Another week has come and gone… which means it’s time for - you guessed it - Link Love Friday! This one is pretty long… so settle in and get comfy. We’re covering all the bases today!

To start things off we’ve got Google making a show in the online storage business. But not in the way you’re probably thinking. Instead, the search company is now offering customers the opportunity to buy more shared storage space for Picasa and Gmail. Does this mean some people actually have more than 3 GB of email? 3 gigabytes?!?! Come on… do we really need to keep those Facebook notification emails forever? The “delete” button isn’t as volatile as it once was - use it!

Microsoft launched its own online storage solution - called SkyDrive - right around the same time Google announced theirs. The difference? SkyDrive is free… and tiny! 500 MB is all Microsoft is willing to give you. What else are they spending those billions on? I say every Windows user should get at least 2 GB to make for all the space the operating system takes up on the physical hard drive. Just an idea.

Regardless of the different approaches the companies are taking, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington says both services are garbage. I agree! What ever happened to good ol’ floppy disks? Now that’s convenient storage!

Speaking of Google, Mountain View’s most well-known personality, Matt Cutts, was credited all over the web a couple of weeks ago for having suggested Google was starting to treat underscores and dashes the same way in file names / urls / etc. According to a paragraph buried in the middle of a post on whitehat SEO for WordPress users, Cutts responds: that’s not exactly what he said. He said Google was “looking at” treating them same. I figure that means they’ll eventually make the switch, not tell anyone at first, and the suddenly write a big blog post about it once the search engine community figures it out. Stick to hyphens for now.

According to Tadeusz Szewczyk, the SEO industry confuses the outside world with their terminology and phrasing. To help those outside of the industry, Szewczyk created “The Real SEO Glossary” that tells people what their SEO consultant is really saying. For example, “our network” roughly translates to “our link farm” and “authority site” generally refers to “sites that do no SEO”. Thanks, Tadeusz! I knew there was something fishy about that “PageRank optimization” offer I got last week…

Search Engine Roundtable posed an interesting question this week: Should You Let Content Theft Slide if the Site is Linking Back to You? That’s an excellent question that we’re actually dealing with here at the Internet Marketing Monitor. I’d like to answer that question with another question, though: should you let personal property theft slide if the guy who broke into your house tells all his buddies where he got the good stash from? Hmmm… me thinks not.

Since we’re talking about content, I thought I’d share an interesting case study from MarketingSherpa. GovernmentBids.com recently redesigned their website after letting it stagnate for 10 years… and conversions are up more than 40%! There are two morals to this story. The first one is that site design can often make or break a successful online endeavor. The second one is that when 1998 calls and asks you for its site design back… hand it over gladly.

Now that I’ve gone and mentioned successful online sites, you’re probably wondering who the most popular online brands are, huh? I knew it! Luckily, Greg Sterling has summarized a JupiterResearch study over at Search Engine Land that talks about exactly that! Not surprising, Google tops the list. Others include Yahoo!, Amazon, eBay, MySpace, Microsoft, AOL, and Apple. To use Sterling’s words, “as one might expect”, Apple came out on top of the “brand loyalty” category. A whopping 51% of Apple customers classified themselves as ‘brand advocates’! But honestly… I thought it would have been more than that. Maybe some of them misunderstood the question.

Talk about misunderstood! It took me a couple of reads to figure out exactly what this Hit Tail post was talking about. But when I finally realized it was a pitch for a demo of a Hit Tail product, I clicked, watched and pondered. According to the presentation, Hit Tail can take a feed of your site’s content, put a mask on it (that looks just like your site), and achieve instant search optimization. That’s pretty cool… watch the demo to see what I’m talking about! I just wonder if it can put a mask on bad content?

And finally, Valleywag wants to know what Yahoo! president Sue Decker knows about her company’s stock that we don’t know? I think that’s a great question! After stock prices hit a three-year low, Decker dropped $1.1 million bucks right out of pocket to snatch up 47,000 shares. If she’s trying to send an encouraging message - and possibly jump start more interest in the company - she could always look into greeting cards… maybe a nice dinner date with investors… even a fruit basket. They’re a lot less expensive. But then again, perhaps Decker has a plan. The way I see it… she makes this purchase… people start thinking she knows something… Yahoo! goes through the roof… she sells on Wednesday, points at the rest of us and laughs: “Gotcha!”

Have a great weekend everyone!