SEM Guru

Google have announced free access to Urchin. This was previously $199 per month. Some strings attached, but not many! http://www.google.com/analytics/

This from a question originally posted on SEO Round Table

If you want to know what I think, personally.... Well, I do not think Google manually adds sites into the SERPs based on it being competitive or not. I do think they adjust the algorithm to ensure the sites they want in the top 10 for certain keyword phrases are there. But I do not think they manually stick a site in.

Do they pull sites out? If they are "spammy" they will. If not, they may adjust the algorithm to knock them out.

All in all, I think for the most part, Google keeps it automatic and does not use manual means to have the "most relevant" results in the top 10.

I have to agree that Google change their algorithms to ensure the sites they want are in the top 10, however they can't always achieve that using algorithms alone. I've seen results for searchs where around the 6th position there's a line and three different entries, then another line and then the rest of the organic results. These inserted results seem to be linked to the search term having more than one meaning, the second meaning this then displayed within the lines. Sometimes this is a trademark that is also a search term, other times I've seen it was when looking for a PHP command, and the official php.net site has appeared within the lines and no where else in the top 10.

From the BBC News site

More than 10% of net users are going online with the Firefox browser, show figures from analysis firm One Stat.

The global average of 11.5% is the highest percentage of users that the open source browser has ever reached.

What does this mean to you? Well if you've got a site that says 'Best viewed in Internet Explorer' or if you haven't checked your site in a browser other than IE you could be turning away up to 15% of all your visitors - 1 in 7!

Make sure you check your site in Firefox, make sure you don't use any Microsoft HTML extensions, stick to W3C compilant HTML and CSS. In short the days of assuming everyone is using one browser are hopefully coming to an end.

All candied up and nowhere to go except to look at what Google have done to their ranking software. As the update is still ongoing not much can be said for sure. The concensus appears to be:
- reciprocal linking is dead - has been for nearly a year guys!
- ranking is difficult - again has been for a long time.
- if your site isn't older than 2003 forget it.

OK so what should you do? PPC to gain marketshare has a low ROI and high cost. Best bet is still organic SEO however you'll need to change your linking strategy:
Articles - publish articles and allow others to republish your articles.

Press releases - anything and everything you or your company says or does should be a press release.

One way Inbound links -try to gain these as much as possible. Forum postings, blog postings, etc.

If all else fails write great content that other people will link to.