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For smaller markets especially, this can be infuriating. I would recommend looking at the recent changes and trajectories in markets like Italy, Spain and Portugal that have had these problems but where Google is gradually focussing effort. I think a lot depends on your timescales, but if you are building a business that you want to last, you should be using sustainable tactics IMO.

I linked to a couple of resources over on distilled some time ago:

http://www.distilled.net/blog/ppc/combining-search-and-display-advertising/

Are any of those what you are looking for? Microsoft research is generally pretty powerful in this area.

There's been a lot of controversy back and forth on this. I have definitely seen sites get hurt by link profiles that competitors could have built (sadly, often it was the company itself). However - I have only seen this for pretty weak sites (as others have said). I have not yet seen a case where a strong site with a natural link profile got hurt by competitors. I wouldn't spend an awful lot of time worrying about it.

I'm amazed that the acronym has spread as far as it has. I see it actually being used all the time. Quite amazing really.

As Hannah mentioned, we have a bunch of internal memes at Distilled which are similar to a bunch of the principles behind TAGFEE. If you're interested in how we embed this stuff in our culture, you might like to read this post Tom wrote about how changing culture with language: http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/40478/Startup-Culture-Memes-Do-You-Have-A-Duck-Of-Awesomeness.aspx

Thanks for checking this out and not just taking it at face value guys. I have to admit I didn't test it in detail. It seemed plausible because GA is generally last touch, but I'm glad to see someone testing it. I have updated the post.

So they clearly have ways of detecting bounces across a variety of methods (return to SERP, GA, toolbar). I have seen no evidence that they use this directly as a ranking factor. It seems pretty noisy / easily gamed and also not desperately well-correlated with quality (as sometimes if you are just looking for a phone number for example, a bounce is the desired behaviour).

I think they are using usage data of a variety of kinds to measure and improve the algo, but I'm not convinced it factors in directly from bounce rate itself.

Hope that helps.

Hi Francesco,

I can't see why this is happening, but I'm going to fire it over to the customer services guys to take a look. Sorry the response is slow in coming - I'm still getting used to the new Q&A system.

Searchcap is what you're looking for - feed version gives me a daily update of stuff to read: http://searchengineland.com/feeds