Following Google's "Penguin" algorithm update in late April, many SEOs have been debating the possibility of a practice called "negative SEO," whereby one SEO could hurt another's websites by intentionally pointing unnatural, "spammy" backlinks to their sites. Unnatural link activity includes links offered via paid inclusion directories and "link farms"; others have even suggested that anchor text diversity may trigger a Penguin penalty too.

Retailers, more than most marketers, have a wealth of data and information at their fingertips. Retailers also have more product, geographical, and inventory diversity than marketers in other industries. Thus, being able to leverage all data is crucial. By leveraging your data across all aspects of paid search optimization you can do some amazing things.

What do you do when the search engine you started up with your fellow uber-geek partner makes you fabulously wealthy, but somehow all the billions it's raking in leaves you feeling rather empty? Well, if you're Sergey Brin, you find a new toy. You leave the mind-numbingly mundane business of running a multibillion-dollar mega-corporation to your power-tripping co-founder, and you lock yourself away in an undisclosed office somewhere in Silicon Valley, spending your day playing with robots, space elevators, virtual reality glasses and self-driving cars.

Three years ago, I laid out a 12-step program for breaking the Google habit, but have yet to personally conquer step two: "Believe that there is a greater resource out there." Could that be eventually be Bing?

Technology and our expectations of what's possible also seem to play a game of cat and mouse. No matter what we dream up, it seems that it becomes reality in the blink of an eye. In fact, I suspect that technology now regularly outpaces our wildest dreams. Almost anything is possible, at least in theory. If it doesn't exist, it's probably just that it's not practical. Nobody has bothered to put in the effort to make it happen.

It's not marketing when we do it online. Let me explain.

If you have read my contributions to Search Insider over the last few years, then you may have gathered that I am a major proponent of leveraging the interdependence between search and social efforts,and doing it in a live setting. With this in mind, today I wanted to recap some of my "search and social" columns into one list, in order to provide greater context to what I consider to be important components to real-time marketing.

This week, I'm at the Marketo User Summit in San Francisco, so I thought it might be an appropriate time for me to write about a topic near and dear to me: the integration of marketing automation and search marketing.

Paid search has proven to be one of the highest ROI channels in digital advertising, but keywords are both the life's blood and bane of an SEM's existence. With an infinite number of keywords that could be associated with any retailer's product catalog, it's damn near impossible to predict and manage all the right keywords that will maximize your revenue and return on ad spend.

Last week I talked about the power of our beliefs to shape our view of the world around us. I also mentioned how our belief constructs impact our view of brands. As luck would have it, two separate pieces crossed my path this week, both of which provide excellent examples of how we may perceive brands, and how marketers often get it wrong when trying to shepherd a brand through the marketplace.