by Mike Krumboltz If you ever had any doubt that Johnny Depp is a pretty cool guy, exorcise those thoughts right this instant. According to numerous sources within the buzz, the Hollywood star left a waiter a staggering $4,000 tip. Picked your jaw off the floor yet? Good. WAVY.com explains that Mr. Depp was dining at Gibsons Bar and Steakhouse in Chicago with Marion Cotillared and director Michael Mann . The trio had worked together on the upcoming film " Public Enemies .

The reasons for Microsoft to still consider a deal with Yahoo! diminished even further this week as news broke that three former Yahoo!'s have been recruited to Microsoft . They aren't the first. You would think there was a fire sale on former Purple People. Larry Heck , Scott Moore , Qi Lu , and Sean Suchter have all ended up at Microsoft after leaving behind their Yahoo! gigs. Now, joining them, is Kevin Timmons; Yongdong Wang,

Mike McDonald at WebProNews wrote a great article on SEO ranking factors and which ones are most important right now. Of course, it's not all encompassing. It only touches on a few of them. But one thing I noted was that Mike and Rand Fishkin agree that H1 tags are not that important for ranking. Here's what he says about the subject: H1 Tags - A couple of years ago, making use of H1 and H2 tags on selected areas of your HTML code kind of came into vogue.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has just received the Media Person of the Year accolade at this years Cannes Lions during a spectacular awards gala at the Palais Des Festivals. Well have more from Steves participation at the event tomorrow as we bring you highlights from his seminar Living Up To The Promise Of Online Advertising.

I got a spam email that I thought about blogging about, but decided not to. Then they spammed me *again*. Sheesh. So here goes. If you get an email with a subject like "Affordable Link Building Outsourcing," think twice. Any email that starts out Make your links appear Natural Link Building is one of the most significant aspect of the off page optimization process and is a major determinant' is starting off on the wrong foot.

I guess you can't RT useful and interesting blog articles as easily as you can tweets, so I'm writing here today to pass on the latest news from our teammates in the Bing Developer Center. They've just released the updated Bing API Web Page Error Toolkit .   I'll be talking about custom 404 error pages on this blog soon, but for those who want a head-start on the subject,

If you conduct a search for a brand, you're most likely looking for the official site. Bing is separating the official sites out from the rest of the results for brands with a feature called Best Match . Here's an example of a search for FIFA. Notice the search box included with the result plus deep links: Best Match isn't perfect. It didn't recognize Caribou Coffee. Also, the "best match" for Keen was a psychic site, Keen.com. But what about Keen shoes?

by Claudine Zap Our top picks from the day's hottest searches. " Transformers 2" reviews (Searches increased by 340%). The blog Gawker called the sequel " Loud, obnoxious, and loud ." Appalachian trail (+273%). The South Carolina governor who went AWOL for a few days had traveled to Argentina. He was not hiking the Appalachian trail as his staff had originally said . Iran protests (+263%). Despite mounting protests over the disputed election results,

Here's another Bing-related trend which Microsoft should add to the positive performance of Bing in just two weeks. According to Efficient Frontier's latest analysis, Bing's share of paid clicks increased to 13% from 8% prior to its launch two weeks ago. This adds to several positive indicators we've reported the past two weeks such as Bing getting the number two spot in search market share even just for a day,

The folks behind SEM Rush recently launched SEO Pivot . SEM Rush does a great job of comparing sites head to head, but is a bit top heavy in the search results (only searching through Google's top 20 search results).SEO Pivot is more for just looking deeper into 1 site at a time, however it does use a smaller keyword database of 500,000 top keywords. It can help you uncover some broad keywords that you rank better than expected for. Who knew we ranked #97 for price fixing,