LBi Search: LBi Search Newsletter: December 2007

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Search Engine Updates

Paid links and Netrank

This month, Matt Cutts and Maile Ohye have published a post about paid links on the Google Webmaster Central Blog, which has caused a furore in the search industry.

If you have any questions surrounding Google's announcement, paid links in general or anything else, please contact Eleanor Precious on 07875 091 487 ellie@netrank.co.uk

Location detection based on mobile phone towers added to Google Maps

Google has launched "My Location" for Google Maps, which spans users with GPS enabled handsets, early adopters of GPS SIM cards and users who are, for whatever reason, happy with their old, GPS free handsets, offering a feasible workaround for mobile search applications.

Changes to Google sub-domain listings.

Google is changing the way in which it treats sub-domains. Instead of treating sub-domains as entirely separate sites in the SERPs, Google will now be clustering sub-domains with the main domain, in essence, restricting a domain to two pages for all but the most eclectic search terms.

How this will affect social and blog sites, such as Blogger or Wordpress, where many sites hang on sub-domains of the main domain, remains to be seen.

Content analysis and sitemap details added to Google Webmaster Tools

An excellent Content Analysis summary page, covering title tags, meta descriptions and non-indexable content issues, has been included within the Diagnostics section of Google Webmaster Tools.

There is also a new Sitemap details page, which gives further details about how a site's xml sitemap is processed.

Google Webmaster Tools are also now available in Czech & Hungarian.

Site error handling added to new Google Toolbar

The new Internet Explorer version of the Google Toolbar includes site error handling tools for:

404 errors with default error pages - the Toolbar will suggest an alternate URL to the visitor.
Non-existent domain names - the Toolbar will suggest a similar, valid domain name.
Connection failures - the Toolbar will display a link to the cached version of the page.

Yahoo! creates ads for PDF files

Yahoo! has brokered a deal to begin inserting dynamic adverts into PDF files. These advertisements will be able to be seen when a PDF file is read, for example, in Adobe Reader, but will not appear when the document is printed.

Yahoo! Weather Report

Yahoo! has announced that it has been rolling out changes to its crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms during December. Some users may have noticed some changes in rankings as well as some shuffling of the pages in the index during this process.

Yahoo! adds support for the X-Robots-Tag header

Yahoo! is now supporting the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header that Google announced earlier in the year.

This move gives webmasters more granular control over pages to be excluded from the two engines' indices, on a per-URL basis, and brings Yahoo! in line with the expanded reach of the Robots Exclusion Protocol to include pages that do not contain HTML, such as Adobe PDF files, video and audio files, Flash and other file types.

Acquisitions and Partnerships

Microsoft buys Multimap

Multimap, one of the top ten most visited sites in the UK, has been bought by Microsoft.

Still the most popular UK map site, Multimap delivers more than 190 million page views per month across 48 countries. With plans to add 3D and aerial functionality, Microsoft says that the acquisition "will play a significant role in the future growth" of its search business.

New Product Launches

AskEraser

Back in July, we reported that Ask.com was to launch an opt-in product called AskEraser, which would delete search records shortly after the time of search.

This month, the privacy tool has been launched on Ask.com and is to be rolled out across other Ask Locales during 2008.

Google Knol to rival Wikipedia?

Google Knol will allow anyone to create a page on any topic. The page can then be commented on, rated and contributed to, but only with the permission of the primary author.

Whilst still in private beta, the description sounds a lot like Squidoo.

Windows Live Search Maps launches in China

Windows has launched a Chinese language version of its Live Search Maps service. However, the Chinese cities are not rendered in 3D as there are strict air traffic control regulations in China.

News and Research

Opera files antitrust suit against Microsoft

Opera has filed an antitrust suit against Microsoft in the EU. Microsoft has said that it believes that "the inclusion of the browser into the operating system benefits consumers, and that consumers and PC manufacturers already are free to choose any browsers they wish."

Opera disagrees, stating that the bundling of IE with the operating system gave Microsoft an unfair advantage.

Opera has also asked that the Commission require Microsoft to "follow fundamental and open Web standards accepted by the Web-authoring communities". This move implies that web standards should become official but is likely to be moot soon, as IE8, the next generation of browser from Microsoft, is billed as being far more compliant and, indeed, passing the Acid 2 CSS tests.

The 10th of December was the biggest e-retail day ever.

With 17% of Britons still paying for last Christmas, the 10th of December saw the largest on-line spend of all time, with around £370million of the £7billion spent this Christmas changing hands on that day.