In a spirit for the makeover of the navigation bars, recently, Google has updated its Google Maps navigation interface.

Here are a few changes to the tool:

• The zoom bar has been redesigned.
• Now, the Street View can be accessed by clicking the person icon that is located above the zoom slider.

If reports from Liveside.net are to be believed, then it has been noticed that Microsoft is having the ownership of a new domain name kumo.com!

The reports are even pointing towards an internal Microsoft test site as well. Can it be seen as an option that Microsoft’s Live Search is going to have a new name?

In a post that was written by Mary Jo Foley, a firm discussion has been done on Microsoft’s plan of rebranding Live Search.

Recently, an article by Skip Chilcott, Sr. Product Manager of Microsoft has amazed many SEOs, as he openly asked the entire webmasters to participate in Link Exchange program. This is because, Link Exchange program is likely to result in providing a boost to their ranks in search engines. However, Chilcott’s statement contradicts with

Google’s Webmaster and Microsoft’s guidelines

Here is what Google has to say regarding participation in the link schemes:
“…there are some webmasters who get involved in link exchange programs and other build partner pages just for the purpose of cross linking and disregarding the quality of links. This leaves a long term impact on their sites. But the strategy totally violate the set guidelines of Google Webmaster and can also have negative affect on search engine ranking results..”

Google Search’s ‘Spell Checker’, the handy feature might have helped you many times to get over searches with ‘typo’ errors. This is the feature that helps us everytime when some spelling errors occur in our typing, with its suggestion like, “Did you mean ‘relevant word’?”

Obviously, the feature has put a dent in the revenue of all those SEOs who had been making money on people who make some common spelling errors while Googling, however, it was really a help for most common people who made use of the feature to suggest correct and relevant terms.

Finally Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang officially announced his retirement from the position that he had assumed about 18 months ago. It was not an unexpected move, still it came as a shock to many of us.

The official press release begins as follows:

“Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO) today announced that its Board of Directors has initiated a search for a new Chief Executive Officer. Jerry Yang, co-Founder of Yahoo!, has decided to return to his former role as Chief Yahoo! upon the appointment of his successor as CEO, and he will also continue to serve on the Board. Yang, 40, assumed the CEO role at the Board’s request in June 2007, and he has led Yahoo! through a strategic repositioning and transformation of its platform. Chairman Roy Bostock, working with the independent directors and in consultation with Jerry Yang, is leading the process of assessing potential candidates and determining finalists for consideration. The search will encompass both internal and external candidates, and the Board has retained Heidrick & Struggles, a leading international executive search firm, to assist in the process.”

Of late, Google’s web stats tool, Google Analytics is making certain changes. Recently, Google Analytics came up with an entirely new intro page with some aspects that enable users to identify whether the traffic for a certain website has increased or not.

According to Google Blogoscoped,

Google’s Google web stats tool Analytics is rolling out a new intro page. On the upside, you can now directly see if the traffic to a certain site increased in the last specific time period. A red arrow pointing down means your site’s losing visitors, a green arrow pointing upwards means it is getting more. This should be great for spotting sudden peaks, especially on sites which you’re not watching as closely everyday; and sometimes, such peaks may require you to take action.

However, it is true that the Google Webmaster Tools offers the webmasters with great data, still the feature lacks certain things. One such drawback of the tool is that earlier, the webmasters had to chart the timeline of the inbound link from GMT on a manual basis.
But now, Russ Jones has announced the launch of a new tool called Glync, which shows link data for last one month.

Pro Version 1.0b

The Pro Version offers a wide array of data directly from your External Links page.

Earlier, you needed to create a text-based PDF (not image-based), whenever you wanted your PDF files to be indexed by Google, as Googlebot was unable to recognize the content of image-based documents. But, gone are those days!

Google says, the case is no longer the same, in an official announcement.

Here is what Google elaborated:

“This Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology lets us convert a picture (of a thousand words) into a thousand words — words that can be searched and indexed, so that these valuable documents are more easily found.

Google has become open with the prevailing restrictions regarding alcohol and is now allowing AdWords advertisers to bid on beer and champagne. Before this, the advertisers were only allowed to use “wine related terms” while bidding.

According to Gonzo SEO

“Beer, wine and champagne may now be promoted from ad text and may be the focus of your site. We consider beer, wine and champagne to be products intended for the sale and consumption of adults. Therefore, ads promoting beer, wine and champagne will be given a ‘Non-Family Safe’ status.
For information on how the family status of an ad may affect, please visit Google Adwords Support”

Of late, the users of the AdSense have been viewing political ads on their websites. However, they are not that happy with the move. With the election over this will change, at least until the next election. The following statement says it all:

“I’m outraged that a political ad was fed onto my site…”

Here are a few more comments on the move at the Webmaster Thread:

“Today on all of my sites I am seeing political ads targeted to my region, regarding a passionately-fought proposition.