Inbound Link Strategies: Movin' On Up

This is a very good article I highly recommend you reading, if you haven't already. Here's a snippet of the intro:

If you've ever done SEO (define) work for a business that leverages affiliate relationships, the phenomenon recently dubbed "Google Bowling" is nothing new. Hotel chains, home mortgage resellers, and travel agencies brokering cruises and cheap airfares indiscriminately rob top search results from business partners and rivals alike.

The intent to do harm to another business on the Web adds a new twist to the age-old issue of bad linking strategies. Google's ongoing attempts to curb search result manipulation by way of link popularity appear to have reached fruition with its latest algorithmic update.

The good news is by link dampening, filtering, and, in some cases, penalizing sites that purchased or sought out low-value incoming links en mass, Google has finally instituted a way to make search results for highly competitive terms more relevant.

The bad news is some legitimate businesses always seem to have their search positions washed away by improved results. If your results have been affected by the latest Google update, don't despair. You can do much to move out of a bad-link neighborhood into a better one... | read more @ ClickZ

Google Adds Library Texts to Search Database

Google said yesterday that it had completed the first major expansion of its Google Print database of searchable books, adding the full text of more than 10,000 works that are no longer under copyright, culled from the collections of four major research libraries.
The additions, from the university libraries at Michigan, Harvard and Stanford and from the New York Public Library, represent the first large group of material to be made available electronically from those libraries, which along with Oxford University contracted with Google last year to let the company scan and make searchable the contents of much or all of their collections.
The new material includes works of literature, like 'Transatlantic Sketches' and other works by Henry James, from Harvard; government documents, like the collected appropriations bills passed by the 50th Congress in 1888 and 1889, from Stanford; history, like the 1903 work, 'The Seventh Regiment Rhode Island Volunteers in the Civil War,' by William P. Hopkins, from the University of Michigan; and biographies, like the New York Public Library's collection of the annual publication, 'The Wealth and Biography of the Wealthy Citizens of the City of New York.'
The entire text of the works can be searched and read online through the Google Print site (print.google.com). Users can also save individual pages and cut and paste excerpts from the material. The ability to print is currently limited, however, to single pages at a time, said Adam Smith, a senior business product manager at Google.| source: NYtimes

Yahoo goes drag-and-drop for mapping

Yahoo is expected to release on Thursday the public beta of its new Yahoo Maps service, which is designed to make maneuvering the map easier and allow users to quickly create multiple-point driving directions.
The upgraded Yahoo Maps is more tightly integrated with Yahoo Local, allowing users to quickly find, for instance, the locations of Mexican restaurants in a particular neighborhood by typing in things like 'best margarita' or 'outdoor seating' or other category types or descriptions.
In addition, users can now type in a business address and the service will display the business name, phone number, user rating and link to additional information.
The new service also aims to make it easy to map out driving directions with multiple stops, including the ability to drag-and-drop specific businesses into the route. The map is larger and includes a collapsible mini-map with a shadow box that can easily be dragged around to shift the neighborhood displayed in the larger map.
The service automatically stores frequently referenced destinations, which can also be set to automatically fill in a search box using a nickname. Users can click on the browser's 'back' button to see the previous map action, and the map can automatically be configured for a printing layout.
'The interface is cleaner and better' than before, said Greg Sterling, an analyst at The Kelsey Group. 'You can drag the map around without reloading it and the data changes as you drag it.' more @ ZDnet