Jim Moran is co-founder of Yipit with Vinicius Vacanti. Yipit was an early entrant into deal aggregation space and the company recently raised $6 million in funding. The site gathers offers from Groupon, LivingSocial and nearly 300 deal services, and sends the best to you each day based on your preferences.

In a previous life, Jim worked in mergers & acquisitions at The Blackstone Group…

I’ve been reading a lot of the coverage of the Search plus Your World launch and I wanted to share my story and then clarify something.

I love to stay up until early in the morning playing Werewolf. In early December I went to a journalism conference called “News Foo Camp” in Phoenix and played a lot of Werewolf. When I got back, for some reason I searched for [werewolf] — maybe I was thinking about making a custom deck of werewolf cards…

David Mihm is a passionate golfer and when he has time to play, maintains a scratch handicap. He is also passionate about local and is one of the people in the industry that you should pay attention to.

His online tool set at Getlisted.org has helped innumerable SMBs get their business’s noticed. His annual Local Search Ranking Factors is a foundational survey that helps virtually every local SEO every year…

1. Particular postions, points or places
2. Centers of activity, attention, or concentration

Loci 2011 is a 2011 year end review of articles in Local Search that will be appearing over the next week(s). It is a series that I started at the end of 2008 and and this will make its fourth appearance. I have always thought that collaboration & cooperation are the best way to increase our understanding of the world…

In the last installment of this series, we looked at how Google may be using phrase based indexing to use the fact that many phrases often tend to co-occur with other phrases within the content of web pages, to re-rank those pages. When we look at phrases, we also need to drill down to [...]…

When you are looking to build links and drive traffic, one of the time tested methods that continues to work is creating “how to” style posts. In this article, we’ll look at some examples and discuss how to get the most out of the tactic, how to take advantage of seasonal search/traffic volume, and some potential trouble spots to watch out for.

From the earliest days of the internet, people have turned to search engines to find information and to solve problems…

If you were to click on the Google logo on New Years day it would have taken you to the search results for the phrase “New Year’s Day” as shown in the screenshot below. When I looked at this the dailymail.co.uk advert stood out to me because although the Daily Mail isn’t noted for high level journalism I very much doubt they use PPC to promote stories.

Sure enough when I clicked on the ad it took me straight to a really really clever site about some kind of wrinkle treatment…

Back in 2007, I wrote about a Yahoo patent describing how Yahoo! might crawl a webpage, and then recrawl the same page around a minute later to see if any of the links on the page had changed. It might do that to try to identify what it called “Transient Links,” or links that [...]…

Gab Goldenberg wrote the Beginner’s Guide to Remote Usability Testing and about the mobile usability of text fields for Usability Post.

Due to a surgery that’s left me unable to sit for the time being, I’ve recently been in the position to make much more extensive use of my iPod touch for browsing the web. And besides for realizing that the WP core needs a mobile friendly backend, I picked up on the darker side of mobile detection in sites…

Apple’s latest phone has a slick voice controlled feature named Siri that lets you tell your phone to do a number of different things, and can even power searches that it will answer for you. There’s been some speculation that type of verbal interaction might harm Google because it would bypass the search advertisements [...]…

Need A Free Ebook Directory? Here’s the Ebook Directory list….

Hat tip to Eric Ward for telling me about ebook publishing as a link building technique. It obviously helps more if those ebooks are free. Check out Eric’s link opportunity alert newsletter for more…

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

Our main goal at Google Search is to bring you the most relevant and useful results as quickly as possible. But, we are aware that often that is only part of your task or journey. Sometimes, you need more than simple results. You might want to learn, to discover, to be entertained or get insights.

Insights can happen when you least expect them. To improve their chances, it’s good to try other things, or do things differently once in awhile…

There is a story unfolding at Google that indicates a huge shift in their thinking about Places. Google, over the past 9 months has been making significant investments in creating support mechanisms for Google Places. Yes, you read that right. But just to be sure let me repeat myself: Google has been making significant investments in creating functioning support mechanisms for SMB problems with Places…

There’s an eternal debate amongst copywriters whether long copy or short copy is better, and the truth is that there’s no absolutely correct answer – the length of your copy depends on how much persuading your prospects need. Here’s the simple guide as to what factors influence how much copy you need.

If you like this post, get my latest posts by email or RSS…

The builder of the largest search engine in the World during the first decade of the 21st century, joined Google shortly after building that search engine, and possibly licensed the technology behind it to Google. She worked for Google for a number of years, creating a way of indexing pages based upon the meaningful [...]…

Yesterday, my colleague, Amit Singhal, posted about the global trends revealed in our 2011 year-end Zeitgeist. In addition to looking broadly at topics from more than 40 countries around the world, the site included the most popular local terms from more than 30 major cities in the United States. Looking at these lists, I was surprised to see that, from city to city, almost all the terms across all the lists were related to local news, education, civic services or entertainment and activities…

Google acquired a number of patents from a company that’s presently suing a number of major developers of wireless hardware devices for patent infringement. The company is Gold Bridge Technology (GBT), and they tell us on their “Meeting the Challenge” page:

One of GBT’s most significant group of patents pertains to the UMTS W-CDMA [...]…

Over the last few months, I’ve seen GoDaddy rise up in the rankings for a lot of hosting related terms. At first I suspected they were finally using their very strong domain in a smart way, but then I noticed they ranked for terms I know you can’t rank for without a lot of external links, no [...]

GoDaddy’s spammy link building techniques is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast – Tweaking Websites…

Google has finally  provided some public guidance, if not a a long awaited fix, to deal with the persistent Places error state “We currently do not support the location“.

The forum comment provides a step by step procedure for assessing and coping with (but not solving) the issue. The listing nuking message, in the system for sometime, seems to have been occurring more frequently over the past 3 or 4 months…

This year marks our 11th annual look back at the searches that compose the year’s Zeitgeist—the spirit of the time. With Zeitgeist, we look at the most popular and the fastest rising terms—the terms with the highest growth in 2011—in many categories across many countries around the world. For our 2011 Zeitgeist site, we’ve improved the visualizations to make it easy to compare terms across categories, added detailed infographics for an immersive dive into the data and created a video overview of the search terms that captivated the world this year…

The ability to provide a Google check-in offer is now live. The feature has been added to the Offer coupon creation option in the Goolge Places dashboard and a detailed help file has been added to Places for Business Help area. Google describes the process as follows:

Allowing customers to check-in when they redeem offers
If your customers have to visit your locations in order to do business with you, you can request that they check-in on Google Maps for Mobile before they redeem your offer…

PageRank is a measure that stands for a probability that if someone starts out any page on the Web, and randomly clicks on links they find on pages, or gets bored every so often and teleports (yes, that is official technical search engineer jargon) to a random page, that eventually they will end up [...]…

Google seems to have taken out the whitelisting process for several types rich snippets, most importantly the review and review-aggregate types. In the process they have also made some changes to how combined author / rich snippets are shown. Let me run you through what I’ve seen over the last few days. Review snippets for [...]

Rich Snippets showing up everywhere is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast – Tweaking Websites…

Last week Google while rolled out new Talkbin features and also reduced its price for the month of December by 80% The monthly price for the anonymous feedback service was lowered from $25/mo per location to $5/mo. per location. Tonight in my inbox I received notice of an new promo, pricing the product at $1/mo. per location…. a 96% reduction.

The product, a very slick text based customer feedback tool, is positioned by Google as the next generation of customer service and at a dollar a month becomes a no-brainer for any bricks and mortar business looking to improve customer feedback…

It’s no secret that editorial links are typically relationship driven, but who has time to build relationships? That’s why we talk at each other in ephemeral tweets that last 140 characters … if you had that kind of lasting power in your relations with your wife, a divorce would not be long in coming!

So I want to share two little time-saver tools to building relationships by making more meaningful investments of time…

A lot of the time, I dispel misconceptions by leaving comments on blogs. That works great, except for the rare occasion when someone pretends to be me and leaves a rude, fake, or otherwise untrue blog comment. Over the previous decade, I’ve only seen 4-5 times where someone impersonated me. But in the last month, I’ve seen at least three nasty comments written by “fake Matt Cutts” impersonators…

I like looking at patents and whitepapers and other primary sources from search engines to help me in my practice of SEO. I’ve been writing about them for more than 5 years now, and am putting together this series of the 10 Most important SEO patents to share some of what I’ve learned during [...]…

The first PageRank patent application was never published by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), it was never assigned to a particular company or organization, and it was never granted. It avoids dense legal language and mathematics that can make reading patents difficult, and it captures the excitement of a candidate Ph.D. [...]…

This guest post is by Andrew Breen of Outshine Online Marketing who offers SEO, PPC management, and CRO services. We met at SMX West a few years ago and he recently got back in touch to see about guest posting… I suspect this technique is how he found out about me taking guest posts !

ScrapeBox kicks butt for link building. It has dramatically sped up my link building process more than any other tool I’ve used…

The most common question we answer in our website reviews is “how do I make my site rank for keyword X?”. What most people don’t realize is that they’re asking the wrong question. You see, sites don’t rank: pages rank. If you want to rank for a keyword, you’ll need to determine which page is [...]

Using Cornerstone Content to make your Site Rank is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast – Tweaking Websites…