The official blog of the Live Search team has been talking about “Optimizing your very large site for search.” Well, it is a series decked with four key aspects that a site should have to raise its relevance and coverage. Following are the four aspects:

Part 1
We started by focusing on reducing the surface area of your site by removing and canonicalizing your URLs. Reducing URLs that are redundant or unnecessary will make room for the ones that are. This post offers some practical suggestions on how to make fewer URLs a reality.

Part 2
After removing redundant URLs, we focused on the need to optimize for crawl by ensuring you are compressing your site and telling us which content is new or recently updated. This helps us focus on crawling the latest and greatest content.

Gerald Weber, President and Founder of Search Engine Marketing Group has come up with three easy steps to let all the webmasters know as to how they can rank their local keywords in Google maps. Have a look at these extremely simple, yet effective steps:

“Step 1— If you’re not already in Google maps, you can accomplish this by creating a new listing at the Google Local Business Center

Webmasters often use the number of “hits” a website or a page receives to determine the success ratio of their websites! Recently, the Official Google Blog has come up with a few useful tips to determine the same.

“You may be used to reading about how many “hits” a site or a page has received. But reporting a “hit” meant something back in 1985 when it was essentially a pageview (the number of times your webpage was viewed)”- Google

It seems that the concept of “hits” metrics is pointless.

It’s time for Google to withdraw from a lot of their applications! After shutting down Radio Ads, recent news is that the search engine is to end Business Pages for Mobile Ads product.

Tim Cohn from SearchMarketingCommunications has reportedly encountered with the following alert when he logged into his AdWords account:

“AdWords Business Pages for mobile ads are being retired. As the first stage, you will no longer be able to edit your mobile Business Page after March 23. Please make any necessary changes before that time.”

Three leading search engines, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft are all fighting duplicate content. In an effort to clean up duplicacy of content, they are implementing a new HTML tag – “ .” It is a Canonical Tag, which will allow all the web publishers to remove duplicate pages from their websites.

Nathan Buggia, a lead program manager at Microsoft said, “We are happy that everyone is going to support the same implementation.” He further added, “This is a clear benefit for publishers as it gives them an opportunity to get more exposure through search engines.”

Social Web Blog marked Google’s 80th official blog launch. The new blog was launched on February 9, 2009. It will cover news and updates regarding Google’s social networking and media efforts in future.

“We are launching this blog for anyone interested or involved in helping to make the web more social. Whether you own a site and want to add social features to increase community engagement, or you’re developing a great social application, this blog is for you. We will write about social initiatives within Google, such as Google Friend Connect, as well as community efforts like OpenSocial. We plan to share some success stories, present tips and tricks, provide updates when there are new developments, and much more”, the site added.

Google has launched a new blog called “Conversion room” The blog is run by European Googlers and is dedicated to improving conversions.
In addition, the Conversion Room will let users know about events taking place in Europe. It will also provide tips and information that are useful for a global audience. The most recent blog post talks about installing site search and tracking the results.

As part of marketing strategy, Yahoo! Canada has joined hands with the Air Miles Rewards Program to issue Air Miles collectors some free reward miles for doing everyday searches through Yahoo! With this partnership Yahoo! is all set to increase its market share in the world of search engine.

According to Gina Cothey, Director of Network Optimization, Yahoo! Canada,

Yahoo! has recently indulged in testing a new feature called “Search Pad,” which automatically collects sites and content when users conduct online research. The feature is almost similar to Google’s Notebook application (that has already been disposed!) But, now reports are that the webmasters are not happy with Yahoo’s Search Pad. According to them, it is a scrapper tool! Some of them are even willing to block this tool completely. The point is that the tool has not been getting much positive reviews!

Below is a video to help you know more about its working:

A lot of people have been speculating that Google AdSense is testing a new ad format. Various reports of publishers say that they are noticing the new ad format at DigitalPoint Forums
Have a look at the new format:

According to many, the new format will bring in more revenue.

Below are some of the responses from publishers: