Google Test Lab For Experimenting With Google's Rankings

Rand Fishkin, the co-founder of Moz, announced on his personal blog a new thing he is playing with he named IMEC, aka Internet Marketing Experimental Collective.

The goal is to increase the number of people experimenting with Google's search results, so they can give more validity to the experiments they run. Rand said, "The goal is to assemble a group of marketers who care about producing high-quality, consistent, repeatable experiments in search engines and on social media to learn more about how these platforms work."

Here is an example of an experiment one would run:

A Google Update Brewing?

The ongoing WebmasterWorld thread has been pretty active with webmaster chatter since Sunday, when I went offline for two days.

It also appears that the automated tracking tools are seeing nice spikes over the past couple of days including Mozcast, SERPs.com and SERP Metrics. Although algoroo doesn't seem to agree.

Google's Matt Cutts On How To Buy Domain Names

Google's Matt Cutts posted a video on the question How can I research a domain that I may want to purchase?

Matt Cutts gave a few tips on what to do, what steps to take, when researching a domain name buy.