Psst—it’s Friday. Partay.

• Bad news for the SEO industry: we’ve seen the elephant. We’ve jumped the shark. We’ve made USA Today’s Small Business Strategies column.
• SEO Blackhat says that they’ve Confirmed that Bounce Rate is A Search Engine Ranking Factor. Well, from their graphs, I see that their overall traffic, Google traffic and bounce rate all declined at the same time. But if I remember my Google Analytics correctly, bounce rate going down actually means that fewer people are leaving your site after viewing just one page, so your site is stickier. So Google rewards sites that people leave quickly with higher rankings and thus more traffic? I’m not convinced. Correlation still isn’t causation—couldn’t it be that Google traffic dropped off (for whatever reason) and then a higher proportion of visitors are the loyal visitors who weren’t bouncing anyway?

Here’s a nice discussion from the New York Times’ Bits Blog—and a debate held this week by Intelligence Squared US. The arguments, naturally, centered around Google’s purported motto: “Don’t be evil.”

Everything from corporate identity to workplace policies to business behavior was fair game. The Bits summary of the arguments included seven deadly sins of Google and eight of its virtues (both of which I hope were delivered tongue-in-cheek). Sins, complete with Latin, from Siva Vaidhyanathan, an associate professor at the University of Virginia:

Luxuria (extravagance or lust): The people who work there get massages. That is corporeal lust of the highest order.

Gula (gluttony): They can eat all day, no matter what they want. There is so much food that they never need to say no. That is the very definition of gluttony.

In a report from, of all places, Yahoo! News, Google’s new Search Wiki is out and it gets personal. No not like that but it actually sounds like 2 years of yammering about personalization of search may finally be more reality than hype.

The new service unveiled on Thursday by Google allows users to remove ‘bad’ results from future search queries.

For now, Google simply wants to make specific sets of results more useful to each individual that comes to its search engine, said Marissa Mayer, who oversees the company’s search products. Users will have to have a personal login to take advantage of the editing feature.

“It should make the search results more dynamic,” she said.

Is it one of those days where you are, too? Let’s make your day brighter with a little linky goodness, shall we?

• Improvements in paid search from Google as AdWords is testing a new user interface
• Another Googly test: YouTube and HD Videos. Can we all cross our fingers for this one?
• Don’t go unplugging your home computer yet: a three year study concludes that casual Internet use is good for kids. Good news for me—I’ve been online since I was like twelve.
• Consumer Watchdog asks Eric Schmidt about user privacy, and as Valleywag puts it, “Google engineers have thought long and hard about this, and concluded that protecting users’ privacy would make pages load too slowly.”
• Cashback worked so well for Microsoft Live Search that now they’re using cars, tickets and more as “Big Ticket Search” incentives—but only in Canada. Man.