Over the last 10 days, the world of Internet search has swarmed around any source for news on Google’s “Farmer” algorithm change that affected nearly 12% of USA search results. Any company generating its revenue by producing low quality content rushed to wrestle up new rank and ad revenue data and..

When your job is to drive organic search engine traffic to a website (SEO Director/Manager/Ninja), you will inevitably need to prove your worth. There’s nothing like cold-hard-facts to paint a picture of success (or expose “The Man Behind The Curtain”)

We know Google does look at where you host your site. But how deeply do they look at the server location?

Some have speculated that Google made the “Farmer” update to help its advertisers, and its own bottom line, but data from large search marketing agencies shows revenue wasn’t the search engine’s primary signal. Yet, data from Efficient Frontier and the Rimm Kaufmann Group… Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

It’s reasonable to say that the world of technology patents is screwed up and headed for some major reform.

Google was under a lot of pressure to make an update that cast the “content mills” from its index. With the heavy pressure of the tech media community, spunky upstarts like Blekko calling the company out, and an acknowledgment from Google of an increase in spam on its index, the search engine giant had to act both quickly and effectively. Their most recent major algorithm change, known in the tech community as the “farmer update,” was released with bullet speed and did a great job at getting rid of a lot of spam – but at what cost?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Google Hotpot is the most heavily promoted Google product since Chrome, and that’s nothing to ignore. When you consider how heavily the search engine giant has invested in this service, you get a much clearer sense of where the company’s priorities lie; you should expect Google to be promoting their existing local features while developing new ones in the upcoming months. As part of promoting Hotpot, the company’s biggest existing local feature, Google is partnering with “ Students for Clean Water ” at the University of Texas.

I’ve written a lot about Google Hotpot in the past, including some information on how the evolution of Places (yes, Hotpot and Places are for practical reasons essentially synonymous) is working as the foundation for Google’s upcoming social network. However, adding new features, functionality, and social elements to Hotpot didn’t come without cost. One of the major issues that’s arisen is that data providers have been upset with Google’s use of their information

via Yahoo Yahoo is old enough that it can get a job, a driver’s license, and (if it lived in Germany) drink beer. That’s right: Yahoo has made it to its sweet sixteen, surviving the more than a decade and a half

Image via Google While Google has released a myriad of tools to help webmasters, one of their best-known and most pragmatic is Google Analytics. Provided as a free resource for webmasters, Analytics nonetheless manages to be one of the most advanced, most detailed, and easiest to understand site analysis tools. While remaining intuitive enough that beginning users can get started without much worry, it’s also a powerful enough resource that a library of books has been written about it.