SEO setbacks are never easy, but Eric Enge has a few tips to ease you through tough times. He provides tips on determining when problems occur, such as a downturn in Web site traffic. Enge suggests keeping a detailed log for all changes made to a Web site. Not just changes made specifically for SEO reasons, but obvious major ones, such as changing domains, navigation, or implementing a new customer management system.

Helen Overland wanted to know if the sun sign you're born under links in some way to the Internet marketer you have become. So, she puts together a list of the sun signs, provides a description for each, and lists industry celebrities that correlate with the sign. Some of the SEO and PPC big shots listed include Danny Sullivan, David Szetela, Charlene Li, Bill Slawski, and Dave Harry.

Yahoo's Ivan Davtchev believes there's still an "awful lot that is still up in the air about Yahoo search," according to Tom Krazit, who overheard him say this at the recent Search Engine Strategies conference. For starters, it's been rumored that Yahoo will close certain search application programming interfaces (APIs). During a SES panel discussion, Microsoft's Sasi Parthasarathy, speaking on behalf of Yahoo, dismissed the API rumors. The news about the closing of the Yahoo Term Extraction API was noticed on a public Yahoo message board for search professionals, rather than as unsourced Internet scuttlebutt.

Bill Slawski calls attention to a patent for ranking articles in Google News. Granted this week, but originally filed in 2003, the patent discusses ranking factors it might use to present news article based upon the "quality" of news sources. It provides some insight into ranking factors, which range from the source to the number of article produced by the news source, and the average length of articles from the news source. Breaking news score, use pattern, human opinion and circulation are also under consideration for ranking a story in Google News in this patent, according to …

LeapFish. Heard about it? Amber describes its pay-per-search advertising program, and how the search engine works. She calls the company "up-and-coming," one that may effectively compete with the "big dogs." And, no, she's not getting paid to blog about them, she writes. Overall Amber likes LeapFish's PPC platform, but sees a few problems. For starters, there's a learning curve. It works different than PPC advertising programs offered by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. When you buy keywords, they are yours until you sell them. And, some competitive keywords are not cheap, she writes.

Danny Dover provides an interesting look at real-time data and the influence it has had on society. For example, "social media has the potential to become the greatest early detection system [for pandemics] that the world has ever seen," he writes. "It is faster, nimbler and has more access to user data than any traditional search engine." Dover continues, "Not only does Facebook have the data necessary to see who is suffering from an illness, it has the data necessary to predict who these ill people will most likely come in contact with."

A recap of last week's Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose includes a light-hearted but serious public service announcement about hacking sites to gain links. The 58-second video shows Michael Gray and Matt Cutts sitting side-by-side on a bench. Cutts says he and Gray don't always see eye-to-eye, but one thing they do agree on is that "hacking sites to get links is basically pure evil." Gray chimes in and says "if you're hacking for links, your sites will burn in hell."

Richard Baxter looks at how structured markup can influence SEO. Structured markup could provide consumers with much more information in search engine queries than presently offered. For example, about a week ago Baxter began seeing prices for some merchandise listed online. He writes that while it's an early sign of Google's intentions, without webmasters implementing a more structured approach to their code, progress could be slow.

Consider "measuring to profit" to determine the success of PPC campaigns, suggests Jason Tabeling. Marketers should define a successful PPC campaign with deeper metrics, not just return on investment measurement, he says. For example, a T-shirt and a pair of pants each cost $10, but the cost to make the T-shirt is much less than the pair of pants, and therefore is more profitable for the company. It's important to "measure to profit" -- because if you made bidding decisions based on revenue, then you might not care if you sold a T-shirt or the pants, he writes.

Research competitors' ads, avoid hyper-competitive keywords, focus ads on consumer savings, and refine ad groups to focus on high performers. Those are some of the tips Brandon Leibowitz offers up to help increase conversions and reduce costs. Leibowitz says marketers should know what it means to "keyword match" and understand the difference between broad, phrase, and exact keywords, because using the wrong technique can sink a campaign.