Where do email subscribers fall on your list of priorities? We’ve recently pushed email toward the top of our most valued sources, and it doesn’t seem like we’re alone in that. While social media might be the hot place to push your marketing efforts, there are many who choose to rely instead on building a valuable email list

Especially when beginning an SEO engagement, it’s helpful to ensure tracking is as accurate as possible. Having the ability to compare analytics to external sources can give us something to point to when tracking doesn’t seem right.

Today’s Google logo is a an homage to Leo Tolstoy to mark the Russian author’s 186th birthday.

Negative SEO is real.

Yandex is Russia’s most popular search engine with a 62% market share, and also has a stronghold in Poland, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Turkey. Google is still a major stakeholder in the Russia market, but if you are marketing in Russia, you should optimize for Yandex first, Google second. Yandex has several SEO requirements that differ from other search engines, which makes SEO in Russia a different ball game.

For the readers here, this is probably very obvious, but @Marie_Haynes tells me, that it is not so obvious and it is “an issue many people argue about.” You cannot recover from a Penguin penalty (algorithm) if Google did not run the algorithm again. The only way to recover from an algorithmic issue is for the algorithm to run again

In late August, Bing announced the Bing Image Widget Tool and then a couple weeks later, Getty Images sued Microsoft over that tool, citing “massive infringement” of copyrighted images. Then within a couple days, Microsoft pulled the tool, as you can see from the image above…

In late August, we reported that many searchers began seeing the old Google home page again.

Without immediate, new concessions from Google it appears that the company will not be able to finalize an antitrust settlement with the European Commission before antitrust chief Joaquin Almunía leaves office in November. It’s almost certain that a stronger Google critic will succeed him…

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today…