The SEO community's buzzing over official word from Google that selling text links can hurt your PR and rankings. It's truly sad that $600-a-share Google is willing to ruin its own search results because they can't figure out how to differentiate paid ads from useful links. They're not always different things, either, one of many reasons why penalizing a site for carrying a text link is just wrong.

The search giant's argument is that too many people are buying links on websites in order to artificially boost their PageRank, a factor in determining search result ranking. Continued »

It began with Google. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the company's founders, decided to build a search engine which didn't rank pages primarily by keyword density like their competition. Early search engines were easy to fool — fill your page with the same phrase over and over and you'd appear near the top of search results for that phrase. Google was different. It let the web itself tell their search engine what pages were about and which were most important. This process is what they called PageRank, and works by analyzing the incoming links to each page. Continued »

The end of the year is the perfect time to stop and take a "big picture" look at just how much I've spent on search advertising, what that money has bought me, and what changes I should make in the new year. While I purchase advertising for my websites from many search engines, ad networks and individual websites, I decided to start by focusing on the top three search engines. MSN AdCenter didn't open until mid-2006, but what results I do have from them are interesting. Continued »