Jon Henshaw admits he's not a lawyer, but decided to analyze the Federal Trade Commission's new endorsement guidelines for bloggers anyway. He debates how the guidelines may influence paid and affiliate links by exploring "what happens when a link isn't part of an endorsement or review." Henshaw writes "the new FTC guidelines have effectively turned themselves into their own Internet Thought Police, but even more ridiculous is the fact that they won't be able to actually enforce it." He provides his own interpretation of the guidelines and makes a few suggestions on how bloggers can protect themselves, which …

Magnus Nilsson suggests viewing duplicate content on a Web site as a long-term strategy rather than a problem, though search engines put an emphasis on original content. He points to the new movie site blog film.feber.se as an example of not giving up on readers to gain in the search engine rankings. Search engine marketers have had a long-standing hate/love relationship with duplicate content. On one hand it could prevent content on the Web site from indexing in the search engines, but on the other hand site owners know it's important to serve the reader first. The …

SEO professionals never proclaim to leap or scale tall buildings in a single bound, but most have a few tricks up their sleeve when it comes to ranking Web pages at the top of search engine queries or hiding those derogatory comments about a company deep in the SERPs. So, after a discussion with "some pals," Dave Harry uses his imagination to turn some industry people he respects into geeky gods. Harry's list of "The League of Awesome Optimizers" includes Superheroes, Super Groups and Patent Pals. Some of the recognizable names on the list are Aaron Wall, Virginia …

Tim Ash provides a checklist of ways to organize landing pages, including "availability," "fault tolerance" and "legibility." He writes, "If visitors can't find something on your landing page, it might as well not exist." While most of the descriptions are short and concise, Ash spends a considerable amount of time stepping through the process of making content legible. He calls attention to font style, size and consistency. He also suggests avoiding all capital letters and blocks of text of more than 50 characters in length.

Negative match keywords in Yahoo search marketing could reduce the number of unqualified clicks. True, but Carrie Hinkle writes that if not done correctly, the negative keywords could prevent a targeting keyword from serving up, too. For those wanting to dive in and use negative match keywords, Hinkle steps through the decision-making process to help prevent paid search campaigns from underperforming on Yahoo. She explains the nuances between standard match and advance match settings in Yahoo accounts.

WebMynd, Unified Search, Google Search Sidebar, Googlepedia and Infoaxe are five add-on tools Ann Smarty reviews that provide deeper resources to make better decisions. She provides a screen shot on how the results will look in Google search engine result pages, as well as instructions on adding a search sidebar to SERPs. These add-on tools aim to make Google search result pages easy to scan for more information and advice.

What do you get when combining music with paid search? Manny Rivas uncovered a few old photos of Marty Weintraub sporting a full head of hair. It seems this "PPC rockstar," or "social media rockstar," once wailed into a musical instrument, rather than computer keyboard. Rivas explains that the poster, circa 1985, that "left the weekend aimClear crew howling" was found after cleaning out the office. Rivas writes: "In a momentary haze, Marty gave me permission to publish these pictures and I wanted to do so before he changes his mind! (Go Marty! I just had to share.)"

"Today I will make a case that nearly every organization should offer SEO training to anyone who even remotely touches the company's web site, and why every senior manager should also be encouraged to attend," writes Eric Enge. He notes that failure to train people can waste money and time -- not only blowing schedules, but leading employees down the wrong strategic direction. "You may think I am fear-mongering here," Enge writes, but then provides providing specific examples to head off that thought. One example ends in a project's "six month launch delay at a cost of hundreds …

Bill Slawski ponders this question after reviewing several white papers and patents during the past five years. In a recent post, he analyzes the way Yahoo segments Web pages to distinguish noise from information. Okay, page segmentation is one thing, but can it influence query rankings and the type of information crawled and indexed by search engines Google, Microsoft and Yahoo? Slawski explains it's possible "a link from a main content area probably carries more weight than a link from a sidebar or a footer section of a page," and that "search engines are attempting to ignore boilerplate segments …

Aaron Wall summarizes recent innovations from Google, Microsoft and Yahoo as a way to contradicting comments from Microsoft's Steve Ballmer. Ballmer says search hasn't changed much in the last five years and that the next 10 years will demonstrate much more innovation than the prior. Wall believes innovation in search continues to move at a faster pace. Supporting his agreement, Wall posts a few videos and points to some examples, from SEO Toolbars, to search's business model.