search engine optimization

Bas points us to the news that a city in Russia, Chelyabinsk, which is ranked in the "top 10" list of "dirtiest cities" by the government, has apparently decided that the best way to spend taxpayer money isn't necessarily to make the city any cleaner, but to clean up their Google and Yandex rankings.

Over the weekend there was a fascinating NY Times article about how retailing giant JC Penney apparently had a massive black hat search spam campaign going, which put its homepage at the top of a ton of beneficial searches.

In digging into it, the NY Times uncovered a lot of questionable behavior, and Google quickly responded by implementing some sort of "corrective behavior" that sank JC Penney listings.

Anti-piracy outfits come in different shapes and forms.

The largest group are so called DMCA-agents, usually small companies that help copyright holders to prevent their content from spreading over the Internet.

They are tasked with sending takedown requests to sites that host or link to their content, including Google, Twitter and torrent sites.

We've seen all sorts of really bizarre and downright dangerous plans to change copyright law to favor newspapers, but a new one, posted at Henry Blodget's Business Insider may be the most ridiculous of all.

Typekit takes a cloud-based approach to fonts on the web, serving