Strolling around the SEO corner the last few days has been a surprisingly fruitful experience, especially given the fact that a lot of the items one comes across in the search engine optimization realm is just regurgitation of ideas and concepts that have been thrown around for some time.

I came across this gem by Jill Whalen over at Search Engine Guide. She outlines a lot of the common myths about what the search engines ascribe value to when crawling a site’s code. I especially found her commentary on how optimizers have developed a phobia of using Flash altogether when, in fact, the engines really only have a problem with Flash when it comes to navigation. All in all, the article is a great read and definitely worth checking out.

Then I stumbled upon Rae Hoffman’s scorching disassembly of Merchant Circle, a service that specializes in “reputation management” for businesses looking to improve their search ranking and community perception. Never one to mince words, Rae publicly tears apart the service limb from limb and lets us all in on some of the less-than-reputable ways in which Merchant Circle actually goes about managing a client’s reputation.

Finally, this story at SEOBook caught my attention. Apparently, Yahoo is getting into the business of selling quick links in its search results to its paid inclusion members. For a company that’s just starting to rebound from a disastrous 2006, this could potentially be a nightmare in the making if it comes out that the integrity of search results has been compromised as a result of link sales.