Google has long been known for having "10 blue links" and they have expanded far beyond that.
But even amongst the traditional listings there are lots of variations in how they are displayed.
Here is a regular result
with a second indented result
sometimes the second indented result can show inline sitelinks
traditional single listing with 2 indented results under it (and then sometimes a non-indented 4th listing)
traditional single listing with 3 or 4 inline sitelinks
sometimes that has a second indented listing as well
traditional single listing with 8 sublinks below it (and this often has the second intented results below it too. Full story...
A few years ago Google's chief economist Hal Varian explained that scale is over-rated:
We're very skeptical about the scale argument, as you might expect.
There are quite a few spy tools on the market currently, some more heavily promoted than others. They come in a variety of flavors such as SEO spy tools, PPC spy tools, and some which do both.
Compete takes pricing to a different level but has some unique features as well. They have a few different pricing levels but to get all the features you need to dial it up at $499 per month.
iSpionage is a newer player in the spy tool market. They are much more PPC oriented than organic SEO oriented.
Keyword Spy offers 3 different accounts.
Research Tracking ProfessionalThe countries available within a Keyword Spy account are:
No other competitor really comes close to the breadth of their country offerings.
SpyFu is one of the more feature rich tools, but probably has the least attractive interface out there.
Anywhere there is controversy you will find many marketers who will opine and try to shine the lights on themselves about how wonderful they are and how much they help everyone else and how everyone should link to them in the controversy.
Some people email you out of the blue accusing you of things that are not true while being rude and condescending.
When Transparency is Valuable
If you are selling a site which you just want to get rid of and lack passion for then there is nothing wrong with being fairly transparent and shopping it for the maximum amount you can get at an auction or such.
The landing page, in terms of SEO, went out of fashion.
Landing pages, which tended to be mass-generated, near identical pages pointing to one money page, became a target for the search engine spam filters.