Bing Homepage Contest

For many people, their favorite feature of the search engine Bing is the beautiful photograph featured on the homepage. Now Bing is having a contest to select a users photograph for their homepage for 24 hours. The winner will be selected based on user ratings and by the Bing homepage editorial team. The theme for the contest is “Summer Travel” and the last day for the submissions is July 16th. So, if you are interested in submitting your photograph, visit the Bing Photo Contest on Facebook.

June 2009 PageRank Update

Google has once again rolled out more updates to their PageRank Toolbar. Typically Google makes PageRank updates about every 3 months, but this update comes very close to it’s last update in May. So if you are engaged in SEO on your site and see a change in your PageRank, don’t be too alarmed.

Bing’s New Features

Are you wondering how Microsoft’s new search engine Bing is going to affect your organic rankings? Microsoft now offers a white paper for webmasters outlining Bing and it’s new features.

After reading through the white paper, it appears that Bing is still following the standard SEO practices. Click here to download the PDF.

Bing TV Commercials

Over the past couple of weeks I have seen a tremendous amount of Bing television commercials. I have been impressed with the commercials that position Bing as the first ever decision engine.

What have you thought of these commercials? Do you think they will entice people to start using Bing over Google?

Google Webmaster Tools Adds Change of Address

Google has added a new feature to their Google Webmaster Tools where you can notify Google when you are moving from one domain to another. For example, let’s say that Getupdated.com was going to move to GetupdatedUSA.com, we would now be able to login to Google Webmaster Tools and specify the change. According to Google this is going to allow them to update their index faster and will make the transition of changing domains smoother.

To check out this new feature login to your Google Webmaster account, click on a website, then Site Configuration, and finally Change of address.

For the best results, follow the steps that Google recommends on the Change of address page and then submit your new URL.

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Google Video Adds Search Options

Last month I blogged about how Google added a new feature which they call Search Options.

Now, we are seeing the search options also available on Google Video. When you type in a search query on Google Video you will have the following options on the left hand side: TV view, duration, time, sort by relevance, and source.

These additional search options make finding the specific video you are looking for much easier.

Google Squared

Google Squared is Google’s new experimental search tool that presents information from the web in an organized spreadsheet making it very easy to compare data.

For example, since I like to read, I typed in “best selling books” to Google Squared and the results I received were in a spreadsheet and showed me a list of some of the best selling books. Next to each book was a small image related to the book, a description of the book, the language the book is in, the author, and the publisher. At the bottom of the spreadsheet there was an “Add” box where I could suggest other topics I you would like to show up in the spreadsheet.

For more information, below is a video from Google explaining Google Squared:

Yahoo Search Update - June 2009

Yahoo has officially announced that over the next few days they are rolling out some updates to their crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms.

So if you see fluctuations in your rankings, don’t be alarmed. Hopefully these updates will be minor.

Bing is Now Live

Microsoft’s new search engine Bing is now live. If you try and go to live.com you will be redirected to bing.com.

Here is a great article on Bing Tips & Tricks.

Try it out and let us know what you think.

Google Launches Web Elements

Internet giant Google took the opportunity at its own Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco to launch Google Web Elements. This tool will allow site owners to integrate widget-like Google tools into their own Web pages.

The widget-style tools, announced May 27, gathers together 8 Google widgets on a single page - Calendar, Conversation, Custom Search, Maps, News, Presentations, Spreadsheets, and YouTube News. Even though many of the widgets offered on the Web Elements page are old news, at least putting them all in one place is helpful.

The company is flaunting the user-friendliness of this new feature since it allows the code for the tools to be integrated into the site via cut-and-paste. For example, the News element adds headline news about the topics you choose to any page. You just need go to the News element page and use the wizard to update the live preview as you change the topics and pick the best size for your site. When you like what you see, simply copy the short embedded code and paste it into the HTML of your page.

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