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What a great weekend that was, I did almost nothing online compared to what I chew through on a weekday and now I feel really refreshed and ready to jump in to this week's work. We had a new piece of furniture delivered on Saturday afternoon and for some reason that seemed to spur both Steve and me on to clean up our offices. Isn't it strange how one thing can sometimes lead to another?

Sometimes though it does pay to follow those impulses that you might get from time to time because, even though you may never quite know where they're going to lead you, there are times when your subconscious knows exactly what you need to do to make money. So don't be afraid to experiment and see what's actually behind that nagging itch in the back of your mind.

Apart from tidying up my office I also caught up on some of my reading and I was interested to see that one of the leading search engine marketers on the planet was beginning to look at whether or not good search engine placement was all about on-page factors anymore.

Mike Grehan is suggesting that there are some interesting things happening and very few people in SEO and search engine marketing have yet noticed what's those interesting things might be. Among those 'interesting things' is the way some search engines seem to be picking up on what's popular with people in places other than search engines and how that might be influencing what appears in the search engine results pages. It seems that the changes have been so significant that Mike has ditched plans to rewrite the book on search he first published in 2001 and produce an entirely new book instead.

Even at a local level Mike suggests it may be that links and on-page factors are becoming less important although that's not something that Steve and I have found to be the case just yet.

Cloaking and Paid Links
Now there are two search engine terms that are almost guaranteed to give many search engine marketers nightmares. There's nothing quite like some taboo terms to unsettle people in this industry and those are two of the terms that are guaranteed to be very unsettling.

And they should be unsettling too because Google has been known to severely punish sites that engage in either ... or both ... of those practices. However, not all search engines look at cloaking and paid links in quite the same way. It seems that MSN Live is not quite so harsh with sites that it finds are cloaking as Google is and paid links don't necessarily get MSN Live's panties in a bunch like they do with Google.

It seems that while MSN Live doesn't encourage people to engage in cloaking or paid links they're not entirely forbidden either. A spokesman for MSN Live suggested that paid links sometimes do have some value for the end user and that MSN Live reserves the right to treat them as valuable ... just not quite as valuable as an organic link.

MSN Live doesn't encourage cloaking either but, unlike Google, they do see areas where cloaking may be appropriate. However, I wouldn't rush in to start cloaking my sites for MSN Live just yet; with Google holding at about 62% of all searches it's easy to see that MSN Live is probably not going to send you enough traffic to make you rich.

The interview I saw with the MSN Live spokesman was interesting on another level too. In talking about cloaking he suggested that one valid reason for cloaking was if a site needed to be heavy with Flash for its entertainment value and yet still needed to rank well in the search engines. He singled out the Nike site as an example of a site that cloaked for that very reason.

Now pause for a moment and think about what Google says about cloaking ... got all that negativity and punishment for sites that cloak firmly set in your mind? Now I bet that if MSN Live knows that Nike cloaks then Google has to know too ... so why is Google still indexing the Nike site if they're so dead-set against cloaking?

To paraphrase George Orwell's Animal Farm, all webmasters and websites are equal but some are more equal than others.

Once you understand which way is up in the world of search you've taken your first steps along the path towards making money as a search engine marketer and all you have to do is learn how to make more money that those who are more equal in the eyes of Google than you are.