Ken Lyons (from WordStream) dropped in to guest post on the Trail this week. He is highlighting their new tools and how it can be used to create a system to manage link text diversity. Pretty cool actually.... Give it a read!

Forget about the recent reports on most-searched terms and Twitter trending topics. As Symantec just released a more controversial top searches report for 2009. And this time while YouTube, Google and Facebook are the most-searched topics among teens, and so is Sex.

It is an amazing discovery when you’ve been using a site for more than a year and then come across some new, unexpectedly genius way to take advantage of it. This happened with Twitter to me: I found a new awesome way to make the most of its feature called "Favorites" (do you use it?).

Some patents from the search engines provide detailed looks at how those search engines might perform some of the core functions behind how they work. By “core functions,” I mean some of the basics such as crawling pages, indexing those pages, and displaying the results to searchers.

If you search for “pizza,” or “movie times,” or “division of motor vehicles,” there’s a chance that you might want to find information about where to get pizza near you, or to find what films that local movie theatres or showing, or find out more about driver’s licenses in your area. This is true even if you don’t include a specific location with your search.

I was lucky enough to catch a tweet on Twitter from Kami Watson Huyse of the Communication Overtones blog, which led me to an interesting piece on the Trustworthy blog written by Kirk Skodis.

I had the good fortune of sitting in on Debra Mastaler's link building presentation at SES Chicago last week. Mastaler is commonly regarded as one of the primary thought leaders in link building. Her presentation didn't disappoint.

Articles from the December issue of SES Magazine are up on ClickZ. This practical advice from search and online marketing practitioners can be found in articles from the most recent issue of SES Magazine; these articles and more have been published at ClickZ.

A WebmasterWorld thread has new discussion around the topic of pay-per-click (PPC) bidding wars. A PPC bidding war is when two or more advertisers want to out bid each other in the search ads in order to either deplete the funds of the competition or to secure a certain position in the search results.

An early WebmasterWorld thread is discussing the topic of Google One Box "blindness." Google One Boxes are those enhanced results you see at the top or within the search results of Google. When they first came out, there were hard to miss, but now SEOs and maybe some searchers are subconsciously blocking them out, like they would ads?