We have seen in the past few years Bing growing leaps and bounds in the search market. However, the growth really isn’t coming from Google’s market share, though it has nibbled some away. Instead Bing is growing because it is cannibalizing its partner Yahoo!

Growth is growth though, and Bing is becoming a significant player in the search industry. As a search marketer this is obviously very important to me. I personally don’t care how my users find my website (Google, Bing, or their mother), just that they do find it.

Like most of the Internet marketing world I signed up for G+ (a.k.a Google+ or Google Plus) right when it came out. I played with it for a few days, tried out different features, and then mostly forgot about it.

I still get notified when people add me to their circles, but I haven’t really engaged with the new social toy since its first launch. However, the below video makes a strong case on why I (and others who use Google products) should take G+ more seriously.

Yet, I still have to wonder if G+ will really live up to its hype, and what will happen if it doesn’t. There are plentiful Google initiatives which have met their demise over the years due to the lack luster of their services. Such Google products like:

“Like at Halloween: I knew I’d arrived when I saw people dressing up on Halloween as my character.” ~Jane Badler

Saturday my family and I went to a Halloween party/dinner. However, at 1pm we were still having troubles trying to decide what to go as. A few web searches showed that there are some ambitious and creative people out there when it comes to Halloween costumes.

This got me thinking, and I started typing in Internet marketing costumes ideas. I was surprised (and probably shouldn’t have been) to see that marketing geeks truly show their love for their industry come Halloween. Below are the top family friendly costumes I found that will bring out the web geeky kid in all of us.

According to Google’s Annual Stock Holder Report, 99% of all its revenues come from their advertising programs (and not the 97% usually reported). For a company which almost did 35 billion dollars in revenue last year, that’s rather impressive.

As Google’s advertising flagship, Adwords is the bulk of that cash flow. The creative people at Wordstream did an infographic on the 20 most expensive keywords in Google AdWords. I was curious to see what it would cost if SEO was treated like Adwords. Meaning, what we would have to pay Google if they charged us per click for every #1 organic position we held in their search engine.

Doing this exercise puts in to perspective the importance of ranking organically over paid. There is no doubt that paid has a place in a search marketing strategy, but for many users the instant fix of paid search heavily over shadows the long run benefits of SEO.

An important element in ranking in Google is having other websites linking to your website. Simple enough, right? So simple that Google has written algorithms that try to penalize people for gaming their system.

If you gain too many “backlinks,” too soon; have lots of spammy backlinks; or both; you can trigger the penalty algorithms. These algos will assassinate your website and leave it in the land of the domain dead. You will no longer exist to the hundreds of millions of Google searchers.

The problem with these deadly algos, is that your competitors can “build” massive spammy links to your website, and potentially get you banned. Google denies this as possible, but I believe this to be a pernicious lie. I’ve seen first hand (but not by my hand) sites receiving the death ray of backlinks from their competitors and shortly after being penalized.

Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan reported today that Google setup a “honeypot” to prove that Bing is copying its search results. According to Danny’s article Bing does not deny Google’s allegations:

“Opt-in programs like the [Bing] toolbar help us with clickstream data, one of many input signals we and other search engines use to help rank sites. This “Google experiment” seems like a hack to confuse and manipulate some of these signals.”

For the last several years exact match domains have been the gold of SEO. You could buy one and with relative ease rank the domain on that exact keyword. So, if you had StoneGardenTurtles.com and were selling stone garden turtles than it was somewhat easy to rank on the keyword stone garden turtles. However, if you bought HippyTippyTurtles.com than it meant more work in gaining organic traffic on the exact keyword.

Recently, I have seen a shift with Google that suggests that exact domains have lost much of their SEO value. At the same time, I have also noticed that the usual links I have been acquiring are not as powerful. To confirm my suspicions I reached out to SEOMoz and asked their opinion on the matter.

SEOMoz’s Answer
There appear to be changes happening a lot lately with Google SERPs. In particular, I’ve noticed changes in the ranking of exact match domains. I think this is because of Google trying to take action against thin affiliate sites who buy exact match keyword domains and ranked very easily with few links and poor content. So I think they’ve been tweaking the algorithm a bit to try and solve the problem. I wouldn’t be surprised if you are seeing changes in SERPs because of this.

I actually believe this isn’t far from the truth!

Related Posts:

• A Case Study Showing How Bing is Inferior to Google
• Google Trap Proves Bing is Copying
• Website Cloaking At Its Worst
• Google Has Penalized Themselves
• A Strong Case For Google+

A little while ago my friend, Reina, asked about my thoughts concerning the recent change in the FTC advertising guidelines. I have a strong opinion on why I feel the FTC is meddling with bloggers (and other web entities). Below is my answer to her question. It may come across a bit as conspiracy theory, but I don’t believe I am wrong (I guess conspiracy theorists usually believe they are right).

REINA: So today is slow at work so I was going back through all my emails at work and found an article about changes in FTC guides regarding web endorsements. I’m curious if you’ve heard about this, if so, what your thoughts are on it, and also how it has affected blogging and advertising. Have you noticed a difference? Is this sort of thing enforceable or will it be online business as usual? The article made me think of you. Just curious what your thoughts are. Here’s the article.

yodas-page-rank I find it fascinating how everyone is trying to kill page rank, including Google. I was just reading a blog that shared, “Page rank means nothing.” The blog further states:

“Ya, I said it. It’s a loose comparative tool for relative sites but does not rank the site’s productivity. A less than google-perfect site can still be making tens of thousands of dollars. I know this because one of my sites has well over 550,000 in traffic monthly and ranks #1 out of more than 2 million sites… and has a PR of …. ready for this? PAGE RANK 2.”

I don’t doubt the blogger when she say that she is getting “550,000 in traffic monthly” and that her site “ranks #1 out of more than 2 million sites.” What I seriously doubt though is that all that traffic comes from just one single #1 ranking keyword. If so, that single keyword is very unlikely to be “low hanging fruit,” that a page rank 2 site can easily snatch up.