On Friday, February 11, 2011, the United States government made another huge domain seizure. The Cyber Crime Centers of ICE seized a slew of domains acting on behalf of “Operation Save Our Children,” an anti-child pornography initiative. As has become all too common with these types of seizures however, a mistake was made and innocent sites were targeted.

David Segal of the New York Times takes a look at the use of “blackhat” SEO techniques behind the ubiquitous presence of J.C. Penney at the top of Google’s search results over the last few months.

When it comes to link building, the strategies are wide; numerous; and often time-consuming or expensive, yet widely accepted as a necessary aspect of SEO. Jeremy Bencken, proposes a unique alternative method to build links and establish presence.

One of the long-standing dilemmas any search engine has to grapple with is how to rate their own products in search results. Various rumors have been circulating that a particular engine or another is playing favorites by giving a search ranking boost to their own products. Ben Edelman, an assistant professor at the Harvard Business School and search engine “bird-watcher” of sorts aims to shed some light on these rumors via his recently-published study.

You could say Bing is taking a cue from its competition, but it seems to be more literally taking search results as well. Google Fellow Amit Singhal is claiming so much and has provided some amusing (if not totally clever) results from its “Bing Sting.”

The rumblings of recent weeks have come true; Google is now actively censoring search terms such as “torrent,” “BitTorrent,” and “RapidShare” from both its instant search and auto-complete suggestions. While standard search results are not yet affected, Google is sending out a questionable message; censorship can be bought.

Everyone on the web knows about Google –the search engine giant is so ubiquitous that “googling” has become a part of our standard dialogue. And, thanks to Microsoft’s advertising budget, many consumers are now seeking out Bing as a search alternative. But what about smaller and quirkier? Have you heard of DuckDuckGo for example?

It is common knowledge that the more features you can squeeze into a piece of real estate the better, and HTML links are no different. Is the increasing use of link shortening services such as TinyURL and bit.ly harming your SEO efforts however?

A successful web presence is critical to the livelihood of your business in today’s marketplace, and your website is the digital front door. With the increased popularity of Content Management Systems, questions have begun to surface as to whether these systems lend greater benefit to SEO than the tried-and-true method of building an HTML site from scratch.

As various sources around the web report increasingly-useless search results via the Google engine, Net Applications runs a few side-by-side comparisons with Bing to explore the quality of search results.