I know it's hard to believe. I'm doing the Thursday round up. Rebecca has left town for Memorial Day weekend and thus it's fallen to me to get together this week's links. When she says it's more time consuming than it seems, she isn't lying.

Three star links:

• The Guardian's Victor Keegan discusses the fallacy that Google is unbeatable, however he makes some points I don't agree with, such as "(Google) is brilliant at displaying the answers most linked to - but not if what you want is buried deep in the search pile." I disagree with this: I've found that some incredibly obscure queries elicit some incredibly obscure results and they're remarkably relevant.
• Where you sit in a classroom may be intricately tied to where you sit in a conference session. Where do you sit in a conference session? If I'm pretending to work hard like Lisa, I sit at the front with her. Otherwise I'm hovering between Uncommitted and Too Cool for School.
• Slate dissects the claim that 1.3 million people earn their living from eBay. It seems that 1.3 million people make a good amount from the site, but it's unlikely that eBay is the primary source of income for all these people.
• As much as this is a shameless plug of their services (done in an obvious way that I actually sort of like), I Am Ghostblogger writes about how our lives are moving further toward virtual interaction as things like gasoline petrol get more expensive. I don't know; even if cars ran on sunshine and jellybeans, I'd still spend lots of time on Twitter.
• Danny Sullivan takes a look at Microsoft's new "bribery" plan to have searchers use its engine for shopping purposes. Apparently, the experience is far from stellar.
• Dave Naylor lists a couple of very good reasons why you should nofollow your blog comments... namely, services that offer hundreds of "targeted" blog comments on do-follow blogs.
• It appears that Google won't allow ads for the term "link building", but it's fine with "linkbuilding" and several other similar terms. Sure enough, no ads show up for a search on "link building", although "linkbuilding" is fair game. Anyone from Google care explain?
• Neerav Bhatt covers Barry Smyth's (of SMX Sydney fame) CeBIT conference in Australia.
  

Four star links:

• Stephan Spencer from Netconcepts asks SEOs to join the campaign to have FreeTibet.org rank for the term "Olympics." Several SEOs have already joined the campaign to acknowledge some of the (real) ethical problems with the hosts of this year's Games.
• In a neat display of social networking and media, our new associates Distilled Twittered and... Flickred (?) their tool-and-team-building day at their offices in London. I'll link to their main blog; they started blogging their day early in the morning and ended late in the evening.
• Onward Search shows that SEO, quite at odds with the current state of the economy and even comparable marketing and IT occupations, continues to grow. Is SEO "recession proof?"
• Elizabeth Marsten at Portent Interactive provides a simple, easy-to-follow intro to how to set up a Google Product Feed.
• A short but stunning write-up of Macy's SEO and SEM efforts, Jonathan Mendez analysis of the retail giant's online presence is a good "how not to" guide for online marketing.
• Another Guardian article addresses why we're often afraid of things that will never happen, whilst we ignore real threats. Called the paradox of the false positive, we're virtually designed to fear terror attacks and city-crushing earthquakes but not a slew of common and devastating occurrences.
• Included as a four star link not only because of the author's name, "Jane" makes a brand time-line of her day. Incredibly simple and yet surprisingly interesting. I wish I'd thought of it!

• Rand and I were honoured to be asked our opinions (which we didn't collaborate on but which turned out to be quite similar) by Search Engine Marketing in the UK. Along with a number of other SEOs, we were asked if we thought recent developments show that Google is penalising for the use of nofollow on one's own site.
• RSS made fun and interactive! MSNBC provides a different way to look at its feed with Spectra.

YOUmoz entries:

• Email Marketing for Linkbait - It's the Distribution, Stupid: Gab investigates the viral possibilities of email campaigns, as opposed to "regular" linkbait attempts.
• My Year in SEO: rhaden provides an interesting story of her introduction to SEO. From wondering what on earth a sitemap was, she learned enough about SEO in one year to be able to provide support and advice to others.
• Why is Yahoo! Hiding Links from Google?: Richard Baxter sees some oddities with Yahoo!'s homepage whilst browsing as Googlebot and asks the community why Yahoo! would be doing this.
• Thinking of a Link Exchange? Target the Right Webmasters!: Konrad K looks at the most important things to consider when going to peers for links.
• Big Lin... I mean, Word Project: carfeu's short piece is a very entertaining look at a somewhat interesting scheme he read about in Wired...
• Shooting Yourself in the Foot: The Top 10 Dumbest Site Design Practices: webwordslinger runs through ten unfortunate site design flaws and inspires some heated discussion along the way.
• The Perfect Linkbait: LarsBachmann's piece inspired another heated discussion as to the nature of chain letters online and whether this particular linkbuilding technique is even legal.
• Windows Vista Performance Problems Solved: Get Ubuntu: Richard Baxter highlights a great video about switching to Ubuntu and making the most of the OS.

Best of YOUmoz:

• Bad Bots Confound Web Analytics By Executing Javascript Tags: jay5r looks at how bots are beginning to mimic human behaviour and the problems this can present.

New events added to the Events Calendar:

No new events added this week.

Upcoming events:

• SEO Training Class. May 23 online at highrankings.com/seo-classes
• Webanalytics Congres. May 29 in the Netherlands

New additions to the SEOmoz Marketplace:

Featured companies:

United States / North America

• Metter Advertising, Inc, in Coopersberg, PA
• LeonaGriffin.com in PA
• The Select Group in Raleigh, NC
• Magnolia Web Design in Marianna, FL

UK / Europe

• Idealis, in Spain
• Optimising in the UK
• Utopia Creative Solutions in London, UK

India

• Sansoft Technologies, Nagpur, MS, India

Featured job postings:

• Spur Digital is looking for a link building specialist. It is a full-time position, located in Houston, Texas.
• The Select Group is looking for a paid search specialist in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Thanks for getting through my first Thursday Round Up post! It is indeed more work that it appears to be, so please stop ignoring Rebecca's weekly efforts with this ;)