SeoAlchemist

Last week, my friend Chris Bennett at 97th Floor and his brother Patrick at

Modern Blue launched a new analytics package called

BLVD Status that I am particularly excited about. I was one of the original pre-beta testers and was able to see this grow into a really powerful and helpful tool for anyone trying to better track their search & social media marketing efforts.

BLVD Status is an analytics program that has a live dashboard similar to something you would see in
Have a Mint but with really robust information like conversions, search engine rankings, outgoing link information and many more data points. BLVD Status presents a slick and clean user interface, but I am more excited about the actual data it provides you. With many analytics programs I have tested, it seems like you can’t get the data you are looking for without custom programming and tweaking.
Below, details about what features it currently includes, and what I would like
to see in future releases.

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If you are an experienced link builder, you might be tempted to read something other than today’s column, which on first glance may appear a bit to rudimentary for your skills. If you do stick around, and I hope you do, I’ll share with you what I consider to be one of the tragic mistakes that even sophisticated link builders often make when contacting a site to request a review/link: Using the wrong contact method.

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A review of Microsoft’s research on BrowseRank.

A review of Microsoft’s research on BrowseRank.

Google’s Matt Cutts issued the announcement that Google [Toolbar] PageRank was going through an update over the weekend, and it seems that the rollout of the update began Friday night or yesterday, with the PageRank of some sites rising in value and others dropping.

Sure, Toolbar PageRank is not a valid indicator of everything that goes on behind the scenes at Google, and penalties associated with PageRank … or the changing of PageRank, do not have a direct effect on site ranking in Google. PageRank is seen however as a quality indicator by publishers, advertisers and average neighborhood web users, so a site’s toolbar PageRank does have importance. (more…)

Earlier this month, I reported that Google Maps was testing walking directions on a small subset of users. This morning, I noticed that Google Maps now is offering walking directions for all Google Maps users.

For example, conduct a search for 200 Madison Ave to 200 Lexington Ave and you will see the option to take “Walking” directions, as opposed to driving directions. Here is a picture:

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A guest post by Michael Natkin about building traffic to a new blog.

The Virtual Earth Blog announced that they have released a bulk of new imagery to Virtual Earth and Live Maps. I am not going to list out all the new locations you can find the new satellite, ortho and bird’s eye imagery, but here are a few:

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Interesting links from the past week or two.

It’s fairly safe to say: 1) patent law is a mess, 2) patent law is in transition and 3) newer court rulings are reducing the rights of patent holders. But in a very provocative argument, based on recent cases, the PatentlyO law blog argues that new rules and tests imposed by courts (though not yet the US Supreme Court) could effectively eliminate software patents.

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