Microsoft has conceded from its bid to take over Yahoo! Inc. According to NYT , in a meeting that took place in Seattle, Washington, Yahoo! rejected Microsoft’s bid of $33 a share which roughly comes to a total of $47.5 billion. The new bid by Microsoft of $33 a share was a jump of $5 billion since its original bid. Yahoo! CEO (Chief Executive Officer) Jerry Yang during the course of the meeting, made it explicitly clear that Yahoo! would not settle for any bid lower than $37 a share. Furthermore, Yahoo was concerned that the buyout might pose problems with the regulators and wanted a higher offer, in case the concern turned into crisis. The new bid by Microsoft was perceived by many analysts as a move to avoid a hostile takeover of Yahoo! which would have been quite an unpleasant experience for Microsoft as well.

Landing Page Load Time is the amount of time taken by keywords with landing pages to load. Now this factor will be displayed in the Keyword Analysis Page of the Google AdWords accounts. According to Google AdWords Blog, this factor will play a crucial part in a Webmaster’s Quality Scores. The slower a landing page loads, lower the Quality Scores will go and faster a page loads, higher the quality scores will go.

After narrowly avoiding a takeover bid by Microsoft, Yahoo! Inc. now has a bigger problem to take care of. On the closing day of the trading session, Yahoo’s shares went down by 15%. Just about two days ago, Yahoo! had declined Microsoft’s takeover bid of $33 a share stating that Yahoo! would not entertain any bid below the rate of $37 a share.

Till now Google Earth, Google Sky and Google Moon were the only applications that gave us a panoramic view of heavens and earth. However, that dominance has now been shattered by the launch of Microsoft’s Worldwide Telescope.

The Worldwide Telescope  is based on the Web 2.0 services created by Microsoft’s high performance Visual Experience Engine that enables unobtrusive pan and zoom functions into the vastness of the universe. Now, the entire universe is right there in front of us just a few clicks away. The Worldwide Telescope incorporates terabytes of enriched images of numerous celestial bodies and are arrayed in a way that places them in the interface according to their related actual positions in the sky.

The king of ‘Spam Killers’ Google’s Matt Cutts  gave a presentation at O’Reilly’s web conference, where he spoke extensively about the menace of Spam. The key areas he covered in his presentation were:

1. How Google tracks and detects Spam.

2. The sort of technology and systems to fight off Spam.

3. How a Webmaster can protect his websites from being attacked by Spam.

His presentation is available in a video format and in many circles, this video is being hailed as the ‘Best 10 Minute SEO Video’. Check it out!

Google has recently announced the launch of its social networking tool, aptly named ‘Friend Connect’. This feature will enable Webmasters to enable social networking features on their websites that would help grow their website traffic.

Friend Connect will enable non-social networking website to take upon the looks and features of a social networking website, without losing its basic structure and goals. The Webmasters need not perform any programming for this feature. Just by adding a snippet of code in their websites, they can avail the advantages of features such as user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the Open-Social developer community.

During the International World Wide Web Conference in Beijing, NYT  reported that Google has now begun testing a new algorithm that would perform exactly the same functions for images as the PageRank does for the text of a webpage. That means, it will be scanning images on the web for Image Ranking. This technology is known as ‘VisualRank’, which is a blend of image recognition softwares combined with other techniques to rank images.

There is a new addition to the wonders that keep appearing in Google’s SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). According to Search Engine Land, this wonder is the sudden appearance of elements in Google AdWord advertisements that Google use for evaluating quality scores. As of now these sudden appearances have been reported from google.de (mostly German Top Level Domains).

There are three parameters that are visible in the SERPs

1. Pscore

2. mCPC

3. Thresh

Most commonly, mCPC is being regarded as an abbreviation for ‘Minimum Click-Per-Cost’.

Some time ago, there had been reports by multiple users of massive ranking updates in Yahoo’s SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) due to a possible update. Now Yahoo! has announced that it is in the process of running a Search Index Update for its crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms. This could mean more erratic changes in the page rankings and page shuffling in the index.

Recently, many users had complained to Yahoo! regarding some issues with ‘Deletion of URLs’ in the Site Explorer. According to Yahoo!, this problem has now been resolved.

It has been almost a week and a half since Yahoo! had announced its intentions to test Google advertisements in Yahoo! SERPs (Search engine Result Page). Now according to Wall Street Journal  the tests have been declared successful and a possible Yahoo! Google partnership talks have begun.

This partnership would definitely let Yahoo! breathe a sigh of relief as it will now be able to face off against Microsoft’s $42 billion bid for a takeover. Both these Online Search giants will try to draft this potential alliance in such a way that they would enable them to avoid any legal implications. However, according to some experts, this deal under no circumstances would undermine Microsoft’s dominance if it decides to march towards a takeover. In such a scenario, Yahoo! will simply pull out of the Google partnership and merge with Microsoft.