Medvedev commits to Friday pull-out as NATO feud erupts (AFP iactiv)

AFP iactiv - President Dmitry Medvedev issued Tuesday a fresh commitment to withdraw Russian troops from Georgia as NATO-Russia relations plunged to their lowest ebb in years.

Russia starts Georgia pullout, West urges speed (Reuters)

Reuters - Russian troops will pull back from Georgia's heartland by the end of this week, the Kremlin said Tuesday, but NATO said it was freezing contacts with Moscow until all Russian forces were out of the country.

Russia moves toward pullback but shows strength (AP)

AP - Russia took the first steps toward a troop pullback from Georgia on Tuesday but at the same time paraded blindfolded and bound Georgian prisoners on armored vehicles and seized four U.S. Humvees.

Obama: McCain should stop questioning character (AP)

AP - Democrat Barack Obama challenged Republican opponent John McCain on Tuesday to stop questioning his "character and patriotism."

Ten French soldiers killed in Afghanistan ambush (AFP)

AFP - Ten French NATO soldiers were killed in a Taliban ambush in Afghanistan, officials said Tuesday, the deadliest ground attack on foreign troops here since the US-led war was launched in 2001.

Afghan militants kill 10 French, strike at US base (AP)

AP - Insurgents mounted two of the biggest attacks in years on Western forces in Afghanistan, killing 10 French soldiers in a mountain ambush and then sending a squad of suicide bombers in a failed assault early Tuesday on a U.S. base near the Pakistan border.

AP NewsBreak: Umpires refuse replay call with MLB (AP)

AP - Umpires want baseball to take another look at instant replay. Umps said their governing board voted Tuesday to boycott a conference call with management intended to discuss implementing replay and are angry that their concerns aren't being addressed.

McCain campaigns for off-shore drilling on Gulf rig (Reuters)

Reuters - Republican John McCain took his campaign high above the waters of the Gulf of Mexico on Tuesday, visiting an offshore oil and gas rig and predicting many more like it along the U.S. coasts if he is elected president.

Goodyear to close 92 U.S. stores, cut jobs (Reuters)

Reuters - Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co said it would close 12 percent, or 92, of its company-owned U.S. stores and cut 600 full- and part-time jobs as the U.S. economic downturn put more pressure on the company.

Page Rank News

BBC finally experiments with in-text 'links' (e-Consultancy) - Mon, 18 Aug 2008 14:57:35 GMT
The BBC is experimenting with the idea of linking out to external sources from within the body text of its news articles, in a trial which will last for four weeks. Obviously this is a good idea, though why it has taken a decade for the BBC to roll out a 'trial' is anybody's guess (though it won't have done any harm to The Beeb's own Pagerank). However, the way it is going about this ...

Optimizing Google OneBox and Yahoo! Shortcut Local Listings (Search Engine Land) - Mon, 18 Aug 2008 22:28:03 GMT
If you have a site you want to optimize for local searches, you generally want the site to appear in the web search local listing (Google Onebox or Yahoo! shortcut). Creating a page for your local listing could be a determining factor in your listing's appearance. Below, an easy four step guide to creating a great, complementary page for your local listing. Click to continue reading... ...

Wordcamp 2008 (ZDNet) - Sat, 16 Aug 2008 21:58:37 GMT
In the quiet flats of University of California San Francisco Mission Bay campus, bloggers, thinkers, journalists, developers, and inventors melt together for a full day of lectures and learning. The goal of Wordcamp 2008 is to figure out the future of publishing on the web. ...

How Do We Determine Authority for Link Building? (Search Engine Roundtable) - Thu, 14 Aug 2008 14:57:01 GMT
Michael Gray writes an interesting post about that teaching advanced link building and PageRank will never die . In the article, he explains that everyone who learns about optimization techniques are at different levels; some are more advanced and may consider topics to be basic. Now what happens if you recommend link building tactics from an "authoritative" site? By whose metric? If you apply ...

Human Hardware: Searching With The Basal Ganglia (Search Engine Land) - Fri, 15 Aug 2008 11:43:02 GMT
In the last column , we explored how navigation can become a habit. Ann Graybiel’s work shows how regular paths become etched in our basal ganglia, limiting the need for conscious interaction. When we do something enough and the situation seems familiar, we can cruise through on autopilot, saving our prefrontal cortex for more urgent demands. This is how you can drive home from work and ...

Daily Search Forum Recap: August 14, 2008 (Search Engine Roundtable) - Thu, 14 Aug 2008 21:41:57 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.

Search engines could be lubricated by quantum maths (New Scientist) - Wed, 13 Aug 2008 11:58:54 GMT
Google's algorithm for ranking web pages could benefit from quantum shortcuts derived from the Schrödinger equation (full text available to subscribers)

Key Takeaways From SMX Advanced For In-House SEMs (Search Engine Land) - Wed, 13 Aug 2008 12:57:33 GMT
Perhaps for the first time ever I'm guilty of being slack. Either that or I've been seriously buried (a condition I'm sure most in-house SEMs are quite familiar with). Although there was some great live blogging of SMX Advanced, nobody to my knowledge summarized key takeaways for in-house search marketers. So here are what I consider the most compelling topics discussed at SMX Advanced ...

SearchDay: Awesome Ad Groups: Small is Good (Search Engine Watch) - Tue, 12 Aug 2008 22:55:44 GMT
Today's search engine marketing news and opinion: Awesome Ad Groups: Small is Good; After the Yahoo Shareholder Meeting; Google Translate Goes Live with Human Translators; and more.

How Much Might Your Website Be Worth? (Search Engine Journal) - Tue, 12 Aug 2008 22:47:59 GMT
Whether you want to sell your website or you are just willing to know how much you have potentially earned so far, you might be curious to know how much your website is currently worth. Like with selling a business, trying to determine your website price is really hard to do: so many factors might [...]