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Here are the latest numbers:
Search Engine Blog.com - Search Engine Marketing News, Views & Rants: Top Search Engines in September

It seems that Martha Stewart’s Apprentice show as an optimizer in its midst. That might help continue to push the awareness scale a bit.
Search Marketer A Candidate On The Apprentice

This topic doesn’t overly excite me in that I am not usually a big conspiracy theorist when it comes to the engines doing some highly covert manipulation of their listings. I think we give all large organizations too much credit when we suspect them of being able to do something so coniving and spectacular as to be able to control our lives to such an extent as some would like to believe.

There’s probably not some big “hijacking” of Yahoo listings going on, as Danny Sullivan points out below. But what’s interesting is what he points out here:

As for the ranking, paid inclusion URLs are given a quality score checkoff, and that can help with rankings. Some non-paid inclusion URLs are also given it, but that’s more random. The checkoff for any site isn’t a guarantee, but it can help. All the more reason why people may want to do paid inclusion at Yahoo — or all the more reason Yahoo might want to elminated that, because of the trust issues involved.

Paid Inclusion Making Yahoo Results Seem Hijacked?

Don’t write off paid inclusion. It can be a handy way to get good ranking at Yahoo.

Here are some of the more interesting numbers:

• Advertisers spent $5.8 billion to place ads online this year
  • a 26 percent increase compared with the first six months of 2004
• Spending on search-related ads reached $2.3 billion
  • a 27 percent increase compared with the same period last year
• Search ads accounted for 40 percent of Internet ad sales, in line with last year
• Advertisers spent nearly $3 billion online in the second quarter alone
  • 26 percent increase over the same period last year
• Online ads that incorporate streaming video or audio accounted for just 8 percent of online ad revenue in the first half of the year
  • but are among the fastest-growing segments

  • Spending on these “rich media” ads grew 26 percent

  Internet ad revenue climbs 26 percent | Tech News on ZDNet

This is very interesting. This site draws a map of a specified zip code on top of a Google Maps area. It must take people who organize that sort of thing a lot of effort to lay out zip codes the way they do.
Click for a zip code picture

This is an interesting topic for me. The position and the message of the optimizer is really lowsy. Search engine optimization, as this article finds, is a better performer than pay per click. But it doesn’t matter. People prefer ppc because it’s easier… and, I think, because they feel like they are paying for something that they don’t really know will work or not.

For those new to the search engine marketing space, it would seem logical to conclude that based on the vast number of marketers participating in PPC advertising that it would be a more lucrative channel than search engine optimization, which is known to involve a lot of work,? says Murray. ?But the numbers speak for themselves.

InternetRetailer.com - Daily News for Wednesday, September 14, 2005

“MarketingSherpa cites Merrill Lynch data that the U.S. total SEO spending rose 177 percent over the last 12 months. The study projects the growth will continue, but at a slower pace.”

It continues to be a good time to be in Search Engine Marketing
SEM Sees Optimization PPC

Alright folks, this is how it’s all going to go down. Matt is giving the details as what to expect if Google has found that you triggered a spam penalty:
Matt Cutts: - The Google Spam Penalty Aler

Well look at this, SageRock is only one month younger than iProspect.
I knew I felt a kindred spirit with those guys.

Domain Back Links Domain Age
http://www.sagerock.com 8,420 20-nov-1999
http://www.iprospect.com 14,600 19-oct-1999
http://www.oneupweb.com 3,980 27-oct-1998
http://www.bruceclay.com 117,000 24-jan-1997

I’ve become quite a fan of Jim Boykin’s blog. He’s got some really good insight.

Check out these two tools put out by webuildwebpages.com. They are Age and Links Analysis Tools. Jim has a theory that the age of a site plays a bigger role in coming to the top of the engines than people might have previously thought.

These two tools make checking that really easy:
Jim?s SEO Thoughts - New Age of Website SEO Tools