Turns out Wendy in Russia is a little sexier than Wendy in the states.

We here at Ad Age cover a lot of the hardware that gets dished out at the South of France confab, but if there's a Lion for humor, creative vet Gerry Graf wins the Titanium for funny.

Posted by Aaron Wheeler

It’s here! Google has released Panda update 2.2, just as Matt Cutts said they would at SMX Advanced here in Seattle a couple of weeks ago. This time around, Google has – among other things – improved their ability to detect scraper sites and banish them from the SERPs. Of course, the Panda updates are changes to Google’s algorithm and are not merely manual reviews of sites in the index, so there is room for error (causing devastation for many legitimate webmasters and SEOs).  Read more... (2392 words, 6 images, estimated 9:34 mins reading time)

When the FBI wanted to put an end to the roughly 16-year disappearance of Boston mobster James "Whitey" Bulger, it decided to advertise. To women.

Posted by russvirante

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

As an SEO agency, Virante has always prided itself in having research-based answers to the questions presented by our clients. A year or so ago, I caught myself referring to the a site as having "a great looking natural link profile" without really having an numbers or analysis to describe exactly what that profile should look like. Sure, I could point out a spam link or two, or what looked like a paid link, but could we computationally analyze a backlink profile to determine how "natural" it was?  Read more... (1565 words, 10 images, estimated 6:16 mins reading time)

Posted by iPullRank

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

So you want a career in SEO? Or maybe you already have an SEO role and it’s time for a change. Well, I’ve been doing SEO for five years now and I can safely say that I’ve endured the pros and cons of almost every type of SEO career situation. So let me give you some insight on the good, bad, and ugly for all of them.  Read more... (5805 words, 29 images, estimated 23:13 mins reading time)

Posted by randfish

For years, the best way to gain rankings in search results was to have:

1. Accessible pages featuring
2. Quality content
3. Targeting the right keywords
4. In a way that naturally earned external links

But this changes things:

The cupcake post from Everywhereist normally wouldn’t rank there. In fact, unless you follow Geraldine on Twitter, chances are you won’t see much of her site in even semi-competitive results. Here’s a screenshot of a logged-out view.

 Read more... (428 words, 10 images, estimated 1:43 mins reading time)

Posted by salario

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Your landing pages aren’t converting. Sadly, this is not your customer’s fault. It’s your job to tell your customers why your product is awesome and you have fewer than five seconds to tell that story.  Read more... (999 words, 13 images, estimated 4:0 mins reading time)

Posted by Cyrus Shepard

Google’s personalized search means nearly every result returned within a browser is altered one way or another. It’s rare that two different people on Earth ever see the exact same set of search results.

And Google made sure it’s darned hard to turn off.

The rise of personalization has created both winners and losers in the Internet world.  Read more... (758 words, 13 images, estimated 3:02 mins reading time)

• Netflix recommends movies that it predicts I will like. They claim 85% accuracy within half a star. My experience suggests lower.
• Amazon does a great job of suggesting books for me based on what others have purchased.

Posted by Dan Deceuster

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Dictionary.com defines a link as "anything serving to connect one part or thing with another; a bond or tie." Interestingly, the given definition for a relationship is "a connection, association, or involvement." From a semantic point of view, these two words seem to be synonyms. Yet from an SEO point of view, all too often they are mortal enemies.  Read more... (1380 words, 8 images, estimated 5:31 mins reading time)