Putting more clicks between the home and product pages could cost companies higher page rankings in search engines. Richard Baxter reminds SEO professionals and webmasters to keep sites flat. Avoid the pyramid schema. Don't burying content within mounds of categories because fewer levels can improve sales. Make sure search engines don't index content on development servers. Baxter writes that this is one of the most "suicidal" SEO moves companies can make. Other factors that come into play when designing a SEO strategy around the site's architecture include broken internal and external links, server header responses, duplicate content, orphaned …

Noah Mallin provides an interesting spin on the biblical plagues written in the Old Testament, which are discussed during the Passover seder, likening them to the plagues of search and social media. Mallin likens blood to red ink, locusts to content exhaustion, and darkness to Web site overload. There are 10 plagues in total. Yesterday, he provided the first five. "We've split this up into two parts, not unlike the parting of the Red Sea," he writes in Part I.

Mike Moran tells us why companies many not want to do SEO work in-house. After spending years working with companies to build in-house strategies, he can now provide lots of reasons when you might want to use an agency because there are always reasons to tap a different approach. Sometimes agencies have advantages, Moran writes. Among the reasons he suggests: Agencies are typically up-to-date on search activities, have contact with search engines, and understand best practices. "Most companies (yes, even small ones) eventually realize that they need to do a mix of outsourcing and in-house," he writes.

In a video interview with Mike Murray at Search Engine Strategies, WebProNews asks about keyword selection. People make the mistake after researching keywords to bid on words as people search on them, though the words don't appear on their Web site. Companies must have a page that supports every keyword. Another trend Murray discusses centers on whether the domain really influences the keywords for the rankings. "I call it people with their heads in their clouds [and] I'm just going to dream up these words I'd like to have," he says, joking. "They need to come back down …

A patent granted to Google this week would enable people to see information about page links by mousing over them. The search engine filed the patent, "Methods and systems for assisted network browsing," in 2003. Bill Slawski makes no assumption that Google will implement this feature, but looks at numerous options made possible by the patent. Slawski ponders possibilities for use in Google's browser Chrome. He also considers having the ability to see what's behind the links' destination before clicking on it - like ratings, annotations, anchor test, history of use, and summaries or other data points.

Google has been testing new features in AdWord with a handful of users. Amber took the product for a spin. In this lengthy post, she writes that the new AdWords interface looks and feels similar to the old, but offers a handful of upgrades that make the new version "very cool." Amber says she appreciates having to click through fewer windows to complete a task, and that Google has made it easier to add new campaign and ad groups. "One thing I hate is the left hand navigation with the list of campaigns and help section," she writes. …

Make sure sites that link to yours are "good neighbors" or risk the chance that Google, Yahoo and Microsoft will drop your site's ranking in search engine queries. David Harry looks at host-level spam detection by reviewing three Yahoo patents. These patents identify spam hosts using stacked graphical learning, and detect spam hosts based on propagating predictions labels, as well as clustering host graphs. Harry runs through the patents providing details for each. To help understand how search engines look at spam clusters, Harry suggests reading up on TrustRank or HarmonicRank concept.

Long-tail keywords drive more traffic in aggregate than main category keywords, but they are typically difficult to manage; it's nearly impossible to create a predictive model for their success. This WordStream post suggests positioning your site's SEO strategy to drive long-tail keyword traffic to the site, but focusing on using mid-tail keywords because the site will gain better performance. SEO professionals can do this by structuring Web sites to acquire longer-tail traffic by carefully planning interlinking and link-building and content creation strategies to aggressively target mid-tail keywords.

ShoeMoney.com, built by online marketing guru Jeremy Schoemaker, has sued Google after discovering someone bidding on his trademarked name. What went awry? AdWords filters didn't work, according to Jason Kincaid, who writes that the evidence points to a Google employee. "A friend of Schoemaker's discovered that the violator had a number of friends on Facebook who worked for Google's AdWords," Kincaid writes. "A cached version of his LinkedIn profile stated that he is an employee at Google working as an AdWords Account Strategist, though the title has since been removed."

Yahoo is working on changing search algorithms and updating indexing, according to Dan Rampton. The search engine during the next few days will roll out changes to the method used to crawl, index and rank sites. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land expects the updates to be "fairly significant." People can get updates and share their thoughts with other Yahoo Search users at the Site Explorer Suggestion Board.