Many webmasters at WebmasterWorld are talking about Yahoo Search update. According to them, Yahoo Search is updating its index and algorithm. However, officially it has not been confirmed yet! Below are some of the important points from the WebmasterWorld thread:

1. Link counts have seen some amount of drop.
2. Canonical issues are also discussed.
3. One person is reporting “I am seeing two different titles and descriptions for singular vs. plural of my main keyword. It’s the same URL, so kind of odd.”

Even though Yahoo! has not announced the update officially, but the Yahoo Search Japan blog announced it. Here is the translation

Towards the end of 2008, Google was found saying that they were trying to fix the blogroll issue and at some point they also said that the issue had been fixed. But, despite this, it seemed that Google continued to receive complaints over Google Blog Search’s Matching skills.

Recently, Googler, Jeremy Hylton said that Google is all set to release a “user visible experiments” next week, to target Google Blog Search’s issue with “blogroll detectors” and the link queries in a better way! Hylton said in his post at Google Groups thread,

After Zimra founder Satish Dharmaraj marking his exit from Yahoo!, another executive to resign from the search engine is Marco Boerries. The top mobile executive has already announced his resignation

Boerries wrote in an email,“With a very heavy heart I have to tell you, that I will be leaving Yahoo!.” He cited personal reasons for the departure. Boerries spent four years as Yahoo!’s top mobile executive. He was named the 16th most powerful person in the wireless industry by FierceWireless in the year 2008.

Matt Cutts of Google has presented a series of slides via his own blog, where he explained about Canonical Link Element.

“One exciting new development even since we made the video is that Ask announced that they will support the canonical tag This means that pretty much all the major search engines will support this as an open standard. That should make life easier for site owners, developers, and webmasters”- Matt Cutts

Jon Henshaw of Raven SEO Tools has come up with a number of tips to help you create dofollow links on social bookmarking mega platform Delicious.com.

Here are the tips:

1. Try to be the first person to bookmark the link. That way you’ll be able to control the anchor text that’s used in the link.
2. After you bookmark the link, have at least one other Delicious user bookmark it. Have that account use similar tags, but don’t completely copy each other. Also, it’s probably wise to mix up accounts that bookmark the same links, and you may want to consider having the other account use a proxy server or different IP.
3. Although step two is all you need to do, it may be helpful to actually build a few links to the “Everyone’s Bookmarks for” page, just to make sure it gets spidered, referenced and rated by search engines.

According to the report of Hitwise Data (PDF FILE), a majority (almost 50 percent) search queries are at least three words long, and more than a third are four words long or even longer than that.

Based on the report, it can be said that today, most Internet users are extending their search queries in different search engines. Have a look at the following table, which will give you a deeper insight regarding the same:

In the table, it is shown that 1- and 2- word queries are becoming less common, and 4, 5, up to 8 words queries are becoming more common.

There are reports from Webmaster World that Google is updating Image Search for the month of February.

According to Zeus, a member at WebmasterWorld:

“Yesterday I saw some few glitches here and there in the Image search, but today there are some BIG changes, new Images has been added again, maybe also moderate filter update, where they for years have had a problem with loosing good sites images, be cause other sites are hotlinking to those images with bad text, then Google see the Original site as bad.”

In an effort to educate the business owners, Google has launched its new glossary, named “Understanding Your Local Business Center Account.” This has been announced by the search engine on their Google Maps Help thread

“We just published a glossary to help you read and understand your Local Business Center account”- Google

Here is the Glossary:

• Active
• Awaiting next update
• Awaiting verification

Google is reporting through its Inside AdSense Blog that AdSense is allowing publishers to set their preferred fonts in the AdSense Editor. Currently, publishers can choose any font from Arial, Times and Verdanna.

“However, you can also select custom font faces for specific ad units that you’ve created with the Manage Ads feature.

There had been lots of speculations doing round that Google might expand its “AdSense For Domains” at a global level, after it was being extended for all the publishers in the US last December. Well, all such speculations prove to be true!

Several blogs are reporting that Google is finally expanding AdSense for Domains program for international AdSense publishers. However, it has not yet been confirmed by Google!

For more information, visit forum discussion at Webmaster World