Hey everyone! How has your week been? Hopefully it was great, and hopefully you're also in for an excellent weekend! It's been a nice quiet spring week here in New York. We had a little rain and a tornado watch, but the rest of the week has been nice -- albeit cloudy -- but I feel springtime! Truthfully, I hope it lasts a lot longer. I hate the heat. It's why I left Florida. :)
Mother's Day
Happy belated Mother's Day to all your mothers out there! We saw a fair share of Mother's Day logos, and we also celebrated with a lovely pink theme that covered the "U" in Roundtable. (Did you notice that? Bet you didn't!)
Google Goes Universal
World, meet Google 2.0. Google is now integrating its other search properties into its main search results. This was first seen by a select few individuals but was unleashed shortly thereafter. There's an incredible writeup of the Google Universal Search on Search Engine Land, because world, this is the future of Google search.
At the same time, we're talking about some slightly noticeable differences in the Google Search Engine. They now are using CSS. For me, a change was evident when I did searches and saw the white gradient above the search results. What did you notice? Was it too subtle for you?
Are Your Yahoo Rankings Suffering?
A bunch of users have been sharing their pain over what apparently is a lack of Yahoo rankings. If you're ranking so well on Google, you should be ranking somewhere in Yahoo, right? Well, if you are, tell them and ask them what's up. Apparently, two different algorithms are at work here, but who knows for sure.
By the way, when you lose rankings after launching an SEO version of a site, it's usually only temporary. Make sure you have 301 redirects and that there's no duplicate content. Barry suggests more in this post.
Celebrate!
As you may know, two big guys in search have been married -- and no, not to each other. My apologies for the misleading headline. :) Sergey Brin of Google married a woman named Anne, and Gary Price of Ask.com married a lovely lady named Lisa. One wedding was in the Bahamas, while the other one was in Chicago. As Nathan asks, where do we send the gifts?
Stephen Colbert Still Sucks
(I wonder if I can rank for that headline.)
In response to the recent "debombing" of Stephen Colbert as the Greatest Living American, Matt Cutts commented that this is not a live algorithm. To quote Matt, "it's not a manual change; it's just a fresh push of our Googlebomb data. The algorithm doesn't run every day."
GoogleTalk
Matt Cutts also followed up on an earlier post I wrote about Google being attacked over webmaster relations. In his followup, he writes about the -950 Penalty and over-optimization. There's a video to watch with insightful information as well. Take some time out of your day to educate yourself if you're so inclined and interested.
Tag Clouds
We added a tag cloud to Search Engine Roundtable. The tag cloud is growing every day. What do you think about tag clouds? Should they be blocked from search engines? They're almost like meta keywords, if you ask me. They could be dangerous if not implemented with caution. I spent last Friday cleaning up our tag cloud, and we still have close to 900 tags.
aQuantive is Rich
Just a few hours ago, news broke that Microsoft acquired aQuantive, an ad company, for a hefty $6 billion. It's been a busy day for those guys at Avenue A | Razorfish, but it's exciting news for our Associate Editor, Chris Boggs. Congrats. :)
Conference-O-Rama
It's almost June. To be precise, it's 17 days until SMX, and I'll be there with Barry. There's SES Latino and SES Toronto as well, and we're looking for people to cover the sessions for Search Engine Roundtable. Let us know if you're interested.
Next Week
Next week, on Wednesday and Thursday, Barry and I will be celebrating the holiday of Shavuot, so we'll be out of commission. Hopefully, we'll have a few good articles lined up for you and our other editors will write in as well. We'll be back on Friday!
