I’ve traveled around many webmaster, web design and SEO message boards to glean the conventional wisdom of the day and find out what current SEO technology is being used. And, in my travels I’ve heard that most SEO’s and others believe that inbound links from bad neighborhoods such as spam sites won’t hurt another website.

The conventional wisdom is that first Google says so. And, second, if links from other “bad” sites did hurt your site, then this opens up a whole Pandora’s box of competitors sabotaging each other’s websites. Surely, the search engines must protect a website against competitor sabotage?

But, a few months back I happened upon an article at SEOMoz that talked about how some of the most well known names in search engine optimization and marketing view ranking factors from the search engines. On most of the items there was community agreement on issues that were old hat to me.

But, way down at the bottom, the second from the last entry was a section called “Inbound Links from Spam Sites.” Unlike on the message boards, most of the industry professionals who weighed in on this issue agree that inbound links from bad neighborhoods can hurt a website.

Of course, many used qualifiers for their statements, but nonetheless, there it is. Now, this is something I have suspected for a while myself. I suspect the search engines have engaged in a little disinformation in this area in order not the panic the SEO community and set off rogue companies right and left who are bent on sabotaging their competition.

Why would the search engines want to publicly acknowledge that sabotage of competitors was possible? But, what is even more interesting to me is that there is no conventional wisdom regarding this issue in the SEO community. Depending upon which message board, forum, blog, or website you travel to the conventional wisdom can change. And, that itself is enough to give one pause.

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In March 2008, I had talked about the new Google phone based on the search giant’s Android software system. What was missing at that point was how Google intended to deliver the ads to their new cell phones.

But, now the picture has become a bit clearer as Google has joined Clearwire and Sprint in a consortium aimed at building a nationwide WiMax network. The theory is that cell phone users, when given a choice will choose Google for search, video, maps and other applications.

And, of course, along with these Google apps, ads will also be served. While this WiMax network is expected to take two years to build, Google, of course isn’t waiting this long to get into the game.

The search giant has convinced Sprint to drop Microsoft as their default cell phone search provider this summer and make the switch to the Larry and Sergey show. Ads served on cell phones, according to Google, convert twice as well as other ads.

So, search engine marketers had better be ready to delve into this new medium for targeting their clients’ businesses. When it comes to cell phone advertisements, in a very short while, Google will be saying, “Can you hear me now?”

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VisualRank image search was unveiled by Google in Beijing, China today. VisualRank is like PageRank for images in that it uses visual data in addition to text to rank images in the search results pages.

Other companies have been trying to crack the visual search code for years with varying results. Typically, what image search does is use the name of the photo or graphic plus the surrounding text to guess its theme and rank it accordingly.

What VisualRank does is use this data, plus recognize some of the visual data as well. Google is not yet saying which visual data is recognized but one can guess, color, shapes and perhaps even faces and some objects could be identified with VisualRank.

What this means is better results. How many times have you conducted an image search only to find several duplicate images within the top results pages? VisualRank is supposed to identify these matches, but only display the most relevant.

Now, both Google and others are saying that applying VisualRank to its entire database of images would be impractical since the process is processor intensive. But, imagine if VisualRank were applied just to the top 20 results for the most searched for images, how cleaner the user experience would be.

If VisualRank is rolled out on a limited basis such as this, it will greatly enhance image search for visitors, especially those looking for products on the Web. While other image search engines will have visitors seeing double, VisualRank will bring much clarity to an already cluttered field.

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Yahoo has beaten the estimates somewhat with a 14-percent greater earnings gain over 1-year ago. Analysts were estimating earnings of $1.32 billion and Yahoo announced the actual number was $1.35 billion this quarter.

But, Microsoft has not blinked because of the announcement. In fact, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made a preemptive announcement that Yahoo’s earnings would not affect the bid price for his company to take over Yahoo.

In fact, Ballmer has stated that Yahoo has until the end of this week to accept his offer or face a proxy campaign that could lower the price off the $31 per share offer that is currently on the table. Critics see this MicroHoo merger as a negative since it will shorten the field of players in the search marketplace.

Stay tuned as this has the makings of a very bumpy ride in the days to come.

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Last week, search giant Yahoo announced the acquisition of Hungarian firm Tensa and their IndexTools analytics software. The addition of Yahoo IndexTools, which the company is stating will now be free, will give users tools for website monitoring, metrics, analytics, traffic performance and optimization.

While Yahoo Site Explorer in itself is a useful tool, it falls short of Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools in offering a robust system to webmasters who want a leg up on the competition. And, what is more is that Yahoo IndexTools may be integrated into the company’s advertising program as well to aid advertisers and marketers with critical information.

A week ago, Yahoo announced their new Yahoo AMP ad management platform that will help publishers, advertisers and other middlemen communication faster and more effectively through their Web interface. It is rumored that Yahoo IndexTools is expected to further integrate with this platform as well.

This will give ad buyers and sellers added insight into the market and how to target advertisements more effectively. The question remains, however, will Yahoo IndexTools be available to anyone who wants it simply by logging into a Yahoo account? Of course, there will be more details to come in the weeks ahead.

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I ran across an article on the CNET News Blog about whether or not the Google duplicate content rankings drop (for lack of a better word) is actually a penalty or a filter. This got me to think about perspective. From the perspective of the search engines, it is a filter that lets the original page (first time and date-stamped page) of content enjoy higher rankings than the same content published on another page at a later date.

This makes sense because searchers don’t want the SERP’s cluttered with the same exact pages over and again. It seems only natural that one page would be at the top of the rankings and the other ones buried.

But, from the perspective of a webmaster, this may indeed be a penalty. Take for instance the webmaster who has the famous www versus non-www Google canonical issue on their website. The search engine may apply a penalty for both the www version of a web page and non-www version for having identical content. Both pages (meaning the entire website) may be buried in the rankings for up to 6 months after the fix is applied to force one version to resolve to the other.

This may technically not be a penalty according to the search engines, as it is the timeframe needed for a URL removal request. But, to any webmaster or online business owner, waiting out weeks or months with a website buried in the rankings will seem like a penalty even if technically none is at work. Functionally, it is indeed a penalty in position, rankings and money generated through the search engines.

Whether the ranking drop due to duplicate content is called a filter or a penalty matters little. Depending upon the type of duplicate content issue at work (duplicate content between separate websites, which could last only days once the offending material is removed or months for the www versus non-www issue) the consequences can be very detrimental to online business owners no matter what official terminology is used.

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After a yearlong deal to acquire DoubleClick / Performics, yesterday Google has announced the selling of the Performics Search Marketing division. On the official Google Blog, DoubleClick Director Tom Phillips states a conflict of interest as a reason for the sale.

According to Phillips, “Maintaining objectivity in both search and advertising is paramount to Google’s mission and core to the trust we ask from our users. For this reason, we plan to sell the Performics search marketing business to a third party.” This needed to be done as Google has stated many times in the past that they are not in the search marketing or optimization business.

What is interesting is that Google will be integrating the DoubleClick affiliate program into their existing advertising program. This means that there is future potential that Google AdWords may one day be based upon a pay-per-click (PPC) model and a cost-per-action (CPA) model similar to some hybrid programs that a few other online advertisers are trying out.

Just how this integration will occur is anyone’s guess right now. Also at stake is how much control both advertisers and publishers will have if this hybrid system comes to be. Stay tuned, though, as this may just up the ante on online advertising for the foreseeable future.

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Inside of Webmaster Tools, the Google Robots.txt Generator has been unveiled. The Robots.txt Generator will help webmasters travail the often misunderstood method of allowing or disallowing search engine robots from crawling files, folders and pages on a website.

Inside of the tool, webmasters are offered the Action of allowing or blocking plus another pull-down menu gives the choices of All Robots, Googlebot, Google-bot Mobile, Googlebot-Image, Mediapartners-Google, Adsbot-Google or Other robot and you can input the name of this bot in the field.

There is next a field for files or directories to fill in so use the relative path. Once adding this you’ll see a the robots.txt file displayed in a window that will look like this:

User-Agent: *
Allow: /

User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /directory/file.html
Allow: /

Just upload this file to the website’s root directory and you’re done. It’s pretty simple and it gives webmasters a no-guess way to allow or block the bots at will.

Since this is April 1, hopefully the useful Google Robots.txt Generator tool is not an April Fool’s joke such as the Virgle Mars trip they are promoting today.

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Well, you can’t swing a dead cat now days without hitting an SEO that has a differing opinion when it comes to a website’s meta tags. Besides the cultural sensitivity issues surrounding swinging a dead cat, some SEO’s will argue that meta tags are dead while others will say they are very much alive.

But, many times this is an apples and oranges argument since some search engine optimizers are talking about one aspect of meta tags while another SEO is talking about another. I can’t tell you how many message boards I’ve been on where someone will state, “The search engines don’t use the meta tags.”

This is one of those revolving door issues that surrounds whether or not the search engine “display” the meta tags of a page in their search results. Over at Search Roundtable they’ve taken a look about how search engines are currently using the Description meta tag for display purposes.

But, whether or not a search engine uses the meta tags to pull from in order to display a website in the results is a different argument than do the search engines use this information in order to rank a site appropriately. Some will argue this point, but the short answer is, yes, search engines use the meta tag data to rank websites.

I’ve had customer after customer come to me with keywords stuffed into their meta tag areas and by simply removing the repeating keywords the pages were able to recover. This shows me that the search engines do give value to the words written in the meta tag areas.

Over at Search Engine Watch, Eric Enge has a slightly different take on whether meta tags are valued or not by the SE’s, saying that they have been devalued over the years because of spammers. Enge points out that trust towards webmasters to do the right thing is coming back in vogue, though, especially in regard to Yahoo.

Meta tags are clearly not one of the primary sources anymore from which search engines use to rank pages. But, they still important on a smaller scale for most websites and SEO’s need to pay attention to meta tag optimization in order to gain rankings and avoid penalties.

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In a presidential election year, with Barack and Hillary barraging each other with so-called “attack ads” and John McCain waiting in the wings to weigh in as well, Yahoo has jumped on the bandwagon to throw a punch at long time rival and larger opponent Google. Like a less influential candidate vying for votes, Yahoo has decided to go after the Google base of voters (searchers) by drawing contrast, as they say, between the two candidates.

In a radio advertisement that has just begun airing, the Yahoo voiceover says “…search engines like Google get you lost in all of the links, but not Yahoo.” There is also attention given to Yahoo’s dropdown search box and upcoming features for the world’s second most used search engine.

Yahoo (sometimes called the Avis of search) as the number two contender and subject of buyout and takeover talks recently needs to draw a distinction between its offerings and that of Google. Since people are creatures of habit, this will not be an easy task to draw searchers away from the Mountain View behemoth.

But, while Yahoo may be slapping Google with one hand, they are shaking hands with the other as both search companies and top social destination Myspace have teamed up to endorse the non-profit OpenSocial Foundation. The three are facing off with Facebook over the open source standard going forward for social networking sites.

So, like a candidate in a political debate who will sometimes face-off with the frontrunner and at other times join forces to gang up on another rival, Yahoo gives Google a slap then a tickle in the competitive world of search. But, unlike most political races, there is no election day as the quest for votes among the search engines is ongoing plus there is no end is sight for this debate.

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