Google recently added the ability for you to report link buyers, which is probably nothing more than a mind control game and a complete waste of time. I recently saw what looked like obvious link buying by Discovery.com. Do you think Google would do anything about it if I reported them? Nope.

Google also recently starting a phased launch of their position placement reports, which is far more beneficial to webmasters, as it shows what sites your AdSense ads are syndicated to. Most sites monetized via AdSense only make a fraction of their full potential, so sharing this data presents more arbitrage opportunities. How you can use this data to profit:

• refine your AdSense ad buys to only target the best performing sites and pages

• better learn who has your desired traffic stream and create things that appeal to their ego / belief system / audience
• buy custom ads direct from the best converting sites (including text links)
• find out what pages on competing sites get the most traffic and see how easy it is to rank for the terms those pages target
• survey a competing site's traffic profile to find out which entire sections or sub-sections you should duplicate
• if a site is getting a lot of traffic but an exceptionally poor CTR, consider buying the site outright and better integrating the ads into the content

A friend pointed me to SEO Digger, which is another site which shows what keywords a particular page ranks for.

Other similar sites that do this are SpyFu (AdWords & Organic), KeyCompete (AdWords), and URL Trends (Organic).

I just updated SEO for Firefox again. Now it numbers the search results, and it allows you to sort the results by any of the selected variables. I didn't want the sorting to be obtrusive, so you have to right click on the search results, scroll over SEO for Firefox, then scroll over sort on the submenu and click the variable you want to sort by. The sorting works best at digging deeply if you have your results set to show 100 search results per page. To show 100 search results on Google you would add &num=100 to the address bar of the search result.

A few ways to use the sort feature:

• find the most recently cached pages

• find the oldest sites for purchasing advertising on them
• find the most important internal pages on a site to get a link from. For example, search for site:targetlinksource.com topic, and sort by PageRank, .edu page links, etc.
• etc etc etc

SEO for Firefox has been updated again. It now shows the number of pages from a site that are stuck in the supplemental results.

Here is an old primer on supplemental results, and here is how to find what pages from a site are in the supplemental results.

Yahoo! Pipes is a visual RSS slicing, dicing, and meshing tool. Basically you can take any feeds you like, add them together, and apply a bit of filtering. It is fairly intuitive and a lot a of fun for a wannabe programmer like me. And then when you create something, someone else can clone your pipes and add more stuff to it.

Here are some cool ways to use Yahoo! Pipes:

• track the latest news in your industry (filtering by sources, keywords, or both)

• track domain and marketplace offers like Shoemoney does here
• track inbound links or mentions by syncing up blog search tools
• see how fast ideas are spreading by tracking all the major social sites and blog search engines at the same time
• watch eBay price trends (and just about any other trend which you can subscribe to)
• see which Yahoo! Pipes are spreading, think of how you can improve those ideas or apply them to other markets
• if you are dirty or aggressive about monetization ;) create a Pipe that is a core to many other pipes that pulls data from major websites like eBay while using your affiliate links in your Pipes

Tim O'Reilly has a great post about how the concept of Pipes could be highly valuable.