As many of you already know, last year Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman kicked off the Search Marketing Expo (SMX). The conference series started with SMX Advanced in Seattle and it was a hit. Compared to most conferences, people actually came away learning new information as well as actually being happy with conference food for the first time...

The moderator at WebmasterWorld, Receptional has said in a WebmasterWorld thread that he got an invitation from Microsoft, asking him for participate in the adExcellence accreditation program in the United Kingdom. The program was launched as beta in the US just last month, see: Microsoft Launches adExcellence, the adCenter accreditation The...

It has been an interesting week for blogger faux pas. Search Engine Land found itself taking flak for it’s sensational post about obtaining links from Wired’s wiki. Meanwhile, Gizmodo suffered at the hands of its peers for its CES television monitor prank. Both serve as examples of how it’s sometimes impossible to look ahead to...

Some time last year I realized my association with the search engine optimization and marketing industry might change because the atmosphere was getting partisan. Bad feelings between leaders were festering and it didn’t take much of a nudge to start a rumble. The situation isn’t improving and I wonder why. Case in point is a recent...

Danny Sullivan (a.k.a. The Godfather to those of us in the SEO realm) messed up, kind of. In a post he OK's for the Search Engine Land a couple days ago titled, "Get A Free Link From Wired" they basically outline how to get yourself a free link on the wired.com site. I especially love the "don't be too evil" note which implies...

There is no such thing as a free link.  No matter what the person who is selling you it tells you.  And the web will always adapt to make it so.  Even if its hard work. Barry Schwartz posted Get A Free Link From Wired today on an SEO blog, noting that: Some SEOs were saddened when Wikipedia added nofollows to external links. Perhaps...

Ross Mayfield took umbrage to Barry Schwartz creating a page on Wired's How To Wiki and pointing the page to Search Engine Land. Shooting the messenger is a favorite pasttime for people who don't really understand the impact of their actions. Mayfield proved pretty quick on the draw today after Schwartz demonstrated something that Wired should...

Danny Sullivan's Search Engine Land will debut a half-day conference format, SphinnCon, in Jerusalem, Israel on February 5th. There's no need to fret about travel plans to SMX West, the big event Sullivan's group will host in Santa Clara later in February. The SMX series will be moving full steam ahead as it has been. However, the serendipity of...

Mahalo, everyone’s favorite human-powered search engine and Jason Calacanis venture, has announced a few more “socially” improvements to its site. One of the major updates leverages other social media sites; the other is frankly patterned after another. Mahalo has expanded its Mahalo Follow tool to enable its users to post...

This article talks about how social networks can make a post go viral - or spread like crazy. It focuses specifically on the biggest social networks - MySpace and Facebook. Facebook tends to be a bit more technical - allowing you to utilize apps to spread the word. They also attract different types of people. Social networks and related sites can...

Aaron Wall put up a post about a new Google filter that causes people with high ranking terms to be bumped down to position #6. There is also a thread at Webmaster World about this phenomenon. This is still reasonably speculative in nature, but there are a lot of people who have seen this. Aaron offers some really interesting speculation about why...