Bush signs law extending unemployment insurance (Reuters)

Reuters - President George W. Bush on Friday signed into law an extension of unemployment benefits, the White House said.

Obama on track to name Clinton as top diplomat (Reuters)

Reuters - Retired Marine Gen. James Jones emerged as a leading contender for White House national security adviser as President-elect Barack Obama worked on Thursday to assemble his foreign policy team.

Thousands protest in Iraq against U.S. troops pact (Reuters)

Reuters - Followers of Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr marched on Friday against a pact letting U.S. forces stay in Iraq until 2011, toppling an effigy of President George W. Bush where U.S. troops once tore down a statue of Saddam Hussein.

Bush signs jobless benefits extension (AP)

AP - With no end in sight to economic bad news, President George W. Bush on Friday ensured that millions of laid-off workers will keep getting their unemployment checks as the year-end holidays approach.

Obama plans to nominate Clinton for top diplomat (AP)

AP - President-elect Barack Obama plans to nominate Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state after Thanksgiving, a new milestone for the former first lady and a convergence of two political forces who fought hard for the presidency.

Kenya: Somali pirates make $150M in a year (AP)

AP - Somali pirates have collected more than $150 million in ransoms over the past year, Kenya's foreign affairs minister said Friday, calling on ship owners not to pay when their vessels are hijacked.

Central bankers wary of deflation (Reuters)

Reuters - Euro zone demand is plunging and price pressures vanishing, business surveys showed on Friday, while central bankers weighed the bleak prospect of deflation.

Islamists on trail of Somali pirates (Reuters)

Reuters - Dozens of Somali Islamist insurgents stormed a port on Friday hunting the pirates behind the seizure of a Saudi supertanker that was the world's biggest hijack, a local elder said.

Use of nuclear weapons more likely in future: US intelligence (AFP)

AFP - The use of nuclear weapons will grow increasingly likely by 2025, according to a bleak US intelligence report that warns that US global dominance is likely to weaken over the next two decades.

Page Rank News

Google SearchWiki brings custom search results (CNET) - Thu, 20 Nov 2008 21:12:12 GMT
Company gets a taste for collaborative search: SearchWiki lets people promote Web sites they like, delete ones they don't, and share comments.

Roll your own search results with Google's new SearchWiki (Ars Technica) - Fri, 21 Nov 2008 00:58:43 GMT
Google's SearchWiki—the feature that allows people to annotate, add, delete, and move around search results—will soon be available to all users logged in with a Google account. The company's not sure yet what it plans to actually do with the data, though. Read More...

New Paid Links Service Sparks More Debate (WebProNews) - Thu, 20 Nov 2008 21:01:35 GMT
Quite a storm of debate has erupted over a new service called InLinks - essentially a paid text link service that allegedly makes it hard for Google (and other search engines) to detect them. And mouths of  Internet marketers begin to salivate. read more

Bartlett Communications Launches Free Website Evaluation Tool for Small to Mid-Sized Businesses (PRWeb via Yahoo! News) - Fri, 21 Nov 2008 07:01:00 GMT
Web-based 'eValuator' tool developed to help businesses assess the health and value of a website

Building SEO Momentum by Using A Consistent Site Structure (Search Engine Land) - Thu, 20 Nov 2008 17:10:30 GMT
Change. It is a part of life, especially on the web. Evolve or die. But some things need not change to be successful. In some cases change undermines your momentum, particularly in the field of search, where most of the traffic goes to the top couple ranked sites .

Insidious New SEO Ad Product Will Be Hard For Google To Detect (Updated With Google Response) (TechCrunch) - Wed, 19 Nov 2008 18:53:37 GMT
New York-based advertising firm MediaWhiz , never one to worry about gray areas when it comes to advertising, has launched a new product today called InLinks . It's fairly straightforward - advertisers who want their sites associated with specific keywords simply buy ads. Links to those sites are then added to publishers sites whenever those words pop up in content. These aren't ghost links ...

Is it Worthwhile to Buy a High PageRank Domain and 301ing it? (Search Engine Roundtable) - Fri, 14 Nov 2008 14:24:06 GMT
What happens if you want some good link juice to your domain? You may engage in the practice of buying a site and 301ing it to your old domain. In yesterday's PubCon session, we even talked about buying sites for maximum exposure and minimum risk . But the question is really: will you get juice by doing this? At a High Rankings Forum post, member Randy claims that Googlers say that the ...

Daily Search Forum Recap: November 14, 2008 (Search Engine Roundtable) - Fri, 14 Nov 2008 21:38:46 GMT
Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Twitterank Creator Speaks (ZDNet) - Thu, 13 Nov 2008 08:26:17 GMT
After my post yesterday afternoon about Twitterank, its creator Ryo Chijiiwa contacted me by email to ask if I'd like to hear his side of the story: I offered him a guest post. Over to Ryo: I blame the Family Guy. There I was in my...

Top Secret Tools of The Trade (Search Engine Roundtable) - Thu, 13 Nov 2008 22:38:46 GMT
Moderator: Joe Laratro President, Tandem Interactive We are live blogging this session from Salon A @ the Las Vegas Convention Center, PubCon 2008. Good afternoon. Basic research tools, killer paid reports, (knowing how to read them) and off the beaten path secret-sauce game-changing ideas are always on the mind of every good webmaster. From staples to, well ...actual secrets, this panel ...