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).

By Philipp Lenssen

TechCrunch reports that Google will soon publicly launch a project named OpenSocial.

To be hosted at code.google.com/apis/opensocial, according to TechCrunch OpenSocial is “a set of common APIs that application developers can use to create applications that work on any social networks (called ‘hosts’) that choose to participate”. Mike Arrington adds:

Google wants to create an easy way for developers to create an application that works on all social networks. And if they pull it off, they’ll be in the center, controlling the network.

Unless you’ve been living on a desert island with no Internet access, you’ve probably seen the recent blog fallout from Google’s latest crack down on alleged link brokers.

This week it seems that Google made some type of manual Toolbar PageRank reduction on a handful of major blogs and portal sites like the Washington Post, ProBlogger, CopyBlogger and Forbes.com. Some of these sites had PageRank scores of 7 which have now dropped to 5, scores of 6 which have now dropped to 4 and so on. The blog buzz is that the sites have been singled out by Google as using their high PageRank scores to sell links and have been punished by the world’s most popular search engine as a result. There is currently no proof of this and no public statement by Google acknowledging or denying the situation.

The Internet is the single greatest research resource that has ever existed. However, whilst it has solved many of the issues of getting access to information, it has created new issues that have to be addressed. Probably the biggest of these is information overload.
In order to keep up to date with my many areas of interest so I can run my business efficiently, understand what is happening in the online content sector and still have time for leisure activities, I have to be extremely good at filtering information.

Introduction
I have read hundreds of articles telling me how to get better rankings in Google. Some of this advice was very good and some was not. Here you will find 10 truths about getting better rankings in Google that I personally have found to be true after years of research. So let’s cut through the fat and get to the lean meat of the subject.
1. The Quick Fix
First the bad news, unfortunately there are no quick fixes in creating higher rankings in Google. You have to have a lot of patience in the search engine optimization game. It will take months for your efforts to come to fruition. That’s why it’s important to get things right from the start and plan out your strategy.

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 traffíc 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). Link popularity is defined as the number of sites that are linking to your site. Some websites have thousands or even millíons of sites linking to them, while others might have only a few. The search engines use the number of inbound links your site has as a measure of how important your site is, which translates into your search engine ranking.

As predictable as daylight, AT&T isn’t happy about Google’s plan to bid on the 700MHz wireless spectrum. The telecommunications giant is poised to claw any competition out of the equation, and is hoping its traditional ally, the FCC, will have its back again.

But the nitty gritty of it is, the telecommunications industry is scared to death of Google.

A quick review:

AT&T, Verizon, and others are chomping at the bit to get a hold of the 700 MHz band, soon to be returned to the federal government by broadcast television once regulation takes effect requiring them to go digital. This swath of spectrum is ideal for wireless broadband and mobile phone networks.