online seo news

Microsoft sets limitations for Windows 7 upgrade

2009-07-01T02:17:00.000-07:00

Microsoft has fixed the date of Windows 7 release as Oct 22nd,but now though this date remains unchanged, Microsoft has announced some limitations.Microsoft has restricted the number of machines which can be upgraded freely to its new operating system to just 25.

Microsoft recently revealed details of the Windows Upgrade Option program for the initial time.Consumers who buy a Vista-based personal computer as of last week are qualified to upgrade their system to Windows 7 at no or modest cost when the latter releases in October.

The limitation has however created controversies from some industry watchers. Michael Silver,Gartner analyst who published a research titled "Enterprises Should Demand Windows Upgrade Option." ,has mentioned that organizations need to comprehend their Windows 7 requirement and obtain the necessary privileges for the most excellent value.

Buzz 140-Twitter Unconference

2009-06-23T06:36:00.000-07:00

Buzz 140-Twitter Unconference was an event held in Chennai, India and organized by Knowledge Foundation.More than 100 people had participated in this event held on June 21st.The participants had called themselves 'Tweeple' and they had actively participated in this lively event.The unique aspect of this event was that the participants decided on what topics and who need to speak in the sessions.

Twitter is an online messaging service.Users can login similar to creating an email account and use twitter. The founders of twitter had began this in order to send messages to just to inform them- What are you doing?Twitter has ensured that to display this message only 140 characters need to be utilized.So guess that makes it lucid why the name of this conference was named as Buzz 140. And interestingly, the theme of Buzz 140 was this...How does one share information within 140 characters?

This is what one of the participants had to say "Twitter is one of the finest and quickest places to obtain information".

Twitter's home page twitter.com displays this- Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?Whether Twitter is here to stay for long or is it just a temporary fad among users,one needs to wait and watch.

Social Media Marketing to improve sales

2009-06-18T01:40:00.000-07:00

There is a myth that exists among several companies that SEO is meant for companies that exist in the IT field.But one company has proved this incorrect by utilizing the concept of search engine optimization in order to increase their sales figures.EmbroidMe,which is the largest embroidery franchise has succeeded in increasing their sales figures tremendously by incorporating a SEO campaign.

EmbroidMe utilized the feature of Social Media such as Twitter and Facebook to order to improve their visibility.As more and more people are actively using the search engines to obtain information in the internet,companies are turning towards SEO in order to improve traffic.EmbroidMe found that there was a tremendous improvement in branding in all of their 450 locations.

Digg removes its controversial tool: "Shout"

2009-06-08T01:23:00.000-07:00

Digg, the popular social bookmarking site had utilized the feature of Shout.This allowed its users in order to share their links with one another and it was the only communication tool. Now the feature of Shouts is replaced with Facebook and Twitter.

Shout made it easier for users to send a story they liked the most directly to other people who employed Digg.In certain circumstances,it was very useful and it helped in some of the stories to catch more attention.On the other hand,shouts was mostly utilized for spamming due to which some users decide to turn it off.Another major problem with this feature was that those links, stories that received shouts were better rated .Due to this, all the users started shouting most of their stories.

Digg in the beginning tried to reduce the value of Shouts tool,in order to eliminate the above problems,but finally removed it completely.Now Digg had added buttons to enable sharing of stories on Facebook or on Twitter.This big move has a possibility of driving more people to Digg,though it enables people to drive people to other sites.

Microsoft releases Beta version of Bing

2009-06-01T02:01:00.000-07:00

Microsoft has released the Beta version of Bing (formerly known as Kumo).Bing is expected to replace Microsoft's Live Search.The full launch is scheduled for June 3rd.

The home page of bing is quite impressive as the images in the background changes everyday.The so called "decision engine" Bing introduces new features with the intention to perform faster.To be more specific the search engine was developed with the aim of offering swift answers to users search queries, especially in the field of shopping,local business,information and knowledge,travel as well as health research.This would also mean that the businesses will have to move away drastically from the common search of keywords during the process of SEO campaigns.

It returns results purely based on their relevancy to individual searchers and displays them based on their subcategories grouping rather than whether they have keywords which match the search query.

Just go to the home page msn.com and type in any of the keywords and press search.You will be directed towards bing.com search result page.Well should we call this clever marketing?Anyhow,we need to wait and see if this search engine is going to be a google beater.

Experiment with the bing search engine at www.bing.com

Release of Google Chrome Version 2.0

2009-05-26T00:12:00.000-07:00

Google has released its second version of Chrome internet browser.The first version of Google Chrome was released nearly 8 months back.Google has succeeded with bringing forth the second version by collecting immense feedback from the user and making further improvements.It has been claimed that around 300 bugs have been fixed by Google before the release of this latest version.

One of the major areas which Google has focused on is speed of the browser. Google claims that a page-loading increase of 30 percent is what Google claims it has included in the latest browser update, version 2.0.172.28.Though Google has improved in the speed factor,it still faces a tough competition from Mozilla which has drawn the support of communities due to its immense add-on capabilities.

New igoogle Gadget "What's Popular" from Google

2009-05-19T02:47:00.000-07:00

Google has launched the new iGoogle gadget known as "What's Popular".This gadget displays the most popular content from the web.This gadget bears a resemblance to Digg, Reddit or Yahoo Buzz,as one is able to vote the web pages. In other words ,it is possible to rate items that you like or dislike by just clicking the ratings buttons displayed close to each item. Later if you change your mind, then the ratings can be changed anytime. The What's Popular gadget ultimately searches what users liked or disliked in order to improve its ranking of interesting items.Also ,it is possible to add content that the users find interesting.

What's Popular utilizes algorithms in order to search interesting content from a combination of submissions and trends in aggregated user activity from Google services such as YouTube and Google Reader.Three categories such as stories, images and videos are available and usually all the pages are sorted according to the algorithm.

Google Launches Profile Search:

2009-04-22T05:30:00.000-07:00

At times, when we searched for our name in Google, we might have been dissatisfied with the results. We usually see that other people who share a similar name dominating the results.Google's new "Profile results" that was being launched recently provide a solution for this.

Google has integrated Google Profiles into their main US name search results.As an example if your searching for a name "Sandra Jose" in Google,at the end of the results ,you will find a picture of Sandra ,brief description as well as links to Google profiles,MySpace,Facebook etc. Upto 4 profiles will be displayed at the end of the page.This kind of Google cross-integration helps to make Google Profiles an extremely competitive product all of a sudden.

In this way,we find that Google Profiles are being extended beyond Google's own services.They are being promoted as a method for people to convey to the world who they are and to some degree, being offered as a way for people to claim their identity in Google's main search results.To start off ,create a profile in Google in www.google.com/profiles and follow the guidelines.

Yahoo provides enhancements for BOSS

2009-04-18T00:43:00.000-07:00

Yahoo adds additional features for its service in building custom search engines,BOSS.Delicious,Language Capability as well as News are the new features added in Yahoo search Boss.

The popularity of Delicious has let to several tools from Yahoo and the Delicious community browser such as add-ons, APIs, and Search Monkey applications.The Delicious data which is available today through BOSS includes Delicious saves, top tags including count information.BOSS has included the Advanced Language functionality to enable filtering of specific language results for a given market.Yahoo BOSS presently supports Czech, Hungarian, and traditional Chinese.BOSS News Service can now be sorted by a date or a specified time range of days, weeks, or hours.

Yahoo Search BOSS, for Build Your Own Search Service, is a new Web services platform that enables Web developers access to Yahoo's search technology. Precisely,it's opening up access,initially in the form of so-called application programming interfaces and in future through custom services from Yahoo and other partners to its Web, news, and image indexes.The goal of BOSS is to nurture innovation in the search industry.BOSS allows access to Yahoo!'s investments in crawling and indexing, ranking and relevancy algorithms including powerful infrastructure.

Enhancements in Digg

2009-04-15T05:56:00.000-07:00

The social bookmarking site Digg has improved significantly.The main aim of digg is to deliver the best stories at the top of the results.In addition to the improved user interface,the following additional changes have been implemented:

1.A faceted model for filtering results means that it is possible to cut your results by factors like Digg count, topic, time, etc. It provides sufficent information about your query and enables you to drill down to your result much more effectively.

2.Advanced shortcuts enable those who are searching for stories with specific promotion characteristics to filter in an effective manner. Include +p to your query for only promoted stories, +u for upcoming stories, and +b for buried.

3.Widely used search tricks like putting your query in quotes for an exact match and adding a negative sign before the term (i.e., -term) to remove that term from your results is possible.

4.Digg has ensured that search is faster now too.

5.A graph depicting the relative number of search results by month for the past several years provides some visibility into the trend of a particular query term over time.

Downgrade options for Windows 7 by Microsoft

2009-04-09T23:11:00.000-07:00

Microsoft provides the option of downgrade for Windows 7 Customers. The options are available to Windows Vista as well as to Windows XP. Microsoft intends to offer n-2 downgrade option with Windows 7 to enable customers to plans their migrations from XP. Thus this download option is a good news for users of Windows Vista and Windows XP.

The Vista version of Windows was not received well by many Microsoft users. Microsoft doesn't usually provide active support for more than 2 versions of Windows. Hence there has been a great deal of apprehension about the loss of XP support when the new OS was announced to be released soon.

With the release of Windows 7, Microsoft hopes to overcome the stains caused by Windows Vista.

Matt Cutts' Explanation about Google guidelines

2009-03-30T21:10:00.000-07:00

Matt Cutts, head of Google's Webspam team has delivered an explanation regarding the Webmaster guidelines provide by Google.This was one of the suggestions provided by the Search Engine Giant.."Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number."

Here are some reasons Matt Cutts cited why it is better to maintain the number of links less than 100.He went on to explain that previously Google indexed just around 100 kilobytes of a page.In case the page exceeds 100 links, it usually exceeds 100kb and the remaining links will be completely ignored or truncated by Google.Suppose, there are more than 100 links on any page ,people who reach the page might be completely overwhelmed and may be unable to find what they were looking for and might decide to leave the page.Google classifies this as a "bad user experience".

However, in some situations, where a large resource library is provided ,it is absolutely necessary to maintain a page with more than 100 links.In these cases Google won't consider these pages as spam,instead Google will either choose to exclude these links from being indexed or might tag them as nofollow.

Latest version of Internet Explorer launched by Microsoft.

2009-03-25T04:50:00.000-07:00

Microsoft has made the latest version of Internet Explorer IE 8, the world's most popular web browser to be available for download .Microsoft revealed that the Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) is much faster, user-friendly and extremely secure than the previous versions of IE.

Internet Explorer is presently utilized as the main browser by around 67 per cent of the world. This is a clear reduction from 91% in 2004,due to rival's such as Mozilla's Firefox, Apple's Safari as well as Google's chrome. Due to the ubiquitous occurrence of IE,it has become a target for hackers trying to prey on its programming areas.For Microsoft to get back its lost market share it needs to convince the net users that the latest version is more secure.

Steve Ballmer, the chief executive officer of Microsoft, has conveyed that Microsoft promises to deliver a browser through which people can get apt information in a fast manner.He also stated that IE 8 provides protection which is incomparable to other browsers.A new feature known as "Accelerators" has been added. Through this feature, users can look an address on a map, without the need to navigate to a separate website. In addition,"Web Slices", which are redesigned flash sites helps in accessing favorites for a net user.

Expo and Razorfish collaborated to publish Video SEO white Paper

2009-03-19T03:38:00.000-07:00

Expo and Razorish have partnered to Publish Video SEO White Paper: 'How Non-Video Sites Can Employ Video for SEO'.Expo is the first video-based community targeting consumers to enable them to share their opinion about the products they buy as well as extol the brands they are passionate about. Razorfish, formerly Avenue A is one of the largest interactive digital marketing companies in the world, in addition to being one of the largest buyers of digital advertising space.

Till now,tradional SEO is granted utmost importance for online publishers,whereas video SEO is not given its due importance.Several publishers opt to upload to just upload to video sharing sites ,which eventually causes harm to their sites potential in the long run.The publishing of this paper will ensure the preferences will turn towards video as the universal choice for people.Eventually publishers will be prepared with with abundant search optimized video on their websites.The complete white paper can be downloaded from the following location http://www.expotv.com/about/video-seo-white-paper.

SEO mostly to overtake paid search in 2009

2009-03-11T05:56:00.000-07:00

The online marketing agency Razorfish has revealed in the Digital Outlook Report 2009,that search engine optimization will become an important method of marketing,by even overtaking paid search like PPC. It has been predicted that companies might witness a fall by around 10% compared to the year 2008 in the case of paid search budgets. This is the first year that companies would be witnessing a fall in the area of PPC's. On the other hand ,it would be the year when many companies would shift to SEO for its marketing.

Some factors which is causing this shift could be due to the following:
1.Advertisers,after several years of being grounded in the area of paid search are quite confident now and willing to shift to the unpaid listings of SEO.
2.Due to the lower cost of SEO when compared to PPC, companies will be drawn towards SEO.

A recent report from eMarketer predicted that there will be tremendous growth in the field of search engine optimization (SEO) during the next five years.

Canonical link element

2009-03-06T22:33:00.000-08:00

The top 3 search engines Google,Yahoo and Microsoft have come together in order to launch a new "canonical" link tag which will handle the problem of duplicate content.This tag assists webmasters in order to determine which URL they require the search engines to concentrate on when the website contains a lot of vastly similar or duplicate contents which is pointed to by many URLs.

Joachim Kupke, senior software engineer, and Maile Ohye, developer programs tech lead at Google have mentioned that this tag provides an opportunity to have greater control over the URL's which are returned in search results,if your site has identical contents,corresponding to different URL's

Assume the following 2 pages contain similar contents
http://www.canonicaldemo.com/product.php?items=allequipments
http://www.canonicaldemo.com/product.php?items=equipments

Suppose we need the search engine to display this page in the results page
http://www.canonicaldemo.com/product.php?items=equipments,

then the canonical tag has to be used in the following manner
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.canonicaldemo.com product.php?items=equipments"/>

Disabilites 2009 CSUN Conference

2009-03-02T01:04:00.000-08:00

A major conference focusing in the trends in assistive technology including persons with disabilities is to be held on March 16-21,2009 at the Los Angeles Airport Marriott and Renaissance Montura Hotel .This 24th Annual International Technology and persons with Disabilities Conference also emphasizes on adaptive technology targeted for aging as well as international practices.

The Chief Executive Officer of SEO Incorporation, Garry Grant will be doing a presentation at this year's conference and it will be based on practical web accessibility solutions for people with disabilities and the practical benefits of discussing these issues.Garry Grant has a genuine desire to make internet accessible for everyone, especially the disabled, including his daughter who is born blind. The conference is organized by the California State University Northridge's Center(CSUN) on Disabilities.

People tracker mobile tool "Latitude" launched by google

2009-02-18T01:11:00.000-08:00

Google Inc with its mobile tracker tool aids in keeping track of the location of people.This is an upgrade to the already existing Google's Mobile Maps.This tool assists people with mobile phones and other wireless devices to inform their friends about their present locations.The user has the choice to decide who can keep track of their location.

One of the major drawbacks of this feature is the question of privacy concerns.But in order to resolve this issue, Google provides a facility by which the user needs to turn on or off the tracking software manually.In addition,Google assures that all of the information about the users locations would be retained by them.Only the last information regarding the person's location would be stored by Google's tracking service.

A user's location is displayed by means of a picture appearing on Google Maps.The information about the location is fetched with the help of cell phone towers,GPS (Global positioning system) as well as Wi-Fi Connections.

Offline gmail - New in google Labs

2009-02-10T19:08:00.000-08:00

Google is always setting out to include new stuff into their already existing huge features.In addition the latest information is that they now provide an opportunity for accessing gmail while offline.

In order to make use of this feature,we need to install Google Gears .Google gears is an open source software which enables storing data locally in a database.Also it enables web applications to communicate with desktop.Gears will download emails onto your desktop, and it will accumulate any actions that need web access to perform them next time you are connected to the net.

Once Google Gears is installed, we can see an Offline option under the Lab tab in Gmail's settings. Choose Enable next to Offline gmail. Click the option "Save Changes". Once the browser is reloaded, an 'Offline 0.1' link appears in the top-right corner of the main Gmail window where you will be asked to click this link to begin the installation.

Microsoft Releases Internet Explorer 8

2009-01-28T23:33:00.000-08:00

Microsoft has releases IE 8 which is included in Windows 7.This can included for XP,Windows Vista or Windows Server also.The Beta version of IE 8 had arrived last year,but now the Release Candidate (RC) has arrived.

The browser has several add-ons included with it.the company has opted a customization approach with "accelerators" and "web slices".Some of the accelerators created were for Facebook ,Stumble Upon and digg.Other features include private browsing,which eliminates the worry for some people who would browse regularly.Though IE8 has included some new features,when compared to IE7,IE8 looks much more simpler.

Microsoft and Google Return to Basics

2009-01-22T01:31:00.000-08:00

Microsoft and Google have lot in common than the dominance of their respective markets. Both have utilized their cash flows to pursue many side projects in order to move into wider segments.And neither of them have had much success.The recession has had a severe impact on their efforts. Google,just cancelled its print advertisement ambitions,and Microsoft have managed to sell its long-held stake in the cable operator Comcast.

Microsoft's main expertise still in software - its operating system and other programs. These hold around 82 percent of its revenue and nearly all of its operating income. The company has used a lot of those profits to diversify into products like video games and online search,though they haven't obtained much profit from these areas.

Microsoft's Xbox game console just had had its first profit last year after being for nearly 7 years on the market.Microsoft's online search effort has also not been very successful. Its MSN portal has a dismal 8.5 percent share of American search market, and the unit which holds it lost around $480 million last quarter.

Google makes virtually all its revenue from advertising related to Internet searches. Still, that has not stopped it from pouring money - and employee time - into online video, cloud computing and lobbying for renewable energy projects. Analysts say the video site Youtube remains barely profitable.The same goes for Google's free online software initiative, in which it has invested a huge amount.

Source: Google news

Google in third position on top 10 list of spam enablers

2009-01-07T01:35:00.000-08:00

Google still needs to stop the increasing number of spammers from abusing Google Docs, its Web-based collaboration and spreadsheet application,according to junk mail watchdog Spamhaus.Lately, Google changed the position from fourth to third in a list of spammy ISPs (Internet service providers) and other Web services providers updated daily by Spamhaus. Similar to Microsoft and Yahoo,Google's free e-mail accounts are often utilized to send spam.Antispam filtering software is unlikely to block messages coming from the domains of those companies due to their wide use, although spam can be stopped through more sophisticated analysis of an e-mail.

But the greatest problem is how spammers are manipulating Google Docs. The application has a feature where users are able to share a document which is assigned a URL (uniform resource locator).If opened, those documents contain a "redirect" command that pushes them to spammer Web sites, which often sell pharmaceuticals.Spamhaus has had problems in obtaining complete attention from Google about the problem.That's in contrast to Microsoft, which took methods recently to stop spammers from putting redirects on free Web pages and sending out the links as spam.

Performance of Cuil search

2008-12-29T01:10:00.000-08:00

In July,the new search engine 'Cuil' was launched with great hype,but was followed by a sequence of bad publicity.Six months since it has been launched and the performance of this search engine has not been good.

Techcrunch reveals the traffic of the search engine in the alexa chart which was updated in another site.A seen from the chart the levels of reach experienced by the search engine has been dropping extravagantly since launch.The site witnessed a large amount of launch traffic,mostly by bloggers checking to see if it was really as bad as reported, before a huge drop off occurred.

Cuil was launched by ex-Google employees and should have performed much better than it has so far. It's also been funded to the tune of $33 million, which also is not a very investment at this stage of the game,considering that Google has established itself in the area of web search.

Release of Windows 7 Beta

2008-12-26T02:11:00.000-08:00

People who attend the next month's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) could get the first glance at Windows 7,the next version of Microsoft's client OS.At its Professional Developers Conferencewhich was held in Los Angeles in October, Microsoft informed about the release of the beta early in 2009. Though everything has not been confirmed, signs are pointing that the release date could possibly be the CES show in Las Vegas.CES is scheduled for Jan. 8-11.

Microsoft will be releasing Windows 7 in early 2010, although some industry observers expect it may be out by the end of 2009 because of feeble customer response for thier operating system Windows Vista. Several business customers in particular have opted to skip Vista and run XP till Windows 7 is released in the market.

Release of MSN Messenger 8.5

2008-12-23T01:35:00.000-08:00

An wholesome new look included with new features makes Windows Live Messenger into a real competitor for Yahoo!Messenger.As usual,one can send instant messages,call a computer, dial a phone number, post a mobile message or send an e-mail. Editing of status display and starting a video chat with friends is possible. Skins and emoticons are some of the new features included in Windows Live Messenger. During installation , users are also prompted to install the Rhapsody Music Service which enables one to play and share music from the Rhapsody catalog.

The main features include that we can create custom emoticons by choosing an image on our computer which will be automatically resized. Additional best features of Microsoft Live Messenger are the Whiteboard, Remote Assistance and Application Sharing.

A major drawback is ,when we receive a file,it will be saved in the default directory instead of prompting to the user to choose the location yourself.The Web Calling service is available for long distance calls for selected countries.The important offline messages feature is not working at all.