Yahoo Pulse
Yahoo! takes steps to enhance its presence in the Social Media arena. In 2010 Yahoo launched Yahoo Pulse including Facebook integration. Yahoo Pulse will aggregate updates from social networks such as Facebook. Yahoo Pulse has mail integrations similar to Google Buzz but unlike Google Buzz Yahoo Pulse has a complete mail privacy menu. Thank you Yahoo! This is a welcome feature considering how Google and Facebook have not dealt well with the privacy issues.

Google AdWords Mandates Reporting and Transparency for Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Managers

Starting in February Google Pay-Per-Click (PPC) management companies will be required to fully disclose the amount spent on AdWords. Search-Optimization.com will not need to change as we have had this policy since the days of GoTo PPC.

For the advertiser who hires a PPC management company they will now know how much was paid as PPC management fees and how much went into the Google AdWords PPC program. If you are an advertiser you should start receiving this break-out of hard costs. If the agency does not furnish this it is time to shop for a new company that does. I suggest advertisers ask for an accounting of 2010 costs.

Social Sign-Ins

Social sign-ins is the next big thing for the Internet. Social sign-ins allows your visitors to sign in using their social media credentials, such as Facebook, this has a number of advantages. First it allows the visitor to use an already existing profile connected to all of its rich content. Social sing-ins give the web site owner access to information that already would not be available if the user did a quick registration.

Linkedin Share Button

LinkedIn has a share button! Now your readers can share your news with those that you are LinkedIn with. If you select group button you can really make an impact.

Liz Reaves Walker of LinkedIn makes the following comment on the release:

“We know there are a lot of options for sharing content today, whether it’s on Twitter or Facebook. And, now with our new LinkedIn’s share button, we’d like to offer readers an effective way to share relevant professional content – news, thought pieces, white papers, or presentations on slideshare – with their business network on LinkedIn.”

Here is a great way to earn more on your site.

The recent Google AdWords blog is talking about the introduction of AdWords interface section that will make it easier for advertisers to add and track the conversions for search ads. The new interface has sections for code, conversions and webpages.

Conversion Page

It will show the conversions that are being tracked by you.

Webpages

You will get the report of the pages for which you are receiving conversions on webpages.

Code

The code that is supposed to be added to webpages will be received on this page.

A few weeks ago, it was heard that Google was all set to test New Link Command feature for Google Blog Search Ranking Update. But, latest news is that Google has postponed the test!
“Unfortunately, we ran into some delays with these experiments and had to push back the schedule a couple of weeks,” said Googler, Jeremy Hylton

Mediadonis, a German SEO of late talked about a way through which one can check if his/her site is running well, has got penalized, or banned in Google.

According to Mediadonis, “The only thing you gotta do is put “hyves” as a subdomain in front of the domain to be checked.

=> hyves.domain.com

It’s important that hyves is no existing subdomain of that particular domain, otherwise it won’t work!”
Then, look at the page rank – through a PR toolbar for the page and you will get one of the following three results-

Nothing is spared from the adverse effects of recent recession! Even, Search Engine Marketing has not been left out from its negative effects. According to the reports of The Wall Street Journal, SEM declined 8 percent in fourth quarter of last year.

‘Advertisers who spend less than $50,000 on search ads cut their spending by 23% year-over-year, while advertisers that spend more than $200,000 on search per month cut spending by 9% during that time. Purchases by advertisers who spend between $50,000 and $200,000 were relatively flat.’

PubMatic’s display AdPrice Index saw prices worsened by almost 50% from Q4 2007:

As per the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog, from now users will not have to specify the Sitemap file type to submit a Sitemap to Google. Google will automatically determine what type of data is being submitted by the users. In other words, Sitemap submission has now become quite easier!

Following is the list of sitemap file formats supported by Google:

Part of what makes the web so interesting is that there are different kinds of content out there. Do you use videos on your website? If so, send us a Video Sitemap file so that we can send you visitors to those videos! Do you host source-code samples? Submit a Code Search Sitemap! Here are the various kinds of Sitemap files that Google supports at the moment: