Is Facebook's flash fading? In a sign that apparently the grass is not always greener on the other side, Ben Ling, Google Checkout guru turned Facebook Platform Product Marketing Man is reportedly rejoining Google after less than a year at the popular social network, wrote Kara Swisher on AllThingsDigital . Swisher said Ling is rejoining Google to work on the YouTube team, but he didn't confirm this for her and Google refused to comment for me this weekend.

In my overviews of multiple seo tools , I repeatedly looked into tools that check or track keyword rankings . Hamlet Batista recently wrote a brilliant post encouraging us not to rely on ranking metric too much. One of the points discussed in Hamlet's post is that keyword position should not be the ultimate goal of SEO campaign and hence it shouldn't be an SEO process success metric.

The long tail session is hitting all of the blended areas of serach, which is in itself Long Tail. Aaron Shear is speaking now about Shopping Search and hitting the longtail search terms in a shopping search engine campaign. Aaron feels that the main "head" search terms, or the money terms, result in a lot of traffic bouncing off the site : meaning they can drive a lot of semi-targeted traffic but not the best in conversions, dependent upon the terms.

Hey everyone, im here at Search Engine Strategies San Jose, sitting here in the universal and blended search panel. Mr Tawadros talks about how universal search is only a year and a half old and is still a baby. Johanna Wright is the first one to speak on the panel and she will be discussing what universals earch is all about.? Universal search gives the ability to showcase more than just ten links. Google at this time had many of diffrent products such as image search,

Seth Godin recently published a post about the dead zone between being real and being polished : "It's the banal stuff in the middle that people don't read. And yet, 95% of what I see is precisely in the dead spot of the middle zone. " I firmly try to stay in the "real" category (largely because I can't tolerate the polished up fake stuff), though someone sent me an anonymous email today telling me I need to polish it up You know a lot,

Long tail search goes far beyond normal organic SEO and deep into local search. Mary Bowling is speaking at SES San Jose about the long tail of local search. All relevant search to brick and mortar businesses is local search. 30% to 40% of searches have local intent and search engines have to interperate this intent. What is the long term of local search? Even if your main search terms is "denver plumber",

We're reading a lot about the candidates and the media this election season. But what are they reading? At google.com/powerreaders now you can track the news sites and blogs Barack Obama and John McCain read (from Drudge to The Daily Show) and follow articles catching the eyes of leading political journalists.

We've seen and heard Google advocates for the freeing up of the white spectrum. And today it has officially launched its campaign to unite the public in lobbying for the opening up of this unused airwaves between broadcast TV channels to according to Google to provide affordable, high-speed wireless Internet connectivity nationwide. Google is calling for uncharged use of this spectrum not only for their benefit for the whole public as well.

I continue collecting information for my upcoming mega-post on FireFox SEO extensions. Today I am listing add-ons that help to perform link analysis in Yahoo and Yahoo SiteExplorer: FireFox Extension Most useful feature Yahoo search plugins Quickly access Yahoo! and Yahoo! SiteExplorer. yExplore Quickly access link data by right-click on any URL. SearchStatus Quickly access link data of the currently active page. SEOquake / SEO for Firefox See SEO information for each Yahoo!

After a summer of high gas prices, Carmax.com is helping consumers find used cars that are easier on the wallet. They've launched a new search feature that allows car shoppers to search their inventory by MPG or miles per gallon. They've also added an MPG "quick link" feature, enabling site visitors to click on available cars that reach over 30 mpg. "Since gas prices remain high, people are looking for vehicles that offer better fuel efficiency," said Ann Yauger,