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.