One of my clients GSINC has put together a fun Flash SEO game where you get to help Matt Cutts fight spam – literally!
Jump into the boxing ring and take on Hidden Text Kid, Keyword Stuffer, Cloaking Monster and more.
That should keep you busy until Monday! 
I had clients visiting today, so wasn’t able to blog this morning. Here’s the stuff I would have blogged about.
Yahoo’s Q2 results, although disappointing, were far from surprising. Continued poor performance, management shake up—sometimes it seems like their tales of woe may never end.
But all may not be lost (yet). ZDNet covers a thorough report by Robert Peck, analyst for Bear Stearns (not, as I almost typed, Bear Grylls), that explores many of Yahoo’s options to turn their future around. And, it seems, the bottom line is that Yahoo should snap up a social network (I hear they’re delicious) (pun unintended, but I’ll take it).
The polls on the page indicate that many agree with ZDNet’s conclusions: 75% of the nearly 200 respondents said that Yahoo should buy a social networking site. 41% of the nearly 250 respondents to their second poll chose Facebook as the network they should acquire. (I should probably mention here that the New York Times also covered this topic, but their page failed to load for me, despite repeated attempts.)
I bet you thought scissors beat paper—local search beats paper, according to a recent TMP Directional Marketing study conducted by comScore. If you’re having trouble convincing potential clients that the Yellow Pages shouldn’t be their one and only marketing method, here’s the study for you.
The study found that 33% of consumers consider the Yellow Pages as their primary source of local information—and a whopping 90% of those using search say that the Yellow Pages are “still a valuable source for shopping information,” as reported by MediaPost. Despite that concession, 60% of consumers turn to the Internet first for local shopping and business information, with half of those consumers turning to a major search engine, more than a quarter heading straight for Internet Yellow Pages and the rest going right to local search sites like Citysearch.
Here’s our pick of this morning’s marketing news…
If you’ve ever asked for directions in California, don’t ever judge your journey by the number of miles. Most Californians know that you determine the length of a journey by the time it takes, not the distance. For example, if you plan a trip during rush hour, your 5 mile journey in the Bay area could take 45 minutes.
Fortunately, Google’s based in California, so the developers at Google Maps are very much aware that time is just as important as miles. Now when you use Google Maps for major metropolitan areas around the country – those most likely to suffer from congestion – you’ll get an estimate of how long the trip could take in heavy traffic.
Now that Google has announced plans to use better copyright detection technology on YouTube this Fall, it seems there’s a mad rush to file law suits.
It’s almost as if copyright holders realize they only have until the Fall to get their law suit filed and claim damages from Google. After Google launches it’s new detection technology, the copyright infringement claims will have less of a sure footing.
The latest to jump on the law suit bandwagon is a coalition of Japanese media companies.
“YouTube has to stop how it runs its site and get rid of the illegal clips. We want them to reset the service,” composer Hideki Matsutake told a joint press conference in Tokyo Thursday. The coalition met with YouTube and Google executives earlier in the week, the second such meeting this year.
“There is no middle ground,” Matsutake said. “We demand that all copyrighted material be removed immediately.”
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