Mike Dobbs and Martha Mukangara provide analysis of Google Caffeine, comparing 40 retail keywords to the Google engine being used today, which the team dubbed "Decaf." The significant differences between the two demonstrate Google's aggressiveness in keeping up with competitors Bing and Twitter to provide for real-time searches. Among the key findings, domains and rankings will fluctuate, and for specific keywords the shakeup could be significant, according to Dobbs and Mukangara. The two also believe competition for keywords will increase since Google indexes more pages with Caffeine, and long-tail SERPs become more relevant.

Danny Sullivan joins in on the SEO backlash Fox News created after publishing the article "Top Online Marketing Jobs to Leave You Friendless." Sullivan explains the article incorrectly compares "search engine optimizer" to "scamming" search engines. "Fox, of course, actually means spamming search engines," Sullivan writes. "But that's one of the many things they get wrong." Sullivan provides a long list of examples demonstrating Fox News's use of SEO, suggesting the editor and writer involved in the story lacked SEO training, or at the very least, some sort of education about SEO.

Self-funded startup Linktive has launched a social network for site links, according to Mike Butcher, who believes the days of SEO professionals politely asking for a site to link to yours are gone. Butcher explains the service has a link-rating system that allows the community to self-police the network against spammer attacks. Site owners get to authorize and approve all links, similar to the way people authorize friends on LinkedIn or Facebook. Linktive also tried to work within the Google link-building guidelines to ensure the service sticks to the rules.

Not getting an early start, picking a poor content management platform that can't handle the job, and using unfriendly engine crawler development techniques are three of the 10 common SEO mistakes people make, according to Eric Enge. Enge points to the lack of recognition SEO gets when it comes to driving traffic to a company's Web site as one of the biggest challenges professionals have. It can become a problem when key members of management don't understand how SEO works.

If ads don't show up in Google after activating your AdWords campaign, chances are there's one problem with the account, but several possible reasons why. Carrie Hinkle provides a checklist of 10 reasons why your ads aren't showing up in Google. For example, "active" vs. "paused," a fundamental element for any campaign may seem intuitive, but just make sure your account, campaign, and ad group settings are set to "active," Hinkle writes. She suggests beginning at the top and working your way down the list. By the end you should solve the problem.

SEOmoz has released its Search Engine Ranking Factors 2009. Every two years, the company surveys top SEOs, providing what it calls "an amazing aggregation of data about how search engines rank documents." This year the survey includes a set of perspectives on geo-targeting across countries. It also reviews link building and additional information on SEO data, such as link popularity, anchor text and on-page keyword use.

Marketers who need answers on why consumers don't flock to their company's Web site might want to start using Google Analytics to gain a little insight, according to Ron Jones. After all, it's a free tool. To get started tracking and analyzing traffic, add a "small chunk of JavaScript code to each page you want to track on your Web site," explains. Google's tool also offers a variety of reports. Jones lists four, from "Overview Report," to "Site Overlay," describing when, how and why to use each. Google Analytics allows users to add the reports to front-page …

Providing a table of rare words and a lot of context, Bill Slawski works through the process of approximating the size of a search engine's index based on the rare words that appear in queries. He writes that knowing the size of the index allows him to compare Bing with Google, for example. Slawski explains that the rare word count works better than looking at the most frequently appearing words. So, he identifies English language words to use from less than 1,000 search results on Google Caffeine, Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask and Cuil by looking at the …

Rick DeJarnette tells us how to communicate with search engine robots without getting "lost in space," referring to the 1960s television show. In this lengthy post, he provides sample code, tips and tricks to block bots from crawling specified directories and files. A matrix offers insight into the purpose for specific code, such as noindex, nosnippet, noarchive, nocache, and noodp. For example, "noodp" instructs bots not to use a title and snippet from the Open Directory Project (ODP) for that page in the SERP.

If you develop navigational menus invisible to search engines, think SEO is voodoo, recycle information from one client's Web site to another, create duplicate URLs for the same content, or bury important pages deep within your Web site, then you're engaging in some of the not-so-best practices that make Web site developers need professional SEO services. The above are just some of the 85 ways Web site developers keep SEO professionals in business, according to Jill Whalen.