Today AdAge reported that there is some big news expected from Yahoo and Microsoft tomorrow.

The gossip has been here and there but AdAge has lent some credibility to it all – Yahoo is going to partner with Microsoft to use Bing as its main search engine. The look of Yahoo, in terms of branding, is not expected to change; after all this is not a buyout but a partnership.

For more information check out the AdAge article I sourced this news from and I look forward to giving you more to chew on tomorrow.

by Ross Dunn, CEO, StepForth Web Marketing Inc.
Follow Ross Dunn and StepForth on Twitter!

Late last year I interviewed several of Twitter’s Twitterati  (Barry Schwartz – @rustybrick, Darren Rowse – @problogger, Justine Ezarik – @ijustine, Steve Rubel – @steverubel) for an article in the Fall print edition of the Search Marketing Standard to get their impressions on microblogging.

The feedback was, as you might imagine, excellent, and with a big thanks to the brass at the Search Marketing Standard I am now able to share the article I wrote with you in PDF format. I hope you enjoy it. Download “To Tweet or Not to Tweet” from our free account at MediaFire.

If you would like to see more articles like this one, please subscribe to the print edition of the Search Marketing Standard at their website.

On Today’s SEO 101 Internet radio show on WebmasterRadio.FM my co-host John Carcutt and I discussed how SEO relates to social media optimization (SMO). Near the end of the show I brought up Posterous and how much I like it (see “Posterous is an Intelligent Social Media Posting Tool“). Amidst the conversation I noted an e-mail discussion I had with some Posterous representatives. In the discussion I asked questions that I felt were very important in determining whether to use Posterous as a core blogging platform for a business.

Question 1) Is it possible to use a subdomain for my Posterous account? I know a domain is possible but not so sure about a sub-domain. I thought blog.mydomain.com would be great.

Answer: “blog.mydomain.com works great”

My Take: A short but very sweet answer. I am not always a proponent of using a sub-domain for a blog but the fact that Posterous offers that capability makes it all the more alluring.

Question 2) When will it be possible to use my own URL shortener? I would really rather not use yours so that I can keep all of my tracking in one place. Read more…

I recently wrote a half-teasing post about a branding issue Posterous appears to be having but I also noted that it is looking like another emerging winner in online social media and the reason is simple; it makes posting to a myriad of social media profiles as simple as writing a single email or clicking on a share button in your browser. I thought of a variety of different ways to explain how it works but I found a video that did all of the work for me. The video below from NBC’s Tech Now does an excellent job of illustrating how easy Posterous is to use and how it might help you manage your online social media persona. Read more…

Today I became aware of a very unfortunate branding issue with a new social media platform called Posterous (pronounced Post-Er-Us). First of all, you should know that Posterous is a killer application that I have little doubt will soon be a leading social media property; I will have a follow-up post outlining the reasons. Now onto a sad yet humorous (IMO) lesson in branding; Posterous appears to be commonly misspelled (and even mispronounced) as Posterious (Post-Ear-E-Us). Read more…

The Internet is a-buzz with the latest offering from Firefox – the best browser available in my opinion – and the upgrades look absolutely tantalizing:

• It is twice as fast as Firefox 3: an impressive feat!
• You can save movies as easily as saving an image,
• It will download fonts from websites if your computer does not have the necessary font – this is very new and very very cool. Why? Because now sites can include their very own custom fonts that can add a lot of pizazz to a site and create a very unique look. Now you will be able to see the site as the designer intended.
• It offers location-aware browsing: an option that will enable the browser to tell websites where you are located so that they can tailor their content for your area. Again this is an OPTION do not fret over your privacy.
• You can surf the net anonymously using private browsing options just like Google Chrome offered when it released.

BUT! Read more…

While doing some local search marketing for a client of mine last Friday I took a moment to watch the introductory video at the Google Local Business Center and I was impressed on how well it got the message across to viewers. As a result, I think it is a benefit to you to watch this if you are not already maximizing your Google Local account:

One critical element that this intro leaves out is Read more…

If you don’t know already it is very important to setup your local business listing on local and mainstream search engines. Well since Bing came out I thought I would go there and get StepForth’s listing. So I visited the Bing Local Listing Center and tried to add my company’s local listing but I ran into an annoying wall a little ways into the process that was a real let down; they didn’t bother to tell me that only the USA is supported at the moment.

January 30th, 2013 Update: Great news! You can now add your Canadian business easily and free to Bing Local via Nokia.

If you are in the USA the process to get your local listing is straight forward – at least as far as I got. Just go to the Bing Local Listing Center and log in with your Microsoft Passport (or create one) and if the system does not find a current listing it will allow you to create one. Well StepForth does not have one yet according to their system so I was directed to the listing local listing creation page. When I got to the creation page and began to fill out the submission form I was rebuffed by a big pet peeve of mine… the system knew I was Canadian (it is noted in the header of the page) and yet the only way to add a listing was to enter a State and Zip (see screenshot). Read more…

At SMX Advanced a few weeks ago there was a huge hullabaloo about Matt Cutt’s saying that PageRank Sculpting using nofollow tags is no longer effective and it should no longer be used. I haven’t posted anything about this until now because frankly there were enough people making a stink about this topic. That said, I now am ready to weigh in on the subject mainly because Matt Cutts posted his own take on PageRank Sculpting last week and it gave me some food for thought.

So what is the deal? What did Matt say? Let’s examine the details based on his post:

Matt’s Post: “So what happens when you have a page with ‘ten PageRank points’ and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? … Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.” (Colour formatting added.)

Read more…

Good news fellow WordPress junkies! John Godley at Urban Giraffe has kindly updated HeadSpace 2 so the rel=”follow” attribute is no longer implemented! I don’t know about you but having that made-up attribute on my website as a result of using HeadSpace was not a comfort to me. Anyway, a big thanks goes out to John Godley for being such a great guy and acting on my suggestion to drop the psuedo attribute. Thank you John!

Not sure what I am talking about? What is HeadSpace?

If you are familiar with WordPress but you have not heard of HeadSpace then you are in for a real treat. Read more…