If you take the rarely said but significantly-held opinion that Yahoo have to make some changes soon or struggle, what could be more likely…

“… the two companies - which first explored the idea a few years ago and then went their own ways - were looking at ways they could pair their strengths to create a greater competitor to Google…”

Well, the point being that what would be the point of msn? Microsoft have never been in love with the internet. If they could have got away with calling it DeskWeb, they would have..

Obviously the combination of PPC programmes would be interesting and tricky - but maybe it’s the blogs - Spaces and Yahoo360 - where the greatest effect in terms of change of competitor could lie - although how you’d go about challenging Blogger is the real and present nightmare. The company-knows-best, rather controlling attitude of MS, approach, ie login to free hotmail every 30 days or else, the tight controls on what code/scripts can appear on Spaces, would presumably extend.

However, by the end of the day, it appeared that the story was misguided, or at least out-of-date, unless you define “takeover” as “partnership.”

Yes, a non-story - with testing-the-water as a heading… You’d sort of think it has to be - one day - if not now…

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.

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.”