Andrew Shotland's local search prediction for 2010 caught the attention of a blogger who goes by the name Vanillacoke. In an interview between the two, Vanillacoke queries Shotland about his prediction that Google will not be allowing agency accounts for its Local Business Center. Eliminating agency accounts might make it more difficult for small businesses who likely don't manage their own campaign, Vanillcoke writes. But I'm wondering if such companies have the budgets to hire an agency. br>The two also delve into free vs. paid local listings, and best ways to target local keywords.

Search may have become the vehicle to find the rants, but SEO and social media amplify the message. Michael Martinez drills into SEO advice Danny Sullivan gave Bill Gates about his new blog. "The fact that a lot of imposturous blogs are crowding a name space ('Bill Gates blog') that Bill has eschewed doesn't lead me to conclude he is doing anything wrong," Martinez writes. Gates' marketing skills aren't in question here. Martinez believes the SEO marketing plan has everything to do with the strategy and not the skills of Gate's SEO team.

The WolframAlpha development team tells us the site now includes substitution systems. These strings are composed of two parts: a string and a set of rules. One string looks like a series of numbers, such as "0? and "1." The rules describe what happens to each number in the string. For example, "1" -> "0" and "0" -> "10." The team lays out the rules of the string, provides insight into the benefits, and why it's important.

Trouble-shooting ad targeting is never easy, but Ulrike Jung tries to provide tips and tricks to ease the pain. Part of the ad-targeting cycle means code gets generated in an AdSense account and placed on a crawled site. The content is matched to semantic clusters and an ad query gets created. Jung looks at some of the common issues surrounding the ad targeting cycle and how to solve them in AdSense.

Become easy to find. Keep designs simple. Don't forget the contact information. Catherine Juon puts together a checklist for starting a new Web site because she knows you have a ton of things on your mind. Not your traditional type of SEO checklist, but one for today's search engines, she writes.

Are you a frustrated SEO professional with a little rant bottled up inside? David Harry gives you the opportunity to let it all out at seobullshit.com. Harry founded the site last week to give SEO experts a place to vent. Yes, now you, too, can rant about a variety of subjects, such as why some "'SEOs' out there still advise their clients to maintain URIs within a (pseudo) file system hierarchy" when they should know it's not the correct thing to do, according to Sebastian, who posted the rant on Tuesday. So what are the rules for blogging on the …

In more than 120 years of predictions, there have only been 15 occasions when Phil didn't see his shadow, according to the National Climate Data Center, which estimates the groundhog's accuracy rate at around 39%, writes C. Alan Joyce. Joyce tells us how Phil fans and skeptics can do their own analysis, as well as points to a Web site that provides predictions on the event.

The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) invites search marketers to participate in its sixth annual "State of Search Engine Marketing" survey. Either in-house or agency search marketing professionals can participate. SEMPO membership is not required. The study projects budgets industrywide for search, advertising and social media campaigns in 2010. All who participate through Feb. 22 receive a free copy of the final report when it's released in March.

How do you get your site ranking well when Google shows "enormous favoritism"? Michael Cottam serves up some suggestions, such as putting up light content on new sites and watching the SERPs for a month to make sure they are not "sandboxed," he writes. He also explains the use of 301 redirects for keyword-rich domains, content-rich doorway pages on those domains, and the best way to move existing sites.

President Obama answers questions submitted and voted on by YouTube users. There were about 11,696 questions submitted on a variety of categories, such as jobs, foreign policy, health care and government reform. To try and get as many questions answered as possible, Steve Grove and the YouTube team put together a section called "Good idea/Bad idea," where the group tried to solicit short responses from the President on ideas sent in by the YouTube community.