PR of the linking page is more important than the PR of the linking domain. This is because your site will get the PR of linking page and not that of the root domain. Even if the linking page has no PR it can still be targeted provided it is frequently crawled and indexed.
http://forums.seochat.com/google-optimization-7/assessing-the-pr-of-a-backlink-286523.html

A true SEO is creative. They think outside the box. They always have a plan and goal for how they want things to turn out. They don’t conform to one way of marketing a website or blog, they do things their own way. They know what works and what doesn’t. A true SEO doesn’t start out an expert. They learn from trial and error.
http://www.simplefuzz.com/how-to-become-a-true-seo-and-serve-your-clients-better/366/

SEO isn’t about stuffing your pages with keywords and it’s not about worrying about linking to the same sites often or deliberately not making changes to your content. We know this – it comes naturally to us as SEOs, but it’s surprising to see that other people do believe it.
http://sharkseo.com/nohat/what-seo-isnt/

A comment in a forum says Google’s use of breadcrumbs in the SERPS can help the user as well as remove relevant signals of allowing the user to see the actual page name. Eye-tracking studies show that 24% of people viewing SERP snippets look at the URL. Now that breadcrumbs are part of the snippet, this “signal” is the key.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/breadcrumbs/15022/

As expected the Google Caffeine index is now live on one Google data center. Note, it will not be added to more Google data centers until after the holidays. Again, Caffeine is live on a single data center which is currently accessible about 50% of the time on 209.85.225.103.
http://searchengineland.com/google-caffeine-now-live-on-one-google-data-center-30697

A number of companies provide “yellow pages in a box” solutions complete with monetization. Services like Local.com’s PremierGuide, MojoPages and ShowMeLocal can get you up and running in minutes with well-SEO’d yellow pages solutions.
http://searchengineland.com/news-media-dont-give-google-the-noindex-finger-30555

Quality inbound links are an essential element of web site marketing and search engine optimization programs to increase traffic and online sales. The greater the number of relevant and authoritative links to a web page, the greater the potential for higher search engine rankings and qualified traffic.
http://www.toprankblog.com/2009/11/1-seo-tools-for-tracking-inbound-links/

A comment in a forum says some search engines rank new sites high in SERPs for sometime. People call it the New Content Boost. This boost can make sites rank high in SERPs but this boost is temporary. Bing however, do put quite some weight on site age.
http://www.bing.com/community/forums/t/651807.aspx

There are a variety of ways in which a social campaign can contribute to your performance in search engines, regardless of what these recent deals might produce. Like Lee Odden of Top Rank Online Marketing recently discussed with WebProNews, you can optimize your social content.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/11/20/if-you-care-about-search-you-must-care-about-social-media

Most SEOs and their companies / clients will automatically focus on driving large volumes by optimizing their site for relevant keywords with the highest search frequency, when this really isn’t usually the best approach.
http://searchengineland.com/analytics-ppc-seo-so-happy-together-30510

Comment spammers are often trying to improve their site’s organic search ranking by creating dubious inbound links to their site. Google has an understanding of the link graph of the web, and has algorithmic ways of discovering those alterations and tackling them.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/11/hard-facts-about-comment-spam.html

Bing’s FAQs state that you should do the following on-site seo to rank well in their search engine: target no more than two keywords per page, use unique title tags on each page, use unique meta description tags on each page, use H1 tags, use text navigation links, create content for your human visitors, not the Bing web crawler, and incorporate keywords into URL strings.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1583311

According to a forum, every page should have it’s own unique set of keyword phrases you optimize it for. Don’t think of just one phrase per page, but 3-5 different phrases. While you may have some overlap between pages, it won’t do you much good to optimize your entire site for just a few keyword phrases.
http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=42314

Yahoo conducted a survey of small business online retailers to find out how they think they’ll perform this upcoming holiday season compared to previous years. “Surprisingly, based on the current economic landscape, the results show an optimistic outlook, with over 60 percent of the Yahoo! merchants surveyed expecting sales to be the same as most years or even stronger,” a representative for Yahoo tells WebProNews.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/11/24/yahoo-survey-finds-optimism-for-holiday-online-retail

With Pixelsilk content management system we have yet another benefit: easily optimize your website for search engines. No, it is not about SEO automation like you may think: this is about creating clean, SEO-friendly websites – it’s about making the process easier and clearer (even for an absolute newbie), not about automating it.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/pixelsilk-seo-cms/14743/

Microsoft has a bad anti-competitive reputation. It’s also in the middle of trying to convince regulators both in the US and Europe that it should be allowed to purchase Yahoo’s search technology and effectively end Yahoo’s role as a search provider, leaving the space to just Google and Microsoft.
http://searchengineland.com/thoughts-on-bing-news-corp-opec-for-news-30307

Conventional wisdom in the world of landing page optimization is that “less is more.”  Keep the visitor focused on the conversion action typically a contact form in B2B marketing -  by stripping out content and navigation.
http://searchengineland.com/b2b-landing-page-strategies-more-might-really-be-more-effective-30526

According to a comment in DigitalPoint forum, buying traffic from traffic brokers for an adsense site is a risky business. First, 99% of the traffic brokers will send you bot generated traffic that will just increase your impression and not giving you any click. Second, you will risk your adsense account getting banned for artificially inflating the adsense stat.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1585886

During the past two weeks, the Bing team has been hard at work rolling out new features, which followed the adCenter release of several new features including search query reports. As we head into the holidays, it is important to understand the differences between natural search results compared to sponsored sites (pay-per-click ads) and where they appear on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
http://community.microsoftadvertising.com/blogs/advertiser/archive/2009/11/25/beginner-s-guide-to-sem-natural-versus-paid-search.aspx

Online advertising revenues in the U.S. seem to be stabilizing. The online advertising revenues of the four largest Web advertising companies (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL) increased 1.2 percent in the fourth quarter. Google accounted for all of that growth, however, so we are still waiting for display advertising to find its footing. It is likely that in the U.S. alone, search advertising is also leading the recovery. But now that Google is mixing more visual elements into search ads, perhaps display ads will see a boost as well.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/25/online-advertising-third-quarter-2009-iab/

Forget PageRank, at least if you’re a news publisher looking to do well in Google News. Google’s news service doesn’t rely on the same algorithm used by “regular” Google, of which PageRank is a part of. Instead, Google News taps into its own unique ranking signals, which include user clicks, the estimated authority of a publication in a particular topic, freshness, geography and more.
http://searchengineland.com/google-news-ranking-stories-30424

Online stores are probably raving right now with the current traffic spikes that their sites are getting this Thanksgiving week. According to Hitwise, online traffic for Black Friday sales websites increased by 4% as compared to the same week in 2008.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/black-friday-traffic/14956/

Microsoft is not afraid to buy search market share, which is what it’s doing with the Yahoo search deal and even its Cashback program. But with these latest talks, it is literally trying to buy the news, or at least exclusive access to the news. Bing can’t buy all the news, it can only buy certain brands.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/22/bing-tries-to-buy-the-news/

Title is the most important on-page ranking factor. Each page on your site should be targeting a different keyword phrase. Therefore, the title of each page should be different and contain that page’s specific targeted keyword phrase.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1586573

Microsoft has launched a new site for Bing, where users can go to find out the latest features that have been implemented into the search engine. The site’s called Behind Bing. “You can see each feature in action though a screencast, see me talk about why we did it the way we did (for those who like to geek out), and get some drill-down details,” says Bing’s Stefan Weitz.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/11/20/microsoft-takes-users-behind-bing

Google’s Matt Cutts discussed how the search engine handles sites that that are “in the cloud” with regards to how listings are affected. He says if your site is talking to the cloud behind the scenes, there is now way for any search engine or bot to know about that.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/11/20/google-doesnt-know-if-your-site-is-in-the-cloud

The Google Blog formally announced the new search ad formats Google has been showing in the search results. The new ads include the relatively old AdWords video ad, AdWords Sitelinks, local AdWords, product AdWords, comparison ads and more. The product ads are now available to all U.S. advertisers.
http://searchengineland.com/googles-new-search-ad-formats-30474

Yahoo has announced a new set of features for its Search Assist service that makes the Yahoo search box a lot smarter. Perhaps the main innovation here is the inclusion of content and information right inside the Search Assist dropdown.
http://searchengineland.com/yahoos-search-box-gets-smarter-30428

A lot of questions still exist about the Meta robots tag and robots.txt despite the popularity of these terms with any search engine optimization professional. Indexing is when the crawled pages (pages fetched during the crawling process) are actually placed in the search engine index, ready to be shown any time on the search engine result pages when a relevant query matches that document.
http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Search-Engine-Optimization-Help/How-Search-Engines-Handle-the-Meta-Robots-Tag-and-Robotstxt/

Google’s ability to crawl Flash files is still evolving, so building a site entirely in Flash isn’t best practice. While Flash, Ajax and JavaScript offer enticing user experience, they continue to offer a less than ideal experience for search engine crawlers.
http://www.toprankblog.com/2009/11/seo-for-flash-tips/

Like Google, Bing places great emphasis on quality links to determine its rankings. “Just don’t make the mistake of believing it will result in instant gratification. Successful link building efforts require a long-term commitment, not an overnight or turnkey solution,” says DeJarnette. “You need to continually invest in link building efforts with creativity and time.”
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/11/23/link-building-for-bing-rankings-dos-and-donts

Google recently shared a few important tips for making sure your mobile site is being indexed in Google’s Mobile Search. When a mobile user or crawler (like Googlebot-Mobile) accesses the desktop version of a URL, you can redirect them to the corresponding mobile version of the same page,” explains Mukai. “Google notices the relationship between the two versions of the URL and displays the standard version for searches from desktops and the mobile version for mobile searches.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/11/23/ensuring-your-site-is-indexed-in-googles-mobile-search

Retailers have spent 47% more on search ads on Bing in Q4 this year than during this same time period in 2008, with Bing now accounting for 8% of all US retailer search spend, compared with only 6% in the first half of Q4 2008. Average order values on Bing are 21% higher than across all engines, which could account for the spend growth.
http://searchengineland.com/reports-bing-gains-among-retailers-at-local-level-too-30326

Google is buying ads to explain why an offensive image of the First Lady is back in its index and ranking so highly on searches for Michelle Obama in Google Image Search. Search engines are a reflection of the content and information that is available on the Internet. A site’s ranking in Google’s search results relies heavily on computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page’s relevance to a given query.
http://searchengineland.com/offensive-michelle-obama-image-returns-google-buys-ad-30381

In a perfect world, your well-written, useful and refreshingly original blog would rank well in search engine results just because it’s good. But that’s not reality. Great content is the foundation of a good blog, but it doesn’t guarantee high rankings. There are some search engine optimization (SEO) things you simply must do to increase the chances that your blog will be found – and read.
http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/blog/2009/11/seo-for-blogs.html

Yahoo Search is now including a new Twitter feature in search results for select topics that are in the news. For example, if you search for “health care reform,” or “obama,” you will get a section for news results, which contains tabs for news, photos, videos, and Twitter.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/11/19/yahoo-showing-tweets-for-news-results

To make sure a URL isn’t really indexed, use your traffic analytics tool to see if there are no Google search referrals to this page. If the page is ranked, there should be nothing wrong with it.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/your-site-is-badly-indexed-what-can-this-mean/14704/

Natural search is a marketing funnel: at the top are your supply of pages which get crawled. Some percentage of those get indexed. A percentage of the pages indexed get ranked. A percentage of those get clicked, etc. So an important way to baseline current performance is to map your search traffic against the pages that drive the traffic.
http://searchengineland.com/jedi-metrics-how-to-prepare-for-seo-growth-29974

A lawsuit in Wisconsin is bringing a fresh challenge to the practice of paying for keywords on Google and other search engines to boost one company’s link over a rival’s. The practice has occasionally prompted a rival to file legal challenges alleging trademark infringement. Now a Wisconsin law firm is trying a new angle — accusing its competitor of violating privacy laws.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hnqI2aij9Ux408IS_iA621J9LNigD9C2TCO80

In July, Google upgraded AdWords to allow advertisers to add the full address to their search ads through location extensions. It appears that they are now testing a new ad layout similar to the one developed for Local Listing Ads.
http://blumenthals.com/blog/2009/11/20/is-google-adwords-testing-a-new-local-adwords-display-type/

Meta elements have zero effect at Google on rankings and little impact if any at other search engines (it depends on the engine). However, meta description elements are still important and should be optimized to get them to show often as snippets in the Google SERPs.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1580644

According to Stevie’s comment in SEOChat Matt Cutts says, “Having lots of sites isn’t automatically bad, and having PPC sites isn’t automatically bad, and having whois privacy turned on isn’t automatically bad, but once you get several of these factors all together, you’re often talking about a very different type of webmaster than the fellow who just has a single site or so.” Meaning, if you have a single site with whois privacy, it’s no big deal.
http://forums.seochat.com/google-optimization-7/is-google-able-read-who-is-info-if-we-hide-it-284474.html

Bing appears to be either testing or rolling out a new feature for news sites in its search results. The feature brings up a few of the most recent posts from a news source, when that source itself is the query. As TC’s Erick Schonfeld notes, “It’s part of Bing’s obsession with providing realtime results.” This obsession should be amplified soon (with Google also) as the results from the deals with Facebook and Twitter begin to surface.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/11/19/some-bing-users-seeing-latest-posts-on-publisher-searches

Leapfish is a new social and real-time search engine. In their own words: There is more content, more variety and more services that are all very valuable to us. LeapFish searches the traditional, multimedia and social web and providers results from all over the Internet from major authorities in their respective spaces. Here are some of the database and parts of the web we search; Google, Yahoo, Bing, YouTube, Twitter, Image Authorities, Blog Authorities, Wikipedia, Yelp, Digg, CyberHomes, Yahoo Answers, Amazon and many others from a growing list of providers.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/leapfish/14779/

According to the most recent comScore search market share data, the combined reach of MicroHoo search would be 27.9% vs. Google’s 65.4%. Assuming the deal goes through up next for Microsoft would be a decision about whether to attempt to buy Ask, which IAC’s Barry Diller is open to selling, and whether to bid for AOL’s search-ad business when that deal comes up for renewal in 2010.
http://searchengineland.com/microsoft-yahoo-search-deal-on-track-for-completion-30134

Yahoo has enhanced its News shortcut with real-time feeds and updates. The idea is to make the News Shortcut more current and more social with Twitter content in the form of videos, photos and tweets.
http://searchengineland.com/yahoo-brings-real-time-updates-to-news-shortcut-30177

Clients can easily become obsessed with on-page SEO, constantly tweaking title tags, headings, and on-page content. While these activities are important at the right place and time, people shouldn’t get obsessed with it. Tweaking on-page content on existing pages quickly begins to offer you diminishing returns. In addition, you probably have limited resources for SEO.
http://searchenginewatch.com/3635670

People search Google for domains/URLs rather than typing in to address bar. Few people link out to other sites and when they do, there are keywords. So, if you link out to lots of relevant sites using the URL as the anchor, you will appear high in the SERPs.
http://www.cre8asiteforums.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=73830

Mark in a forum says that the most challenging part of SEO is the frustration of cases where Google refuses to rank you for a certain keyword, no matter how hard you work at content and backlinking. Yet, you’ll hit Yahoo & Bing page 1 for that keyword and you’ll see garbage sites getting page 1 of Google for that keyword.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1578583

According to the moderator of a forum, optimizing for Yahoo is the same as Google but without the need for so many backlinks. Yahoo relies more on on-page factors than Google.
http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=42266