If you are launching new sites for clients, make sure you set the expectation that it is likely to be 7-8 months before the site achieves any real results in Google.

Due to the search engine optimisation tricks employed by the SEO industry, Google is more reticent about adding new sites correctly.

I've certainly seen this lately, brand new sites are there, but only show for obscure searches, I cannot confirm that it takes 7-8 months to index correctly. I can confirm that I have been banging my head trying to get such sites to appear in the expected results.

"The Long Tail comprises the almost infinite variety of human interests and desires that mainstream offerings cannot fully satisfy.'"

At least this is one of the many definitions. This page is good. Very good. I'm going to spend a lot of time here. There's even a wikipedia page.

There's a lot of comment and speculation about the possible Google's comment spam solution, if indeed that's their solution. I'll implement it on my hosted blogs—of course, and it'll be transparent to the user.

However, I wonder at it's effectiveness. Sure, it takes the incentive away, but will this be enough to stop comment spam? There's the point about getting other search engines to do the same, getting all blog technologies and individual blogs to incorporate the feature... Maybe the incentive to comment spam will disappear over time? I wonder how long that will be.

My problem, currently, is with referer spam, though we tell Google not to look at the referer page, still they spam. Their reason, "if I spam a million sites a day, and a handful of links actually increase my Google Page Rank, that has to be worth it, since it cost next to nothing to do, and pays in better search listings."