Not too many people use the Yahoo Directory any more. At least I don’t think they do. But it remains a good SEO choice for some to make in order to build quality standing in search engines. The directory is considered an authoritative source, and a good title and description can give immediate results not just in Yahoo, but Google also as these directory pages often carry a lot of PageRank.

In 2002, Yahoo started charging $299 a year to appear in the directory. However, lately, many are reporting that Yahoo is not charging anything to renew in the directory and yet sites are remaining in it.
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In a recent post on his blog, Matt Cutts revisits the old Google recommendation that web pages stay under 100 links per page.

Initially, Google recommended this because they could only index a maximum of about 100 kilobytes of a single page. With a boatload of outgoing links, they wouldn’t be able to handle the entire load.

But now Google can index well over 100K per page. So why not load ‘em up?
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When many people start a company, they aren’t thinking of the search engines when they name it. This is a mistake.

Taking into account branding, relevant keywords, and location are important.

It’s a good idea to take a list of names you’re thinking of and run them and some other related searches into Google. With more and more people actually using Google instead of a URL to find web sites, if you don’t rank high for your own name, you will lose a lot of traffic.
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There is a quite remarkable article in the Huffington Post by Aaron Greenspan, a web entrepreneur who took Google to small claims court–and won.

Greenspan was using Google’s AdSense on a site of his. AdSense is Google’s ad network that displays ads from Google’s clients, and Google pays the publishers for clickthroughs.

After amassing $721.00 through AdSense, Google–without warning–canceled Greenspan’s account, and did not pay him the money he was due. Google gave no reason for why his account was canceled, other than to say he was posing a “significant risk” to Google’s advertisers.
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Ask.com, much like that stray kitty you feed although you know you shouldn’t, now stays with you after using it.

Try this: get on to Ask.com and search for anything. Now click on one of the organic results. The Ask.com searchbar stays at the top of the page, and the URL is hosted by ask. What this means is if your grandma is still using Ask because she likes that Jeeves character and she bookmarks or copies a link, it will have that Ask.com bar there permanently.
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Hitwise has put out a very interesting study that I noticed on Search Engine Land today: search queries are getting longer. More words in the search box equals more long tail terms that are important to pay attention to.

1 to 2 word phrases have declined over the last year in the total number of searches, while longer searches have steadily increased. In fact, 8-word searches increased 22% over the last year with the cutoff point being at 3 word searches, which remained unchanged.
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Google’s SearchWiki, which is already meeting with mixed reviews, gives users the chance to infuse a little bit of social media into their search experience. Think Digg for search results. Users can approve or disapprove of certain results and even comment on the pages. While this has previously been available for organic search results, it is now testing the same system on AdWords ads.

Many fear that this is an invitation for fraud. Noting Google’s dubious reputation when it comes to click fraud, what is to prevent advertisers and marketers from knocking down all of their competitors in order to gain an unnatural advantage?
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No webmaster wants Google crawling their site and indexing different pages that are essentially the same thing. There are many situations on sites that, for example, sell a lot of different items in different categories or have different session IDs, where multiple URLs get crawled, diluting the value of each link.

Previously, it may have been necessary to either deal with it or nofollow a bunch of URLs to try to get Google to give more ranking to the canonical URL. The canonical is the preferred URL that you want crawled, usually the least complicated or most easily visited one.
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Increasingly, pro-Russia hackers are having success in taking down ISPs of countries they feel like need a bit of a rogering. Estonia and Georgia have been victimized in the last couple of years, and now Kyrgyzstan is feeling the heat.

Kyrgyzstan doesn’t get a lot of publicity. It makes Kazakhstan look like a world power. Borat did not come from Kyrgyzstan.
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One of my favorite parts of Google Hot Trends is to see the remarkable synergy between television and search engines. A sporting event, new drama, reality show, or commercial will often cue a TV viewer to search for more info on the web. For example, if a strange illness is discussed on an episode of House, that illness will skyrocket in the number of searches that appear and the term will likely appear as “volcanic” on Google Hot Trends.

So who is watching TV and surfing the web at the same time? I know I do it all the time, partly because my flat screen is perfectly placed in conjunction with my desk to enjoy some telly while I’m surfing. But a new study out from Integrated Media Measurement, Inc. (IMMI) shows that I’m not alone.
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