Ralph Tegtmeier runs down six-black hat misconceptions. He writes that the misconceptions range from black hat SEO no longer being effective because the search engines have grown smarter, to black hat being poison to your company image, or black hat not having a viable business model. Tegtmeier lays out positives and negatives to help SEO professionals decide for themselves how and when to use the techniques, but warns that all major search engines have increased their editorial staff, "having learned the hard way that fending off 'search engine spam' cannot be done effectively in any reliable manner via …

Marketers should start thinking about the holiday season to finalize their SEM plans. P.J. Fusco says it's time to start making a list, checking it twice to "influence whether your search engine referrals this holiday season will be naughty or nice." Start by thinking about the pages and URLs from last year. Are they still intact? Fusco writes that if you abandoned the URLs, leaving the pages alive but disconnected from the site, you could resurrect the holiday landing pages this year. Search through your site's log files or metrics for November and December to find the …

Eric Ward made a bold statement during a conference call he sticks to even now. He said: "In the same way the engines can evaluate the links pointing at your site and rank you in the top ten, they can also evaluate the links pointing at your site and determine you are link spamming and not rank your site anywhere." Ward believes lowered rankings are wrongly interpreted as a penalty when what's really happening is a devaluation of an inbound link portfolio. Think of it this way: Something that once had value no longer does. He attempts …

In an interview with Manoj Jasra, Wall Street Journal SEO strategist Alex Bennert says working as an in-house SEO expert lets her focus energy and skills on one client. She still juggles multiple projects and works with various internal departments, but there the goals are all similar. The topics of conversation range from Bennert's thoughts on unique SEO opportunities available to online publications, to creating a strong SEO culture that gets writers and staff on the same page. That strong culture includes SEO training. It appears that WSJ writers, editors and bloggers -- as well as its …

Marty Weintraub writes that the first page of "Google-unpersonalized now sports damning rhetoric about you for searches related to brand and product categories." It could cost you "tens of millions" to manage the damage. He suggests taking a deep breath, gathering your wits, drinking some decaf, and defending your brand with the eight critical steps he details. The first two steps require you to set up a monitoring grid that alerts you of day-to-day brand buzz noise. For Twitter Weintraub suggests the TweetBeep, which offers email alerts as keywords are tweeted. Facebook, LinkedIn and other "walled gardens" …

Chris Lake is concerned about an anonymously penned article that appeared on Techcrunch calling for regulation of SEO and Google. Lake asserts the two should remain unregulated, and pooh-poohs the even "far more crazy" idea the writer proposes: that algorithm methodologies should be publicly disclosed. Doing so "would completely destroy any search engine that complied by allowing the spammers to bastardize the results," he writes.By spammers, Lake doesn't mean SEO professionals, who he believes are unfairly "castigated" in the article. " Lake's 10 reasons why the idea of regulation "totally sucks" and is completely unworkable start by proclaiming …

Rand Fishkin has published a lengthy post featuring details on intelligence tools and data. Fishkin acknowledges progress has been made to provide link data and tools, but believes the industry hasn't hit its full potential. Some of the biggest future projects he has been thinking about include crawling deeper and producing more frequent index update, building ranking models that predict actions that will drive up organic rankings, and visualizing important data about links, pages, keywords and global metrics.

Understanding the impact of social media on your business isn't easy, but necessary. First you need to define the meaning of success. Then consider how to leverage social media to reach that goal. You will need more than a Twitter account, writes Jason Burby. You need a full-blown social media strategy to meet those goals. This is where execs struggle, he writes. Burby points to leveraging positive social media comments, and seeking out and addressing negative buzz quickly, so things don't spin out of control. He explains that once these building blocks are in place, you can …

Eric Enge delves into how changes in the processing of nofollow attributions have caused concern among publishers. He details the impact of the changes, how they will affect your business, and ways to adapt your SEO strategy. Enge believes that it may make sense to remove any onsite nofollows. "For example, if you nofollow all the links to your 'About Us' page, the link juice in those links is discarded," he writes. It's also important to remember that while Google took a new position and policy on nofollows, Yahoo and Microsoft haven't moved forward and joined in.

Here's more advice on how to get buy-in for PPC campaigns. Mona Elesseily provides insight on overcoming obstacles. Some objections might occur when trying to increase bids to test higher ad positions, or attempting to drive traffic from the content network. SEO professionals need to demonstrate their expertise in the subject and solid project management skills. Sometimes clients are not convinced the contractor is equipped to make significant improvements. Just because you secured the contract doesn't mean you're done in terms of selling your services, she writes.