It's a question that's been bugging me profoundly since I got into blogging over a year ago. Blogs are cheap, easy, efficient, wildly easy to find on the Net, super marketing-friendly, and just plain fun. They work rings around websites. So are conventional websites no longer necessary?

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Would you believe that about a third of blogs are spam? At least those are the numbers for Wordpress, according to Matt Mullenweg, the blogging platform's founder. But think about how many spam blogs there are out there. You'll find them in pingbacks, search results, and linking through spam comments. Is it hard to believe that about a third of blogs out there really are spam?

Should your company offer an API for outside developers to build on? Should you engage in one of the fast growing developer platforms or with another company's API? There's a world of options opening up to leverage cross-site functionality and data exchange, but there are also some serious questions to ask about this emerging paradigm. [img: Flickr Mashups by David Wilkinson]

Is having a dedicated IP address critical for achieving great Google rankings and if an IP address is shared among many sites, is the PageRank for each site diluted?

This is, believe it or not, still a very common question in the SEO world, despite the search engines addressing these concerns. Over at DigitalPoint a reader asks:

I quite often look at my blog statistics to see who visit my blog, where they came from and which posts are popular. Lately I've been particularly interested in the keywords people use in search engines and where these keywords lead them. While you could definitely call me blog statistics addict and argue that the time checking stats could be spend more productive there are reasons why checking stats is good for you. They may serve as an inspiration for new blog posts.

Recently Google's Kevin Marks was interviewed by cNet, where he said:

OK, stop and think about your application. Do you really need to be a standalone site? Do you really want to write user registration code, or would you be better off taking your application and bringing these other sites where there are lots of users already and where they have already expressed both their personal information and their connections to other people?

I'm going through the process of losing some weight. It's been one of those things which I have needed to do for 10 years or so, made especially worse by the fact I work in front of a computer and don't play any sport. I have managed to lost 12kg (26 pounds) so far, which isn't a bad start, but I have a lot further to go.

This post was guest blogged by Alan Johnson, who teaches you how to build a profitable website in 10 days over at The Rating Blog

After having covered the top 7 reasons why I may forget about your website with my previous guest post, it's time to analyze things from an entirely different perspective and look into the top 7 reasons thanks to which I may just remember what your website is all about:

In the winter edition of Search Marketing Standard on the plane this week, they had an interesting survey that Prospero  released last year about how companies measure ROI from their social marketing efforts.

The one thing that stands out from the survey is that most businesses as this point in time do not know how to measure the effectiveness of their social media efforts. Asked about social media return on investment (ROI), 35% reported positive ROI and 41% said that ROI was "unknown."

Posted by randfish

If you search enough at Google, you're bound to end up with some strange results, but as search marketers, we're often able to take a closer look and understand why something is ranking or appearing where it is. However... even I was stumped, surprised or just tickled to see some of the results below: