Since its inception, StumbleUpon, the social search and Web site discovery engine, has displayed modified results on the SERPs of the big three engines --telling users how many "stars" other Stumblers have given a specific page, and whether a majority gave it a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down." Now, recent Stumbler data will be added to the results from searches on AOL and Ask.com, as well as Google and Yahoo News, Flickr, Wikipedia and YouTube. The expansion of the Stumble results means that advertisers who don't necessarily rank high with the big three search engines (or at all) …

At last week's SMX Social Media conference in New York, linkbait (and how to create and harness it) was the focus of a number of conversations and panel discussions. But many search marketers have a vague idea of what linkbait is, and an even vaguer view of how to use it. "Linkbait is any sort of content that you create with the intentions of making it virally popular." So says Eric Lander, associate editor of Search Engine Journal. Now that the definition is out of the way, how does someone go about getting those free, juicy inbound links …

Marketers may be familiar with "The Pareto Principle," the idea that 80% of a business' sales, sign-ups, or other positive activity stems from 20% of the promotional efforts. Named after the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, the 80- 20 rule can be applied to all sorts of areas in life--- and Jeff Quipp's post explains how it relates to search. For example, roughly 80% of a site's search traffic is most likely driven by 20% of the total set of keywords. Or 80% of a site's overall traffic is likely to come from 20% of the myriad possible sources …

Yahoo cited "Search Engine Fatigue" as part of its rationale behind adding the new Search Assist feature to its search interface, and now a report by Autobytel follows up on this idea of users getting overwhelmed by the amount of results, ads and overall clutter in the typical search experience. Autobytel, the new and used car search marketplace, commissioned Kelton Research to poll 1,000 U.S. adults and found that 72.3% experience "search engine fatigue" (either always," "usually," or "sometimes") when researching a topic on the Internet. In addition, 25% of all users said their primary complaint when it …

For sites with dozens of pages of information, much of the SEO work is about deciding which content should be made available to the search engine spiders -- and which should just "exist" for visitors to find through intra-site navigation. According to Michael Gray, depending on the nature of a business, these ancillary pages could include sections like "about us," and the company's privacy policy or terms of service. Gray outlines a strategy for determining whether to include these pages or not (based on how relevant they'll be to a majority of user queries), and then gives details for …

New data from Click Forensics found that while the overall click fraud rate (16.2%) went up modestly in Q3 -- up 0.4% from Q2 and 2.4% year-over-year - click fraud on the major engines' content networks inched closer to 30%. Silicon Alley Insider includes the actual Click Forensics press release, as well as analysis of the data, and comes up with key takeaways. Namely -- click fraud continues to get worse, and it's bad news for content providers who make a living with AdSense/Yahoo Publisher Network/etc. revenue. The Insider also suggests that the giants provide more info about …

Greg Meyers notes that studying cultural change is as much a part of the search practice as the nuts and bolts of meta tags and HTML. To that end, his latest post serves up a definition of the "Echo Boomers" generation, an offshoot of Generation Y that is the last set of youths to be part of the Web revolution. Echo Boomers differ from the younger "Internet Generation" in that they were not surrounded by the Web from the onset -- but are still quite Web-savvy, and are often the users teaching Baby Boomers (their parents and grandparents) …

In a recent domain name auction by Moniker, the Dallas Cowboys NFL team "mistakenly" bid on cowboys.com -- thinking that the domain was being sold for $275. Days later, the organization wanted to overturn the deal, realizing too late that they'd won the domain name with a bid of $275,000. It seems that the football team didn't understand how much of a commodity domains are and how the right one can impact brand awareness -- not to mention new ticket sales and other revenue. In the Dallas Cowboys' defense, the organization has decades worth of brand equity and …

Forget Northern California. It seems Seattle is the new hot spot for search, as Yahoo has joined Google and Microsoft in setting up new engineering digs in Bellevue, Wash. The Web giant has confirmed that it will lease space for up to 600 employees at a site that's literally down the road from Google's Kirkland brand and Microsoft's Redmond Campus. "The Pacific Northwest actually has a huge concentration of engineers, of technical people," said Yahoo's senior vice president of platforms and architecture, David Sobeski, in an interview. "It's the guys who can go figure out these …

Google announced that it would be doubling the number of additional links displayed in the results underneath a site's initial listing to eight. These Sitelinks point users to FAQs, product pages and other sections of interest on a Web site -- and can be an extremely useful user navigation (and conversion) tool. To make mobile search more efficient, the search giant will be including up to ten Sitelinks in mobile SERPs -- and has now also added Sitelink management features to the Webmaster Central platform. Site owners can see which pages will potentially be included as Sitelinks and choose …