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 29, 2007:

Can Clicking on Google Organic Results Influence Rank? [Search Engine Roundtable]

This is one of the great unknowns as far as it’s real impact on search rankings go. Tamar at SERoundtable watched her personalized search results change as a result of clicking on a certain link a number of times. But, as she asks, does that mean Google is applying the CTR principle to unpersonalized search results? It’s an interesting question - and one that no one other than the folks behind the algorithm over at Google know the real answer to. But I’d say that it would silly of them to not put CTR to use to some extent. Manipulation aside, it’d be a great metric to help rank sites.

External Site Auditing Tools - TFS 7 [ShoeMoney]

The main purpose of this post is to point out some tools that can be used to help you decide whether or not to buy an existing site. But this still is also of great value to website owners who aren’t selling. Using the data provided by these tools and Firefox extensions, website owners can get a decent picture of where their sites fall into the grand scheme of things. For more information on Firefox extensions for website owners and SEOs, check out my previous post “Turn Firefox Into a Search Engine Optimizing / Website Building Machine“.

The Art of Blog Marketing [Marketing Profs Daily Fix]

The first few lines of this post sum it up better than I could:

This is a story about building relationships online through blogging and how connecting and sharing is about the art of marketing. For this post, we will leave science aside, except for the technology required to blog.

It’s a great read for anyone writing a blog, thinking of writing a blog, or simply curious about what the whole blogging thing is all about. As the article points out, marketing is the art of making connections - and blogging offers people a unique way to make connections, build relationships, and simply make friends. The marketing, sales, and “coverage” aspects are just nice side benefits ;)

  Google buys anti-malware browser virtualization start-up  [Zero Day]

The technology Google acquires through the purchase of GreenBorder Technology is pretty cool.  But that’s what why this is newsworthy (well… it is… but only partially).  The reason I find it interesting is the same reason that a lot of buzz has built over the acquisition.  What is Google doing with this?  Will they be releasing an updated Google Pack with GreenBorder technology?  Are they going to web-a-tize it and make Google a “malware-free surfing zone” or something else?  Or maybe they’re just buying it because they’re bored.  Who knows.  But it should be interesting to see where they go with this.

Who’s glad to be back at work after the three day weekend?  At least the work week is starting off with some interesting announcements and newsworthy headlines.