The battle still remains between the two largest online social communities, Myspace and Facebook. While many people think Myspace is "dead", the site was up a 7% in May compared to May 07'. Facebooks' numbers were quite impressive increasing 83% from May 07' according to Nielsen Online reported by Marketing Charts . The network I'm most impressed with that had a very significant increase in the social space is LinkedIn, a social community for professionals,

Google is doing their part to celebrate gay pride and gay marriages in California with a new addition their search results for gay oriented terms; flying the gay pride flag between the organic search results and the Adwords search results on the right side of the serps. A colleague sent me a screenshot he took when searching for gay marriage on Google. Does this influence the click thru percentage of the sponsored Google Adwords listings? Perhaps.

Back in March Hitwise published its UK search report on differences between plural and singular keyword forms echoed by multiple bloggers enthusiastically encouraging webmasters to focus efforts on plural because plural form was proved to send more traffic . Recent news on Google Trends new makeover prompted me to test the tool again and this brought me back to plural vs singular considerations.

If you're the top honcho of one of the major internet player, and it happens to be your first year anniversary on the job - would you be happy knowing that the men and women who are supposed to greet on this special dare are leaving your company one after the other? Alright, that was a badly conceptualized question.

An often discussed lately geo targeting and IP delivery poses another rather interesting question: how to deal with multi-language countries like Canada or Switzerland? IP delivery won't work here as people located on the same territory may speak different languages and interested in the corresponding language versions. A thread over at Google Groups discusses just the case of targeting both French- and English-speaking citizens of Canada.

Careerjet , a job search engine celebrating its 8th birthday has many great accomplishments to its credit. First, the engine supports 56 country specific sites in over 20 languages. Second, it has launched public APIs and innovative affiliate programs for both online and offline partners. The crawlers of the engine use semantic analysis to index job related information from over 58,000 sites on a daily basis.

A couple of weeks ago Search Engine Journal covered the controversy behind Google StreetView and their Google Armada trespassing on private property and filming homes and the happenings on such property despite obvious no trespassing postings. The story was about a small St. Paul Minnesota suburb named North Oaks , which is a private city of 4,500. In North Oaks, the community is owned by the residents and the streets are private property.

Microsoft has announced that it might open a Search Technology Center )STC( in Europe next year. The STC will be created to hasten Microsoft's investment Live Search as well as to disrupt the search and advertising marketplace to their advantage. "As I stated in my May 18 memo about our Online Services strategy, today Microsoft has 68 percent reach to Internet users throughout Europe through our online assets and strengths in display advertising; however,

Before I start reviewing available tools showing which keywords your competitors rank high in Google, let me describe how you can use this information: do not just copy-paste your competitors' keywords, use it as additional help for your keyword research ; compare which keywords your competitors optimized their pages )i.e. tried to rank for( and which keywords they ended up ranking for . Thus you'll be able to avoid their mistakes. 1.

In what could be another blow in Yahoo's fate, Yahoo EVP Jeff Weiner unexpectedly bolted out from the Yahoo camp due to personal reasons as explained by Yahoo President Sue Decker in email )via Techcrunch ( to Weiner's team. I wouldn't question why  instead of CEO Jerry Yang, it was Ms. Decker who was addressing the matters to Weiner's team. I agree with Arrington,

A SEJ reader sent in the following question: Is it a must to create a sitemap for your site and submit it to Google? Can it harm? This is an often asked question, surprisingly. Webmaster forums keep discussing horror stories how their site traffic dropped after they created a sitemap and submitted it to Google Webmaster Tools . So here I am giving a list of frequently asked sitemap-related questions to cover all this FUD. Is a sitemap a must for a newly launched site ? No,

" In addition, Yahoo! and Google agreed to enable interoperability between their respective instant messaging services, bringing easier and broader communication to users ." This sentence was probably the most overlooked part of the Yahoo & Google press announcement which was sent out last week as the two Internet giants formed a partnership based upon monetizing Yahoo with Google AdWords and AdSense.

The verticalization of search has made its way into the analytics market, as Indeed.com , the search engine for jobs, has announced the launching of Indeed Job Analytics. Indeed Job Analytics reports are customized for each company and will answers many questions commonly asked by employers,

I have recently covered a number of topics on backlink analysis , so make sure you haven't missed anything: Tools to explore backlinks anchor text ; Advanced link: operator to explore your competitor's backlinks )in Yahoo(; Analyzing your competitor's backlinking strategies . Today I am going to add a few useful FireFox plugins that can also be very helpful for exploring backlinks. 1.

A few days after the Yahoo-Google deal was finalized, Bilionnaire Carl Icahn commented a rather unexpected remark especially coming from somebody who was opposing Yahoo's decision not to except the Microsoft bid. What's even worst, that someone has even waged a proxy battle to overthrow the current Yahoo board.

Do you love Search Engine Journal? One of our lovely and loyal readers, a staff member of Dr. Michael Dorausch )who we sent to SMX Advanced ( and Planet Chiropractic , sent us this appreciative photo this morning, via Twitter and Flickr : Wowza! After picking my jaw up off the floor I was thinking that I <3 SearchEngineJournal.com too!

BlackHat SEO has a reputation, and it's usually not a good one. Those who practice so-called "blackhat" SEO techniques are often branded as social outcasts, treated by holier-than-thou "whitehat" SEOs and Google much like Hester Prynne in the "The Scarlet Letter". Case in point: the recent SMX Advanced conference in Seattle apparently had a lot of blackhat emphasis this year, much to the shock and horror of some. A few high profile blog posts later,

One of Google's biggest goals this year was to make YouTube profitable.  Well the year is nearly half over, and they've still yet to figure this puzzle out.  Traffic and users is not the issue, but rather, how to convert them into cash in their pockets.

Remember the Microsoft's Live Search Cashback rewards program that we told you about not so long ago? It is now working on a direct-to-merchant system with eBay's "Buy It Now" program. That means, you'll start seeing more cashback ads when searching for jewelries to electronics. Whereas previously,

You know that related search suggestions that Google's search offers up whenever you used Google search? Those suggestions offer up a quick and useful link to related search terms which might point you to more relevant search results than what you used. If you're not familiar with it, those are the links that appear right below the search box after you enter a search term. Got it now? Well,