Search Engine Optimization

European Parliament is still holding off Google DoubleClick deal, this time on privacy issues.

The hearing was arranged to discuss the potential privacy implications of Google’s proposed DoubleClick acquisition, as well as wider privacy concerns surrounding Internet data. Privacy advocates and campaigners from numerous organizations were present, expressing concerns surrounding Google’s potential dominance of the Internet advertising industry and the huge amounts of consumer data the company has access to. – Clickz Network

On December 20th 2007 FTC approved the purchase, giving Google green light on the purchase.

Though it seems Google is facing some opposition with the acquisition, deal will go through as enough time passes by.

As response to proposed acquisition, Microsoft was forced to buy Aquantive. Aquantive and DoubleClick are direct competitors.

Some of the companies under Aquantive are listed here, one of which made my eyebrows go up with – “Huh”. You can check it here.

Yahoo has officially confirmed its 2008 update.

Welcome to our first weather report of 2008. Over the last few days, we’ve been rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms. While we expect the update will be completed soon, as you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index.

A number of people have already spotted it long before the official line and SEO roundtable drew a line 4 days earlier.

Discussion at WebMaster World.

More on Yahoo.

Blogosphere is exploding with reports of upcoming Yahoo layoffs ranging from hundreds to 1.500 in order to increase Yahoo’s bottom line, as the layoffs will save approximately $150 million, making greedy wallstreeters happy.

Yahoo! has staggering number of visitors, but it fails to make most of them.

Yahoo stated that it will no longer spread its efforts and will focus on its it key areas in near future.

I sense Googlers are quite happy an Mountain view, as their biggest search rival bends on its knees in order to stay up in the game. Will Yahoo stay here? As many have speculated, Yahoo might outsource its search to Google and cut even more jobs as a way to stay in the stock game, but this will not likely happen as Yahoo search is pretty good, at least better then that of Microsoft. Yahoo got a streamlined supply of loyal visitors, so it is going to be a player for a bit.