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Posted by Duncan Morris Will and I have a recurring argument about what should and shouldn't be in a site review. My argument has been, and remains that before you can do a proper site review you need to do keyword research, in order to validate that the site architecture is correct.

Knol Off to a Quick Start One day after Knol publicly launched Wil Reynolds noticed that a Knol page was already ranking . Danny Sullivan did a further test showing that 33% of his test set of Knol pages were ranking in the first page of search results. Danny was also surprised that his Knol was ranking #28 after 1 day. After citing it on his blog now that Knol page ranks #1 in Google!

cNet recently covered a new Microsoft Search research paper on BrowseRank [PDF] . The theory behind the concept of BrowseRank is that rather than using links (PageRank) as the backbone of a relevancy algorithm, you could look at actual usage data from hundreds of millions of users. Since there are more web users than webmasters BrowseRank would be a more democratic system, but many users are mislead and/or easily influenced by social media, public relations,

Like so many pursuits in life, it is easy for blogs to get stuck in an intermediate rut. I know, because I've been there. My site, Herbivoracious.com , has hit several plateaus in its first year of life. Each time the visits started to level out, I debated whether it was worth the effort to keep writing if only a few people were going to read it. Naturally I wondered what it would take to get more exposure for my site.

There are times when even the best SEO program struggles to get a couple of places up the search engine ranking ladder to make to the front page. There are number of strategies you could apply; one of these uses Yahoo! Site Explorer. The differences between being on the front page and being on page two often comes down to site age and the number of backlinks a site has. Pages that are appearing above yours in the SERP's most likely have these extra backlinks.

China has now 253 million internet users according to the latest report of the China Internet Network Information Centre (The CNNIC is a government agency). That's 43 million users more than the last report released at the end of last year and it also makes it the world leader in Internet users. 253 million internet users equals an internet penetration of 19.1 percent which according to the report is still below the global average of 21.1%.

Here's an interesting read on a bad, bad practice that has come to be called "scads". It stands for scam ads. In a nutshell, the practice involves taking a brand name and bidding on it as a keyword then writing an ad that entices searchers to click on that ad, but when they do they are taken to a totally unrelated website that has nothing to do with what they thought they were going to view. To be frank, it's a scam. And it torques people off when it happens to them.

A few days ago rumors abound that Google is close to acquiring Digg for a whooping sum of $200 million. This even prompted Loren to ask why Google would buy Digg for such an amount. Well, Loren can rest easy now as TechCrunch reported that the rumored buy-out deal has been buried - cancelled!

Posted by randfish For a long time, I've held the personal belief that to be the best search marketer you can be requires knowledge of a vast information set. This includes black hat tactics - the unethical, the illegal and those that merely violate a website's TOS or search engine's guidelines (or walk that fine line). Naturally, the SEO blogosphere has a number of places where this material is discussed, from forums and blogs to wikis and articles,