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The Google+ honeymoon period may be drawing to a close, as record early growth reportedly tapers off and users make fewer, shorter visits to the new social network. Having seen a 238-percent rise in US visits in the week ended July 16, according to Experian Hitwise, Google+ saw US traffic fall around 3-percent the following week, Bloomberg reports. Meanwhile, sites offering “+1 for pay” rankings have already sprouted up, offering to help dastardly site owners game Google’s rating and promotion system.

Read Full Article Here: http://www.slashgear.com/google-growth-slows-stat-firm-says-as-1-seo-gamers-surface-28167963/

EU Takes Aim At Search Engines

July 7, 2010 - 8:00 pm

Kimberly Gold is an attorney at Arent Fox LLP in New York, NY. She also blogs about legal issues related to social media at LawandSocialMedia.com.

European Union antitrust chief Joaquin Almunia said today that he is looking “very carefully” at antitrust claims that Internet search services demote rivals' sites in search engine results.

The European Commission, the antitrust agency for the 27-nation block, is investigating “some allegations of anticompetitive conduct in relation to search,” Almunia said during a speech in London. Without specifically mentioning Google, Almunia highlighted the “importance of search to a competitive online marketplace.”

This comes five months after British price-comparison site Foundem, French legal search engine Ejustice.fr and Microsoft Corp. service Ciao from Bing filed an antitrust complaint against Google, claiming that they were ranked low in Google searches because they offer rival services to Google.

FULL ARTICLE

Searchers Complain of Search Fatigue

A recent market study by Kelton Research study reported over 70% of adult searchers experiencing something called "search engine fatigue" when they look up a topic on popular engines.

The study defined "Search Fatigue" as impatience or frustration at not finding the exact information a person searched for right away.

"As people use the Internet at home more and more users get broadband, what was once fast is now slow," said David Hallerman, senior analyst at eMarketer. "This is the nature of computing, not just the Internet and search engines."

According to a recent CNBC piece on the subject "Yahoo is making Web search faster by introducing new ways of predicting what users are looking for, while seeking to keep pace with rivals by including video, audio and picture results as answers to text searches."

Earlier this month Yahoo release features aimed at better understanding the needs of consumers conducting certain kinds of searches and to get them to the information they seek on the first try.

4 Good Reasons Why PageRank is Dead

By Justin Palmer

Yes, you read that right. I'm beginning to believe PR is a thing of the past. Maybe I'm simply venting my frustration at the fact Google seems to be updating the Page Rank in the Google toolbar much slower than they used to. Regardless of the reason, this article will discuss 3 reason why I think Google Page Rank is becoming less important.

1. Long Tail Search

   Terms: There has been a huge shift in the SEO industry in the last few years. With increasing competition in nearly every online market, it's becoming much harder to rank for high volume, high competition keywords. In addition, online marketers are realizing that the better performing keywords are the unpredictable, multiple word searches known as long tails. Because of this, many are finding that their PR 0 article or product pages are bringing in more traffic than their homepage or other SEO landing pages.

2. Original Content Beats PR: Contrary to popular belief, Google prefers rich, useful, and original content more than dozens of links pointing to your landing page. Yes, anchor text is still important, but without something to link to, countless links are worthless. On page SEO is still very valuable.

3. Aging: While it's well know than Google loves sites that have been around awhile, they are also just as fond of fresh, new content such as blog posts. I've found that many of my blog posts rank for their keywords within hours of the initial post. Obviously, they haven't had time to gain a single backlink, let along Page Rank.

4. Home Page Links: Traditionally, the highest Page Rank of any page on a site is the homepage. Unfortunately though, home pages do not always contain specific enough information to be link worthy. For this reason, many websites receive inbound links spread out throughout the site to specific topical content.

While the term PageRank may someday fade into the distant past of SEO, the concept of link value and authority it represents will probably always be around. The metric, however, may eventually become irrelevant due to the reasons listed above. Remember, don't panic if your Page Rank isn't as high as your competitor's. As long as you've done your keyword research, are focusing on niche terms, and ensuring your site is crawlable and optimized, you'll see the better results.

Justin Palmer's company, Palmer Web Marketing specializes in offering inexpensive SEO pricing and Church Search engine optimization. His current project is C28.com, a Christian music CD store that also sells men's and ladies Christian t-shirts.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Justin_Palmer

SEO Experts Read Syndicated Articles

I've found some great articles recently, and want to share them with my readers here. Even though I have only about 20 regular visitors to the blog right now, I don't always have time to post new and relevant materials. So I have decided to mix it up a little and rotate in some decent reading materials I've come across.

As an SEO, I am spending a certain amount of time each day working on optimizing sites, and then almost an equal amount of time learning, reading and keeping up with the latest strategies, testing new and old best practices for viability, etc.

It truly is surprising how much you can pick up on just by looking. You type a competitive keyword or phrase into the Google search bar, and up pop 10 sites. As you begin to analyze the SEO approaches these sites take, you see that there are many, many ways to achieve that ranking.

Some focus on content content content, others focus on links links links... A lot of white hat, a little grey and black hat being used - still getting vastly different SEO approaches to the top.

So take it from me, if you only read one two SEO blogs once in a while, you can't ever expect to be an SEO Expert. Like any other Expert, the more you learn - the more you realize you still have a lot to learn.

So therefore, I will continue to add my thoughts and major discoveries here, but also post some SEO Expert advice from others... categorized as Syndicated SEO Articles for your convenience. Enjoy.

Joe is a self proclaimed SEO Expert in New York

SEO Expert Advice : Link Building Is an Art Form

Most SEO Experts agree that link building is an acquired skill. Recent buzz in SEO community following the Google Jagger update earlier this year is that many sites that had deployed grey-hat or black-hat link building strategies have suffered major drop in rank in recent months.

Search Engine News, a popular SEO resource site has released a document called "Your 8 Week Step-by-Step Link Building Task Planner", for member's only on it's web site. As usual, they give you the introductory version of the material and a fairly comprehensive overview.

I would recommend getting something like this to share with smaller clients, or co-wrokers who don't know a whole lot about SEO, to help the along the path of success. Often times, an SEO Expert is too busy to get into the basics of educating those around them.

I believe in sharing knowledge about SEO with others, because it builds a comfort level and makes what we do a controlled discipline in their eyes, rather than have us be viewed as a bunch of SEO black magic or SEO voodoo masters.

For more details, check out the post here:

http://www.searchenginenews.com/seo/your_8_week_step-by-step_link_building_task_planner

As always, for more in depth SEO advice, including a comprehensive set of SEO resources, an SEO Blog, and an SEO Podcast - visit my main site.

Joe Beccalori is an SEO Expert in New York, NY

Google Crawling Certain Blogs Every Few Minutes

Google's Crawlers have gotten so efficient in recent months, that highly ranked blogs and other very dynamic content are being spidered in near real time. SearchNews recently reported a record One Minute Crawl time, and shared some excerpts of communication back and forth to Google. What this means is, once significant page rank is acquired, fresh content is still one of THE best proven methods of getting the spider to come back faster and faster. The more often search spiders are visiting your site, and the quicker they are re-indexing your content, the more opportunities you'll have to optimize in a shorter period of time.

If this isn't enough motivation to keep your content fresh and up to date, I don't know what is.

So, be on the lookout for many more job postings for Web content writing and editing in all consumer directed and retail businesses, with lot's of online draw.