After the news of Michael Jackson’s untimely death. It has surprised me people are so quick to cash in on the event. Google trends hasn’t quite caught up with this yet looking earlier this morning for Michael Jackson searches there was no spike on the 30-day chart. Tomorrow maybe we will see the spike.

However there is already a web-site which has many jokes that are specifically about his death with Adsense advertising in place (http://www.deadmichaeljacksonjokes.com/). I am not a fan of his but it is still quite distasteful.
Update. On Monday, 29th, the Google trends dwaft the previous data with is not surprising.

Following on from the revelations that nofollow will no longer work for sculpting PageRank, there is a post on Matt Cutts’ blog explaining the issue. It is not the information that it will no longer work that is surprising, more the revelation that it has been this way for more than a year!
….when you have a page with “ten PageRank points” and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Let’s leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question. Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.
One of the nightmares for any website owner is to find that their site has been removed from Google’s search results or they have been heavily penalised. When this happens it means that they have most likely strayed from the Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
The method for reinclusion is the same as it has always been, fix your site to make sure that it complies with the Google’s guidelines. However, now you will receive an email notification saying that they will review your website.
Subject: We’ve processed your reconsideration request for [example.com]
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider how we index the following site: [example.com].
We’ve now reviewed your site. When we review a site, we check to see if it’s in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines. If we don’t find any problems, we’ll reconsider our indexing of your site. If your site still doesn’t appear in our search results, check our Help Center for steps you can take.
This is might not seem significant change to their policy, but before you did not receive anything. You had to hope for the best. At least this is an acknowledgement that they will actually look at your site and review it.
Darwin went on Galapagos tours to see the effects of evolution on finches on its many islands. SEO is a battle for survival. Search engines are the environment for the results and search engine optimisation specialists create websites that adapt to the search environment exploiting every niche. If your website appears in a good position there is a good chance that your company can generate enough revenue to keep on in business. Websites that don’t have to find other ways to compete.
If the environment changes then your website must adapt to survive. We are seeing the demise of black-hat SEO because the search environment has changed. Search engine are getting better at finding sites that use inappropriate optimisation techniques such as link-farms, content theft. Black-hat SEO has to find more extreme techniques to work making it something that many sites would not find acceptable.
Such techniques are also more vulnerable to collapsing due to changes in the search engine’s algorithms. If you are interested in long-term survival then it is better to look at ethical SEO and grow your site into maturity. Trust factors are more important in the overall strategy and these can be built only over time.