Dunn is basically talking about the principle – “What hurts can make you stronger.” His point is that when you get a penalty in Google, it forces you to really pick apart your site and figure out what’s wrong. At that point, you can make it better (and perhaps better than ever).

Dunn talks about a specific example in which a client had an issue with a site. There was keyword stuffing going on, and it got penalized by Google. When they went back and cut back on the spam and cleaned it up, they got back in Google’s good graces. Dunn attributes this to the fact that the client had good content (better than competitors in fact), and Google likely recognized this fact when determining rankings after the keyword stuffing issue was addressed.

Dunn says being penalized by Google serves as a wake-up call to webmasters. He says you should get someone outside of the company to look at the site. You can consult with an SEO or a friend with some SEO experience, look for advice in forums, and/or get a site audit.

Dunn and Hedger go on to discuss how you know if your site has been penalized from Google or your rankings have simply dropped. They also discuss Google’s Caffeine update and what this could mean for SEOs. Watch the video to find out what they think about the matter.

Ask.com product manager Ryan Massie thinks his company has the formula for success when it comes to the local search market. Massie told attendees at the Kelsey Group’s ‘Drilling Down on Local’ conference, “When someone comes to that search box and we give them exactly what we want–the right result, the right content, take them to the right page–they’re going to come back. That’s success.” Ask launched their local search product, Ask City, earlier this year.

Long running technology journal InfoWorld will come to an end in the world of print. Publisher IDG will focus on InfoWorld’s online version as well as events they will host. InfoWorld.com vice president Virginia Hines said on the site the move would, “remove the distraction of maintaining and fretting over a costly, nearly obsolete distribution channel.” The print version ends in April.

Viacom general counsel Michael Fricklas said YouTube is not protected by the DMCA when it comes to copyright infringement. Fricklas said in a Washington Post op-ed piece that DMCA safe harbor provisions are “not available to someone who ‘derives a financial benefit’ from copyrighted material he stores if he has the “right and ability to control” it.” Viacom is suing YouTube and Google for one billion dollars over infringement.

Historic American newspapers dating all the way back to the turn of the twentieth century from states like California, Utah, and Kentucky to name a few, will be available for free online. “Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers”, is a site featuring more than 226,000 pages of public domain newspapers that are accessible for Americans to research and learn about American history by reading actual accounts from the time period. The National Digital Newspaper Program, which produces the domain, plans to have newspapers and historic documents from all states and U.S. territories published between 1836 and 1922 available on the site in the next 20 years.

Just days ago, a Google executive confirmed that the search engine company would be coming out with a mobile phone. Now, another Google executive, Vinton Cerf, is denying this claim. Cerf, who is one of the most credible members of the company, admitted to Google’s interest in the “mobile revolution”, but he denounces all rumors suggesting that the mega search engine has any actual plans to produce a mobile phone.

Online high school sports network, MaxPreps has become a part of College Sports Television, also known as CSTV, after CBS purchased the site. The database covers close to 80,000 football and over 500,000 high school basketball games every year. There are more than a million high school athletes registered with Maxpreps. Andy Beal, president and CEO of the company says “This new arrangement will open up many new ways to inform and entertain millions of people who are involved in high school sports.”

Terry Semel couldn’t be happier with the performance of Yahoo’s new search advertising system. The Yahoo CEO told an AdAge conference that Panama would show “some very exciting numbers” in the first quarter as they try to gain on Google. “We have said from the beginning and we say it clearly right now, again, that our intention is to close the gap and Panama is doing a great job,” Semel said.

Yahoo has disclosed for the first time it discards anywhere from 12 to 15 percent of clicks on its ads as either invalid or of inferior quality. To help fight click fraud, Yahoo promoted one of their attorneys, Reggie Davis, to a newly created post of vice president of marketplace quality. “We need to take some of the inconsistency out of this issue,” Davis told Reuters about the challenge of fighting click fraud.

The source of the anti-Hillary Clinton video spoofing Apple’s legendary ’1984′ advertisement has been identified. The Huffington Post identified Philip de Vellis, who has resigned his position with Internet company Blue State Digital in the wake of the controversy surrounding the ad. “I made the “Vote Different” ad because I wanted to express my feelings about the Democratic primary, and because I wanted to show that an individual citizen can affect the process,” De Vellis said on his blog.

Rumors about a possible Google Phone received another boost as photos of the new gadget began to circulate on a mobile phone forum. Garett Rogers speculated that the pictures of the Samsung built mobile have probably been manipulated even if they are of a real prototype. Google reportedly has about a hundred people working on software for the device.

Microsoft has opened a social networking site for the finance industry. The Dynamics Live Community beta site recently opened during a San Diego conference, where Microsoft staffers have been calling it a ‘MySpace for financial pros.’ The new site offers articles and expert columns as content, and blogs and forums for its users. Networking features are listed as ‘coming soon.’

News aggregator Topix.net paid one million dollars to purchase the Topix.com domain January. Topix CEO Rich Skrenta told the Wall Street Journal the two domains have been running side by side since then, and plans to switch to the dot com address. But Topix could face a loss of search engine traffic during the changeover, and Skrenta’s plea for help from Google received a canned response to post his request on a support message board.

“This can’t be the process,” Mr. Skrenta says. “You’re cast into this amusing, Kafkaesque world to run your business.”

Defense contractors have been big players in crawling audio tracks for online video. Beet TV said Podzinger, a subsidiary of BBN, has crawled one point five million YouTube clips since December. Podzinger’s Alex Laats said they crawl thousands more each day. Beet TV also claimed that the same technology has been used by government agencies for a variety of other tasks since 2001.

In related news, Bad Toelz Mayor in Germany demanded Google Earth delete a reference to “Mount Hitler“from the 3-D software. Mayor Andreas Wiedemann said residents have called the peak “Mount Hitler” for a brief period during the Third Reich, but that after World War Two it went back to the original name Heigel Kopf. Google Earth gives users both names of the mountain, but Wiedemann thinks it misleads. Google Germany spokesman Stefan Keuchel said the Hitler name appears as a “technical accident.” Google earth considers deleting the matter if they find no historical reason for its addition.

Olympic organizers opened a ticketing website today allowing Chinese residents to reserve tickets online for the 2008 Games. The web site announced organizers would distribute tickets in three phases and they would randomly give out tickets to over-subscribed events. Olympic organizers said overseas residents could purchase Olympic tickets from their national Olympic Committee or from designated outlets at the same price as Chinese residents. Tickets vary from 30 yuan or around three dollars and 50 cents at preliminary events to five thousand yuan or more than 640 dollars for the opening ceremony. To see about acquiring tickets, log on to www.tickets.beijing.2008.cn.

Microsoft announced today that it secured Quest Software as its first protocol technology program licensee. This program comes out of the March 2004 European Commission order forcing Microsoft to license its protocol technology at “reasonable and nondiscriminatory” terms. The program intended providing all licensees with the power to produce server-based products to perform with Microsoft’s technology.

The Commission warned Microsoft about penalties just last week that the company’s license prices seemed too high. Quest has access through Microsoft’s Work Group Server Protocol Program to communication protocols in the Windows operating systems. Quest plans on developing software to expand the customers’ ability to integrate Unix, Linux and Java authentication systems with Microsoft’s Active Directory. The Department of Justice expressed concerns that Microsoft has fallen behind on deadlines to revise the documentation to licensees.

Ad Age and Vizu Answers performed a study on blog readership. The study showed that two-thirds of blog readers read more than three blogs daily. Most readers re-visit the same sites to get their information. About 67 percent of users follow links to learn about new blogs. About 23 percent of readers rely on recommendations, rather than just using as search engine.

Readers determine the credibility of blogs based on the “quality of writing.” Viewers think personal opinions separate blogs from other forms of online media. The survey showed 65 percent of blog readers search for entertainment. Nearly one-third looks for information. Around one-eighth of readers relate blogging to business. Three-fourths of those who interact regard themselves as primary readers. Around 20 percent of readers claim to create content.

Microsoft associate general counsel Tom Rubin has criticized Google over its “cavalier” approach to copyrighted materials. Rubin thinks Google breaks copyright law because it has “bestowed upon itself the unilateral right to make entire copies of copyrighted books”.

Yahoo shut down its Mixd group mobile service for the youth market. In what looks like a consolidation move, those users are being moved to Yahoo Mobile. Yahoo could integrate some of Mixd’s look into Mobile.

Terry Semel, Yahoo’s CEO, picked up a bonus of eight hundred thousand shares worth $25.7 million in 2006. For the year, Yahoo’s shares dropped 35 percent while they worked on building their new advertising system.

The global Internet audience has grown ten percent in the past year. ComScore Networks said 747 million people aged 15 and up used the Internet in January 2007. The United States and China have the top two Internet-using populations.

Google has television on its mind, and wants to hire someone to lead its charge into the TV advertising market. A job opening posted at Google seeks a head of national TV sales to work out of their New York office. The person who wins this position will guide the development of Google Television, as the company continues to try and branch out beyond Internet advertising. An Ad-Age report cited TV executives as being worried about Google bringing down ad pricing. Google believes its auction-based model will bring new customers to the TV ad market instead.

A Yahoo executive trashed the usability of Google’s products, and blamed that for the low adoption of services like Google Talk and Gmail. Jeff Bonforte, senior director of real-time communications at Yahoo, said Google doesn’t have the intimate connection Yahoo does with its users. “When it comes to consumer applications, no-one is more successful than Yahoo hands down,” he said. Since Google is ruled by engineers, their products aren’t built to have mass appeal. Other than their search and maps products, Bonforte said Google has had no success appealing to a wide audience.

PPC can yield tremendous returns and can (in turn) drain a significant portion of the budget. Experimenting on keyword techniques for natural search rankings can be time consuming and risky, spelling further expense. Why not lean towards the basics? Content and links seem to ever drive discussion and have proven successful in any circumstance. Yet, as the yin and yang of SEO, content and links depend on each other, each driving forward only while the other thrives. You won’t get links without good content and why create content if no one’s listening?

Carcutt seems to think that the perfect solution to this dilemma is in social communities. Why not participate, allowing relevant user-created content and sharing features on your site?

“[You] need to start building relationships with those communities… you’ve got the social bookmarking… the content repositories… the news submission sites… if you pick one of each of those and start building a relationship in those communities now, it’s going to pay off. It’s going to take time like anything in SEO.”

Additionally, nothing comes without a price… or a word of caution.

“You’ve got to approach this as a community, a participant… an active, welcomed member of the community to make any headway. If you try to game them, they’re going to catch on. There’s nobody better in the world than twenty-something computer geeks at catching deceit.”

Social communities constitute a large portion of our online experience. Participants are real people, empowered by technology to speak their minds… to destroy scams and dirty marketing ploys… to praise great products and services… essentially to make or break your business. Social communities are a force to tap… and to fear, therefore respect.

However frightening the frontier can appear, as an honest participant, nothing but success can come of the venture.

“The most fundamental [strategy] is key phrase research. Learn how to put those key phrases into copy to have it make sense.”

This philosophy, to write write copy with search engines in mind, is the key offender. Bob Bly, the well-known author of “The Copywriter’s Handbook” is a vocal opponent and has even written an article titled “Why I Don’t Believe in SEO Copywriting.”

In this article… as if in response to Heather’s statement, Bly remarks, “When I write copy, [the] audience is the prospect, the potential buyer of the product I am selling. However, with SEO copywriting, you pander to another ‘audience’ – the search engines – and not the reader. And by creating copy that’s optimal for attracting search engines, you are, to some degree, weakening that copy’s power to sell. You dilute its strength because you are worrying about two audiences – the reader and the engines – instead of focusing every word on the customer.”

It would seem that Mr. Bly is, understandably, concerned about preserving the power of words… that by “pandering” to a spider, this is somehow compromised. Perhaps he’s correct. The argument is certainly strong. Yet let us consider Heather’s defense of such.

“SEO copywriting is still copywriting. It’s not changing the concepts of regular, direct response copy writing. What you’re doing is adding those key phrases in to make your copy more specific. You might not get to be as flowery as you’d get to be in a print catalog or you might not be able to describe things in fifty words and expect that page is going to position well. SEO copywriting is controlling the controllable on your website…. but to be able to walk that line between writing good content but making sure that you have keywords in there.”

Sounds innocent enough. Who’s to say that a careful craftsman couldn’t weave a poetic “compromise?” There’s certainly wisdom to be spread about in both camps… and that’s not even to consider other varying opinion.S