It's hard for me to believe, but a year has passed since I wrote the column Welcome To The Summer Of Search. That piece was one of my all-time favorites to write. In it I looked forward to another summer spent in the trenches of the search industry, while reflecting on day one of the SMX Advanced conference I was attending. A year later and here I am again, back to the grindstone after a week spent with industry colleagues at SMX in (chilly) Seattle.

Last week, I explored the dark recesses of the hyper-secret Google X project. Two X Projects in particular seem poised to change our world in very fundamental ways: Google's Project Glass and the "Web of Things."

If you're a Google Website Optimizer user like me, you likely received an email last week indicating that the free Google testing tool was being discontinued. While at first I was disappointed by this announcement, reading further, Google said it would be integrating testing functionality directly into Google Analytics. For those of us who have used Google Website Optimizer for many years, the change may seem challenging.But there are two main benefits I already see from the new system.

Following Google's "Penguin" algorithm update in late April, many SEOs have been debating the possibility of a practice called "negative SEO," whereby one SEO could hurt another's websites by intentionally pointing unnatural, "spammy" backlinks to their sites. Unnatural link activity includes links offered via paid inclusion directories and "link farms"; others have even suggested that anchor text diversity may trigger a Penguin penalty too.

Retailers, more than most marketers, have a wealth of data and information at their fingertips. Retailers also have more product, geographical, and inventory diversity than marketers in other industries. Thus, being able to leverage all data is crucial. By leveraging your data across all aspects of paid search optimization you can do some amazing things.