One name we haven’t seen in the Net Neutrality debate is Apple, Inc. Though Jobs & Company are cozy neutral net advocate Google, they also just launched iPhone with AT&T exclusivity. And that brings up some interesting questions, the most interesting of which: Is Is Buying An iPhone A Vote Against Net Neutrality?

It wasn’t too long ago that former AT&T chief Ed Whitacre, who has been vocal about his and his company’s opposition to Net Neutrality regulation, expressed an interest in buying Yahoo, which historically has been on the pro side of the issue. We pondered then what a buyout would mean for the Net Neutrality cause.

What do you need to get top rankings on Google? There are many ingredients in the mix, but here are three of the most important that you need to concentrate on.

1.) Keyword Relevant Copy and Content.

Whatever the keywords you want to get ranked in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), be sure that you have enough copy and content about those specific words which will give Google a reason to rank you in the first place.

Don’t buy paid links! Paid links are bad! Don’t cloak either. Search engines don’t allow it. You’ve all heard this before right?

Well as it turns out, not ALL search engines are as hard line on these issues as some claim to be. MSN Live specifically has now gone on the record that none of the above are necessarily taboo.

Over the holiday break, Jeremiah Andrick, product manager for MSN Live Webmaster Tools, stopped by our offices. We did a lengthy video interview where we chatted about all kinds of good searchy things. Highlights of our chat included some of the emerging differences between Live Search and engines like Google on subjects like cloaking and paid links.

I created a new site on Friday, and by Saturday exactly 24 hours later it was in Google’s Index. I posted about this just over a month ago in my post, 7 Steps to Get Your New Site Indexed in 24 Hours.

I had a lot of comments about whether or not Adwords was necessary, so I thought I’d try it again without running Adwords this time. Here’s how it all played out:

Search engine optimization techniques for Google and Yahoo are quite different. Many websites rank well in one search engine but not the other. This is the direct result of each search engine having its own unique ranking algorithm. For example, the Google algorithm predominantly values the anchor text of in-bound links. Yahoo places more emphasis on keyword density and meta tags.

The primary reason for the difference in ranking algorithms is that Google owns the patent on Page Rank (PR), named after Google’s founder Larry Page. As a result of owning this patent, other search engines need to place more emphasis on different optimization factors including website URL, keyword density and so on.

By Lani and Allen Voivod (c) 2007

Now more than ever, if you want to be a successful business owner, you need a successful business website. Which means you have to make nice with the search engines. And the long-standing rule of search engine friendliness is to create inbound links — links from other sites pointing to your site.
Ten-ish years ago, when Google started the shift away from code to content (including inbound links) as the preferred way of determining “relevance,” the world changed. Immediately, businesses owners started scrambling, and begging, for every link they could get. Thank goodness that’s not the case anymore! But inbound links are still important. In many ways they’re more vital than ever.

This article was taken from WebProNews.com

The four-year experiment is over.

Webmasters can stop fretting about Google’s supplemental results – they’re not really there anymore. Google has lifted the veil between indices.

Though Google repeatedly said that webpages placed in the supplemental index were not placed there because of some kind of penalty, webmasters quickly realized how badly their search traffic suffered.

Though not an outright penalty, voices from inside Google suggested that pages in the supplemental index often had certain things in common: few or no quality backlinks, orphaned pages, URLs with too many parameters, low PageRank, duplicate content, et cetera.

This article taken from SEO Speedwagon - December 14, 2007 - Erik Dafforn

Late yesterday, the Google Analytics team announced a major update to its free analytics package.

Taking full advantage of the upgrade requires something that I’m sure that the GA team wishes didn’t have to happen — the modification of the tracking codes on every page of your site. Basically, you’ll need to change the small snippet of code that used to refer to urchin.js so that it now will reference ga.js — Google’s new JavaScript tracking file.

The wild debate about Google’s increasingly hardline stance against paid links looks like Wimbledon, with Matt Cutts taking on Rich Skrenta, while Danny Sullivan volleys against Michael Gray.

Internet Drama, in the form of the ongoing paid links debate, received a couple of new entries to fan the flames. Webmasters see paid links as a way to boost their search engine presence against the competition. Google perceives paid links as a mechanism that devalues their core organic search results.

Rich Skrenta posted his stream-of-consciousness thoughts about the paid link debate. He said “PageRank wrecked the web,” a reference to part of Google’s model of weighting search results based on inbound links.

Google is by far the most important search engine on the net. To rise to the top of their search engine, you need to improve your link popularity and you need to understand how they measure your link popularity (over 50% of all search engine traffic comes from Google, and if you can rise to the top, you will likely rise to the top of all the other search engines as well).