Whispers about potentially requiring speakers at Search Engine Strategies conferences to not speak at competitor shows have been dismissed as untrue.

Our next mobile search interview is with Barry Schwartz better known as Rusty Brick. One of the industry voices for Search, barry has put together one of the leading forums called Search Engine Roundtable. Thank you barry for the interview.

Yahoo Search Marketing has a new feature available that changes the pricing model for its advertisers.

The safety risk to search engine users declined by about one percentage point according to a study from McAfee, "The State of Search Engine Safety." Sites that offer adware, spyware, viruses and exploits are considered risky.

TheStreet.com has launched StockBlogr, a blog search engine focused on financial blogs that offer investment advice, stock information and trading strategies.

Rumors of a new effort by Microsoft to tap Silicon Valley’s bright young techies and build a better search engine have been met with a collective arching of the shoulders.

Everyone knows that Google and Microsoft are rivals, but the first area of competition that comes to mind does not involve books.  Nonetheless, the two appear to be at it again, and it seems as if Google is readying a new tool for attack.

"Google ranking this and Google ranking that"… it’s all everyone talks about. But a recent report by Infospace highlights the need for online businesses to focus their search engine optimization efforts across more than just Google.

I’ve noticed this several times and thought I’d bring it up.

TechMeme seems to penalize bloggers who link to other bloggers. Most bloggers believe that a major part of how TechMeme decides which is the most important story is to count links. That isn’t true in following mine, and other people’s results.

I believe there’s a “linking penalty” on TechMeme. At least it seems that way after doing my own link counting.

Let’s say there’s three stories.

I’ve been doing a few local searches recently to find some examples of well-optimised Abingdon websites, I found a Google search for "Abingdon hotels" brought up an excellent example of both good and bad SEO for various local accommodation websites.