I have never been a fan of Fairsearch.org.

The free market is a tough place especially in the Internet search space since it is a relatively new industry and the best player out of the gate has become dominant. That player is obviously Google.

Fairsearch.org (which is really a very thinly veiled Microsoft ploy to attack Google) is trying to get out in front of a supposed result in the FTC investigation of Google that has been ongoing for about 20 months.

Bloomberg is reporting

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is poised to announce that Google has agreed to voluntarily change some business practices and settle allegations it misused patents to thwart competitors in smartphone technology, said the people, who asked not to be named because the decision isn’t public.

A study by Experian Marketing Services was brought to my attention this morning in a press release.

It shows a positive trend. It says that the traffic to the sites of the Top 500 retailers was up for the 2012 holiday season. Take a look.

That’s good. But is it the right thing to concentrate on? As a retailer, traffic is nice but sales tell the story. A publisher can celebrate pure traffic because it implies more people see ads etc. Retailers however need sales. It’s that simple.

In 2013 are you concentrating on traffic to your site? Where does traffic rank on your list of most important metrics? How are you measuring conversions? Can you say that you really know what your online presence is generating for your business?

This post comes from our Search Marketing Channel sponsor SEO.com.

It was written by SEO.com’s VP of Client Services, Greg Shuey.

A lot of SEOs still believe that setting an SEO strategy is as simple as performing site optimization, maybe adding some content to the site (landing pages or blog posts), and then link building like a mad man. Putting heavy emphasis on link building used to work for SEO because the algorithms would consider external anchor text links as credible sources of tying together content and keywords.

In this post, I’d like to address a component of strategy setting that is often overlooked or completely ignored and can have a massive impact on your ability to rank well in the SERPs (search engine results pages) and drive revenue for your business. We are going to be discussing gaining insight from SERP analysis.

Google is trying to make structured data something even a non-tech type can create. A new product called Data Highlighter allows the creation of structured data for events only (currently). Here is a quick video describing the service.

The Google Webmaster Central blog post about the service tells us

Until now, marking up your site’s HTML code has been the only way to indicate structured data to Google. However, we recognize that markup may be hard for some websites to deploy.

Today, we’re offering webmasters a simpler alternative: Data Highlighter. At initial launch, it’s available in English only and for structured data about events, such as concerts, sporting events, exhibitions, shows, and festivals. We’ll make Data Highlighter available for more languages and data types in the months ahead.

Google, I have a confession to make. I’ve been sneaking around behind your back with Bing and I’m sorry. Bing’s not as smart as you but he’s better looking. But the real reason I’ve strayed is for the gifts. Bing showers me with Amazon and Starbucks gift cards — how’s a girl supposed to say no to that?

But I’ve come to learn that Bing just wants to be like you, Google. Every day, in every way. Take Bing’s snapshot column for example. It used to be all about restaurants and services. Now, they have snapshots for people and places, too. The most commonly asked for information appears right there on the page as soon as you hit the search button, along with the traditional list of links. Bing does take it a step further, offering a third column for comments by my friends. That’s a nice touch but honestly, not all that helpful to me.