Search Marketing Map

Here's a good visual representation of Search Marketing using a cool free mapping tool called FreeMind

Google International Search Results

SEOBook has a good post listing some of his observations on the differences between Google.com results and Google International results.

Google Single Keyword Update

There is no question that there is a huge update going on at Google right now. Both SEOBook and Search Engine Land did to posts on the subject in the last 2 days. Matt Cutts sums it up with this comment on the Search Engine Land post:

"Hey Barry, these are two unrelated things, but the right teams are aware of both of them and have changes pending. The change for one-word queries is already live at some places and should be live at 100% of the datacenters in the next 2-3 days, for example."

The other item he is refering to is some heavy Chinese spam on Google.

RankPulse shows the activity clearly, massive movement mainly on single word queries. I'm trying to dig in a bit deeper, but that will take some time. One thing I did notice is that virtually all of the sites that got hit with a drop in the last couple of days are suffering from big canonical issues.

GapMinder And Global Poverty Data

I can't remember how I found this talk over the last week, but I finally got around to watching it. The video is about historical world country data, health, poverty, etc and is worth spending the time to watch. Hans Rosling puts the data in a visual context that is compelling and the guy is quite entertaining. The first talk is over a year old, but I recommend watching the 2006 talk first since its better and he goes a bit more granular on the data.

2006 TED Talk

2007 TED Talk. you can make this one full screen by clicking a button in the top right.

He also started a foundation to create a way to compile and present the data that is out there about world issues called GapMinder. Funny enough it was recently bought by Google. heres the site, GapMinder, and the tool is called GapMinder World 2006 which is pretty cool to play with.

Looking For A Web Analytics Package?

Look no further than this Web Analytics Study by StoneTemple, which covers the major packages in probably more detail than you care to read. Especially useful are the Qualitative Comparisons or strengths and weaknesses of each package reviewed; IndexTools, ClickTracks, Google Analytics, HBX Analytics, and Affinium NetInsight.

Interview With Aaron Wall

Linkjuicy.com did a great interview with Aaron Wall of SEOBook Most of the interview discusses paid links and Google.

There is a mention of the site penalty that MasterNewMedia.org recently received and that Robin Good's post on the issue is worth a read.

Text-Link-Ads Lost Rankings

Text-Link-Ads stopped ranking for their main keywords a few months ago. A number of people have suspected that there was some sort of penalty enacted by Google, but there has been no evidence as of yet. One new post suggests that it might have actually been a proxy hijack that caused the problem. Matt Cutts added a comment to the post stating:

"I know for a fact that a proxy was not the root cause of this."

Google On Paid Links

The Paid Link discussion has been going on and off for the last couple of months, mainly kicked off by Matt Cutts offering a new way for webmasters to tattle on other webmasters via a paid link report in the Google Webmaster tools. This kicked of an initial flurry of comments and posts.

Rand of SEOMoz restarted the discussion in July with a post of his own whining how the good guys can compete because the playing field isn't level. Once again the discussion was off and post after post began popping up. I commented on Rands intial post, but held off for a bit on the overall discussion.

All seemed to have come to somewhat of a head at the most reccent SES in San Jose with a panel discussion on Paid Links. After much venting by everyone involved, the dust has seemed to settle a bit and I suspect the issue will be mainly dropped again, that is until Google starts to take some serious action against those who purchase links. The reality is that paid links work and people will continue (and in many cases in order to be competitive need) to use them to improve their SERPs.

However, I think it is worthwhile to note a bit of information from the horse's mouth. Matt Cutts gave a slide show talk at the SES panel, here is the Power Point Presentation On Paid Links. Noteworthy is Matt's new paid link lingo, they are now officially known as Paid PageRank Passing Links or PPP Links for short. Also, in the talk, Matt mentioned that Google algorithmically detected and devalued all of the paid links which Rand spoke of in his July post.
Matt goes on further to make this statement: "Google is willing to take strong action against PPP Links."

Finally, hes gives a couple of examples of sponsored links or paid advertising in the slides. A bit of digging there and I found that the 2 pages he was referring to were http://www.linux.org/apps/ and http://www.nypress.com/20/35/news&columns/waterlog.cfm respectively.

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Handy Tip For Searching Date Ranges In Google

Google System Blog has a great way to search for custom date ranges by adding a operator to the query string.