Today marks the celebration of the birthday of the United States of America; Independence Day, the Fourth of July. While many Americans are enjoying their day off, the three day weekend, fireworks and backyard bbq's, the search engines are also showing their love for our independence, with their celebratory logos. Google's Fireworks over the lake logo : Yahoo also brings fireworks into their 4th of July logo,

Many webmasters come across one common dilemma: is it worth focusing efforts on one huge brilliant copy or is it wiser to split it into several related copies . Like with many topics we discuss here, there is no definitive answer to that.

Hitwise Intelligence's VP for Research, Heather Hopkins made an interesting analysis of Yahoo! online properties based on some Hitwise data. Hopkins noted that of the top 20 Yahoo properties for June 2008 based on internet visits, Yahoo! Search was just a mere third trailing behind Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo main portal. Yahoo Search got a mere 12% share of the total number of visitors going to Yahoo's properties for the said month.

Viacom, if you recall, filed a $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube not too long ago.  As part of the lawsuit, a court as now ordered Google to turn over a complete log of all users' activities to Viacom.  These logs would include such things as usernames, IP addresses, and videos that each account has viewed in the past.

Google has developed a new version of their Google Talk messaging service for the Apple iPhone, in an announcement just in time for the launch today of the 3G iPhone. From Talkabout, the Google Talk Blog : Our new version of Google Talk is designed specifically for the iPhone and runs in the iPhone's browser, so you don't need to download or install anything. Just visit www.google.com/talk on your iPhone, sign in, and start chatting.

I've decided to make up a short all-in-one guide to summarize what we know about SEO for URLs. And if you have something to add, please do. So he we go: Length of the URL : no more than 3-5 words in your URL. According to Google's Matt Cutts if there are more than 5 words' [Google] algorithms typically will just weight those words less and just not give you as much credit.

Google Street View, which photographs the streets and lanes within cities and other destinations via a continuous panoramic camera placed on the top of cars, has now gone live for France .

Microsoft Live Search's Australian partner ninemsn is reportedly having a contest right now to promote the use of Live Search, and among the prizes of the said contest was none other than an iPod Nano. The contest goes something like this. Everytime you conduct a search using ninemsn's live search , three cards from a set of five cards will flip open to reveal a secret prize. If three of the cards that flipped revealed the same prize, you get that prize.

Very often with large dynamic sites webmasters just can't do without pagination. Apart from usability here they come across another serious issue: duplicate content . The thing is that all pages normally have identical titles and meta description and while some SEOs think it's not an issue at all )as search engines "don't see identical titles as duplicate content"(, I do believe that this may at least result in inadequate site crawling rate and depth.

Social media has opened up many avenues to many people and has brought forth a new level of communication. People now lean on the social media for support networks, feedback, counsel, research, conversation, and more. Often times many people have questions that their close friends or family members aren't best equipped to answer. Traditional search engine queries aren't always the best way to get you answers to the precise inquiry you may have either.

We keep hearing about website internal duplicate content issues but many of us are sincerely unaware of the fact that that's what our own website also suffers from. Why? most of the websites are made with the help of third-party site creators that create duplicate URLs to same content and we don't know about that; sometimes webmasters just lack SEO knowledge. For example, they might be unaware of the fact that URLs are case sensitive and www.yoursite.com/page1 and www.

Yesterday, we told you that Google will be making Flash contents searchable in cooperation with Adobe. Now, we found through a video interview with R.J. Pittman, Google's Director of Product Management for Consumer Search Properties, that Google will also be working on image processing technology to effectively search and organize the web's trillion of images. Of course, we know the underlying purposes of this,

The power of excellent public relations and positioning a company as an alternative t the technological norm has paid off for Powerset, the semantics oriented search technology which launched its limited public testing application in May which lends a new way to semantically navigate Wikipedia . Rumors began spinning around the blogosphere last week that Microsoft was looking to acquire Powerset , and it looks like the inevitable has happened.

It's getting even harder to make of a good short relevant domain name. Hence the web-based tools allowing you to find one are numerous. This time I will review mostly the ones that check the domain name availability dynamically and also provide you with some tips to advance your search.

Both Google and Yahoo in coordination with Adobe is finally making it easier for webmasters to make Flash contents on their site searchable by search engines' crawlers. Where as before, webmasters have to do some special arrangements with their Flash content to make it indexable by the search engines' crawlers. For Google, their search engine will index textual content of SWF files including Flash gadgets - such as buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites,

Expectedly, now that Google has relaunched DoubleClick's Performics ad affiliate network as the new Google Affiliate Network , there's no point in maintaining the Adsense Referrals Program anymore. So,  Google Adsense has just sent an official email to )I suppose( all Adsense members informing us that Google is retiring the Adsense Referrals Program starting the last week of August.

When Google acquired DoubleClick , the company has brought with it its affiliate ad network program called Performics. But Google never did something to push Performics as one of its advertising program, until now. Google has renamed Performics as the Google Affiliate Network , and Amazon with its popular Affiliate Marketing Network called Amazon Associates have something to worry about. The Google Affiliate Network works like your ordinary affiliate ad network,

When Google acquired DoubleClick , the company has brought with it its affiliate ad network program called Performics. But Google never did something to push Performics as one of its advertising program, until now. Google has renamed Performics as the Google Affiliate Network , and Amazon with its popular Affiliate Marketing Network called Amazon Associates have something to worry about. The Google Affiliate Network works like your ordinary affiliate ad network,

Though the iPhone may be considered the best phone for internet mobile use, Google has improved its search results for the Blackberry. As Googles goal is to help users search more efficiently, these improvements to the Blackberry will do just that. As reported in the Google Mobile Blog,

Keyword research is the first thing you do when planning a website. You do it before thinking over the site architecture and creating the content. Keyword research is the what you do to estimate your competition and create a promotion strategy. Previously, I have talked about the keyword research tools and ways to organize your keyword list . But where to start? How to find the correct core terms that you will then explore and expand?