As blackouts roll across the web this week, some sites opposed to SOPA/PIPA legislation have kept the lights on in order to maintain their search engine rankings. As one of many tech sites to openly protest the bills facing Congress that would censor the web, Google first offered advice to webmasters on how to close or limit access to their sites without medium-term effects. Now taking it a step further, Google has slowed their web crawlers in an effort to support sites eager to participate in the online demonstration.

Google’s Pierre Far posted instructions on Google+ detailing how to update your site to join the protest of these bills. One such way is using a 503 HTTP status, telling spiders that the site is only temporarily unavailable. By using this code, the content is not designated as “real,” and will not be indexed. Googlebot’s crawlers are automatically slowed when there is a significant spike in 503 statuses. Paired with the manual configuration on Google’s end to reduce the crawl rate, more sites will be protected.

Mr. Far later emphasizes the importance of not altering the robots.txt file on your site  to block any crawlers, as this could affect the recovery of the crawl rate post-blackout. By keeping it simple and avoiding any drastic changes in coding, websites can be involved without severely adverse effects.

Craigslist, Wikipedia, and Reddit are among the list of prominent sites behind the massive social media effort protesting the proposed censorship of Internet data and policing by the Department of Justice. While Bing and Yahoo have not expressed any involvement, search results on these sites may still be influenced.

What do you think of Google’s actions in protest of these bills?

ComScore reported December 2011 U.S. search engine rankings this past week with, to no surprise, Google still in the lead. On a more noteworthy finding is Bing surpassing Yahoo, coming in at the number two spot. When Bing launched as a search engine in June 2009, they were at a mere 8.4 percent search engine market share. As of this past year they now account for 15.1 percent of internet searches.

Google still dominates the market with 65.9 percent market share, and Yahoo dropped to the number three spot at 14.5 percent.

The reported search engine rankings for December 2011, according to comScore, are stated below:

• Google – 65.9% (up from 65.4% in November 2011)
• Bing – 15.1% (+.1 change from November)
• Yahoo – 14.5% (down from 15.1%)
• Ask – remaining at 2.9%
• AOL – remaining at 1.6%

More than 18.2 billion explicit core searches were conducted in December, which is a two percent increase from November. 12 billion searches were placed on Google sites, 2.7 billion were through Bing (up 2 percent), and 2.6 billion on Yahoo! Sites. We are anxious to see if Bing will remain in the number two spot in following months, and maybe even further the gap with Yahoo searches.

Google’s latest tool  involves revamping the search algorithm to allow for a search, verbatim. A normal search on Google will auto correct misspelled words, and substitute synonyms (for example, automobiles to cars), but Google Verbatim will do neither. This will allow for you to search for your exact terms without all the fluff.

“We’ve been listening, and starting today you’ll be able to do just that through verbatim search. With the verbatim tool on, we’ll use the literal words you entered,” says Google.

The Google Verbatim search tool will be located under the “more search tools” on the left side of the Google search results page. Check it out!

It is no surprise that Internet Marketing will continue to grow and start taking additional budget dollars away from traditional marketing. It is surprising by how much the current market is expected to grow in size over the next few years. Check out this chart below. Overall Interactive budgets will soar to above $55 Billion. The Internet Marketing Agencies will continue to take business from traditional agencies as online begins to rule the advertising world.

According to our friends at Blogstorm and Forrester Research, a lot of companies are still not taking advantage of organic SEO. In fact, many companies spend 20 times as much on PPC over SEO even though SEO drives 75% of the traffic.  This will begin to change as more companies realize the benefits of organic SEO.

SEO drives 75%+ of all search traffic, yet garners less than 15% of marketing budgets for SEM campaigns. PPC receives less than 25% of all search traffic, yet earns 80%+ of SEM campaign budgets.