Google has introduced sitemaps for Google News. So if you have a site included in Google News, you can creat and submit News Sitemaps to inform Google about the articles that you wish to be included in Google News.
In addition, you can access crawl errors, which tell you if there were any problems crawling the articles in your News Sitemaps, or, for that matter, any articles on your site that Google News reaches through its normal crawl.
Yahoo!'s Frazier Miller has commented that instant messenger is really the original social network. Miller had previously worked on Yahoo! Messenger and Yahoo! Mail; and has recently joined the Yahoo! Local team.
In an interview with Adage, he said that "Local is expanding from a look-up use case or the old Yellow Pages approach to a browse-type use case, where you want to bring in user-generated content elements to make a decision."
Nielsen//Netratings has released data for the month of October. The top search engines are ranked for share of total searches, number of searches and percentage of growth.
Google retains its position as the top search engine in U.S. It commands a share of searches which more than double when compared to Yahoo!, the distant second and more than five times of MSN, which is in the single digits here.
Google has launched a major advertising campaign by partnering with newspapers for advertisement. It all began with a small scale test that involved Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, the Washington Post and many other newspapers.
Yahoo! has finally integrated Yahoo! Answers into Yahoo! Search Results. The move has been anticipated for quite some while now. It has been in line with the evolution of natural search into social search media, as is prevalent in China.
The answers will provide searchers with results which have been qualified by other users and chosen as relevant answers. In contrast with the robots, now search results will be human qualified.
Yahoo! has announced the formation of a major "consortium" in alliance with seven newspapers to tap into the local advertising market. The newspapers involved are Cox Enterprises, Belo, E. W. Scripps, the Journal Register Company, Lee Enterprises and Hearst. The last one has a running partnership with Google to run the latter's text ads in Hearst print publications.
Lately more and more experts have talked about supplemental pages. But practically nothing has been clarified about the confusing issue so far. Matt Cutts and Vanessa Fox spoke about it at Pubcon. Adam Lasnik has been talking about it at WebmasterWorld too. So what do we have?
Search Engine Watch Forums has a discussion on sites banned by MSN. One of the guys had no rankings at all and search for his domain didn't even show it. The MSN support team asked him to check the robots.txt file.
There are many others who are facing the same problem and got in touch with the support team. Here is a response which just about summarizes it:
It has not hit the headlines yet. But a few webmasters are experiencing huge shift in their Google SERPs.
A few comments at Webmasterworld:
My pages lost about 80% of their traffic about 10 days ago or so. Nov 16/17 I noticed a few terms popping back into the top three positions..
The problems of Google News are refusing to subside in the Scandinavian countries. Some time recently Google was stopped from indexing the news of Belgian newspapers till Google agrees to pay them. The Scandinavian versions of Google News, which was launched last week, has ran into trouble too.
@pagetraffic
