At SES Jose, a few people asked for a way to authenticate Googlebot, so I talked to some folks on the crawl team and got an official way from them to verify Googlebot. Since it was official, I said “What the heck, why not throw it up on the official Google webmaster blog.

And so I did–the post is live here. Enjoy, and hope this is helpful to folks.

Read the Full Article by Matt Cutts at Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO that was origially posted on September 21, 2006, 6:03pm

September-ish is Google’s birthday! Nathan Weinberg notices that the birthday cupcake only has five candles, but it’s because they are the Roman numerals VIII to mean eight.

You may be asking yourself: “Is Google’s birthday Sept. 7th or Sept. 27th?”. Check out my blog post from 2005 and you’ll see that (in my opinion) Google’s true birthday is Sept. 7th. I think one year (last year?) there was a lot of stuff going on Sept. 7th, so we didn’t get around to celebrating our birthday until Sept. 27th. So why do it on Sept. 27th again this year? Well, I know I forgot and didn’t even notice when Sept. 7th passed by. I mean, I had to keep my eye on the prize: Talk Like a Pirate Day on Sept. 19th.

Read the Full Article by Matt Cutts at Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO that was origially posted on September 27, 2006, 11:40am

Many marketers make the case to use the intelligence learned in SEO to put into a PPC campaign. Such a strategy could be revising content on landing pages, changing title tags and description tags, long tail keywords, etc. Implementing these changes could have an effect on Quality Score, CTR, Avg CPC, Ranking, etc.

But, I say how about doing it the other way around also? Why not use the performance data from Paid Search for SEO purposes to lower your total CPC cost?

For example, if there is a high traffic keyword, and/or a very expense keyword, why not optimize one of your webpages for that term? That way, you’ll end up saving a lot of money from Paid Search because of your SEO.

Rather than going after the “head terms” first, you might want to give this a try on your Long Tail Keywords. Once your chosen webpage has been optimized for that expensive keyword, sit back, relax (not too long), and watch all that “free” traffic from that once-upon-a-time expensive keyword.

Using PPC data for SEO

Originally from Shimon Sandler by Shimon Sandler

SEOMoz Page Strength Tool : Replacing Google PageRank?

SEOMoz has put together a new tool which Rand & Co. feel can “replace the often inaccurate and infrequently updated Google PageRank score in the toolbar.” SEOMoz has consolidated various metrics used to judge site value, visibility and SEO strength into one easy to use tool which hopefully will have a Firefox extension in the near future.

In an effort to make a better site and search engine importance measurement tool, SEOMoz Page Strength is pulling in linking info from Yahoo, pages indexed in Google, domain age, links from .edu and government sites, Alexa Traffic Rank (which does not seem to be working), Google PageRank, DMOZ and Wikipedia listings, and domain visibility.

I’ve found the rankings of my own sites to be accurate, especially those which have not achieved Google PageRank to date because of their newness and recommend giving SEOMoz Page Strength a spin.

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Yahoo Search Index and Google PageRank Updates

The past 24 hours have been quite busy as far as search engine updates are concerned, with Google updating PageRank and Yahoo making some changes to its search engine index.

Yesterday evening webmasters began picking up some changes in Google PageRank with the little green bar on their Google Toolbars (for those who don’t use all of those nifty datacenter PageRank checking tools on the market).

Looks like, according to some of the threads, PageRank is up for some and down for others.

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A while back Thomas aka Twistermc, whipped up a handy tool for creating RSS subscription buttons to place on blogs. This makes it easy for the reader to subscribe to the blog using their favoriate RSS reader or aggregator. (See the buttons down the left side of this blog) This particular tool has been very popular and is the source for many, many links to Online Marketing Blog and to the blog marketing tools page over at TopRank.

I was checking out some of these links and noticed that some pretty interesting referrers. There are quite a few prominent SEOs using the RSS Button tool including: Mike Grehan, Rand Fishkin, Jim Boykin, Dan Thies, Kim Krause and several others. I think that’s pretty cool actually.

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Rocketboom’s Advertising Rates

Originally from MIT Advertising Lab: future of advertising and advertising technology by Ilya Vedrashko

I’ve been amazed at my recent poll that shows that 46% of my readers that voted said that they never buy text links.  Now keep in mind, my blog is about 80% dedicated to “link building” topics….and yea, I do buy some under the radar quality links…so it really suprised me that almost half of […]

How 46% of SEO’s get away with not buying text links.

Originally from Jim Boykin’s Internet Marketing Blog by Jim

Recently I fielded an emailed question from a reader as to which is better home for a blog: as part of the company web site (www.company.com/blog/) or as a separate domain (www.companyblog.com)?

I get this question often and see it mentioned in the forums as well.

There are many factors that influence whether your blog should be part of your site or it’s own domain name including:

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