I have been contacted by an AOL source who has just informed me that AOL is just about to close a deal whereby they will take possession of Social networking site Bebo with their 40 million worldwide memberships!

AOL plan to reclaim their leading position in social media which will help their overall online strategic position. AOL value Bebo as a “true pioneer of the social web” as it’s the leading social network in the UK, as well as being ranked No. 1 in Ireland and New Zealand and No. 3 in the US. They plan to enlarge their current visibility to a staggering 80 million unique users worldwide which few other social networks can reach.

This move by AOL is a rapid international expansion and will surely make the other major players in the industry take notice.

Remember you heard it here first!

• I did get this info before the official release by email
• The total price is around $850 million dollars

I was randomly searching the web yesterday when I stumbled across a search box within Google’s search results.

Initially I thought it was a direct search function within the site but after testing it just searches the indexed pages that contain the searched keyword(s).

This function can be performed by any site by typing the following code into Google:

KEYWORD site: yourdomain.com

Other related posts on this topic:

• Search box in search results
• First search box

I want to take this opportunity to say I recently attended a social event after one of the days at SES London 2008 – minding my own business chatting away to fellow SEO enthusiasts I noticed a guy (Mr X) standing rather close to me at the bar – in a patronizing tone he “wanted to get to the bar“. No please, no thank you just annoyance that I was slowing down his drinking ability.

Through the night I saw this guy sucking up to the Google and MSN representatives (that looked utterly bored with Mr X) as he proceeded to tell them how to do their jobs and how great he was. One of my friends proceeded to tell me that Mr X was infact head of SEO for a well known Online Casino company. This information immediately clicked in to place as to why this guy had been swanning around for the last 3 hours believing he was only one step away from the big man himself.

Back to my point, I was by no means stalking Mr X – please bare this in mind! Outside I heard him boasting to some other disinterested people how he only used “Blackhat all the way” to get the “best results“. I did at that point want to “whitehat “his ass fairly sharpish.

Instead I found out what the exact URL was and started my analysis of the site (the next day). The site had keyword stuffing all over the place, their backlinks were so obviously all paid for, the anchor text did not change at all – 100% one phrase and where was this douche ranking? Well 2nd of course (grrr), as many of us bloggers and site owners keep receiving penalties from Google for the occasional “suspicious” link or two – sites that must make hundreds of millions of pounds can get away with it by the looks of it (old news I know)!

I’m not blaming Google but when the evidence against a site looks so obvious, why doesn’t Google do something about it?

Anyway, not to be outdone by Mr X, his site has been reported for every Blackhat evidence I could find – bit “snitchy” I know but all this could have been avoided by saying one word – “please”. Google get to work PLEASE!