It’s been an eventful week in the SEO blogosphere, from Google CEO Eric Schmidt predicting the future of real time search engine indexing, to Yahoo flushing millions of dollars of Geocities PageRank down the drain!  Here’s a collection of this weeks top search marketing and social media links from around the blogosphere:

Google CEO Eric Schmidt talking about 'the biggest challenge of the age'

SEO:

• Google Web In Five Years – Google CEO Eric Schmidt talking about how ranking real time social media content is ‘the biggest challenge of the age’.
• Pitfalls to avoid when carrying out international SEO – Some great tips to keep in mind when carrying out SEO work for an international client.
• Google’s additional discovery method – Search Engine Land talks about how Google has a updated it’s web page discovery method using RSS and Atom feeds
• Yahoo Flushes Geocities down the drain – With the deletion of Yahoo’s Geocities, 7.45 million Geocities URLs now produce 404 error message, this blog post by Local SEO Guide suggests an alternative approach that would have had significant SEO benefits for Yahoo. Continue Reading »

Today I almost forgot to write my Twitter Friday column. Why? I was so preoccupied with the new relaunched StumbleUpon version. To make it short: SU attempts to compete directly with Twitter and Google. This might sound ridiculous but they really do. Theoretically it would be possible: SU exists for several years and has collected tens of millions of web pages in its “index” together with millions of reviews with new sites being added very quickly. Isn’t this the ideal social search engine? Isn’t this the perfect way to determine which websites really do matter in real time? Sadly, no.

Now this is the Twitter column so I won’t compare the new StumbleUpon to Google. Let me explain though why

StumbleUpon is not Twitter and can’t compete with Twitter.

StumbleUpon does not allow business usage of its site. Yes, you can get banned solely for submitting your SEO company website to SU. Continue Reading »

The press coverage of the cervical cancer jab has been unpleasant to watch and brought back memories of the MMR vaccine hysteria.

Although the press may regret the damage they have (once again) done, the Google results could remain filled with flawed information for a long time because of this.

Some of the dangerous articles have been exceptionally popular and, of course, those people who believe in a big pharma conspiracy have been linking to them and driving them up in the search engine results pages.

Well, one SEO professional has had a pretty good idea. Writing for Econsultancy (an industry source Kevin often writes for), Malcolm Coles suggests we try to boost the NHS’s ranking by linking to it within posts like this.

I don’t know if a few SEO bloggers can make enough of a difference and I urge the NHS to review its optimisation efforts. However, if linking to official pages using phrases like cervical cancer immunisation has a chance of helping, then I’m happy to try.

Do take Malcom’s suggestions on board and link to these pages using relevant phrases, as I have done here.

Let’s not see another wave of youngsters missing out on an important preventative treatment.