The week of April 1st, or better known as April Fools Day, has put some smiles on the faces of some of the SEM enthusiasts. Rumors spread that MSN was to buy Google, but according to Andy Beal time was running out. The launch of GMail - Google’s Email Service was thought of to be a April Fool’s hoax, but we soon found out that the email service was real, it was the privacy concerns that was a laughing matter.

On a more serious note, there were some serious posts during the past week at the Search Engine Roundtable. One of these posts was highlighting Ammon Jones’s first post at the Peabody Blog. We also did cover some linking matters at IHelpYou forum.

Google announced an AdSense Update, which got some people talking over at the forums. In addition, Overture and Google decided to drop gambling sites from its AdWords program. Speaking of AdSense, DigitalPoint released a new AdSense graphing tool to help you visualize your AdSense efforts. Which reminded me about the post on how Google is now allowing some companies to use the Google API for commercial reasons. So is that the only reason why Google needs to keep quiet? Or is it because more and more people are finding Orkut to be less helpful then useful? Or it might be because of all the lawsuits that Google either directly or indirectly causes. Either way, the week can be summed up by Dan’s humorous but thoughtful post named Straw Man SEO.