As part of the Yahoo-Microsoft Search Alliance, Yahoo! has been transitioning the backend for their organic search to the Microsoft search platform. Search results for Yahoo! are already aligned with Microsoft for the United States, Canada, Australia, Brazil, and Mexico, while expansion to the rest of the world is expected before too much longer. Apparently API access will shut down on September 15, 2011, so it's unlikely to be much longer before Site Explorer officially disappears. According to Yahoo! Site Explorer will shut down once the transition of organic results in all markets to the Microsoft Search platform is completed, which is expected later this year. source

Google rates websites just like how people judge others based on their neighborhood. In terms of your website’s neighborhood, If your home (website) is close and associated with other beautiful well known homes, then Google will see you as one of them. On the other hand, if you’re home’s neighbors are unkempt, dodgy slums area of the web, that does not bode well for your home as Google will also see you as part of the slums. Google classifies a bad or good website not only on its content but also with the web hosting (neighborhood). If the web host has bad reputation and hosts other suspicious websites, Google will penalize all of the sites in that host and cause a drop in search engine rankings. If using a shared hosting provider, other bad websites in that web host will also drag your site down and be a reason for a penalty. Google penalties are adjustment of page rank positions for a site. A Google ban is imposed upon sites that are cloaking by adjusting the content offered to the browser based on its IP address and provide information specifically for the IP’s location from the world like weather news, etc. Before pointing at your hosting provider for the fault, you should check first the criteria of Google about determining a good website from a bad one. Take into consideration as to whether changes have occurred in rating websites, the technical guidelines and quality measurements. Finally, always evaluate a web hosting provider whether or not it has a good standing before signing up with them. Having a better host spells a difference in building your online presence for it to be appealing in the search engine ranking world. The Northern Office specializes with online marketing support which includes website hosting target specifically for corporate websites and e-commerce websites. This guarantees our clients that their neighbors are other reputable websites and organizations. For more information on The Northern Office and our website hosting services, please visit our website or email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

If you know that your specialty is writing blogs, then you can also be great on writing press releases. Blogs and press releases share the same characteristics: strong headlines, top-down format, etc. Press releases are one of the best ways to promote a blog. They are also one of the effective ways to publish your message without duplicating any content. Here are some tips to re-write your blog post and turn them into press releases. The easiest way to start is to:

1. Take a blog post from any news. Unlike blog posts, a press release always announces something. It is not commentary, a how-to guide or numbered list. Blog post topics can be perfectly worked for press release.

• Launch of a new company
• Clients successful stories
• Innovation of products, new services or future events
• Careers
• Achievements
• Milestones

You can also promote your own ideas such as predictions and opinions from current news.

2. Convert it to the third person’s voice It is important to convert the headline and the body of blog into a third person for press release. It is relevant not to use “I”, “we”, or “you” instead use the company name, clients, or customers.

3. Revise the headline Keywords must be in the first few words of the headline of the blog and press release. Press releases have a subhead which highlight the headline’s point-of-difference or provides factual backup for the headline. Way to format the headline and subhead:

• Press release headline must be in all CAPS
• Subhead in Title Case, Except the Little, Non-Important Words

4. Rearrange the post to contain these press release elements

• Dateline: Writing a press release on your own, the right format is to use all caps on address and date.
• Lead: Be creative at you first sentence by adding what, where, why and how. Your headline must contain keywords.
• Quote: By adding a quote, even if it’s not necessary, this helps you to illuminate and gives your press release a personality.
• Boilerplate: Website and phone number at the end, also add a short paragraph about the company, in a third person view.

5. Review AP style or the basics

  “The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law, usually called the AP Stylebook, is a style and usage guide used by newspapers and in the news industry in the United States.” – http://www.wikipedia.org/   You can start by checking the AP (Associated Press) Style AP stylebook. This can check your grammar, punctuation, and answer any questions you need.

6. Check out other writer’s press releases PR Newswire and PR Web are websites that has press release that can be checked out. Some may be useful and some may not be great. Most writers don not follow the “third person” and “AP Style”. These are visible and can be spotted right away because they look like blog posts. Professionalism and expertise can reflect from your image, so you must be very careful on how you format your press release.

The Northern Office is a marketing and sales consultancy firm in the Philippines that caters to small and medium sized enterprises that do not have their own marketing department, but are big enough to need it. The Northern Office makes use of creative, original and effective marketing plans and activities that suit each and every client depending on their industry, offering and requirements.

As part of online marketing and content development efforts, The Northern Office produces regular blog posts and press releases for various clients from different industries. Visit our website for more details. http://www.thenorthernoffice.com  

• Implemented support for hardware-accelerated 3D CSS which allows web developers to apply 3D effects to website content.
• Chrome now warns users when downloading malicious files. This is on top of their safe browsing features that protect against malware and phishing websites. Google assures Chrome users that Chrome will be doing all these without tracking what sites you visit or what files you are downloading.
• Users can now delete Flash Local Shared Objects (LSO) directly on Google Chrome which increases your control over your online privacy.
• Chrome features preliminary support for screen readers such as JAWS, NVDA and VoiceOver which are highly useful for the blind or visually impaired.
• Chrome has removed the Google Gears plug-in, to maximize the use of HTML5.

URL shorteners have become more and more prominent in recent years because of shortening services such as "goo.gl" and "bitly."

The increased prominence of these shorteners is associated with the rise of social web, and most specially micro-blogging services like Twitter. This wasn't a huge issue for search engine optimizers, though, since Twitter and other social sdata was almost entirely disregarded by search sites - until recently.

As social search has become more important, so has understanding how SEO works for shared links. In a new Google Webmaster Help video, Google’s Matt Cutts explains exactly how the shortened URLs are treated. Cutts states that almost all shorteners are going to use a “301 permanent redirect” to move the page to the appropriate destination, and that Google will treat any links to that 301 redirect as being a link – for the sake of pagerank – to the destination.

That destination page will also receive the “social promotion” bump for any friends/followers of the original tweeter. Additionally, any other SEO data (such as anchor text, position on the page, and so forth) will be passed on. Cutts is quick to remind us, though, that a lot of additional rules apply in the world of social search. For one, most core pages on sites like Twitter have nofollow tags on any outgoing links. That doesn’t mean that the links are irrelevant, though. Beyond Google’s own social promotion, Cutts states that the links may be found in other pages – such as data feeds – where they will pass on link juice. [via Google Webmaster Help Channel]