ICrossing has acquired German search and affiliate marketing firm 3GNet, further expanding its European presence. The Scottsdale, Ariz.-based interactive shop purchased London-based Spannerworks in early 2007, but according to CEO Jeff Herzog, this latest acquisition was necessary because "the U.K. by no means is a foothold into Europe." In 3GNet, iCrossing gets an SEO-focused stronghold in mainland Europe, some 70 new employees, and offices in Munich and Berlin. The firm's clients include eBay, Espirit and Epson (which is an iCrossing client in the U.S.).

Though Google is more like David to Baidu's Goliath in China, the search giant's top brass, including CEO Eric Schmidt and Google China president Kai-Fu Lee, have been quite public about the company's goals for snagging more of China's search market share. This week, for example, Lee reaffirmed the search giant's naked ambition at the Boao Forum for Asia. "Certainly, we would like to aspire to be a market leader in five years," Lee said. And a look into the latest stats (from Beijing research firm Analysys International) shows that Google's share of search revenue in …

New Web site owners (or even seasoned pros set to launch a new site) should have SEO in mind from the onset, but Michael Gray argues that the trick is to avoid putting the cart before the horse. "Look for a way to differentiate yourself first and use SEO to promote it, not the other way around," Gray says. Without quality content (including text, images and possibly video), or a unique value proposition, all the time spent working on keyword density, meta data and link accumulation could actually lead to a smackdown from the engines. "At …

During a Web site review session at SMX Sydney, Rand Fishkin and Danny Sullivan discovered that Flightcentre.com, a well-known Australian travel site, had been cloaking content from fellow travel site DiscoverTasmania.com. The panelists copied and pasted a snippet of content from DiscoverTasmania.com into a Google search and found Flightcentre.com outranking it for the exact same phrase. A further dig found no mention of the content on the referenced page itself, but a look into Flightcentre.com's source code (sans Javascript and as the Google-bot) showed that the latter site was indeed, cloaking content that it had copied from DiscoverTasmania.com. …

"There is a golden rule to link building: links reflect value on the Web," says Adam Audette. Because of their inherent value, link building has become much harder today than it was pre-Google. Links are a commodity, and with that in mind, Audette delivers a detailed reference manual on effective link building. For example, Audette defines a number of key components that define a valuable link--with the top factors being relevance and context. Beyond those concrete characteristics, the most valuable links are often difficult to obtain, require a human element (two people need to exchange ideas), and involve …

Citysearch has partnered with mobile bar code tech firm Scanbuy to offer local businesses an extra layer of functionality for mobile searchers. The local search giant is running a trial program with some 500 businesses (mostly restaurants) in San Francisco, and will place a scannable bar code right outside the location or on a billboard. After users point their camera-enabled mobile phone at the code, the downloadable application scans it and then serves up the mobile version of the business' Citysearch page--including contact info, promotions and user reviews. Citysearch is currently offering the service at no cost to …

Bill Slawski digs into a new patent application from Microsoft that aims to include the age of the domains that link to a given Web site as part of the site's overall ranking criteria. The patent, called "Ranking Domains Using Domain Maturity" was published last week (but filed in late 2006), and assumes that newer domains have a higher likelihood of being spam and/or being part of a link farm--and should be judged accordingly. Thus, sites with a high influx of links from older domains would ultimately be ranked higher than sites with a host of links …

Microsoft has released a host of upgrades to its Live Maps (and Virtual Earth) properties. Live Maps now uses ClearFlow (a technology developed in-house) to better reroute driving directions. "When you choose the 'Route around Traffic' option you will get much more accurate travel times and improved routes," wrote the Virtual Earth team. "We have also added a bunch more cities that we are covering with Traffic flow data from Traffic.com." The team has also started improving their 3D views of major cities like Las Vegas and Dallas, with more attention to the surrounding suburbs, higher resolution and …