SEOmoz has a couple of very interesting charts showing the top 500 domains and the top 500 pages being linked to from different places. This paints a pretty good picture of what sites are held in the highest regards by content producers.

The SMX Confernece was in Sydney Australia last week, and one topic discussed by representatives of both Google and Yahoo was that of duplicate content filtering across international domains. Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz notes that while the subject has been discussed in the past, many people including experts in the field have been in the dark.

In-House SEO has been a big topic at SMX West. This is because many businesses are moving their SEO in-house to save money because of the economy. With in-house SEO comes training the staff.

I initially intended to piece together a retrospective article about the happenings in the search industry and SEO from throughout the year, based on our coverage of it., much like what I did with online video and online music. I quickly realized this would be a monumental task given that something like 90% of what we cover is search or SEO related.

For every abolition an underground emerges. Google’s not exactly the law, and bootleggers during Prohibition didn’t exactly offer seminars about avoiding the revenuers. Todd Mailcoat, Rand Fishkin, John Lessnau, with six middle fingers between them, offer no such discretion and invited PubCon attendees under the table in a session titled Linkfluence: How to Buy Links With Maximum Juice and Minimum Risk.

Rand Fishkin blogged about the little bits of secrets discussed at a session of the recent SMX Advanced conference; the session centers on some of the tips and tricks that aren’t widely known in search marketing.

Some time last year I realized my association with the search engine optimization and marketing industry might change because the atmosphere was getting partisan. Bad feelings between leaders were festering and it didn’t take much of a nudge to start a rumble.

The situation isn’t improving and I wonder why. Case in point is a recent bit of flap over an article that went out by someone well respected, which in hindsight was an error in judgment. Apologies have been made but it won’t end there because something has drastically shifted in the industry.

This article talks about how social networks can make a post go viral – or spread like crazy.

It focuses specifically on the biggest social networks – MySpace and Facebook. Facebook tends to be a bit more technical – allowing you to utilize apps to spread the word. They also attract different types of people.