Quick Hits, Would Be News

It’s Friday… let’s round up a few things that got lost in the shuffle this week, some deservedly so.

Google has announced lower pricing for their recently acquired Urchin On Demand web analytics product. Which probably affects at least 2-3 readers of this blog. Who probably already know about it.

Hitwise sort of launched a new service called Keyword Intelligence. It’s still in beta, and not available yet, but if you’d like to go to the Keyword Intelligence website, you can attempt to give them an email address (mine failed due to some kind of poorly-informed DNS lookup address validation scheme) to receive information whenever they launch the service. I have no further information on this, but I’m trying.

The ‘internet marketing gurus’ are currently ga-ga over Googspy which, when it’s actually available (their server is probably getting hammered to death by bots already) is the beginning of a nice free competitive intelligence tool. Check out competitors to see (some of) the search terms they are ranked for and advertising against.

The Googspy frenzy in the marketeer world should die down soon, now that Stephen Pierce (creator of the ‘smart pages’ doorway page template) and someone else have just announced some sort of new search engine spamming tool. I have a vague inkling that it probably uses some kind of automated exploitation of blogs (maybe grabbing RSS feeds, maybe trackback spam, I dunno) to siphon off search engine traffic, trap the searcher, and get them to click on an Adsense ad. Thanks again, Google, for funding automated spam.

SEO Browser is not a web browser, but a web site… offering a cool tool for taking a quick look at a web page, in a way that’s a little more like what search engines see. Don’t bother with the simple mode, go straight to Advanced. You are advanced, aren’t you? I thought so. If not, keep watching this space and we’ll get there together.