Understanding the way search engineers think can help you decide whether or not a new idea is worth trying. Knowing when you are taking risks, or making the decision to avoid them, can help scale your search engine marketing strategy to new heights.

There are likely enough current footprints to spamming techiques to where looking heavily at historical data to find past site relationships is probably not that valuable.

Some marketing fails because it does not use market feedback to help improve the ROI on the next generation of marketing. For example, if I make a couple sites and then take what I learned from making those and apply that to making more sites I will probably be more efficient than if I try to make many sites in parallel without collecting feedback.

Jason Calacanis, who sold links for 'scuba blackjack online', claims SEO is bullshit.

Shifting some of the love in Sun's direction, Simon Phipps reports, Sun Announces ODF Plug-In for MS Office Great news today. Sun has announced that it will make available a plug-in for Microsoft Office that adds seamless support for ISO/IEC...

Google Operating system blog reports that after 3 years of invitation only access, GMail is opened for public sign up. The service is still strictly in beta, even though it's been around since 2004. GMail started with invitation only sign...

Quark VS InDesign.com has announced an open competition to redesign the icons for Adobe Creative Suite 3, CS3-version, and other Adobe software products. The contest is open to graphic designers, illustrators, interface designers, and skinners anywhere in the world. (posted by Jennifer Apple)

A List Apart has published Quick CSS Mockups with Photoshop, an article by Casper Voogt that shows you how to take a design from Photoshop and turn it into a standards-compliant mockup. But there's a caveat, so beware... (posted by Jennifer Apple)

Get your free Photoshop brushes to make a Valentine's day card. Two free sets that offer a magnificent collection of love symbols and romantic gestures. (posted by Jennifer Apple)

This photo contest from myPIXmania in Europe looks like fun... Passionate kisses, stolen kisses, dramatic kisses or surprise kisses... all kinds of kisses will take pride of place on myPIXmania... (posted by Jennifer Apple)

Frog Design's Flash Blog has posted a very useful and pretty 3D carousel that pops up the name of the CS3 program as you hover over an individual icon, and the whole thing revolves at user-controlled speeds. (posted by Jennifer Apple)

Professor Douglas Ford Rea has written a Photoshop book that will be of interest to digital photographers who like to keep post-processing down to a minimum: Preventive Photoshop: Take the Best Digital Photographs Now for Better Images Later. (posted by Jennifer Apple)

Rick LePage at Macworld.com has written a Lightroom preview article. (posted by Jennifer Apple)

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom will ship in mid-February 2007 and is available for pre-order in the United States and Canada through the Adobe Store for a special introductory price of US $199. (posted by Jennifer Apple)

Photo expert Michael Tapes has put together a new collection of free Photoshop Lightroom video tutorials, this time for version 1.0. (posted by Jennifer Apple)

Like many people I have a deep emotional reaction to software. I either "click" with it or I don't — and I mean much before evaluating its strengths and weaknesses, or even understanding exactly what it can do. It's the proverbial first impression. And Picnik charms me to no end. (posted by Jennifer Apple)

Featured posts to the Search Engine Watch blog in the past week, along with recent search-related headlines from around the Web.