The usual vague imprecations here, this time about the use of Chinese teenagers to boost traffic just prior to trying to sell a site at Sitepoint.

Impressions are certainly spurious if generated by these means, but quite why, in the real world as opposed to the Googleverse, a click is more spurious than one generated by any other means is not made clear. Isn’t it unfortunate that so little is made clear.

But it’s always interesting to see a site with toolbar PR 1 and Alexa rank 14,000.

In self-fulfilling prophecy tropicalseo return to the vexed discussion of linkbaiting, with this wisdom, which applies to “blogpost” every bit as much as “linkbait piece”

The single most important aspect of a link bait piece is its title. On social bookmarking sites such as Delicious and Digg, the title is pretty much all people see before they decide to vote or bookmark. In a 1000-word article with a 10-word title, the 10 words in the title are probably more important than the next 1000.”

Seorefugee provide a list in which search engines, ie Google, are justifiably berated for some of their excesses

 Search is fracturing: Google now offers web search, image search, video search, news search, local search, “more” search and “even more” search. Do you optimize for one, a few or all types of search? How can you optimize if, as may already be happening, satisfying the demands of one algorithm causes another to punish you.

The death refers to the fact that in the main these are probably bad things for web1.0 SEO and its practioners - but possibly good for end-users of websites.