Let’s start with some notes and free-association thoughts on the text of Ontolo’s link building book:

A – The first chapter got off to a good start with some clever ideas.

1) See how link building can support various departments. Makes me think of the interaction between links and sales (e.g. rank the lead gen whitepaper page) or links and PR (linkbait, publicity stunts, contests…)…

Humans have always been fascinated by the night sky. And Googlers are no exception. Over the years, Google engineers have used their 20 percent time to create Google Sky, Moon, Mars and most recently Google Sky Map for Android. This handy app, built by engineers in our Pittsburgh office, turns your Android-powered phone into a live map of the night sky. You just point your phone to the sky and it gives you information about the stars and planets that you’re looking at…

While UGC and Reviews can often be a mixed blessing, as long as Google continues to reward rich snippets with enhanced visual listings, it’s probably a good idea to try to make reviews part of your website strategy.For those of you who haven’t seen rich snippets and reviews in action, here’s a sample of what they currently look like

To qualify for this program you have to have reviews, format your data using microformats, and submit your website for inclusion in the rich snippet program…

Hey there boys and girls – want to get into multiple niches really fast? Are those niches just slightly different from one another, being a “base keyword” + modifier combination? Know that if you just duplicate the copy from one “base keyword” + modifier A page to a page targeting “base keyword” + modifer B, the newer page will probably get filtered as a duplicate or low value page?

This is true both in sales-driven businesses and in lead-driven businesses…

A: When you rank for coupon terms plus your brand. A guest post by yours truly at my friend Dean Chew’s site, Chewie.co.uk .

Some other recent guest posts of mine:

-Wordstream: ppc-workflow – My PPC workflow and mistakes I’ve made

-Wolf Howl: youre-all-wrong-paid-links-from-offtopic-sites-do-count/ So long as the page is relevant, you’re good!

If these posts are interesting to you, add my RSS feed to your reader already! Enough with the refresh button …

Here’s a secret … I LOVE Aaron Wall’s Keyword List Generator Concatenator tool.

You take keywords, input them in a series of boxes, and it concatenates them together. If that sounds like gibberish, play with the tool. It’s super intuitive and you’ll be able to figure it out pretty easily.

In short, it’s a shortcut to building long keyword lists for exact or phrase matched ad groups…

Find out in this great, interactive linkbait piece by Vertical Measures.

Those of you who are subscribers know that you can always download my link reporting/scoring spreadsheet. [And have been able to download it for almost 2 years!]

The spreadsheet features the various factors that go into scoring etc in detail. Full details in my original SEOmoz post.

So… what are you waiting for? Add my rss feed to your reader, you link building lovers!

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin…

Just saw this piece via the ever-industrious Bill Slawski: Google’s Acquisition of MetaWeb & its Named Entities technology.

Myself and others have noted how exact match domain names were getting impressive boosts just for being exact matches.

I asked Aaron Wall about it, and apparently their SEO Book private forum’s got some good discussions on it. One idea Aaron favoured from those discussions was the idea that Google has trouble distinguishing between legit brands and entities with generic names…

Google Local Business listings are a huge source of traffic for businesses lucky enough to have locations in lots of different towns. Unfortunately over the last few months Google has removed a lot of links from these listings and it’s costing people a lot of traffic.

Previously if there was only one business listed on the map then it used to link directly to the businesses website, now it just links to the “place page” which is of course full of AdWords ads…

When you think about “information,” what probably comes to mind are streams of words and numbers. Google’s pretty good at organizing these types of information, but consider all the things you can’t express with words: what does it look like in the middle of a sandstorm? What are some great examples of Art Nouveau architecture? Should I consider wedding cupcakes instead of a traditional cake?This is why we built Google Images in 2001…

I’ve been reading up on the Content Network before launching a first campaign there in years. The following’s a list of posts I’ve found useful and the key takeaways. They may repeat and overlap in some ways. That repetition is summarized below. The links are accompanied by notes on what’s unique in that guide.

Google AdSense unit image courtesy of Frank O’Dwyer…

A search engine might use two sets of indexes – one for query terms that tend to show up in more searches and on more web pages, and another larger index that includes queries that aren’t searched for as much by searchers and don’t appear on many web pages.

By showing results for [...]…

You may know him by a number of names or titles – Governor of California, Terminator, Governator, Conan the Barbarian, Kindergarten Cop, Mr. Universe, Mr. Olympia, Arnold Strong, Arnie, The Austrian Oak.

To Metaweb, Arnold Schwarzenegger is referred to as 9202a8c04000641f8000000000006567.

Who is Metaweb?

Metaweb is a company recently acquired by Google, and [...]…

Last weekend, Spain won the 2010 World Cup. For the month leading up to the final, Googlers joined the world in cheering for their favorite teams. Around our campus, games were watched on computer screens and on cafe video screens. Code went unwritten. Emails went unanswered.Throughout the world, real life also slowed during World Cup matches. Which teams had the most loyal fans? Which game captured the attention of world the most? To answer these questions, we looked at counts of queries using Google…

The Comscore Search report for June has been released. Google had 10.29 billion searches. If roughly the same percentage of searches (20%) had local intent as Google has indicated then there were approximately 2,187,200,000 searches in the U.S. on Google’s main search site last month that were local in nature.

Across all of the search engines, again ssuming roughly the same % of local intent, there were 3,187,000,000…

As Google reached the limits of returns in direct marketing they started pushing the value of branding (because, hey, if you can chalk it up to latent branding value there is no cap on your max bid). Surprisingly, they even got many big brands to buy their own brands AND buy sitelinks on the AdWords ads. Some went so far as providing case studies for how much of their own brand traffic they were now willing to pay for, which they previously got free…

Information about where searchers hover their mouse pointers over different parts of search results, as well as advertisements and Google Onebox results, may be collected by the search engine to be used as ranking signals to determine in part how relevant those items may be seen by Google users in response to a search [...]…

Some of you may have noticed that your link counts in Google Webmaster Tools have increased somewhat recently, we are seeing amazing numbers up to 1000 times higher than previous figures.

The reason for this is very interesting, following the roll out of the new Caffeine infrastructure Google is able to spider sites far deeper than before and they are now reporting this increased activity in Webmaster Tools…

Recently, there have been a series of negative articles about content farms.

Content farms, such as Demand Media’s eHow and similar low-cost content publication sites, are now deemed an industry “concern”. “Industry” being the traditional publishing idustry, and concern presumably being “competitive threat”.

A trade group called the Internet Content Syndication Council (ICSC) has been circulating a document entitled “Council To Counter Web Content Generators Growing Clout”…

Got a question in my E-Commerce SEO Checklist post from Rania, who didn’t leave me a link for credit.

“4. Steal your competitors articles and product reviews and do article distribution.”

You recommend STEALING articles from competitors as an advanced SEO tactic?! Seriously?!

How about recommending that users create their own unique content in order to increase their site traffic and ranking…

Since their inception, Google Coupons have been invisible to most searchers and offered little value to the SMB. Buried deep with the local listings and no front page exposure, they seemed to be the poor step child of the Google Maps world. Google Coupons are now beginning to be exposed to the the light of day and Google seems to be taking them more seriously. Will they soon be given more prominence?

I just received the following email from Google Coupon Support (who new that there was actually a person or group that provided Google Coupon Support?):

Hello Mike Blumenthal,

This is to notify you that the following coupons in your Google Places account will expire in 6 days on 7/15/10…

Patrick Altoft directs search for Branded3, a Leeds-based full service digital agency. He also runs the popular Blogstorm SEO blog and is a pretty interesting guy to chat to overall! Hit him up if you’re looking for search services in the UK!

We’re continuing a series of interviews I conducted in 2008 with active Sphinners. You might also like to read the interviews with David ‘theGypsy’ Harry and ‘Sebastian‘…

In the past two weeks of World Cup action, 16 teams have been narrowed down to just two—Spain and the Netherlands—who will face off in the World Cup final tomorrow. For both countries, there are high stakes: not only are the two sides contending for the title of best football team in the world, but this will be the first-ever Cup win for either team and Spain is in the finals for the first time…

Answering a question on Wickedfire here.

If you own an Ecommerce site and don’t know where to begin on the SEO go through this check list. In total, it’ll cost less than $500.

1. Signup with all related forums. Put your site in the footer links and go through answering product related questions on a weekly basis.

2. Create a free OSCommerce and Zencart template related to your parent niche (if you sell CDs make a music template), insert your link on it and distribute it on template
directories and their repositories…

This evening Google has announced a plan to provide 30 days of Google Tags free (hat tip to Taylor Cimala of Digital Third Coast Internet Marketing & Jeffrey Magner of Trumpet Local Media ). The following is being sent to businesses with listings in Google Places (It is of interest that even Google still feels the need to note that it was formerly referred to as the Local Business Center):

© Google Inc…

I lived in Kenya for several years in the mid 70s. About every 6 weeks I would take the train from Nairobi to the funky seaport of Mombassa and upon arrival at the coast, would frequent a local bar where the beer was cheap, the ambiance authentic and “working” women would congregate. I would enter, they would buzz around me for a few minutes until they realized that I was just getting a beer and would soon return to their tables…

When you search on Bing, sometimes instead of seeing an ordered list of search results, you might see search results broken up into categories. For example, if you search for “Virginia,” your search results start off with an image and link to the state web site, as well as a map. You then see [...]…

As a former professional cyclist, nothing beats the thrill of being in the peloton and racing towards the finish line. Although I’ve traded in my cycling career for life as a Googler, I’m still a fan and enjoy watching my former teammates and friends battle in races like the Tour de France, which started on Saturday. While the cyclists were preparing to tackle the pave of Arrenberg and the Cols in the Alps, I got to thinking about ways that we can bring that experience to the hundreds of millions of fans who will be following the Tour de France over the next few weeks…

Google is always testing new layouts and changes to the main SERPs but these screens shot captured on July 3rd & 4th by Linda Buquet of Catalyst eMarketing indicate Google’s willingness to experiment with bold departures from past displays for Local results. I was unable to replicate Linda’s results although she saw them over several days on different searches:

Here are Linda’s notes from her emails:

Search term: Dentist Chicago (FYI I am using FF) Double checked and it’s not some weird caching error because other dentist/city searches come up the old way…

Local University Cleveland went off incredibly well despite some unexpected speaker changes. Mary Bowling was laid up with a health problem and Google was not able to attend at the last minute due to some confusion or another. But David Mihm, Matt McGee and I held down the presentation fort with the more than able bodied & insightful support of Anita Campbell of Small Biz Trends/BizSugar, the effervescence of Maryam Gholami of Bing and Geoff Karcher of the Karcher Group…