Internet companies down under are in a sticky situation. They’re handing Google about 80% of their search marketing spend, using Google for 82% of all online searches, and spending around AU$399 million a year. They’re playing nicely with Google, but Google refuses to play nicely back.

The campaigns Microsoft advertisers manage through the company’s adCenter system should be easier to handle after a weekend of upgrades.

Baby products and personal care products drew millions of searches over a three month period in early 2007, indicating growth potential for search engine marketing efforts by consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies.

Consumer-generated content is by far a more trusted form of advertising worldwide than search engine ads, banner ads, or text ads, according to Nielsen, and is trusted almost as much as physical word-of-mouth.

The recent slap a handful of directories experienced was unaccompanied by an explanation from Google, though the general consensus (maybe) was that Google’s webspam team was sending a message. Weeks later, WebProNews has wrangled a response from Google’s Webmaster Central team – sort of.

Eric Enge’s extensive discussion of hidden text and its dangers illustrates a key issue for anyone working on a search marketing strategy. (Hat tip seroundtable.com)

As a site owner, it’s important to devote what link building time you have to creating connections that count – really count – as far as search engine spiders are concerned.

In fact, there’s a range of site link types – links diversity. Some are more valuable than others. Spend your time and resources building the highest quality links and you’ll quickly see the value of these efforts.

Hosted Content

It’s been a couple of weeks since it became apparent that Google was penalizing link directories – at least a few of them – knocking them out of the SERPs even for their own business names. There’s still no official word from Google on this, but there is plenty speculation that it wasn’t algorithmic.

Experienced client side and agency search marketers know that today’s SMB and enterprise SEO projects involve much more than single event “SEO triage” and link building.

Industry Track, Wednesday 3:15 – 4:30 PM