Fishkin spoke with WebProNews and told us about his experience with almost raising $24 million in investment capital. The investment firm the company was working with backed out of the agreement just days before the money was supposed to be deposited into SEOmoz’s account.

Because SEOmoz has always strived to be a transparent company, Fishkin openly blogged about their VC experience. He told us that he hoped other startups and entrepreneurs would read it and learn from it.

Search engines make this determination through topic modeling. The search engines are even able to look at advanced queries and break them down to see which words are the most important out of a specific query.

Having this knowledge could be very important for SEOs, since it could let them know if they need to improve their content. For this reason, Rand Fishkin and the SEOmoz team developed a tool for doing just this called the LDA tool (Latent Dirichlet Allocation).

“Whenever we build, there’s no way it’s nearly as sophisticated as what Google’s using, but what we’re hoping is that maybe it can help people to analyze that and see if it’s a factor in their own rankings or on their pages,” Fishkin tells WebProNews.

The tool is free and is currently available in SEOmoz Labs. Fishkin says he does not know what the implications of the tool will be, but he believes the concept of it is, “a great thing for SEOs to be doing and thinking about more robustly…”

How would this information improve your SEO efforts?

In this interview with WebProNews, Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz says, “…essentially, Twitter is cannibalizing the Web’s link graph, and it’s doing so in a disproportionate manner for more social media forward industries.”

Although Fishkin does not believe the link graph is disappearing completely, he says it’s growing faster in the social Web than it is in the blogosphere. Google is also picking up on this trend and is paying attention to tweets. According to Fishkin, people can calculate Page Rank with the Twitter graph in the same way people do on the Web. He thinks Google is working with this concept now and expects to see more from them in this area.

Speaking of Google, Mike McDonald asks Fishkin about Google Buzz. From a strategic standpoint, Fishkin believes Google wants to let people know that the social Web and social media are important to them. In addition, Google realizes the amount of sharing and connection that happens through email and wants to leverage it.

There are, however, many issues that have been raised over Google Buzz, as WPN previously reported. While the lasting power of Buzz is still to be determined, Fishkin says SEOs are waiting to where it goes before they fully embrace it.

What are your thoughts regarding link bait in this age of Twitter, and do you believe Google Buzz will stick around?

First of all, there are SEO problems that the U.S. shares with the rest of the world in regards to landing page optimization and specifically, the 3-column page format. After the first page, users only look at the center column. If they do look to the right, she said they will leave the site within 10 seconds. If they look to the left, she said they want  information. According to Muessig, these issues are occurring in London and Stockholm.

Among her more surprising and unusual findings, she found that Scandinavian countries have problems with data sets. The entire Scandinavian countries are comprised of only 15 million people. As a result, these countries are unable to conduct A/B split testing and multivariate testing since the data sets are too small.

In summary, we can see that the SEO industry is growing, but regardless of one’s location on the globe, there are always challenges within it.

Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz also talked with us about ranking factors, but took a different angle. Experts are quick to offer advice on how to get your site to rank well, but does their advice match the data? What the data shows is what really matters. For example, Rand says the experts say H1 tags are very important, but actual data shows that they have a very low correlation with rankings.

So what advice does Rand offer for ranking well? He says titles tags, anchor text, on page keyword usage, and social aspects are all important factors. Social aspects are hard to measure, but Rand points out that they influence ranking with the search engines in an indirect way. He also agrees with Laura that there has to be a distinguishing factor involved in order to outrank competitors. Taking it one step further, Rand says the product not only has to be compelling, but it also has to give people an incentive to want to link.

Because SEO is constantly changing, you need to look at the data to make sure that your efforts match your goals.

Are the traditional ranking factors changing? What new factors are now included in the game?

For a brief review, GateHouse Media filed a lawsuit against The New York Times Co. for violating its copyright and trademark by linking to GateHouse articles and displaying their headlines and first sentences. The allegations were primarily directed toward the Boston Globe and Boston.com, which are owned by The New York Times.

The companies reached a settlement and the Times agreed to remove the headlines and text excerpts from GateHouse media stories previously posted on Boston.com.

As Clarke points out in the video above, we don’t fully know whether or not The New York Times was in the wrong because there was not a judicial decision. He personally believes the NYT had legitimate fair use to publish the headlines and leads.

Sarah also raises some concern in this case since many news aggregators and bloggers consider the practice of linking to an article including the headline and lead, a “common business model” on the Web. If this practice is not fair use and the Times actually is in the wrong, then the Internet, as we know it, could drastically change.

The reason why the New York Times didn’t take the case to court for a judicial decision remains a mystery. However, Sarah suspects that time and money played a large role in their choice.

For those who may not know, BlockShopper is a website that provides home purchasing information for certain geographical locations, and Jones Day is a large law firm. In the lawsuit, Jones Day alleged that Blockshopper infringed upon its trademark by using the name “Jones Day” as the anchor text in the links to the law firm’s website. Two associates from Jones Day purchased homes in the Chicago area and BlockShopper reported the information and linked to their lawyer bios on the Jones Day website.

BlockShopper asked the court to dismiss the case, but the judge refused. Since this video was shot, the companies ended up settling and BlockShopper was forced to change its linking policies. Many bloggers, lawyers and those involved in the Internet industry believe that BlockShopper followed the standard Web linking procedure that all other websites follow.

Clarke says he does not believe Jones Day should have sued on the grounds of a trademark violation. He could believe a copyright or trademark infringement over the use of an image, but not over a hyperlink.

Sarah says that while BlockShopper may raise some privacy concerns in an ethical sense, the real estate site does not violate any laws. She questions the law firm’s understanding of the Internet and Web commerce since links are a positive practice.

In a post regarding the settlement, Attorney Paul Alan Levy of the Public Citizen Litigation Group encourages Internet communities to retaliate against Jones Day by “repeatedly deep-linking from its name, and to its web site, in precisely the ways to which it objects, but which cannot prevent through litigation.” He says the firm’s bullying should not continue.

To briefly summarize the case, American Airlines accused Google of infringing upon its trademarks by using them as keyword targets for paid ads from other airline companies. Essentially, when a user searched for “American Airlines” in a Google search, the user was then redirected to the site of an American Airlines competitor. (Clarification: When a user searched for “American Airlines” in Google, paid advertisements and organic results would show up. Some of these paid ads and organic results were from the competitors of American Airlines who chose “American Airlines” as a keyword phrase. The searcher could then be led to believe that the competitor was either affiliated with American Airlines or superior to American Airlines.)

In July of 2008, the companies settled the lawsuit. As mentioned above, the terms remain classified so there is no real winner that we know of. Incidentally, several companies have sued Google over trademark infringement, but American Airlines is the first well-known trademark owner to take action.

In this video, Clarke speculates that Google has a policy that it implements for most all businesses, but for recognized brands like American Airlines, the giant search company may make exceptions to its policy. He takes it one step further and says there is a possibility that in cases such as this, companies create their own policy through a confidential settlement.

Clarke also guesses that if a user conducts a Google search for “American Airlines” today, competitor’s ads will not show up. Interestingly enough, I did a Google search for “American Airlines” and no ads showed up.

Rand prefaces the discussion by boldly stating that they are “a few months away from reversing Google’s algorithm.” If that does happen, just know that WebProNews broke the story. As we all wait on that to occur, Rand tells of a different approach that SEOs can implement.

Traditionally, SEOs look at PageRank to determine how well they rank and how and why someone ranks above or below them. Rand says this methodology is not much better than random guessing. The actual correlation that SEOmoz found is that basing actions on PageRank is only about 3 percent better than guessing.

He instead suggests acting upon data driven metrics. Take advantage of third-party data to estimate traffic competitively. For this, Rand recommends sites such as Compete, Alexa, and Quantcast. There are also tools that Rand recommends for predicting search engine rankings. They are Yahoo Site Explorer, PageRank, and Linkscape.

Rand strongly advocates this idea of bringing mathematics and statistics into SEO. He does however, believe that not one single metric should be held as the key. Link popularity is still the most prominent factor by nearly 75 percent and is followed by keywords and content.

Just for a quick recap, Impulse Media Group is an adult website that has several affiliates. The FTC sued Impulse Media Group for spam that was sent via its affiliates. The case went to jury and found that Impulse Media should not be held liable.

Many people disagreed with the outcome including Affiliate Summit Co-founder Shawn Collins who referred to it as a “travesty.” From a legal perspective however, attorney Anne Mitchell blatantly says, “the FTC couldn’t prove their case.” Clarke Walton also agrees with the verdict on the grounds that Impulse Media had well-designed policy agreements with its affiliates.

Affiliate agreements are very important because they essentially set the bar for how the relationship is governed. Clarke points out that the relationship between Impulse Media Group and its affiliates was that of an independent contractor and not of an agency-principal.

Sarah Bird also throws out a word of advice for affiliate marketers. She says monitoring your affiliates in addition to the terms of use set up, is a good rule of thumb to go by to prevent unwanted activity.

There are currently 21 gTLDs such as .com, .net, .org, but ICANN will expand upon that number later on this year. According to ICANN, “choice and competition are key to the continued success and reach of the global network.” ICANN will be accepting applications for gTLDs in Q4 of this year. Possible new gTLDs include: .hotel, .law, .facebook, .ebay, etc.

The application fee for obtaining a new gTLD is $185,000. Clarke says there will be additional fees if the application moves forward. Annual fees could be greater than $75,000 or 5 percent of your generated revenue. Clarke’s suggested ballpark of bankroll needed for this venture is $1 million.

So how does all this affect search marketers? Speaking on his personal belief, Clarke says it is a possibility that search engines will include these new gTLDs into their algorithms. For example, if .law is only available to licensed attorneys, then Google might find it to be a more relevant search result instead of a random .com domain.

If you’re interested in learning more about becoming a part of the new gTLD program, be sure to look into ICANN’s gTLD application guidebook. Also, stay tuned to WebProNews Videos for a look at several case studies from Clarke Walton and Sarah Bird.

Find out the latest in the case including Gambert’s response to the community and how you can file a Notice of Opposition, right here on WebProNews.

Rand brings up some great questions, and Vanessa has some great answers. One of the most useful tips is deep into the video, so it’s a good idea to highlight it here.

The burning question: When a webmaster moves an entire site, what’s the best way to handle the dip in the search engine rankings while that transition is made?

The common sense answer: Fox stressed that it was a bad idea to simultaneously move a website to a new domain and redesign the whole thing. Instead, she says, take the pages from your old site and put them on your new site exactly as they are. Redirect the pages one at a time, carefully mapping on a one-to-one basis.

We will continue to bring more live coverage from the SES conference in New York.