So, it’s done! Microsoft & Yahoo have come to a deal on online search & advertising. In a nutshell, Yahoo Search will now be powered by Bing. And in return, Yahoo will handle the sales & customer support for online advertising.
Here is the official news from BBC. Today I was browsing through the news of the probable deal, and was waiting for the official news to be published. So from webmaster’s perspective, you can now concentrate on two search engines. Time has come to stop worrying about Yahoo search. Perhaps I won’t use Yahoo Site Explorer again, just use Bing’s webmaster tools 
And this deal will make Bing’s challenge to Google search more realistic. Now Bing will have about 30% of search market in USA, while Google retains its share to about 65%.
Some quick notes on the deal:
- Yahoo will get 88% of the search ad sales from its site for the first 5 years & will also have the rights to sell ads on some Microsoft sites.
- Yahoo has said that the deal would boost their annual operating income by $500m & secure $200m as savings.
But forget about everything. It would take some time to finalize & surely go to through tough antitrust scrutiny. But if it happens Yahoo search is going to be eventually a history. I don’t know how to react! We were listening to all these news about the deal for such a long time, but still it is somewhat bizzare to think Yahoo without its own search!
In late February, I wrote a post about Bloggerforum suspending its forum activity due to too much spam attack. Though I am not a big fan of this forum, sill I used to regularly check back to see what had happened to it. Several months have passed. And now it is the end of July. And when I checked back a few days ago I saw an update. It is getting reopened soon. Though it has not given any specific date, at least there is some big progress. It says that it will be now more effective in spam handling. I hope they will be strict enough this time to prevent those worthless posts that you could find in plenty in the previous forum. So if you were a fan of this popular forum, keep your fingers crossed.
Google has just released a update on Webmaster Tools called Summer Shine. I was going through it. There are some tweaks in user visibility & navigation, but more importantly two new useful features for you.
Thought, you have got sitelinks of your site in Google. You may want to remove a particular one like email contact page link to avoid more spam. Now you can do that. There is a option to block non-homepage sitelinks. The situation may arise quite seldom. But its better to have some option in hand.
Next one is good for collaborative sites. If another webmaster has submitted a URL removal request of your site, you can view them. And if it was a mistake, you can undo it.
Do you use internal linking in your blog extensively? Then you may find self pinging quite annoying. By default, Wordpress will send a pingback each time you link to your post. And it can generate tons of self pings if you link to your previous posts every now & then. It looks clumsy . And only a few self pings would really matter to the old post, as they may give an updated info about the old one. But if you are using a related posts plugin, then you don’t need to worry about showing related info. You then just want to stop self ping.
No Self Ping is a tiny Wordpress plugin that just does it. You just have to install & activate it. That’s all. No configuration is required. From then, self pinging will be completely stopped in your blog. Don’t worry when you see the plugin is last updated in 2007. I have tested it with the latest Wordpress 2.8.1. It works perfect.
I don’t use that much of internal links unless I have to update some news about a service. So I can still use self pings & manually delete them with ease. But it may not be the case with you
Google engineer Matt Cutts is doing a series of video interviews lately especially on Google SEO. Have you wondered where to go to ask him a question for the interview? Here is the link! Go there & post your question for July 2009. Just not only SEO, you can ask him anything on Google products too. Questions should be generic i.e. not a site-specific. Moreover you can vote for other questions whether you like it or dislike. And help them to be popular enough to be chosen for the video.
I have told you before that Geocities is closing this year. Just got a mail from Yahoo about the date Yahoo Geocities is going to close. So just thought of letting you know. It’s official news. Yahoo Geocities will be closed down on October 26, 2009. From that day your Geocities site will no longer appear on the web & you can’t access files from Geocities server. So choose your option for moving & don’t forget to backup your site data prior to that.
As an existing Geocities customer, I have to say I never used it much. I didn’t like it for too many ads & too few features to explore on. But I have got two years of paid hosting & domain from DreamHost for free because of that. It is certainly a good gain 
Your FeedBurner Feed emails use to have your blog title as the email subject. That is not a thing that many of us like too much. It is hardly attractive & after all, when a user checks mailbox after sometime, he will find same heading for new subscribed emails. Do you know you can change it? You can use your latest blog post title as subject of emails while sending them to your FeedBurner Email Subscribers. It can be quite helpful to catch the eye of the readers. Use Email Branding feature of FeedBurner. Then you can choose your own message or use a bit of code to give it a dynamic look. You just have to add
${latestItemTitle}
to Email Subject/Title box to use your latest post title as email subject. By the way, it will be used as both email subject & body title.
Go to your particular feed in Feedburner account. Then click Publicize> Email Subscriptions> Email Branding. Give your feed update mails a more interactive look.
Do you have a new site that is not yet indexed by Bing? Then to submit it manually, you can use newly launched Bing Toolbox. There are two applications mentioned there that can help webmasters:
- To submit a website for Bing search engine inclusion, go to http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx
- And if you want to submit an XML-based sitemap for your site, just enter the below URL in your browser address bar:
http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?sitemap=www.YourWebAddress.com/sitemap.xml
Don’t forget to change YourWebAddress.com with your own domain name
By the way, I would recommend you to enlist & verify your sites in Bing Webmaster Tools. You can get all the data about incoming links, outgoing links & even crawl errors that Bing may have encountered while indexing your site. Moreover, you can get Domain score & Page Score to see how your site ranks in Bing. If you had already registered your sites with previous Live Search Webmaster Tools, then your sites are already listed. You don’t have to worry if you haven’t used the new face. Just go to the new url & find everything the same.
Yeah! You can get a free .com domain name for one year & there are no strings attached. Register.com, one of the most trusted domain registrar is giving away this promotional offer. Actually the offer has been available for a long time. It is said to be for small business. But I contacted the support & they told me that anyone can register with valid info. And you can transfer your domain without having to pay them. Probably you will transfer at the end of the year, as the renewal fee is $35 for Register.com. So it’s better to transfer the domain to GoDaddy or NameCheap. But remember, it usually takes about 5 days to transfer a domain between domain registrars. So don’t leave it too late to avoid any complicacy. Start the process a week or two prior to the domain expiry date.
You have to verify your credit card or PayPal info. While registering you can turn off automatic renewal to prevent getting charged accidentally. Here is the screenshot where you can turn off “Automatic SafeRenew”:
You can register any domain name with .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz or .us extension. But remember you can register only one domain per account.
