It hurts to get close to something that you want and then not get it, doesn’t it? When we’re talking about money and business, this situation is even more painful. Furthermore, talking about the situation does nothing but add more grief to an already complicated situation.

Search has been evolving for years, and it looks as though its really starting to enter a new era entirely. While search and social media may be two different animals, it is becoming more clear that they’re directly related, and will continue to be more mixed into one another.

Search Engine Marketing and SEO have always been very dynamic fields.  Search engines make changes all of the time.  Sometime they announce their changes, sometimes we are left to guess at them.  In either event, more often than not, we are left  largely to our own devices in terms of assessing the impact of these changes and what to do about them – if anything.

Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz has a fascinating (and probably startling to some) post up discussing some new guidelines from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regarding online marketing. The post stems from SEOmoz’s COO Sarah Bird, who is an expert on legal matters pertaining to marketing, and some things she revealed in a recent interview. WebProNews readers will recognize her from these WPN videos on various legal topics.

Has Google’s model of spidering and indexing web pages in an ordered list become obsolete? Is the old static model of search about to be replaced? Does a real-time online conversation (a la Twitter) make for a more relevant and compelling search experience? These are the questions that I recently posed to a group of search and Internet experts. To say that these guys know their stuff would be a complete understatement. It’s more like these are the professionals that have defined the modern science of search and search marketing. You’ll see what I mean when you read the quotes below.

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.

Some people want everyone to like them, and this, to be honest, can be a bit pathetic.  But businesses may need everyone (or at least a whole lot of folks) to like them, and so Rand Fishkin has addressed the issue of why Yahoo and MSN/Live don’t always send much traffic.

At PubCon in Las Vegas, the Search and Blogging Reporters Forum fielded questions about an array of topics, from blogging to SEO, to videos and RSS feeds.

Let the bargaining begin. It’s a natural stage of mourning. As Google shuffles loose the paid links from its algorithms, SEOs are cycling past their initial denial, their outrage, and have begun negotiating. Stay tuned; depression and acceptance are likely to follow.

Rand Fishkin disclosed he is giving up a small percentage of SEOmoz in exchange for a venture capital investment of $1.25 million from a pair of investors.

Rand Fishkin followed up his original ten questions (plus bonus) on SEO knowledge with the answers, and some new questions from Danny Sullivan for everyone’s perusal.

When SEOmoz’s Rand Fishkin calls something “quite possibly the best mainstream media article about Google, or modern search technology, in the last 5 years,” it’s pretty much our duty to cover it.  When Rand Fishkin writes 800 words about said article, well . . . we know better than to condense and summarize.

Nobody stands up Mike McDonald. Nobody, not even Google’s Vanessa Fox. Back on a cold December day amid the howling Chicago winds, poor Mike sat alone, waiting for Google’s Webmaster Central product manager. Alas, but all is vanity, and SEOMoz.org’s Rand Fishkin stole the show (and the interview).

Rand’s fianc

Rand Fishkin recently posted an interesting concept on his SEOmoz.org blog about sitemaps. For those of you keeping score at home, a sitemap is a document (typically xml) that sits on your server and helps search engine spiders crawl and index your site. Sounds great, right? Maybe… maybe not. Rand theorizes these sitemaps may actually be bad for your SEO efforts.