I would like to apologize for the delay in the coming out with the Search Engine Roundtable review for the last 15 days in May. It has been a real busy month, but late is better then never. Here is the Roundtable review for May 15th through the 31st.

Lets start with Gmail related discussion, where a funny but sophisticated cartoon was draw up to illustrate the desire people have to get a Gmail invite. In fact, people were able to lookup gmail usernames and then go to the gmail swap portal to try to get their desired gmail account. Google has been busy, on the 31st they had the long awaited backlink update, Google’s AdWords department launched the AdWords Jumpstart program, and they took the time to block this nifty site named Proogle.

There was also recent technical news and theories that were brewing in the forums in regards to Google. The Hyphen Filter was suggested but ultimately disproved, for now at least. Then came something I named the Network Filter where Google looks at the cross linking between sites within the same IP block. After that we discussed the Country Specific Filter, which in fact is all so true. There was a lot of discussion on a pattern seen across large Web sites that were taking a hit in Google, but isolating the reason behind this loss in rankings was no easy task. So what solutions were discussed for these filters and problems that came about? Well, several were discussed; including the use of cloaking, traiangular linking strategies, fueling pagerank before launching a Web site and getting your site into Google News, your company listed in Google Stock Quotes or by getting into Google’s Secret Directory.

Alright, enough about Google, lets talk more about the industry as a whole. In late May, I used my reach (lol, this site) to ask the search engine industry to publish some sort of acceptable cloaking usage policy, this was in response to the recent research conducted by Ben Edelman and Google stepping up with their Software Principles. On more of a competitive note, lets discuss some of the lawsuits and competitive events that took place. We had this hilarious Nigritude Ultramarine contest where we even found sites ranking number one in Froogle for this term. Dan Thies pointed out that these wise SEOs were painting a bulls-eye on their foreheads asking the competition and Google to look at how I am tricking you. Yahoo’s customers in late May began to lose patience with Yahoo and Google was sued by Geico for trademark infringement. So what can one do to gain the competitive edge? One answer is to offer great incentives to your employees.

Let’s see, Yahoo! released a new design for their homepage, or at least some people can see this beta design. Yahoo is having a real tough time with 301 redirects, which is forcing Yahoo! representatives to tell SEOs to create doorway pages to solve the problem. And DigitalPoint found MSN is secretly previewing its search technology.

To conclude, lets touch on some general search engine marketing topics. One that hit home for me is from my own blog, where I decided to take customer service into my own hands. We had an interactive review of some of the best SEO books on the market. And now that your a search engine expert, what should you do with all that traffic?