I was recently reading an article on search engine land that was discussing a way to check to see if Google has penalized a domain. Basically, by adding the word “hyves” as a sub-domain to your site, and checking the PR, it would come back with a code that told you if it had been penalized. While that’s a great thing to be able to do, what’s really interesting is that, this sparked a pretty involved discussion in the forums and comments.

People were trying different domains, analyzing the results, comparing notes, and the discourse went on and on. Well skip ahead a few days, and guess what? All of a sudden that technique didn’t work anymore. You would think that Google would be pretty busy with cutting out huge chunks of services, their new personalized search results experiment, and launching a news service in Singapore, but obviously Google pays attention to these forums, and sites that talk about search engine marketing, and quietly turned that feature off.

So my point is this, things can change very quickly in the search engine marketing world. Techniques that work today, might not work next week. Only by actively staying abreast of news, SEO discussions, and the general feel in the SEO world, can you hope to improve and maintain your search engine marketing campaigns.