I think one of the best parts of the SEO industry is the amount of questioning and curriosity that exists in the market. It really makes you see a wide array of the web as you search around because there is information in so many formats. You also start to see people attach to ideas that are 100% true while also seeing ideas spread that are 100% false.

What the false ideas spreading really show are how people become rabidly loyal, beyond question, toward certain people or ideas. If your website or product fill a niche where there is lots of discussion or it is easy for people to become rabidly loyal then it is going to be far easier to go from 0 to successful than if there is little discussion about your field. Does your marketing message or your field contain anything that makes it easy for people to be rabidly loyal?

Things people are rabidly loyal about include peanut butter and Firefox.

Things people are not rabidly loyal about include fruit cake and Flock.

A friend of mine and I recently chatted about a few examples of conventional wisdom being wrong. If you find new markets or marketing methods left untapped by people chasing saturated markets using techniques created by misguided group think you are in for making a boatload of cash. If you want to.

For a long time I had a few client sites and this one, but I felt I was perhaps starting to grow a bit inauthentic in my advice, relying too heavily on my brand, what friends told me, and what I read in forums without doing enough testing across a wide array of sites.

I recently bought a few more sites that I can use to test things on. I also partnered up as co-owner on a few sites. Fascinating what you can learn by doing things like tweaking internal link profiles and being aggressive on sites you can afford to lose, and seeing how quickly you can get to profitability in many different markets.

I am doing another major rewrite of my book. Hoping to send out an update notification sometime tomorrow or Monday. Sorry if I have been slow to replying to emails...trying to get the rewrite done.

1 hour video with Terry Semel on the future of the web and media.

Via Peter.

Google made their AdWords traffic estimator available external to your AdWords account. They still use the evil little graphical representation for total search volume, but they give rough approximations in actual numbers for the amount of AdWords clicks they think you will receive.

The tool allows you to pass variables in the URL string, so perhaps this is good for scraping some data on the value of certain keyword markets? I also added a link to the tool on my keyword research tool.

If you do not enter a bid price or budget the bid price they recommend is supposed to show your ads ranking #1 85% of the time. More background here. They also note that when you access this tool external to your account that it will not factor in your past account performance, so the numbers may not be as accurate as if you use the tool in your account.

RustyBrick pointed out a new free SEO tool by Sufyan that searches through a page or site to look for links to sites that are banned in Google. It is designed for smaller to mid sized sites. The tool returns a list of pages you link at and their PageRank. The tool lists the age and URLs of pages that do not appear in Google.

Most large quality sites probably have at least a few links to banned sites, so you don't want to let Google become the editor of your site, but if most of your links go to banned sites that could hurt your site's reputation or ability to rank in Google.

Currently Google is also a bit flaky on the URL search. With some of them they they give the signs of sites being banned while listing many pages if you do a site: search.