It’s self-evident, isn’t it - slap an advert, or several, bang in the middle of the viewport and increase your ROI or CPM or any acronym you care to name… or is it?

Yes, if you have a well-established site, lots of backlinks, stable traffic, then the positioning will play a predictable part in the metrics of it - the stuff about eye movements makes perfectly good sense. But if you’re not a super-powered problogger what then? How many visitors take one look at the PPC, get the distinct impression they’ve arrived at a MFA niche site and close, never to return again?

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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.

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.

Web Host Industry News write on the new methods adopted by hosting providers, in this case Host Gator, to tackle the issue of linkage between sites sharing a class C range, and by implication, virtual hosts with identical IPA’s

“IPA’s that fall within the same class C range are likely to be close, and sometimes on the same server. Google penalizes sites with the same C class for linking to each other. For Web hosts and their customers, this can be an understandably frustrating issue, since certain sites have similar themed content and may wish to host their Web sites in one location.

“This was one of the considerations in Host Gator’s recent launch of hosting services enhanced for search engine optimization under the brand, SEO Hosting. The service includes all the expected SEO capabilities, but more importantly, customers can use it to optimize their Web sites for search engines by enabling them to host on multiple C classes.”