Today at SMX West, Maile Ohye from Google confirmed that Google is indeed now crawling AJAX pages that use the standard proposed last Fall. The documentation is live on Google Code and you can also take a look at my recent article about how to implement the standard and its pros and cons. Maile mentioned that the Google Web Toolkit team is eager to help with any implementation questions over at their community forums.

Read the full article >>>

Google is asking for user feedback and ideas for its Google Buzz product, and has setup an ideas forum using Google Moderator. After signing in with a Google account, users can submit ideas or vote on existing ideas from other users.

According to Google’s blog post, this ideas forum will remain open until March 31st.

Credits to: Matt McGee

Culminating an internal project that seems to have lasted for several months, Google has published a “Google SEO Report Card” showing the results of an internal SEO audit on the home pages of 100 different Google Products. The main verdict? Like many companies, Google’s web site is a mixed bag of good SEO tactics and missed opportunities.

Read the full article >>>

I’ve found it annoying that over the years, more and more people use SEM to mean paid search, as if SEM excludes SEO. That’s not how I defined SEM — search engine marketing — back 2001. I’d still like to see the original definition retained. But I might be swimming against the tide. Below, how I think we arrived at this conflict and some thoughts on where we go from here.

Types Of Listings

To understand where we’re at now, let me start with some core concepts. There are two basic ways to show up in search results:

Many management advice books recommend that businesses should make better use of what’s often their biggest investment: employees. Yet, a lot of companies fail to inspire, motivate and exploit the good ideas of their employees. Local search marketing often has an employee component that’s overlooked as well. Read on for some tips on leveraging your employee capital for better local search rankings!

In the Business 1.0 world, employees were often treated as depersonalized, faceless drones, replaceable cogwheels in corporate machinery. This perspective often seems to be reflected in traditional corporate websites where individual employees are relegated to the background, and rarely are any individuals highlighted or recognized on those company webpages.

This is the first of a two part series on selling SEO in a large enterprise. Part 2 will be published as my next Industrial Strength column. In Part 1, the focus will be on why getting search traffic is important to an organization. Part 2 will explore some of the consequences of that realization.

In many large enterprises, when SEO is first introduced, it happens because some internal person is championing its cause. If you are that person, chances are really good that you are facing some very interesting challenges related to the ignorance of others in the company. They probably think you are speaking Swahili to them.

In a letter earlier this month, members of the European Union’s data protection group urged Google to make changes to its Street View mapping/photo service and warned that Google might be breaking EU laws.

According to Bloomberg News, the letter from the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party asks Google to store unblurred Street View images for six months, instead of the one year that images are currently stored. The Associated Press adds that the letter also asks Google to notify residents in advance of taking Street View photos by posting information on its web site, as well as in local and/or national media.

The Pew Internet project has just released a lengthy report on online news consumption entitled Understanding the Participatory News Consumer. There are no search-specific findings; however it appears from the survey data that “portal websites like Google News, AOL and Topix are the most commonly used online news sources, visited by over half of online news users on a typical day.”

Here are some of the high-level findings from the report:

• 92% get news from multiple platforms on a typical day, with half of those using four to six platforms daily. Fully 59% get news from a combination of online and offline sources on a typical day.  Just over a third (38%) rely solely on offline sources, and 2% rely exclusively on the internet for their daily news.