fantomNews™ — the ultimate know

It’s been a long standing assertion amongst the A-list members of the SEO community that PageRank does not equate with ranking: Too many low PR sites hitting top spots in the SERPs, outdoing their high PR competitors, it’s really hard to come to any different conclusion. However, now there’s a statistical study determining PR evolution in the Google SERPs over the past 6 months and analyzing the correlation between PR and rankings, offering some interesting conclusions

The Search Engine Wars have flared up full scale again: the contenders vying for the attention of shareholders, investment consultants and search marketers alike, it is not surprising to see them flaunt their index size figures all over the place - and once more truth constitutes the first victim. What’s more, these shamelessly skewed statistics are bound to dramatically impact all search and web analytics including those conducted for search engine optimization purposes.

Investors beware: if this should turn into a massive trend, it could seriously impact Google’s business – here’s one PR 7 blogger who is not prepared to take any more crap from them.

According to a recent study the majority of small to medium businesses in the UK, while maintaining their owb web sites, hardly know what to do with them by way of maximizing their market exposure and driving sales conversions - potentially a huge market for aggressive SEO / SEM agencies.

One would have thought that a company of Google’s resources and technical savvy would be able to prevent further downloads of their established spy- and malware. The more so as this specific download link is still being propagated across a multitude of blogs and fora. After all, they’ve had three full days to do it. But that’s precisely what’s not happening.

Hardly four days to oblivion – the deluge of PR-hurting reports has finally found its first deserving casualty: GWA is no more, at least for the time being. Still, it’s definitely a first victory and hopefully not the last one.

Only three days after its beta launch, GWA has arguably broken a dubious record: that of being one of the buggiest pieces of software ever unlashed upon the unsuspecting general public. Let the downloader beware!

We’ve detected another Google Web Accelerator IP range. Make sure you adjust your existing .htaccess code to cover it!

Here’s a page you can display to people who you are restricting from accessing your site because they’re using Google’s nefarious spyware. Plus some graphics we’re donating to the public domain: spread the message!

And on and on it goes with even the most acquiescent, docile and “we’re so excited to be a part of Google’s dream yadda yadda” industry pimping sites voicing at least some mild concerns about where Google’s latest gizmo may be heading.

In what may arguably be their greatest PR debacle ever, Google’s new Web Accelerator is encountering heavy duty flak by tech savvy webmaster, marketers and privacy buffs across the board. Here’s a first selection of gripes.

Here are the first verified Google proxy IPs as employed by their new Web Accelerator service. You’ll probably hear a lot more of this in future.

Thumbs up for search engine marketing which will hit a total turnover of $11.6 billion by 2010 according to this recent survey by Forrester Research.

Another fat nail in the PPC industry’s coffin? If four out of five Web users refuse to click on online ads, finding them intrusive and irrelevant, what does that tell us about the efficacy of PPC advertising?

New web analytics and click fraud tracking tool (beta) launched by WebSourced.