On the bill this week we have the latest news announcement from Yahoo, link buying advice from SEOMoz, some great advice on how to get Wikipedia out of your way and Googles first steps into voice recognition based search.

We also have a nice overview of PubCon 2008 from Michael Gray that you would do well to read after this.

Time (as well as many other sources) reported this week that Jerry Yang, long time CEO of Yahoo is stepping down. He co-founded the company 13 years ago and yahoo has certainly seen some ups and downs in that time. It’s currently in one of it’s weakest positions but the search engine is still one of the most popular in the world and remains tight lipped about where it will go next.

This may be a big deal in the future as Yang was allegedly one of the big players in initially turning down Microsoft’s buyout offer. With Yang stepping down maybe Microsoft will re-open the deal or even Google, the new year will be a very interesting time for Yahoo as a company and the search engine market.

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SEOMoz put a great blog post up this week based on a PubCon talk relating to link buying.

While some of the ideas may be slightly out of reach for us as smaller affiliate marketers it certainly won’t hurt to see what Rand has to say, maybe some of the techniques will instantly appeal to you but its going to be a personal difference thing.

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Blue Hat SEO threw up a great post about how to combat Wikipedia when it is outranking you in the SERPs. As always with the Blue Hat SERO Blog, Eli posts and ideas are often quite compl;ex and rewarding but they do sometimes stray from the White Hat Path.

Employ them at your own risk but do so after reading the whole post and researching what it means, a lot of the time tactics aren’t black hat they are just not white hat, there is a difference.

Being able to overpower Wikipedia is great and in many affiliate verticals so definitely give it a read.

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Finally if you like you SEO served with a side of gadget you’ll love this.

Google have now revealed their new iPhone app that runs searches based on voice recognition. I am going to link you to the Matt Cutts’ review of the technology instead of Google official post because the explanation is much better.

So apart from being cool what does voice recognition on the iPhone have to do with SEO and affiliate marketing?

Because it is the start of a new technology. Voice recognition has been creeping into computing for decades now to the point where XP and Vista actually have the functionality but it is rarely used. If this tech gets more and more accurate it will become more and more popular until it is the primary UI.

Once this happens we will see a HUGE change in search behaviour. I am sure there are crazy essays out there by Doctors of various field analyzing this possibility but from my opinion we would have two major things to be keep an eye on;

1)    Less people will actually search.

Why? Because a whole bunch of people only use search engines because they are unsure of the official source of something, while this is not really a huge concern for affiliate marketing as it is generally a retail or reference search it still means less people to catch with PPC and craft organic rankings.

If some one could just say “visit official Lego site” the browser would just go. No search needed.

2)    More long tail stuff.

People are lazy, typing is hard work compared to speaking, I predict we would see a lot more longer tailed searches, “2008 Man United Football kit” instead of “Man u kit” its common sense people would refine their searches with less effort.

Watch out for slang appearing more too!

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Finally we have a great overview on PubCon from Michael Gray, check his post out at your leisure unless of course you were lucky enough to attend!

It was defiantly another big year for the conference with a lot of major new ideas coming up so be sure not to miss out on them.