Malcolm Colmes pointed out yesterday the slight update to Google Instant which allowed the use of keyboard shortcuts. After hitting return, a user can navigate the results by pressing the up and down keys. With the PPC ads at the top and highlighted first, this means many more users may click through on the paid for ad rather than the organic listings.
This could prove a problem for many advertisers who bid on their own brand terms. While the benefits of this strategy included reiterating the message from the organic listing …

One of the first most enjoyable things about using Firefox is the Google search enabled address bar (seemingly the specifically designated Search bar to the right is just too far to stretch to). While this solves those annoying error pages you get when you misspell a URL like in some other browsers, the real joy comes from the default search engine used in the address bar actually being Google’s I’m Feeling Lucky. Although the button on the Google site is undoubtedly one of the most commonly seen buttons on the …

SEOptimise recently released a great compilation of Black Hat SEO tricks which you can use ‘ethically’. The ethics are of course subjective. To be honest the majority of the methods I find generally understandable, but as an SEO novice, I feel slightly disheartened by this Wild West ecosystem I’ve walked into admittedly quite naively. I appreciate that in it’s nascent form, SEO specialists have no option sometimes but to fight dirty, but I really thought underhanded optimisation techniques were so ’90s’ that they weren’t something we had to worry about …