Rand Fishkin has been running an experiment for a technique that relies on blog posts to drive up Web site traffic, detailing a senario using LastWear Clothing. He began tinkering with the idea after seeing a disconnect between those who naturally earn signals that engines look for, such as blogs and online communities, with those who need them, such as commercial Web sites. He believes the two can co-mingle, and tells us how to stucture the task. Fishkin explains that when buying a blog or any form of online community, the search expert not only aquires links, but also gets an …

Google filed a patent reated to voice controls for cloud services. The user will have an option to use their Android Phone as the remote to make inquiries about TV shows and the TV will list what's available, according to Patently Apple. The screen shots of schematic diagrams of a cloud-based system from the patent filing detail the platform.

Google has made it easy for search marketers to build image ads in AdWords’ Display Ad builder, and Sarah shows us how this is done. She believes the tool could become a valuable resource to expand accounts, and outlines a step-by-step guide to take us through the process, providing screen shots to support the descriptions.

Ruth Alexander believes that search engine accuracy depends on the computer and the copy of Google's search engine being used and whether or not they are personalized. There are several copies in the world, and it will depend on the version that is the least busy. She's convinced that search results are misleading, and tells us why. She points to Professor Mike Thelwall, a cybermetrics researcher at Wolverhampton University in the UK, who explains that "search engines could crawl the Internet forever and still not find all the Web pages that exist."

Yandex, which processes more than two million people searches daily, launched a social networking search program by adding content from social sites in search results, along with a people finder. Web users in Russia can now view all public profiles of a person with accounts on social and blogging sites like VKontakte, Facebook, LiveJournal, and Odnoklassniki. The company said it indexes about 250 million personal profile pages hosted on various blogging platforms and social networks.

DuckDuckGo doesn’t keep a search history or provide personalized results through social networking connections. The company has doubled its traffic from 500,000 daily searches from December 2011 to 1 million this month. Ben Popper tells us that it sets itself apart from other search engines with a strong focus on privacy, but the one thing that sets it apart may become the most difficult hurdle to overcome in terms of gaining momentum among marketers that want to use the data to target ads.

List in the library, host a giveaway, become a product review expert, and begin public speaking. These are some of the 13 unconventional link-building tactics that search marketers should use to increase traffic and improve rankings on Web sites. While link-building is a long-term effort, these tips are not for everyone -- only for search experts ready to try something new.

A draft of European Union Protection laws, published last month by the Commission, suggest that individuals will have the "right to be forgotten." The proposed law would enforce organizations to delete personal data stored about them. Organizations that have made the data public will be liable for the data published by third parties and will be required to take all reasonable steps, including technical measures to inform them to delete the information. A Google privacy lawyer believes search engines should not be responsible for deleting personally identifying information.

Profits rose in the last quarter for the most popular search engine in China. Baidu on Friday said quarterly profit rose 77%, compared with the year-ago quarter. Profit for the three months ending Dec. 31 came in at 2 billion yuan, or $326.3 million. Revenue rose 82.5 percent to 4.5 billion yuan, or $710.9 million. The number of active online marketers rose 12.7% to 311,000 in the past year. 

Google recently announced the rollout of enhanced Sitelinks -- which the search engine claims produces 30% higher click-through rates than paid-search ads without. Sean Quadlin tells us the enhancement allows Sitelinks to show ads that are already in accounts closely related to links. He explains that the feature clicks on for those marketers who qualify, and gives us three steps that will improve our chances.