seo

In its most simple interpretation, a "pain point" is exactly what it sounds like: something so unpleasant that one is likely to try hard to avoid it or fix it. But buzzwords sometimes shift meanings, and for some boardroom jargon-slingers, pain point now means something very different.

Yet another retailer has been caught trying to game Google's search system. Seems Overstock.com was compensating some sites to link to the retailer's site on certain keywords, thus causing its rankings to rise in Google searches. According to the Wall Street Journal, Overstock.com actually offered...

Did you search for an item on Google in the past few months and find yourself directed to JCPenney? Was JCPenney the top returned retailer on just about everything you searched for on Google, even for things other retailers specialize in? You weren't alone; it seems JCPenney is apparently trying to...

The trouble lies in the quality of information -- a thorny problem due to the subjectivity of "quality" in general. Google keeps tweaking its algorithms, but the junk content keeps rising to the top. In the arms race against spammers, the next few years are crucial.

After more than a decade you'd think the quality of health information on the Web would be getting better, but it's still abysmal. Or perhaps more accurately, quality content is becoming harder to find as search engines swell up with optimized sites -- the natural evolution of "link farms" -- that...

Look out, Demand Media: Here comes another cheap content-creation competitor. Meet BlueGlass, the newest entrant in the rapidly expanding field of producing low-cost text and video articles designed specifically to snag search traffic.

Rich Skrenta thinks he has built a better search engine. This week, he's launching Blekko, whose web searches will only accept information from curated lists of trusted sites, mediated by users to filter out irrelevant results. But can Blekko compete with Google and Bing?

Arianna Huffington likes to blast "the media" for getting distracted by silliness like the Balloon Boy story. But no one's more distracted, or distracting, than her own Huffington Post.

The world's biggest wire service and the leading search engine have worked out their differences. Google and the Associated Press have reached a new licensing deal that ensures the latter's content will be hosted on Google News for a long time to come.

As the 2010 World Cup reaches its climax this weekend, hundreds of millions of football fans are busy scouring the Web for news on the globe's biggest sporting event -- and cyber-criminals are waiting for them to make one wrong click. Security experts had been predicting a bonanza for online...