In addition to today’s Internet Marketing Monitor coverage, we felt these stories were worth pulling out of the multitude of news items for May 17, 2007:

Behind the scenes with universal search [Official Google Blog]

Here, Google shares some of the thinking that went into the new universal search approach that’s had everyone buzzing for a couple of days now. According to Google, the change basically boils down to is integration. People don’t have to know that Google has a book search or a news search or any of the other vertical search options that have been available for some time. Universal search is all about bringing these vertical search results into the main Google index. It makes sense for Google. But does it make sense for the user? Read more on how you can take advantage of universal search at the Google Webmaster Central Blog.

DreamHost Blocks Googlebot on Client Sites [Search Engine Journal]

I almost thought I’d read this wrong at first. But no… it means exactly what it says. Apparently DreamHost doesn’t have the resources to handle pages that are indexed frequently by Google. And instead of bumping up their resources, what did they do? They edited a user’s .htaccess file to block the Googlebot. Oh but it doesn’t stop there. They went on encourage the user to block all spiders and bots. If you think I’m making this up, go read the email included in SEJ’s post. I have a personal site hosted with DreamHost. Well… I guess after reading this I should say HAD a site hosted with DreamHost.

Choosing your anchor text for incoming links [Jennifer Slegg]

Sometimes folks don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the anchor text they use for their links. Heck… I’m guilty of paying less attention than I should from time to time. I was looking at a report generated by an in-house piece of software we have that shows the anchor text for all the links on a site. I was shocked to see that two-thirds of the links on a particular site were anchored to the word “here”. You can imagine what the preceding word was, as well. Just a note, folks: the word “here” doesn’t tell your visitors anything about what they’re likely to find when they click. But I won’t go into more. Jennifer Slegg has already done a great job covering the topic in her post.

Temporal Data & the Ranking Rollercoaster [SEOmoz]

I wanted to pass this one along particularly because it talks about “the fresh boost” that Google (and others) tend to give to new pages. You know what I’m talking about, right? SEOmoz calls it “the fresh boost” but you can call it whatever you want. You’ve noticed some new page’s rank jump up above your tried and true ranker only to fizzle out and slip later, right? This is yet another example of why it’s always best to give things a little time when it comes to search and rank. Don’t kick the freak-out gears into high mode the second you notice something strange. Let things settle down and then, if the situation still requires it, freak out. Or approach the situation with a calm, rational perspective. Either one works.

You know you’ve been writing about Google for a while then you automatically add “gle” to “Goo” when you’re trying to type “Goodnight”! Haha. Yes… I just did that. So Googlenight, everyone!

Oh. And goodnight, too! We’ll see you on Friday morning!