You’ve heard of robots meta tags. But how do you use them? If you’ve been online for very long you likely no about robots “nofollow” tags and maybe even “noindex” tags. But what about “noarchive?” Are you familiar with that one? Should you be?

SiteProNews today published an article by Scott Buresh explaining all the different robots meta tags and when you should use them. The last one on the list is the “noarchive” tag. He hit the nail right on the head:

Finally, almost all search engines today, including Google and Yahoo, offer a cached version of a site alongside its listing that provides a snapshot of what the page used to look like. The noarchive tag, therefore, is available to be used in circumstances where there is content on your website that is of a timely nature and therefore that you might not necessarily want search engine spiders to cache for people to have access to moving forward.

To further back up his claim, he uses the example of a business that is running a timed special. When the sale or special offer is over and the time to take advantage of it has expired, you’ll likely not want future searchers pulling up that web page and finding the special. They’ll want to take advantage of it too. But you can hide that page from those searchers just by using the robots “noarchive” meta tag. It’s a good example of when to use a robots tag to keep certain information hidden.

Another example might be when your company is between CEOs, or other high ranking officials. If your VP is acting CEO until the new guy comes in then you might want to reflect that on a special page that will be visible to search engines and searchers until the new guy starts. That would be another good time to use the “noarchive” tag. You’ll likely think of a few on your own now that you know what it can do.

The new buzzword now is Web 3.0. There’s actually a definition for it. Well, there’s more than one, it appears. But I’m just getting used to Web 2.0. And haven’t quite figured out what that is, to be honest. Can’t we meet in the middle and just work on Web. 2.5 before moving on?

I prefer the concept of Semantic Web over anything else. Latent semantic indexing is a kind of analysis that allows computers (ie. search engine robots) the ability to analyze information, words and such, to determine their meaning within context. The concept essentially means that keywords are not as important as we make them out to be.

Currently, search engine optimization relies almost completely upon keyword management. But Google has already implemented latent semantic indexing into its algorithm functions, and there are new search engines being developed that are entirely natural language based. As this technology is improved, search engines will, more and more, begin to rely upon the latent semantic analysis model to retrieve relevant results for searchers and SEO as we know it will change forever. But how?

We are still aways off from it, but this should help you put your mind in that direction. Latent semantic indexing relies on the relationship of words in proximity of definition to other words. That is, “man” and “male” are synonymous concepts while “man” and “giraffe” are not. So when writing website content, future web pages may not necessarily need the occurrence of a particular keyword in order to register as relevant to a specific query. All that would be required is a relatively close usage of language and words to a particular concept upon which the web page is based.

For instance, if I am writing a web page that explains how to change a flat tire, if I want to rank high in the SERPs for that particular concept then it would behoove me to include the phrase “change a flat tire” a certain number of times on the page and using SEO techniques that put certain weight on the way in which it is used on the page. That plus a few off-page factors relative to how my competition employs the same principles determines how I rank for the key phrase “change a flat tire.” That’s how it is now.

With latent semantic indexing, I could write a similar page and never use the exact key phrase as long as it is obvious that is what I’m talking about. In other words, a savvy writer who can write in a conversational, natural writing style will be able to rank well for the concept even without using the exact key phrase. It sounds like science fiction, but I think this is the way the Web is going. When will that happen? Who knows. We could be years away or it could just be around the corner. But there are enough scientists in the world working on it that we could possibly reach the goal before we find a cure for cancer.

I don’t care what you call it - Web 3.0, Semantic Web, Artificial Intelligence - just don’t force me to give up strategies that work before it’s time. Changes take time to digest.

The search engine marketing industry now has its own set of awards, the Semmys. While Search Engine Optimization Journal was not nominated for a Semmy Award, there are several SEO blogs that I admire who were. Among those nominated for the first ever Semmy Awards, for the year 2008, were:

• Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz
• Todd Friesen of Search Engine Land
• Tamar Weinberg of Search Engine Roundtable
• Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable
• Aaron Wall of SEO Book
• Jennifer Laycock of Search Engine Guide
• Michael Gray of Graywolf
• Ross Dunn of Stepforth
• Andy Beard

These aren’t the only nominees, of course, but they are among the top search engine optimizers in the world and deserve the nomination. The Semmys were started by Matt McGee, a notable SEO himself. Other categories in which Semmy Awards are offered include:

• Google
• Analytics
• General Online Marketing
• PPC
• Blogs & Blogging
• Search Tech
• Reputation Management
• Small Business
• Link Building
• Rants
• Viral Marketing
• Local Search
• Social Media
• And a Funny category as well

While many of those nominated deserve recognition, the list of those involved read like a list of insiders. Some of those nominated in each category are judges in other categories and if you read the list of nominees in all the categories you’ll find that you’ll see the same names over and over again. That may be because this is the first year for the awards so those nominated are among those most well known. I suspect that many of the nominations came from posts submitted to Sphinn and if you aren’t posted at Sphinn on a regular basis then you likely didn’t make the cut. The names listed as nominees in every category are the same names I see at Sphinn on a regular basis, so that’s I why I say that.

While Brick Marketing has blogs in virtually every category listed in the nominations, we were not nominated for any category this time. We’re not sulking, however. Some of our other favorite blogs weren’t nominated either. We’ll keep posting good content for businesses wanting the straight scoop on SEO and covering the other topics we cover well. We encourage our readers to head over to the Semmys and cast a vote. There really is good content there and the people nominated are tough to beat, whether we’re in the competition or not.

Content scraping is getting to be a big business, and the scrapers are getting ever more clever.

In the old days, content scrapers would copy/paste your content and slap AdSense ads on the page where your content was used and make a dollar or two before they were reported. Then those nasty bots came around and they were able to scrape your content without actually visiting your website. The bots did all the work in about 10 minutes. The “operator” simply input a list of keywords that the bot was to hone in on and when those keywords were found the content was scraped and held in the bots “memory.” Then the bot would be told where to put the content that was scraped, right alongside those pesky AdSense ads. There were called Made For AdSense sites, or MFAs. They worked and the scrapers could usually get by with making $10 or $15 per site before being taken down. You do that a couple of hundred times in one month and you’ve got a pretty decent income. Do a thousand times each month and you’ll be a rich man before you know it.

Well, Google seems to have cracked down on the MFA sites because I don’t see as many of them as I used to. But there is another kind of content scraper that is starting to become more popular now. These content scrapers try to appear as if they’re not really scraping your content. They actually give you a link back - unless those old MFA guys who just stole your content with a lack of conscience.

The new scrapers take your content and put a link at the top of it out of the goodness of their hearts. At the bottom of your content (on their web pages, mind you), they link to another site that they own in hopes of selling services and products related to the keywords they are targeting with your hard work. Pretty clever, eh?

You can see a sample of this kind of content scraping on several of my past blog posts, but I’ll just link to this one and you can take a look at that first comment.

I love how Saskatoon Web Design just took my entire blog post. Sure, they gave attribution. I got the link back. They even included the internal links that were a part of my original post. All except the affiliate links (they must have scraped my content before I went back in and added those). But at the bottom of the blog post with the words that I wrote, you’ll see a link to the index page of the website on which the Rawk Media blog sits. Clever. These guys are trying to sell their services using content that I wrote, based on the keyword research that I’ve done. I suppose that works if you can’t write. But it does violate existing copyright laws. If they’re not careful, someone may report them to their ISP.

You might think there is no reason to have a blog. You’d be wrong. If you haven’t considered it before, here’s one more reason to start a blog today.

This new study by Brodeur and Marketwire shows that 75% of journalists read blogs on a regular basis. That’s great, and the study has some useful information in it. But what’s not included in the study, and I think it should be, is just what kind of blogs journalists are following?

Do journalists primarily follow news and politics, or do they follow business, sports, fashion, etc. What areas of coverage of they paying attention to? The study would seem to indicate that if 75% of journalists (broad term) are reading blogs on a regular basis then all types of blogs are being read by journalists. But do the statistics support that assumption? I’d like to know.

Assuming that the answer is yes then a company blog will go a long way to making you an expert in your field. You can bet that if journalists use Google to find blogs then when you are looking for a blog in your area of expertise that you could be the expert they call. Wouldn’t you want that to happen? Well, it could; and it all boils down to one thing: Search Engine Optimization.

The rules of SEO apply to blogs as well as websites. If you are writing about one particular niche area every day then over a period of time you stand a very good chance of ranking your blog higher in the SERPs for the keywords that are important to you. Instead of relying on hundreds of dollars for press releases you can put that money into your blog and become an instant expert and add credibility to your portfolio. When journalists need an expert to interview, who do you think they’re going to call?

Gene Marks wrote an article in BusinessWeek that drew the ire of every SEO and Internet marketer in the business. All you had to do was Google his name and you’d see the backlash. Even my post about him hit Page 1 on Google.

Interestingly, there’s at least one person agreeing with him and search marketer Jaan Kanellis is taking issue with that defender on yesterday’s WebProNews.

I’ll have to agree with Jaan Kanellis again. The only reason Gene Marks wrote the article that he did was to get link bait. Either that or the man is a total and complete idiot.

I focused my last article about him on his misrepresentation and lack of understanding of SEO. But he was wrong on so many other counts as well. Jaan Kanellis only mentions a few of them in his latest article:

• RSS
• Blogs
• SEO
• CRM
• PPC
• Web 2.0

Interestingly, Jaan and I both agree with Gene Marks’ comments regarding Web 2.0 and CRM. So we really don’t have an argument on those points with Gene Marks or with Adam Senour. CRM is pretty much useless for most small businesses. A simple spreadsheet will meet most of your needs. And hardly anyone can agree on the definition of Web 2.0. It’s just some buzzword that some marketers are capitalizing on to make themselves appear more important.

But blogs, RSS, SEO, and PPC are marketing tools and strategies that anyone and everyone can benefit from. OK, maybe you’re not interested in running PPC campaigns, but that doesn’t mean you couldn’t benefit from it if you were. Blogs are such simple tools to run and operate that Adam Senour’s comment about the time it takes to maintain a blog is simply ludicrous. But I love Jaan’s point even more:

If you’re not willing to learn and work with the components that make the web what it is then forget about all together. Keep yourself in a box far, far away from technology.

The bottom line is this: Are you using the tools of the Web most effectively? Most small businesses are not. There are things they can do to improve their marketing effectiveness as well as their efficiency. Tools like RSS feeds allow you to do that. Instead of spending hours visiting blogs just to see if you want to read what they have to offer today, you can get all of your news feeds in one place and scroll through them to see which ones you do want to read and which ones you don’t want to mess with. Is that a time saver? You bet it is. A huge one. So why ignore it?

Gene Marks doesn’t have a clue. Neither does anyone who is defending him.

Link building strategies have come and gone. You still hear about the infamous link farm, and every now and then you’ll actually see one still. But what is it and can it benefit you?

Link farms are definitely bad. They really haven’t been very effective since about 2001. But don’t discount all link building efforts as worthless. There are still link building methods that are effective and worth using. In fact, if you aren’t doing any link building at all then you are likely not increasing your search positioning. That will only lead to your competition outpacing you in the long run. But what is considered effective and legitimate link building?

Various Link Building Strategies That Work
There is no one way to go about link building. There are several ways to build links that are effective. One way is to just find websites like yours that are noncompetitive and ask for reciprocal links. Or one way links. The best kind of link is a one way link so if you can build a decent website that gets other people to link to you without requiring a link back then that is the best way to get a link. But it’s not the only way.

Articles As Link Building Tools
Another way to get links is to offer webmasters to write articles for them. Providing exclusive content to other webmasters in exchange for a link back to your website is a great way to get those high value links that everyone covets. You benefit by getting a great link and the other webmaster benefits by getting content for their website.

Directories Offer Great Link Building Opportunities
Directories have often been mentioned. There is a reason for that. They are great sources of links.

• Article Directories
• Blog Directories
• Website Directories
• Niche and Specialty Directories
• General Directories
• Newsletter or Ezine Directories

Any kind of directory is valid. Even paid directories. The key is to get your site listed in a directory that doesn’t require a reciprocal link. But even if you do have to require a link to get listed in some directories, it may be worth it.

Link Building Opportunities Are All Over
Legitimate link building practices are every where. Opportunities come in many forms. It helps to stay on top of the latest strategies for webmasters and using them. Be creative and know the search engine policies.

Every now and then you hear about somebody predicting that SEO will change, mostly because they don’t like us. You hear such predictions, typically, from some pimple-faced adolescent who likes Twittering and loading new apps into his Facebook profile to show all of his friends how cool he is. But he’s sick and tired of seeing Wikipedia listings for every keyword search he performs and gets angry when 8 out of 10 Google search results are irrelevant to what he was actually looking for. Petulance isn’t fun.

These modern day Nostradamuses want us all to believe that search must change, or die. It’s more a hope than a prediction. It likely won’t happen. Not the way they dream of it.

Search engine optimization came about because search engines provided a way for people to find the information they want to find online. Those publishers who had the information figured out that if they wanted to be found by the finders then they had to make their information accessible to their target market. Thus an industry was born.

SEO is not the panacea for all things. It can’t brush your teeth, it can’t treat herpes, it can’t rid your face of all of those pimples, and it won’t bring about world peace. But it can - and does - help millions of people every day find the information they are looking for online. It’s not perfect; there’s no precise science. But if you learn the principles then understanding it becomes much simpler.

It’s been three months since the last PageRank update and already Google has started exporting PageRank information. I’ve seen a few sites with increases in PageRank, but I haven’t seen changes in all of them so they may not be done yet. But keep your eyes on the PageRank of your websites and blogs because it may very well be coming.

Of course, PageRanks can go down or up so if you notice a decline in PageRank then you might want to do some investigating to find out why you went down. If you are selling links or it even appears as if you are selling links then you might want to do something about that. One website owner I know had a page - a single page - on his website drop down to gray, which is an indication of no PageRank data and not necessarily a “0″ as if so often stated, from a PageRank of 1. It is likely that he went gray because his page is a list of publications and at the bottom of the page he has a link with an application for other publications to “get more information” about being listed. While he doesn’t have sales information on the page it could be an appearance issue with Google that has caused the drop. Either that, or someone reported him for selling links.

In other words, consider this a warning and a reminder. Selling links isn’t necessarily bad. If it makes you money you just have to weigh the benefit with the penalty. But keep in mind that PageRank can go up or down and if yours goes down this time around you’ll have to look into it to find out why.

It happens to the best of us sooner or later. You’ll fall in search engine rankings for no apparent reason. You’ve been to the top of the SERPs then all of a sudden you drop, and you don’t know why. There could be any number of reasons why. The first thing you should do is make a list of the things that have been done to your site in the last month. By making such a list you can easily identify any problem areas. Here are some recommendations on some of the most common webmaster problems that have causes search rankings to fall - and what you can do about it if it happens to you:

• If you’ve recently changed hosting providers then you might have had too much down time between providers. If that is the case then don’t worry. Your rankings will come back. Just remember, don’t dally between hosting providers. Get it done quickly.
• One common problem people experience is broken links or permalinks. If you have changed your site infrastructure or moved pages around, but didn’t perform a 301 redirect for the old pages then you could have some broken links. That will hurt you in the search engines. Plus, inbound links will not be effective either. You’ll just lose whatever link juice you have and that will hurt your rankings. Be sure you include 301 redirects in your site structure changes; this is a very common mistake.
• If your hosting company has experienced undue down time then that could be affecting your rankings. Just a one time period of being off line isn’t going to damage you, but if there has been a lot of time off line, multiple instances of it in a short period of time, then that could affect it. Call your hosting provider and ask if they’ve experienced a loss of server recently. If they say that your server has been off line extensively then that could be the problem. No reason for alarm. You’ll get your rankings back when the problem is fixed. If your host can’t fix the problem in a reasonable time then find a new host.
• Is your content spammy? If so, that could be the problem. It’s strange, but sometimes search engines don’t find spam right away. You’ll constantly find top 10 sites that are nothing but spam. But eventually they will catch it. If you have just one page of spam on your website then it could hurt you so check your content.
• Non-optimized web pages. This is the opposite of spam. If your web pages aren’t optimized well enough then the search engines may not know how to rank your pages correctly. Did you rewrite any pages? Double check them. You may have uploaded the wrong pages, previous pages, or just wrote bad content.

These are not the only reasons you might fall in rankings, but these are some of the most common reasons web pages, and websites, fall in search rankings. If you need to, call a professional SEO to help you fix your problem.

Most Internet marketers place social media marketing in a category all by itself, separate from SEO. That’s fine as long as you realize there are distinct SEO benefits from social media marketing, especially social bookmarking.

I’ve noticed that when I bookmark certain blog posts that I will rise in search engine rankings for the targeted keywords based on how many other people at the bookmarking site agree with me on the bookmark-worthiness of the post. Probably the most effective social bookmarking sites for SEO purposes are StumbleUpon, Digg, and del.icio.us, but I haven’t tested them all. In the Internet marketing field, Sphinn is a good one as well.

When it comes to social bookmarking, the primary SEO benefit is content on your page. Whether you are bookmarking a web page or a blog post, you still want your content to be SEOd properly just as you always do. But bookmarking your content can go a long way to increasing your search positioning.

I noticed this because I wrote about a particular topic and saw a blog post rise to page 1 in the SERPs for the key phrase that I was targeting. Then, other bloggers started writing about the same topic. They pushed me down to page 2 because they had higher site authority, age factor, back links, and several other SEO points going in their favor. That’s fine; those are the rules of the game. But I noticed something else happen when I bookmarked my post.

Just one bookmark won’t help much. But other people started voting on my blog post and as more people voted on my blog post the higher in the SERPs I rose. I didn’t get enough votes to push me back up to page 1, but I did rise three or four positions on page 2 as a result of a few meager bookmarking votes. I could just imagine what would have happened had I had a thousand bookmarking votes.

If you are new to webmastering you may have heard of a bounce rate. But what is it? There really are two ways to define bounce rate.

1. Percentage of Visitors Who See One Page - Some analytics software define bounce rate as the percentage of people who only view one page on your website. They may stay on that one page for a couple of minutes, but they don’t go any further. They read a little bit and move on. You don’t have enough mojo to keep them around longer, therefore they “bounce” off to somewhere else.
2. Percentage Of Visitors Who Leave Your Site After A Short Period Of Time - Another way to measure bounce rate is by the length of time visitors spend on your site. Most analytics software define this amount of time as five seconds or less. Some use a minute. But whatever the length of time is, it isn’t long enough to say that the visitor has a real interest in your content.

Ideally, you want your site visitors to stick around long enough to order something. If you run a retail site, you want them to checkout. If you sell services, you want them to purchase, or come back later and make a purchase. But you want them to be genuinely interested in what you have to offer. If your site is an affiliate site then you want your visitors to purchase from your affiliates. To do that, they’ve got to stick around long enough to be genuinely interested in your content.

The best way to ensure that people stick around is to give them what they want. Understand what your target market wants and provide it for them. That means making the absolute most out of your content. But it also means marketing your website to the search engines effectively. Your bounce rate is an important part of analytics and can tell you a great deal about your traffic and the quality of visitors you are getting.

This article on SiteProNews really says nothing new about SEO. Just look at the suggestions for the Top 10 Internet marketing tips for 2008:

1. Optimize your website’s content
2. Create a content development strategy for your website
3. Invest in a paid search (pay-per-click) campaign
4. Publicize your website through article marketing
5. Develop a social media marketing strategy
6. Create a Company Blog
7. Experiment with video marketing
8. Engage your audiences with web widget marketing
9. Discover the benefits of mobile marketing
10. Create an effective email marketing strategy

This actually reads like a top 10 list for 2007. Nothing on this list is even remotely outside of the box thinking. All of these have been suggested before - like last year - and if you haven’t started doing all of these by now then you are likely behind the competition. The first four items on the list are actually from 2003 or before. The rest of the list is 2005-2007.

This article from Jaan Kanellis is actually more helpful. Just look at the difference in quality between the suggestions. This is fom Jaan’s article:

• Internal Navigation
• Tell Why You’re The Best
• Build Links
• Develop Your Content
• Use Title Tags
• Avoid Duplicate Content
• Know Your Competitors
• Consider your Finances
• Track Your Stats
• Increase Your Load Time/Decrease Your Code
• Evaluate Only One Change At A Time

There is a lot of elaboration that could take place here on each of these points, but they all are important to increasing your SEO benefits. Should you take the first list to heart? Yes. All of those strategies are important. But if you don’t get down in the weeds on your website content, blogging strategy, link building methods, and other important webmaster topics then just knowing that you need to develop your content is like saying a cowboy needs a horse. Sure he does, but he also needs to learn how to ride it, put the saddle on, bridle it, shoe it, feed it, and train it to come when he calls. Can you do all of that with your website?

Matt Cutts has a good video today on Google Webmaster Central explaining how to prevent certain pages on your website from being crawled by the search engines.

You really need to be familiar with four methods of preventing the spiders from crawling your pages:

• htaccess
• noindex
• nofollow
• robots.txt
• password protect

Your htaccess file is a ticket to solving a lot of your search engine problems. Not all of them, but some of them. It’s a file on your server that gives instructions to browsers and search engine spiders, telling them how to read your web pages. One common usage of this file is to use it to redirect old web pages to new web pages. Frequently, webmasters will update their information and when doing so will change the URL of a web page. Well, if you do that then you still have that old web page indexed and when people try to visit that page they will get a 404 error page. To prevent that from happening, you can add a 301 redirect command in your htaccess to redirect traffic to your new page.

But the htaccess has other uses as well and you can actually use it to tell the search engines certain information that will prevent them from crawling your web pages. More on this later.

Perhaps the most common way to instruct search engines not to crawl certain pages of your website is the robots.txt file. You can use this file to tell all the search engines, or just some of them, not to crawl specific pages. You just give the URLs of the pages you don’t want to be crawled and specify which search engines are not allowed to crawl those pages.

The noindex meta tag is a bit different than the robot.txt file. It tells the search engines not to show a page in their index. They’ll still crawl it, but they won’t show it in their index so anyone searching for a key term will not see that page on that search engine. Again, you can specify specific search engines or make it general for all search engines.

The nofollow meta tag is a tag that tells the search engines not to crawl certain links. So you can actually have a page that links to one other page on your website and make that link a nofollow link then the one page that spins off will not be found because of that nofollow link. You can nofollow all the links on a page or just some of them.

Finally, if you password protect certain pages, the search engines will not crawl them. They cannot guess your password so those pages are safe. Users of your website can get to them, but the search engines cannot. You can password protect your pages using the htaccess file that I discussed earlier.

Keep in mind that there are complications with each of these methods. The safest and most powerful of all of these methods is the htaccess. The least effective is the nofollow tag because while the links aren’t followed, that page is still on a server somewhere. If you access that page from your browser then move on to another page on your website and you have an analytics program that shows links for referrers, that link could get crawled and you’ll still get traffic to the page. Not a lot, but some, and you’ll run the risk of someone else linking to it. You have the same problem with noindex tags and robots.txt files, so be careful.

For more information on preventing your pages from being crawled, watch Matt Cutts’ video on that topic. He also discusses how to de-index certain URLs you have mistakenly indexed.

WebPro News ran a story from Lee Odden on search marketing trends:

What will be the big stories in search marketing in 2008?

* Heavier Integration of User Data and Personalized Search in Standard Results (21%)
* Mobile Search Explodes (15%)
* Death of SEO as we know it (13%)
* Social Media Marketing Explodes (12%)
* Social Media Marketing Jumps the Shark (8%)
* Google Winning/Losing Market Share in a Big Way (6%)
* Social Networks as Search Platforms (6%)
* Record Search Marketing Budget Levels (5%)
* Increasing Searcher Sophistication (4%)
* New Paid Search Channels (4%)
* Search Engine Consolidation (3%)
* Death of Universal Search (3%)
* “Real” Solutions to Click Fraud (1%)
* Search Marketing Agency Consolidation (0%)

This is an interesting list. I particularly like “Google Winning/Losing Market Share in a Big Way.” I take it that so many people think Google will gain market share and so many others think it will lose. I really take issue with the people who say Google will lose market share. To whom? There is no other search engine on the horizon who even comes close to having anything that can take share away from Google. Ask.com waged its campaign to get share from Google and ended up taking some away from Yahoo! and MSN. Recently, Google gained and all other lost. Yahoo! has been playing catch up for years. In order for any new start ups to wage war on Google and win, they will have to fight a strong, hard uphill battle against consumer loyalty. Fat chance.

Then there’s the “end of the world as we know it” crowd. SEO will die, SEO will die, SEO will die; so they chant from their front row seats in the bathroom stalls. Funny stuff.

What I agree with most on this list is the social networks as platforms prediction and search engine consolidation. We’ve seen that last one before. MSN Live is struggling, several smaller search engines can’t compete, and Google just keeps pulling out ahead. There will definitely be some acquisitions in search real soon.

But even more interesting than that is the concept of social networks becoming search platforms. If that happens, it will likely happen through partnerships. I can see Yahoo! and MSN partnering with Facebook or LinkedIn to a mutually beneficial and satisfying relationship. Google will likely just buy a social network and turn it into another vertical search to be included in its dominance strategy. At any rate, I believe search is only going to get better.