U. S. traffic on Cyber Monday increased 26 percent compared to 2006, according to Hitwise. This is the third consecutive year there has been an increase on the Monday after Thanksgiving.

What we have for you today is a double scoop, double feature and two times our regular interview spunk involving Kevin Ryan, Global Content Director for Search Engine Strategies and Search Engine Watch and Kevin Heisler, Executive Editor of Search Engine Watch.

I’ll have to say, there are a few gems in this one, so read on:

The Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP) debuted today as a set of improvements to deficiencies seen in the robots.txt protocol currently observed by search crawlers.

 It was like pulling the plug while the stereo was still going – that droopy drop-off of sound and fury – two years ago when the first so-called "Cyber Monday" was conveniently labeled, leaked, and then debunked as hooey on Tuesday. And again this year, it just ain’t so.

Google has shown itself to be the strong, silent type, and quick, too – in about two days’ time, the company cleaned up what one individual called “massive amounts of malware redirects” without bothering to say a word about it.

The importance of authoritative content on websites becomes even more critical to site publishers during the holiday season.

The Federal Trade Commission has reached an agreement with Adteractive, an online advertising company, for its use of misleading spam emails and online advertising to attract people to its Web sites.

How much money would it take to put a pair of mouse ears on your head?  Small Internet companies should really think that question through, as fresh reports indicate that Disney is looking to acquire a lot of startups.

Google’s Checkout and eBay’s PayPal unit are showing off their big holiday offers, designed to get you to use their services when making your holiday purchases online.

Pingdom tracked 12 top social networking sites from October 19 to November 19, and found that Microsoft’s Live Spaces had the most downtime, with the site failing to respond for a total of three hours over the course of the month.

By contrast, that’s more than Facebook (10 minutes), MySpace (10), Bebo (30), LiveJournal (40) and Orkut (85) combined, and worst on the list.

There are a number of free or inexpensive search analytics tools available out there, and this article will outline a few of them that have gotten rave reviews.

Emoticons and group chat have been added to the features for Gmail, but they will roll out slowly to Gmail users.

A 48-year-old man involved in an Internet love triangle was sentenced to 20 years in prison for murdering his competitor after the woman they both competed for ended the relationship.

It is (I think) becoming public knowledge that Google has crushed all of its opponents in France – the company has a search market share of around ninety percent.  A new study is surprising, then, in that it reveals large similarities between the French versions of Google and Yahoo.

MTV Networks said it will make every clip from every episode of the popular animated comedy "South Park" available online for free next year in an effort to reach a wider audience.

If you’ve ever thought, “Hey, I could give better search results than that,” here’s your chance: one of Google’s experiments is allowing users to vote sites up (or off) results pages.  They can also add completely new sites to the list.

Reuters details a new program from Corbis giving bloggers access to some of its photos.