My next internet marketing session is geared towards local businesses, (sign up  here) and is specifically focused on beginners who don’t have technical skills. Web designers who are not SEO’s are also welcome.

I’m happy to announce that I’m running my own Meetup groups for 2012, and my first event has now been scheduled for January 19th, at the Convention Center Red Lion Inn.

Why? 

Over the past few years, I’ve spoken on more panels and given more presentations than I can count. I’ve presented to multiple private groups and businesses, as well as at various search marketing conferences. Some have been national, some local, and I’ve instructed some weekend college classes for PCC.

Friendster seems to have about 57 million 404 errors, and they have completely wiped out the vast majority of their users content.

Do a site: search on Friendster.com and try to go almost anywhere -

We have a few Friendster accounts, and just this morning my friend Brad who has a pretty busy 80′s fan site told me over the phone that his Friendster account lost all the content.

Are you feeling guilty because you have improved your rankings unfairly? Have you bought links? Exchanged goods or services for reviews?

Have you commented on blog posts, or maybe participated in forums when you didn’t even feel all that strongly, but you did it in an attempt to manipulate the search results through gaining backlinks?

I just tried to leave a review at Google, while I was logged in, and instead of being given the old review screen, I was asked to set up a new profile. Here, it’s easier to show you…

(*update four months later the name “Hotpot has finally been dumped. What a dumb idea that was anyway, huh?

Google Instant was rolled out to the world yesterday, which changes the way search results appear.

Rather than waiting for you to push a button that says “search”, as you type, search results will simply appear, based on whatever you’re typing.

The SEO Automatic URL Review for Android is finally available, and it covers all the same ranking factors that the web version does.

Just like the iPhone app, the only difference between the free version and the paid version is that you can e-mail reports from the paid version.

Last week users began reporting that Google’s search results (and the PPC ads) began changing right before their eyes. I just saw it for the first time, but then it stopped immediately and hasn’t done it again.

As users type, Google and Binghoo both offer “suggestions” based on what others are searching for with some personalization thrown in, but now they’re changing the results on the page dynamically.

Inside of Google Webmaster Tools, there is an option called “Fetch As Googlebot” that is supposed to go crawl that page and return what it sees.

Until this moment, I’ve never had much use for this, but that’s not the case now!

I discovered a problem when a website which had been hacked and then fixed was still showing the polluted snippet in the description on the results page.

We have a client that has been using OS commerce forever, and we have a good number of links established to the various sections of their e-commerce store. For various reasons, they are looking for a new e-commerce system, and appear to have settled on what I’ll call (for now) Product X.

I received a marketing e-mail that was cleverly worded, and since I’m interested in local marketing, I clicked the link. When I got there though, the message I received wasn’t exactly a perfect sales pitch.

The e-mail I got told me that my business name was listed incorrectly on the major search engines, and I could get a complete online visibility report by following the link.

I love WordPress, I really do, but i just screwed up a site by changing a bunch of permalinks to 302′s.

Worse, WP won’t allow me to change it back without digging into the database, so I effectively rendered my child page permalinks (URLs) useless.

In this short video I’ll show you exactly what not to do -( besides assume that WordPress will work the way it’s supposed to).