Amazon.com has killed another affiliates program due to proposed legislation that would force the company to collect and pay sales tax in Rhode Island. The move comes less than a week after Amazon notified its affiliates in North Carolina it would be ending its program there due to similar proposed legislation. The affiliates are members of a...

The world's largest university press has sided with Google in the ongoing Google Book Settlement debate.  Yesterday, Tim Barton, the president of Oxford University Press, spent about 2,700 words explaining that he believes even a flawed settlement is better than nothing. The phrase "if it's not online, it's invisible" best sums up...

Google's Matt Cutts has an interesting video up (one of many) on the Google Webmaster Central YouTube channel that deals with switching to a new content management system and how that can affect search engine rankings. Someone asks: We are changing a farily large HTML site to CMS. What are the essentials to keep in mind so that we do not lose our...

As you may know, Google's Matt Cutts frequently answers questions from Google users on the Google Webmaster Central YouTube channel. There are a couple recent ones in which he addresses questions about directories and how they contribute to a site's rankings. The first question is: Will Google consider Yahoo! Directory and BOTW (Best of the...

China on Thursday expressed anger at Google for providing links on its English language search site that lead to vulgar content that violated the country's law. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang dodged a question about whether the government had played a role in recent disruptions to Google sites within China. He did make it clear that...

Tomorrow, June 24th at 10 AM PDT (new date, see below), we'll hosting a free webinar on landing page design. Tim Ash of SiteTuners, one of our Website Optimizer Authorized Consultants, will lead the event. He'll be sharing what he calls the seven deadly sins of landing page design.If you want to increase your conversion rate, but are unsure of...

As you may know, the SMX Advanced event in Seattle took place recently, and interestingly enough, two of the hottest topics frequently discussed were not Google-related (not that Google was discussed frequently too). Odd for a search marketing event isn't it? Mike McDonald of WebProNews discussed these hot topics - Bing and Twitter search with...

Collecta, a new search engine, launched today with a unique twist... they're one of the first real-time search engines. Searching with Collecta, you get real-time results from blogs, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, social sites and various news outlets. Collecta's homepage gives the following description of the new search engine... "Collecta...

There is no question that people are putting a lot more of themselves out there online these days with the rise of social media. At this point, it seems that generations will be born into this lifestyle. Who knows what other tools/services will be popular in the future? Right now, online reputation management is critical, and social media has...

When you are evaluating your website from an SEO/Indexing/Crawlability perspective there are a few things to keep in mind and some important questions you may not be asking yourself. What questions are you asking yourself? Share with WebProNews readers. I managed to catch up with Vanessa Fox at the SMX Advanced show in Seattle last...

Search Engine Marketing and SEO have always been very dynamic fields.  Search engines make changes all of the time.  Sometime they announce their changes, sometimes we are left to guess at them.  In either event, more often than not, we are left  largely to our own devices in terms of assessing the impact of these changes and...

Last night Hulu ran the live telethon style infomercial for Bing called the "Bingathon". So how did it perform? Well, it appears nothing "official" has been released yet. So let's see what some Twitter users (a co-host, industry professionals and everyday users) are saying about the Bingathon. Did any of you watch the...

We have two upcoming Seminars for Success for Google Website Optimizer. If you're looking for a day of in-person training to help you get started in your testing, you should try to attend. The curriculum includes:An overview of testing and Website OptimizerHow to identify problematic pages and estimate sample sizesLoads of testing best practices...

PageRank sculpting is a pretty advanced SEO tactic, and it has been widely used by SEO pros since Google’s Matt Cutts described its use on YouTube, giving the strategy the official green light. At SMX Advanced in Seattle, the same harbinger of Google insider information offered a stunning revelation: Google changed the way it handled link...

Blog posts that aren't less than two days old no longer have to be considered lost for all time.  Google's made the Custom Search AJAX gadget available to all Blogger users, and as a result, it's become much easier to call up entries from the past along with other info. A post on the Official Google Blog explains, "You can configure...