Hedge Funds:
Hedge fund investors have too much money chassing too few good deals:

With surging investor demand for hedge funds, buyout funds and venture capital firms, some funds are slamming the door to new investors, industry experts said at a New York conference on Wednesday. Some complain the industry has gotten too crowded to generate the double-digit returns they seek.

Summer is Slow for Search:
Earnings season is coming. Search is normally a bit slower in the Summer since people spend more time outside enjoying fun weather.

Goog:
Google is nearing $300 again, and Google option prices are predicting a move:

"Options are already pricing in a plus or minus 14 percent move for Google's earnings, making outright option buying expensive," Goldman Sachs strategists Maria Grant and John Marshall wrote in their latest Weekly Options Watch commentary.

Goldman Sachs Internet analyst Anthony Noto believes investors should own Google and expects Google to post strong results on July 21. Noto said he prefers to wait until after the quarter to reassess attractive entry points, given the recent rally in the stock.

Yhoo:
Yahoo! has gained nearly $3 a share in the last 5 days. Legg Mason (not exactly sure why but they one of my favorite analyst firms) initiated coverage on Yhoo at buy. Yahoo! recently started adding crawled web listings to their Hot Jobs job search.

IACI / ASKJ:
InterActive Corp is supposed to spin off Expedia and close their Ask Jeeves purchase this month. Although I think they are under contract with Google until 2007 there are rumours that Ask Jeeves will be launching their own internal pay per click network. I can't see them doing it anytime soon though.

THK:
Andy Beal, author of SearchEngineLowdown, recently announced on his blog that he is quiting working for Websourced, which is the largest public SEO company (trading on AMEX as THK). He was a senior VP of marketing and prettymuch the face of KeywordRanking.com as far as I know, so that is a huge blow to them.

Their stock price has been hovering in the $2 to $3 range recently. About a month ago they gained about $25 million in market capitalization which coincided with getting a $15 million loan. Since then the stock has dropped back to $2.05 a share, and currently their market capitalization sits at about 68 million dollars.

I believe WebSourced acquires many of their clients through leads from inqueries at search conferences, such as JupiterMedia's Search Engine Strategies conference (which is highly recommend and being held in San Jose from August 8^TH to 11^TH). KeywordRanking is sponsoring the San Jose event, but it will be interesting to see what happens with Andy. He is a popular speaker on the conference scene.

Recently WebSourced brought on Heather Lloyd-Martin and Mike Grehan (who is arguably one of the top trusted names in search), but in the last month they have lost Andy Beal and Jason Dowdell. Andy posted his reasons for leaving:

I wanted my readers to be the first to know that I have decided to resign my position at WebSourced, Inc. The five years that I have spent, helping the company grow from a start-up to the world’s largest search marketing company, have been some of the most rewarding, exciting and satisfying of my career.

In writing this letter, I hope to avoid any confusion as to why I decided to resign as VP of Marketing. This decision is not one that comes lightly. It is clear that my vision for the company’s future does not match-up with its current course. These philosophical differences have led me to conclude that WebSourced’s current path does not align with my own beliefs.

But you have to wonder the exact reason and how soon others may follow.

To run a successful search firm you only need one or two names and a small group of talented programmers and people who truely understand how the web works.

From my knowledge of the industry and how quickly stuff changes I can't fathom creating a business model that provided effective results and scaling it out to hundreds of employees and thousands of clients.

WebSourced's current business model has a ton of employees, and a small change in client acquisition could likely cost many jobs. It will be interesting to see how the stock market reacts to this news.

Internet Archive Sued:
the Internet Archive caches a history of the web. Recently the New York Times reported the Internet Archive is getting sued. If they are forced to pay any sort of fine that could have huge implications for the search business in general.

A while ago I posted about my anger toward the MicroSoft Bcentral line (in particular login problems). I sent them an email and got no reply, but randomly they recently called me and asked me why I have not used their service in a while, and while the guy was on the phone I got my account information for how to login.

So MicroSoft has a keyword research tool in their small business section, although it is not easy to find from their site.

Their site is ticking me off so bad that I refuse to give them any link popularity for sucking.

Examples:
go to their directory
http://sbd.bcentral.com/
click on the small business tools tab and get a 404 error
http://www.bcentral.com/404.aspx?aspxerrorpath=/products/default.aspx

once you log in to your Bcentral account there is a link that says "free tools" and when you click on it the link goes to here
http://premium.bcentral.com/system/uber_redirect.cfm?product_code=TOOLS
which ends up offering you specials on software. How shady is that?

if you search MicroSoft small business for keyword
http://search.microsoft.com/search/results.aspx?view=en-us&st=b&na=82&qu...
you get no results.

if you search the entire MicroSoft site for searches like that (keyword research, etc) you get to explore their software products like MicroSoft Office.

it took me a while to find the login button on the Submit It site
http://www.submit-it.com/
because they blended it with the page layout in the upper right corner. after you log in you are still at square one hunting for the tool (I must have logged in at least a half dozen times in the last hour).

they have a live chat feature,
http://www.bcentral.com/help/chatpage.asp
and so I asked:
I know it is not your fault, but your site usablity sucks. How does one access the keyword research tool.

the quick start page
http://submitit.bcentral.com/system/UCC/QuickStart.aspx
mentions the keyword research tool, but of course has no link because they want you to do stuff linearly and sign up to add another site first. adding another site at that point can mean just spidering the URL of a site you already submitted.

you have to crawl a domain before you can even use the keyword research tool. they try to have you do stuff liniarly from begining to end (right through submission) because it makes their solution seem more holistic and makes the submission part seem important and helps justify you spending more money on their service.

so you have to do the crawl function. if your site is large this takes a while, and the tool says you might want to come back in 15 minutes if your site is over 50 pages. the tool also arbitrarily caps out at spidering 100 pages, which are pages arbitrarily chosen by the spider and not pages you chose, and realistically not every page should have SEO in mind.

after you do the crawl function you do not need to recrawl to reuse the keyword tool, you can do the following (quoting from Ethan from their customer support):

1. Click the "URL Manager" button next to the new URL.
2. Click "Go to Page Details", and then click "View complete Readiness Check".
3. On the "Keyword Tool tab", select Use our keyword research tool, and then click "Continue".
4. Follow the instructions in the "Keyword Research Tool" wizard.

just to further clarify my opinion on the topic all of the Bcentral tools and services are useless if people can't actually access them or are so annoyed that they do not want to use them.

Most other keyword research tools take less than a minute to use. Assuming I need to do everything just to let me access that tool is some pretty close ended non hyperthreaded bogus paternal crap their MicroSoft.

I should be able to just go to this URL
http://submitit.bcentral.com/system/UCC/sikeywordtool.aspx
and use your keyword tool.

I do not currently display AdSense on this site for a few reasons, one of which is that it probably would not earn much since most people reading this site can distinguish ads from content.

Nathan Weinberg recently wrote AdSense Bad For Bloggers?, where he questions whether or not people can make money from AdSense using blogs.

I think he said his network gets about 1,000,000 monthly pageviews, but AdSense is not making him much money. Blogs about Google and MSN will get traffic, but the revenue streams might not be there since technologically savvy people are less likely to click ads.

One time I had a chat with a well known web guru, who stated that not all sites need to make money. Websites can act as a team.

If you have sites with a ton of authority and little revenue there are a few options:

• alienate your users by trying to force a revenue stream that does not exist and thus lose your social currency

• gather feedback and create a product or service that matches the desires of your site visitors
• leverage the social currency of that site to help build up a network with other high profit channels

You only need one or two strong channels to launch a network.

A few of the major blog networks have even added poker sites to their networks, and people still link through to their network not minding that they are helping to promote illegal gambling.

In Nathan's comments Richard offered a good tip for bloggers wanting to avoid the evil generic blog ads:

The biggest positive changes occured for me when I stopped using the word “BLOG” and I stopped getting the same boring ads for how to setup a free blog.

As an added bonus, Nathan mentioned that ProBlogger made a post about earning milestones, saying that he is making over $10,000 a month from AdSense on his network of around 20 blogs (most of which are low quality content spam IMHO and thus I don't want to link into his bad neighborhood, but the post is here:
http://www.problogger.net/archives/2005/07/12/earning-milestones/ )

If you look at his network (www.livingroom.org.au & breakingnewsblog.com) you can probably guess which ones are making money and create / market better channels on those topics that will make far more than he is. Digital camera reviews are huge for AdSense.

keep up with AdSense and contextual stuff at JenSense

New AdSense Advisor:
out with the old and in with the new

Reporting Invalid Clicks:
information here

What Size is Best?
best ad unit sizes

Other Questions?
recent webinar text and lots of other good stuff at JenSense

New features on SEO Elite:
Brad Callen just sent out an update email promoting new features on SEO Elite. One of which looks for link exchange type pages with form boxes on them to add URLs to, and autosaves your submission data for reuse (sorta like many common toolbars and RoboForm, but without allowing you to enter details like credit card info and business address, etc).

Bulk vs Quality:
In many areas the bulk volume link techniques still appear effective, but I have a single page website that ranks at #17 in Yahoo! for Effexor which has it's only links coming from DMOZ and DMOZ clones. Some of the other top ranked Effexor sites are ranking from bulk linkspam, etc. So both techniques still work.

Mixing Data:
I don't like reusing the same data over and over again because as search advances that mechanical type approach stands a greater chance to be filtered by more and more major algorithms. For a long time I did not mix descriptions that much, but as a forward looking SEO tip I think it is worth the extra time to mix up the descriptions as well as the anchor text.

FireFox InFormEnter Extention:
Dazzling Donna said she is going to be a grandma soon (congrats), and recently pointed at a FireFox extension by the name of InFormEnter, which may help speed up submitting sites and link exchanges.

Directory Submission Manager:
Donna also pointed at a free directory submission manager program, although I am not sure I would want my submission data stored on someone elses site. The best spots to get links are usually those areas where the links have the most value AND most people do not think to look.

Zig When they Zag:
Over the past year I expanded my general directory list out to about 150 listings, but as others are pushing the idea of easy mass submissions I realize now is as good of a time as any to prune the weaker directories from my list and just refer people to other resources if they want to submit to tons of sites.

Most likely my list will soon have about 100 listings removed, as there are many sites tracking directories, and the cost of actively tracking them is far greater than any reward it may bring.