A side project of mine, Free Advertising Blog, has recently moved into the 4th natural search position on Yahoo! out of over 2.4 billion competing web sites for ‘free advertising’.  I thought that was pretty cool; so I took a closer to see how I was ranking on some other terms and noticed I was ranking on the first page for a slew of other search terms related to free advertising.  View screenshot HERE.

Over the last few months I noticed a decent increase in site traffic (along with some revenue) from this free advertising service:

Yep, nothing to quit your day job over but nevertheless a nice increase in web site traffic for virtually no work accept approving classified ads.  I figured this increase was coming from Yahoo! so I checked into the stats (like we all do) just a little bit more:

I have to admit I really wasn’t surprised to see that Google was still dominating Yahoo! in natural search referrals.  Even being positioned on the second page of Google is better than being listed on the first page of Yahoo!.

No sir, I’m not looking the gift horse in the mouth, it just never ceases to amaze me how powerful Google has become over the last 10 years it”s been online.  No competition.

Google just announced that starting tonight, developers can start writing applications using the social API for Orkut, MySpace, Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING at http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial.

OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites.  With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network’s friends and update feeds.

This is slick…So what’s the hold up Facebook?  I bet you buckle like a belt soon under the pressure.  =)