This is the Link Report for August 25th through August 26th:

Please feel free to post your thoughts in the comment section below

To see all of our links please visit our Delicious page at Delicious.com/goldsteinmedia

• Google Now Using You To Provide Traffic Data To Maps – Google is now using location-enabled mobile phones that have Maps for mobile installed to improve its real-time traffic data.
• Bing Continues With Fake Referrers: What Part Of Stop Don’t They Understand? – Among Microsoft's search identity crisis one thing has been consistent, their bot's have been sending fake referrals to Websites. Read More.
• My Favorite Link Building Lie – While it is pointless to seek links (via email or any other method) for crappy content from other sites with equally crappy content, link building via email does in fact work perfectly – but only under one perfectly obvious and sadly overlooked circumstance: when the link seeker represents meritorious content and the link granter is looking for that type of meritorious content to link to. It’s so painfully obvious to me, that I fight the urge to laugh out loud when I read quotes like the one above.
• Amazon Adds A Virtual Private Cloud – ReadWriteEnterprise – Amazon has created a hybrid cloud that can work securely for the enterprise, balancing the need for encryption with the low cost and scaling power that the cloud provides.
• The Twitter Exploit That Could Have Stolen Your Info and Much, Much More – Found by David Naylor, the vulnerability exploits an issue with a recently added an HTML tag to all of their links (rel=nofollow, which tells GoogleGoogleGoogle that links on Twitter shouldn’t count in its algorithm). The result is that David was able to change the links in such a way that it generates a huge cross-site scripting vulnerability.
• Over 80% of Americans Use Social Media Monthly – The demographic data follows the trend we see overall—younger people are more heavily involved, but over-35s and over-55s are becoming more and more active in social networking. While 10% or less of online adults aged 18-34 are “socially inactive,” the older age ranges are showing high growth. Among adults 35-54, participation grew 60% over last year:
• Top 5 Current Email Scams You Should Know About – There are numerous ways to be scammed nowadays. Pyramid schemes, ‘too good to be true’ investments and of course the good old internet. There are literally millions of websites that will gladly take your money, personal info, bank details and a host of other things from you and then skedaddle.
• Make Firefox Faster by Vacuuming Your Database – Firefox – Lifehacker – Speed up Firefox!
• Yahoo’s Testing a New Search Interface…Bing’s Interface Actually – Examples of how Yahoo! is now Bing!
• Twitalytic Alpha Preview–Archiving, Curating, and Threading Tweets | Smarterware – Lifehacker Founder Gina Trapani has a new twitter app. It's not like anything else out there… well except for Twitters business model. Check it out it's in alpha. Open source too.

Google’s Matt Cutts did a video for the Webmaster Central YouTube channel yesterday answering a question on over-optimization of a Website. In essence he said no, the you can’t over use the NOFOLLOW tag, but often times in the search for better placement on the search engines people tend to spam a bit. They over use their keywords and make their site not user friendly. So in the end there are ways to hurt yourself in the search engines but only if you take a more black-hat approach to optimization.

What are your thoughts? Post them below.

Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Flash is a great tool for interactivity and overall interaction. What it’s not good for is Web design. If you really, truly, want to get found on the Internet you don’t want your site in Flash. Yes, you can do really neat things with it. Make your cursor make sounds, have your buttons animate in a way that CSS and xHTML just can’t, but you need to ask yourself two questions. First, do all these “flashy” (pardon the pun) effects do anything to promote your product or your company? Second, is it really worth giving up some Search Engine find-ability for a little unnecessary glitz and glamour? In my opinion, no.

There was a very interesting article in Search Engine Land blog yesterday. The author points out some very interesting points:

But what about those that have a more basic Flash site that does indeed provide information? For them, I would ask, why Flash? If you don’t need to allow your visitors to interact with your website, then why not just use HTML with Flash accents? Because even if the search engines are indexing the information contained in Flash (more on this in a bit), there are other reasons not to use it. First and foremost, not every browser has Flash installed. In fact, currently on an iPhone, Flash shows up as a little blue cube. Second, many Flash-based sites use only one URL for the entire site. Besides the search engine implications of that, it is also a nightmare for bookmarking, as well as for most web analytics programs.

via Are The Search Engines Really Indexing Flash?.

So I leave you with this, if your site does not need the wow power and interactive feel of Flash, but you want to capitalize on the search results, leave Flash for another day or another project.