In addition to today’s Internet Marketing Monitor coverage, we felt these stories were worth pulling out of the multitude of news items for May 21, 2007:

Bad Neighborhood makeover and new SEO tools [SEO Scoop]

I just love a good mystery. Bad Neighborhood, which provides several handy SEO tools already, has been remodeled. But of course… that’s not the mystery I’m referring to. According to SEO Scoop, the site is getting ready to roll out a “plethora of new tools”. But we can’t know what they are just yet. It should be interesting to see what they’ve come up with over there. The Link Checker tool alone is pretty cool and SEO Scoop says the new tools “rock”. Keep your eyes peeled. Oh… and props on the use of the word “plethora”. I love that word ;)

Yahoo! Caught Cloaking. Will They Ban Themselves? [agerhart.com - via Threadwatch]

Cloaking is one of those dirty practices that search engine gamers, or SEGs, use to try to fool search engines. It involves hiding parts of a site from search engines or users. In this case, Yahoo is hiding a keyword-stuffed version of one of it’s autos pages from people… but showing it to the search engine. By browsing the site using the user-agent string for Yahoo!’s own Slurp crawler the cloaked version of the page was discovered. Tsk, tsk, tsk, Yahoo. Breaking your own rules! What… do you want your page to rank well for “used cars” or something? Screen shots reveal the treachery. But I can’t say I’m surprised. Yahoo wants to rank well in Google just like everyone else. Haha.

Neighborhood Search Capability [Google LatLong]

If you’re trying to locate or map destinations in well-known neighborhoods around the United States - like the Upper East Side in NY - Google Maps will now recognize those neighborhoods by name. Big G says 50 US cities are currently mappable by neighborhood and more are coming. This should be handy for quickly refining a search to specific areas.

I intentionally avoided all the rumor-mongering going on today. But suffice it to say… today was the day of rumors (Google… Yahoo… everyone’s playing the rumor mill game today). Should any of it be substantiated… you’ll hear about it here. You don’t care about rumors anyway, do you?