the anchor text which targets the competing mark. What should we do?

Answer: There are four options which can help get you out of this situation.

Work With the Competition

If you have a nepotistic relationship with the competitor and recommend them then perhaps you can both be strengthened as category leaders.

Is the Lawsuit Cheap Marketing?

Anything involving Google and search is still a ripe field for media exposure. If you think your chances of winning are good enough, and the potential return is much larger than the risk of losing consider letting them sue you. It is probably not your fault that Google ranked you, but also seek legal advice outside of reading this post... I am not a lawyer.

Tank Your Rankings for that Keyword

If the links point at a page other than the homepage, consider removing the URL from your site, and then use the Google URL removal tool when the 404 error shows.

If you bought those links cash usually works to help remove them. Use their on site contact information and the email in their whois. Call the number in the whois data. Pay them to take down the links.

Improve the Rankings of Competing Pages

The tips offered in my search engine reputation management post work here as well. Follow the tips in that post to help make other competing pages rank better.

You can also work on improving the rankings of other competing pages while lowering your rankings. Feel free to push a couple strong pages if you are just trying to end the confrontation, but if you feel they are dirty you may also want to help surface some ugly news that was ranking on page 3. Do that and they may care less about your rankings, and shift their focus to those other sites.

Question: I have a .biz website that ranks well in some of the major search engines for a few keywords, but does not rank as well as I would like for many other keywords. Should I consider switching to a .com domain name?

Answer: In the long run I think it is worth moving away from .biz if you are creating a real long-term business. The web was created to share information, and businesses are generally viewed less admirably than the individuals that work in them. As long as relevancy algorithms are based largely on links, then a .biz extension could hurt your exposure in most fields.

Most web companies that control large traffic flow have taught their userbase (and those who they trust to vote) that commercial = spam. To put this in perspective, some journalists write entire articles about businesses and then do not link to the businesses because they feel that doing so would be too promotional. In competitive fields sometimes only a few links separate a business that is getting 5% of the traffic or 30% of the traffic a search engine offers.

If you are starting your business on a .biz it doesn't matter if you have the best information in the world...the bias of .biz (and toward business in general) is going to hurt your exposure, making your business less efficient and increasing your business cost. The small businesses that are best sustainable on the web are those that function as businesses yet have the feel of non-commercial sites (and acquire links as though they are non-commercial sites).