SEO daily links: volume queries' effect, handling spam review, Bing's future, site quality for link building

Minor learning of the day: you cannot change your  YouTube username.
Medium learning of the day: Latest version of Google Chrome can prerender a page if it is coded correctly. This means that after a page loaded a next page can start loading in the background. Useful when there is a predefined or frequently used sequence of pages.
Major learning of the day: You can submit the URL of a single webpage for reindexing if you really want. Learned it from the official Google Webmaster blog via Search Engine Land.
August 3

• Martin Macdonald shared the thinking, methodology and results of his experiment whether large volumes of searches can influence Google ranking and suggestions.
  He was a bit shaky on how he generated the volume of queries needed to achieve his goal, but the rest was interesting. My impression was though that other methods are more white hat and effective than this one.
• Mike Blumenthals outlined his thoughts on how to respond when a competitor posts a spam/negative review on Google places for you.
  Rather timely post as we were preparing for the same possibility too. Now that Google Places is displaying their own reviews more prominently and other sites’ review not at all I suspect this issue will gain importance and possibly notoriety.

August 2

• Greg Sterling tried to figure out how long Bing is thinking ahead.
  The post was prompted by a New York Times article exploring similar questions. Both went beyond the attitude of “Google rules, why does Bing bother at all” and shed some light on how and when Bing may gain a bigger marketshare.
  
• Mike Bluementhal noticed a few changes in Google Places Quality Guidelines.
  He confirmed that Google is still using submitted data not displayed. Good reminder to keep filling everything we can in the forms in the hope that it helps ranking.
  
• Julie Joyce collected 5 Metrics To Quickly Assess Site Quality When Link Building: Crawl Frequency, Origin Of The Domain, Quality Content, Online Sentiment, Social Media Presence.
  These are all god and somewhat evident, but it made up a nice little piece combined with the rehash of more traditional criteria: Number of backlinks to home page, Number of backlinks to other pages on the site, Home page and subpage toolbar PR, Quality of backlinks, Moz Rank.