The Fantomaster (a fabled SEO black hat guru) really caught my attention today by noting an article on Search Engine Watch that he admired! In case you don’t know when Fantomaster admires an article you can be relatively certain the article is worth a read. Written for Search Engine Watch by Rob Kerry the article titled “Playing Dirty with PPC” lays out the steps to get around the editorial controls on the major pay per click search engines.

Here are the interesting but somewhat chilling techniques that Rob outlines in his article:

• How to sneak in advertisements that under normal circumstances would never make it past editorial control.
• How to steal ALL of the top 10 pay per click positions.
• How to get your competitor’s campaign dropped in a single, swift move.

Here is the complete article to read if you are interested. Of course I don’t advise ever utilizing the tactics that Rob outlines; however, I believe it is worthwhile understanding the morally challenged tactics that competitors could use against you.

Read/WriteWeb, one of my favorite blogs, just posted an interesting article on a new site called Wikirage; a site that shows what topics are the most trendy (popular) at Wikipedia.

How Does Wikirage Work?
Wikipedia’s detailed traffic statistics are not available to the public so Craig Wood, the creator of Wikirage cleverly leveraged the editing statistics that are open to the public to create his statistics. As a result, Wikirage creates its popularity index by identifying the top 100 pages within Wikipedia that have received the most updates; a relatively accurate indication of the topics that are driving current trends.

Other Great Trend Resources

• Yahoo! Buzz
• Google Trends

At the SiteProNews blog today Jim Hedger announced that his contract as the daily editor for SiteProNews was not renewed for another year.

The whole staff at StepForth wishes our friend and former in-house writer all the best as he refocuses his attentions on other partnerships and his company Markland Media based in Victoria, BC, Canada.

Nerds and techies rejoice! BUG Labs has launched its official website where they released more detail on their flagship product that, in a sense, is like the ultimate Lego for nerds and techies

In quarter 4 of 2007 BUGbase will be released which will allow inventors to create an infinite variety of gizmos and gadgets from programmable building blocks. The blocks are called modules and all connect to the BUGbase which is a “a fully programmable and “hackable” Linux computer, equipped with a fast CPU, 128MB RAM, built-in WiFi, rechargeable battery, USB, Ethernet, and a small LCD with button controls. It also has a tripod mount because, well, why not? Each BUGbase houses four connectors for users to combine any assortment of BUGmodules to create their ultimate gadget.”

On their About Page, the Bug Labs team coins this concept as “Community Electronics” because in addition to being able to create your own custom gadget you can also share your code and learn from others in the online community called BUGnet. This innovative move by BUG could open up a whole new level of advancement in technology where the eccentric and brilliant minds of inventors join as one to continually advance this hardware and software to unimagined heights.

In a post today dotMobi CEO, Neil Edwards announced that dotMobi would be releasing approximately 500 premium domain names to auction in the next few months. And yes, that includes Sex.Mobi.

Neil goes on to explain why dotMobi waited over a year to release these highly sought after domains: “We are a well funded company who has a long term view on dotMobi. The content publishing tools were not available last year to build good mobile content sites. It was not in the best interest of the consumer or the company to release names for sale when buyers would have had no good way to produce content.”

As an added note Neil Edwards should have quieted a few naysayers out there who believe dotMobi is going nowhere; in a period of only 3 months, Google’s index for .mobi pages has increased five times from 1 million pages to 5 million pages. Not bad for a relatively fresh domain in a emerging marketplace!

Congratulations dotMobi! I hope you guys make a killing on those premium domain names.

A post today at the Google Webmaster Central Blog announced that Google’s Search Quality Team will resume sending notification emails to violators of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

The notices started in 2005 as a courtesy to let webmasters know that pages have been temporarily removed from Google’s index but over the past few months Google stopped sending them because fraudulent emails (that supposedly came from Google) were scaring webmasters half to death. Read more…

News of the potential Google Phone (gPhone) has been slowly but surely taking over the net over the past 6 months or so. As of late, however, the hype is louder than ever since recent (supposedly more concrete) evidence has appeared of its existence. At this point there is simply too much hearsay to really know what the heck is going on but a bit part of my gut says this may just be the biggest bad rumor ever. Unfortunately the other half of my gut wonders why Google’s Marissa Mayer never actually denied the existence of the gPhone at the latest Search Engine Strategies conference. Read more…

I caught an interesting seminar today called “SEO Through Blogs and Feeds” with Stephen Spencer, Rick Klau, Doug Hay and Greg Jarboe on the panel. The following are my point by point notes that stood out as noteworthy. Some of these tips are mirrored in my 3 part tutorial on blogging called Blogs 101 but as always some great new tips popped up. Read more…

Well I am at Search Engine Strategies San Jose; the weather is beautiful, the company great and the discussions so far excellent. The following are point form notes from an interesting seminar that discussed how search can be used to aid in branding instead of just as a direct response sales vehicle. Each point, stat or anecdote is in itself intriguing but overall add up to a helpful overview of how to use search to brand. Please brace yourself, however, this discussion went to many edges of the marketing universe so this post will have gems from many disciplines. Read more…

Next week I will be attending the Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose. I will be covering the event as Press so you can expect some interesting updates over the course of the week – but I can’t promise when.

If you happen to be in San Jose and want to hook up please email me – rossco at stepforth dotcom and hopefully we can arrange a time to meet.

For all those marketers out there: my writing focus for this trip is on the vendors that compliment my company’s SEO/SEM clients and in turn my readers. Pitching other SEO/SEM companies is not in the cards.

All the best,
Ross Dunn