The second part of Yahoo Local Advertising Options, Post-Panama at ClickZ has some fine tips on local search marketing. Patricia Hursh, the author of this writeup explains intricately which ad product is best for your online marketing needs.

Google recently announced they were updating the Adwords Quality Score, however it appears that there is a bug that raises the prices form any advertisers:

Google AdWords Quality Score Has Major Bug

Google AdWords Adds Quality Score Column & To Improved Quality Algorithm from Wednesday warned us of the new changes coming but apparently there is a bug that makes good performing ads prices spike through the roof.

When you attend conferences, read blogs or popular search marketing sites you’ll find plenty of subject matter experts in search marketing tactics ranging from search engine optimization to pay per click to local marketing and social media. It’s great to get those specific perspectives, but I get a lot of feedback from businesses that appreciate a more holistic approach to marketing online.

I am doing a series of post’s over at Blog.lunarpages.com about elite retreat speakers and how attendee’s will be able to take real world applications to problems they encounter while doing business online and apply them in today’s market place.

I’m not a huge Adsense earner, but at the beginning of this month I decided to more aggressively try to increase my revenues.

I’ve now seen a 50+% increase in my Adsense earnings since I began.

What does that mean in real terms? It means my earnings would now comfortably pay off the monthly mortgage repayments on a detached 4-bedroom house in the UK.

The Globe and Mail tells us that "Google loses copyright case in Belgium". Apparently a court has now ruled in favour of Belgian newspapers that sued Google Inc., claiming that the Web search Internet search leader infringed copyright laws and demanded it remove their stories. They want only subscribers to be able to see their articles within their walled gardens. Presumably they do not wish searchers to find their contents by using search engines.

Steve Rubel wrote:

"The page view is on life support. It fails to capture all of the myriad of ways consumers engage in online activities without ever leaving a web page. To get a feel for this, spend some time playing with Yourminis. So what will replace it and when will that happen? Let’s handicap the field." On his blog What Will Replace the Almighty Page View and he thinks it will be events or time spent.

Wordpress by default, just like other blogging platforms, has automatically been adding the "nofollow" microformat extension to all links from user generated content such as comments and trackbacks. To support the growing rejection of NoFollow for blog comments, I have compiled this list of plugins that help you remove nofollow from your blog forever.

It is so easy to dive deep into developing and promoting a website that sometimes the goals of the business get blurred, the aims you set your site are not considered, so you just keep on working just to get more visitors to your website. How do you know you are going the right way from the spot?

How really good is what you do?

Yesterday, InformationWeek’s Mitch Wagner announced the publication’s first foray into Second Life via a blog post on the site.

Wagner noted the publication has yet to ‘do something interesting’ in the Metaverse, but said "We’ve got an interesting plan cooking to help InformationWeek readers find each other and connect in Second Life. It’ll be fun and useful."

A recent Google Groups thread draws attention towards Google’s way of handling nofollow attributes in links. Way back Google posted an entry where they tried to clarify their nofollow attribute. However, the real picture is still not clear.

UPDATE: It looks like Google’s pushed the button too early – and it could be the wrong button too. Lots of people are complaining that their Quality Score has gone crazy.

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I just got off the phone with Google’s Nick Fox, Senior Business Product Manager for Ad Quality, and got the scoop on the upcoming changes to the AdWords Quality Score.

Since the day I began posting on my blog I’ve always published partial feeds of my content. I’ll be honest in that I don’t remember why I made the decision originally, though I suspect it had something to do with not wanting all my content scraped and republished. Until an hour ago I had always thought the partial feed decision was the best way to go. Then I read a single post and did a little research and I now think I may have been wrong all this time.

I missed last week (My laptop started with the “laptop death rattle” – so it was a scramble to do data backups, find and migrate to a new machine). One of the worst parts of being a solo shop is being your own IT guy. Excuses aside – here’s twice the friday favorite goodness for this week.

Karl over at ExperienceCurve posted an interesting question for bloggers yesterday about how you would react to getting free products as a blogger and what sense of obligation you might feel. Nokia is experimenting with this, and just about every consumer products brand I work with is considering it and trying to find the right way to do it as well.

Dare Obasanjo is asking "what is social media?" Frank Shaw (he’s a VP with Waggener Edstrom and is one of the key people helping Microsoft out with its PR) admits he isn’t comfortable with the "social media" term too.

Search Engine Roundtable reports that 301 Redirects Pass Google PageRank & Signals in a "Couple Weeks". SEOs and Webmasters have always queried about the time taken for a site to pass along a PageRank value from one URL to another via a 301 redirect.

This is a question I’ve been asked so many times I’ve lost count. The short answer is there is no magic bullet for increasing blog readership–it takes hard work and continued, compelling content. That said, there are certain things that can be done to help set yourself up for success.

Nowadays, when choosing a business name, people often choose a name that also happens to be a derivative or a misspelling. How will your business domain be affected?

Why do you have a typo in your name?

Project Woodstock from Sun Microsystems arrives as a new open source project for developing enterprise-level web applications.

Humans are predictable creatures, but it’s interesting nonetheless to see seasonal trends depicting where everybody’s going online. January 2007, according comScore, was for taxes, job-hunting, and vacation planning, among a couple of trendy surprises. But the most significant change in traffic was to Wikipedia, which entered the top ten domains for the first time.

Also, as somebody-anybody sentiments rise, visits to potential presidential candidate websites also spiked in January.

Following claims that Yahoo India stole content from some other businesses’ blogs, the company’s representatives want everyone to know that “we do not admit of [sic] any copyright violation.” The content in question, by the way, was a recipe.

Fry, Inc, a ecommerce design, development and managed services provider, has announced that the Web site design and re-launch of ShoeMall.com increased sales for the online retailer by 44 percent in 2006.

Publishers asked for it, and the Google Reader team listened. Engineer Justin Haugh announced earlier today that the company’s crawler now “reports the number of Google users subscribed to the feed.”