Rand Fishkin dives into blogger and technologist Robert Scoble's three-part video series that aims to explain why Mahalo, Facebook and other sites that blend socially constructed features into their Web crawlers, will usurp Google and its algorithm in a few years. Fishkin, SEOmoz's co-founder and CEO, tackles each of the points Scoble makes in his videos, countering his theories with a side-by-side analysis of search results from both Mahalo and Google, as well as a general defense of common SEO practices -- which Scoble's videos also seem to pan.

The piece clarifies points made by blogger Eric Ward in a previous week's post on how to grow a site's link count aggressively -- but not fall into the traps of bad or malicious linking. Ward separates manipulated linking that proves beneficial for consumers and site owners (as in asking for a link exchange, or even purchasing links to advertise on sites that are demographically relevant), from linking tactics aimed solely at increasing a site's search rank (with no concern for content), or ones that attempt to exploit a weakness in content or server design.

Katherine Boehret plays with four video search engines (Google, Yahoo, Blinkx and Truveo) and finds that the user experience on AOL's Truveo comes out on top. When a user searches on the newly revamped Truveo, the crawler brings back videos that are tied directly to the specific search word or phrase -- but also shows results that encourage users to browse videos with slightly related or unexpected content. It's this lure to explore that makes Truveo different, and Boehret also finds that the site's depth of content and interface is the most user-friendly of the four.

Frederic Paul analyzes a study by SEM firm Oneupweb that suggests that just 20% of the top 100 online retailers have their sites "well optimized" for search engine crawling -- a factor that smaller companies can take to heart, as it means that there's still room for them to get noticed on the Web.

Eleanor Trickett's post-SES San Jose piece brings a direct marketer's perspective to how boring the search-user interface has become; how the changes from a more all-inclusive approach to search (like Ask 3D or Google Universal Search) will force marketers to further scrutinize every piece of metadata (if not rethink their whole SEO/SEM strategy); and why Google chose to keep its YouTube ad model simple and safe.

Two weeks ago Google announced it was changing the method used to determine which AdWords ads would take the top spot above natural search results -- and the change is now in effect. Search Engine Roundtable scoured Webmaster forums and blogs for preliminary responses to the search giant's tactic, with some users already seeing a downward trend in their number of top-ranked ads. Instead of using a mix of an ad's Quality Score and the average CPC to choose which ad gets top placement, Google now factors the maximum CPC into the equation. Some advertisers questioned whether this was …

Paul Bennett analyzes the July U.S. Search Market Share data report from Hitwise, focusing on some steps Microsoft can take to beef up its search offering, as the company gave up 3% of market share year-over-year -- directly to Google. Bennett discusses how an oft-rumored merger between Microsoft and Yahoo would have to be structured to make any impact on Google's search domination (as the two combined would still only have half of Google's market share), as well as what Satya Nadella, Microsoft's corporate vice president, has said about "reconceptualizing" the MSN search interface to gain users.

Rafe Needleman gives an in-depth overview of Vtap, a new mobile video search application soon to be released by tech firm Veveo. He found that the app returned "more good hits than any other engine I used" -- regardless of platform. Unlike other video search engines like Blinkx and Truveo, Vtap is only accessible through a mobile Web browser, and the service doesn't crawl the actual video or audio content to create its search index. Instead, it uses the tags and text on the page (metadata) where the file is hosted to generate search results. Veveo is set to launch …

UK search marketing spending will top £2 billion (or more than $4 billion U.S.) this year, a 58% jump from 2006, according to a report by E-consultancy. MarketingCharts digs a bit deeper into the report, breaking down the split between paid and organic search spending, as well as the forecast for future market growth.

Rick Sloboda gives Web publishers a crash course in how to not get taken advantage of by so-called "snake oil" SEO sellers. The article gives pointers on some common "black hat" SEO tactics and tips on how to evaluate an SEO firm's sales pitch.