Hope you guys had a great yesterday and a happy day today! Most of you I know aren't actually working, but some of us are, and we're going to make sure you're well-entertained today in what happened this week in the search industry.
Happy Thanksgiving! How was your Thanksgiving? Hopefully you enjoyed turkey or tofurkey and spent some quality time with your family. I know I did. The search industry, naturally, celebrated with us with some high quality themes.
The site: Command isn't Reliable. Chill Too many SEOs are obsessed with the site: command, but there's really no reason to be. The site: command doesn't always count the number of pages that are indexed in your site, so if you notice a drop, you shouldn't necessarily freak out. The thing is -- some people do. Perhaps it's better to think of alternative strategies, like looking at which keywords your site pages rank for.
Why Do People Consider Link Buying a Black Hat Tactic? Last week, we had a blogger say that Microsoft endorsing link exchanges means they're approving a "black hat" tactic. Lately, too many people have considered link buying a black hat tactic too. Consequently, companies are trying to stop link buying and move to more "ethical" measures.
Yahoo Says it Updated -- Did it? Yahoo said it was performing a search index update. But that's all that happened. Nobody knows if Yahoo did anything about an update, and they're just waiting and waiting and wondering what's next.
Malware in Live Search Tools As anticipated at Pubcon, Live Search has added malware reporting to their Webmaster Tools arsenal. You can use this data to find out if malware is linking to you, or if you're linking to malware sites. I think this is a very cool idea.
Google's Street View Gets Better Google is making street view more enhanced with new features. The pegman is now more visible and you can drag him from the zoom slider to activate street view. That's not all either: you can report concerns more easily and enjoy a mini map view to get two different views at all times. Cool.
Google Terminates Contractors - You Better Hope You Aren't One Google seems to only value their long term employees, and instead has axed their contractors, which has been going under the radar for several months until someone caught wind of these activities. Looks like Google isn't as great as everyone thought it was.
And will Google Even Give Gifts This Year? Now that we're in the midst of a recession and Google is dropping valued and dedicated contractors, should we expect gifts from them this year? It's that time -- do you think Google will deliver?
Google Releases Blogger Best Practice Guide If you're a blogger and you're writing for search engines (I mean PEOPLE, people!), you should consider reading Google's blogger best practice guide which was released earlier this week.
SEMPO and NASDAQ = <3 SEMPO has been given a great honor to ring NASDAQ's bell next week. They may have struggled in their initial first year, but they have prevailed -- and now, you can see that SEMPO is shining. I'm very proud of all those who are participating in the honor. Congratulations!
Microsoft Cash Back Rocks! My friend told me a few weeks ago that Microsoft Cash Back has made a $900 camera purchase $700 -- yes, a $200 savings. He used this trick to utilize Microsoft Cash Back and he's extremely happy. I guess you can win from utilizing Microsoft's search engine in this capacity, so take advantage of it while it lasts!
Have a good weekend!
