11:00 pm SEO News (and Non-news)

Good evening. It’s 11:00 pm, and here’s tonight’s news.

MarketingVox recaps a BusinessWeek article that talks about Big Brands pushing small business out of the paid search market: “…brand giants like Best Buy and Zale are diverting more and more of their marketing to search ads, driving up prices and stealing customers from smaller businesses that have in the past bought the bulk of the ads.”

Timely, then, that I recently did this interview with PPC guru Andrew Goodman discussing exactly this topic. And before that, my interview with Lee Odden also covered a lot of ground for small businesses looking for new ways to market online.

As I continue to help my wife do some marketing for her new real estate blog via MyBlogLog, these should come in handy: SoloSEO’s Missing MyBogLog Tools. Very, very cool.

And in some non-news, Google no longer includes links to Yahoo Maps and Mapquest.

Yawn.

Why should they? Yahoo and Mapquest should be grateful for the free link they’ve had all this time. And the outcry from other bloggers is funny. I’m sure they all advise their clients to include prominent links to their biggest competitors right on the home page. “Welcome to our web site. Did you want to visit Competitor A or Competitor B, instead?” Please.

UPDATE: Looks like Simon agrees with me on this one. “It’s just them being a business.” Exactly.

[tags]sem, ppc, mybloglog, soloseo, google, google maps[/tags]