Organic search can sometimes be difficult for a marketing person to get their head around. This is because Organic search doesn’t follow regular business rules. It follows Google’s Rules.

In business most of us are familiar with the rules of engagement. Barring everything you learned in Economics, HR, Strategic Planning, Finance, it all boils down to this: If you have enough money, talent and time, you can have basically anything you want. And executives are used to this.

Quick recap;

Google created a problem for itself when it chose links to a web page as one of the corner stones for ranking web pages.

As the web of links form link patterns, manipulating links isn’t that easy. Unless you can manipulate the link pattern itself…

Manipulating Link Patterns

Anyone who has ever attempted 3-way linking is familiar with the idea of manipulating link patterns. Truth is, with a couple of sites in your farm, the setup remains transparent.

But using 50,000 sites you could do major damage to Google’s link based algorithm and convince it of your relevance for any query you desire.

An image can comfortably replace text we rather not expose directly to Google.

If a review requires disclosure and you want to avoid the Wrath of Google, maybe putting “sponsored review” in an image is so much smarter.

Or not.

Google & Image Spam

01:22: “Dreaded image spam. These embedded images not only cost you time, but they hog memory and clock bandwidth. They’re also tough to catch.

But not for us… Optical Character Recognition from Google Book Search helps us block image spam before it gets to you.”

Google’s been very very busy lately, devaluing Page Rank, penalizing those who buy and sell paid links, and those who engage in PayPerPost. I think in attempting to justify their actions, we can all surmize that Google is acting in its own best interest … and rightfully so. That said, hostility toward Google seems rampant and growing.

Office Depot’s announcement of new mobile marketing services caught my attention today. These new services include the launch of a mobile store locator, RSS feeds, text message coupons and offers, and mobile sweepstakes capabilities.

I doubt anyone’s getting exited about Office Depot RSS feeds on their mobile device and I’m not alone. According to Steve Levy, President of Market Research in Eastern Canada for IPSOS Reid, 27% of Canadian marketers agree that mobile marketing will be very important in the future with 9% indicating they are practicing it now.

This battle is a lot closer than most of you can imagine. I’m constantly hearing about how the Yellow Pages are dying and there’s no value in them. While most may say that I’m biased because of the number of years I spent in the industry, the same cannot be said for Google Analytics.

Google Analytics cannot lie, it has no biases and, thank goodness for the Yellow Pages, paints a much different picture than many so called experts. You just have to know what to look for.

Google and Yahoo didn’t have much of a presence at the CTIA Wireless I.T. & Entertainment conference in San Francisco last week, but their startup competitors and much smaller rival AOL all did.

While Google and Yahoo have been pursuing mobile search and advertising, they’ve met resistance from mobile operators in the U.S. “Some are concerned about Google and Yahoo being stronger competitors, that they will become in effect the dumb pipe that the ISPs became,” said Greg Sterling, an analyst at Sterling Market Research and Opus Research. “I think that’s a valid fear. On a personal note, I just love that quote!

Google’s recent attempts to stomp out link selling increases the very problem Google tries to fight.

What’s Going On?

After a year long FUD campaign Google has fired off two rounds at sites it suspects of selling links.

It punishes those sites by lowering their Toolbar PageRank, a more or less fake version of Google’s calculated real PageRank. (see also Matt Cutts on PageRank).

Lowering that Toolbar PageRank has no effect on a site’s ranking and thus traffic. But as paid links are priced at PageRank, lowering that visible PageRank lowers the amount of money a site owner can make from selling links.

Whether it’s watching someones misfortune, individual rants, old music videos, my favorite teams past sporting glories, lost TV episodes or political debates, I just can’t seem to get enough of YouTube. It’s become a personal entertainment option and, from an SEO standpoint, as videos are beginning to rank, I enjoy the challenge of defining my clients video content strategies.

This week I’m exploring YouTube, by the numbers:

* YouTube was created in mid February 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, three former PayPal employees.

* The domain name “YouTube.com” was activated on February 15, 2005

Hot off last August’s announcement that R.H. Donnelley (No. 3 Yellow Pages publisher in the US) had begun selling ad placements in Yahoo! Local, comes today’s news that Canada’s Yellow Pages Group will begin reselling Google AdWords advertisements.

Its agreement with Google allows Yellow Pages approximately 425,000 advertisers to appear alongside Google search results. Previously, Google Local or ‘Maps’ would display only names and addresses of Yellow Pages’ businesses next to results from searches on local information.

Yellow Pages Group has been working with Google since 2004, when they struck an agreement granting the Internet giant access to its databases and, quietly I may add, began embedding Google AdWords on its websites earlier this year.