Rand Fishkin takes "olde tyme" to the extreme to show marketers some original techniques that still work today. He focuses on engines like Lycos, Northern Light, HotBot, AltaVista, Infoseek, Yahoo, Webcrawler, and Dogpile. Look for secondary search engines and directories that provide content for Google and Bing. Basic resources and lists support content. And don't forget to reciprocate. Give -- and perhaps you'll receive.

Call it the "worm strategy," according to Nicholas Carlson. He explains how Google during the past six months has "systematically replaced core, Apple-made iOS apps with Google-made iOS apps." Google launched Chrome for iPhone, Google Maps to replace Apple Maps, as well as a new YouTube apps to replace the one Apple removed. Google also launched an ad campaign recruiting iOS developers.

Lycos will make a comeback in 2013, reports The Next Web. The engine "is shedding its Yahoo-dependent search result," and rather than require a click on a link to open a new page, the page will serve up automatically in search engine results, according to Lycos CEO Rob Balazy. He describes a search and gaming site, with support from services like social add-on Zeeblio, which the company built from Tripod technology.

Marketers know what it takes to increase traffic volume, but sometimes engines don't provide the correct tools. Ping Jen tells us about the results of a recent customer satisfaction survey that identifies key improvement opportunities, along with a plan to quickly address each. He provides some tips on using Bing ads, such as increasing transparency for better optimization and performance to drive more traffic to Web sites and conversions.

Christmas Day online retail traffic rose 27% in 2012 compared with 2011, as the top 500 retail sites received more than 115.5 million total U.S. visits, according to Experian Marketing Services. Analysts analyzed the post-Christmas retail trends. The top five most-visited sites Christmas Day 2012 were Amazon, Walmart, Target, Best Buy and Macy's. The top terms sending traffic to Amazon.com were Amazon Kindle, Kindle Fire, and Kindle. Visits rose 24% on Christmas Day 2012 versus Christmas Eve 2012.

Aaron Wall gives us a road map of how Google drives business to Amazon, eBay and other platforms. He tells us that smaller ecommerce sites have battled Panda and Penguin updates, and those that have stuck around might have a few options to succeed, which he lays out. But in an interesting comment at the end of the post, affhelper writes: "Would be nice if Amazon started their own search engine. They not only have conversion data but also a decent amount of search data (Alexa.com). I believe that Amazon could compete with Google over search...don't you?" How would Amazon.com …

Could marketers structure their online marketing plan to ignore search engine optimization and traffic driven from Google, Bing and Yahoo to their Web site? While most of what Mark Lynch suggests seems elementary to marketing experts, he makes a couple of good points that marketers could use as a jumping-off point. Consider tying search campaigns to a strong e-mail marketing campaign, even retargeting. The benefit could mean faster results, rather than waiting for the site to get indexed and search rank to improve. In a previous post he writes about a "drafting technique," such as following a "hot news story" …

Video will become a major part of brands' content strategies in 2013. Neil Davidson tells us how to plan the video distribution process of getting videos. Now that you've made the videos, what's the best way to distribute them? It may make more sense to think about distribution steps when putting together production plans. Davidson provides a list of options on content discovery sites other than YouTube, such as Virool, and Reddit, as well as distribution services like Oneload.

Google faces accusations that it censored some of the world's biggest music artists after its scanning service automatically uploaded versions of songs that have stripped out explicit lyrics, The Times reports. Missing lyrics could be restored, according to reports. Frustrated fans said to hit the 'Fix Incorrect Match' button to restore the original version of the song, according to the news agency.

Targeted. Consumers went for more targeted search terms in 2012, according to Experian Marketing Services. The list of top U.S. search terms in 2012 began with "Facebook" for the fourth year in a row. The report evaluates online activities on more than 60 search engines and Web sites from January through November 2012, excluding mobile traffic. YouTube-related terms accounted for 1.67%, representing a 23% increase compared with 2011. Google terms, including YouTube, accounted for 1.91% -- up 20% compared with 2011. Yahoo terms accounted for 0.79%, up 34% compared with 2011.