It's all change at Yahoo! as this week Yahoo! Connected Life chief Marco Boerries resigned his position, ahead of chief financial officer Blake Jorgensen who also stepped down.

During the latter part of 2008, co-founder Jerry Yang stepped down following months of discussions with Microsoft over a potential merge of Yahoo's search service which finally collapsed.

The JavaScript used to tag website's with as part of Google Analytics is "brittle", one commentator has claimed, a point which "really bugs" him.

SEOmoz contributor Stephen T explained that aside from this issue he really liked the tool as the interface was simple to use and the information was easy to interpret.

Many businesses have failed to realise that by using internet jargon on their websites, they are making it difficult for users to navigate around them, one expert has told.

Steve Simmonds, business manager at Design UK, said one firm he had worked with had its own in-house categorisation which its employees were very use to.

What is universal search? It’s the diverse means of displaying results in the SERPs to give individuals greater choice over the style of listing they choose.

Internet search queries - which dictate search engine optimisation or pay per click - are getting longer, new research has discovered.

The study by Hitwise revealed that more than half of all searches are now at least three words in length, while more than a third exceed four words.

When it comes to internet and social media marketing, businesses should be focussing on the basics this year, one expert has claimed.

Phil Turnbull, marketing manager at Hostway, said now was the time for marketers and advertisers to make sure their campaigns were more efficient to get the most out of the technology they had.

As micro-blogging, such as Twitter, expands on the ever-evolving internet, one expert has predicted that nofollow is dying as a result.

In a blog posting for SEOmoz, Will Critchlow notes that Google lists the three main intended uses of nofollow as being to link to untrusted content, paid links and crawl prioritisation.

A brand new website being launched in a competitive sector should look first to utilising longtail keywords in boosting search engine optimisation (SEO) as these are easier to rank for, according to one expert.

Aaron Wall, in an article for SEO Book, explains that this is because mid-tier phrases can be picked off to rank at the top of search results and result in a build-up of revenue stream.

Google is constantly changing and adapting and making things difficult for search engine optimisation (SEO), but there are ways that smaller companies and organisations can succeed, one expert has claimed.

SEO Book's Peter D claims that one of the biggest changes that SEO workers have had to adapt to in recent years is to algorithm shifts "that reward big players".

Blogs can be a "great" way for businesses to get their message across, one expert has noted - and it could be said that they also increase search engine optimisation.

Maggie Holland, editor of IT PRO, said that writing a blog can also create a sense of connected community between the firm and readers.

If all of the search engines were sitting down to a game of Monopoly then Google would currently have hotels scattered across most of the board, but will the group ever get into a position where it absolutely monopolises the markets?

Ben Camm-Jones, news editor at Web-User Magazine, certainly believes that Google will continue to grow and argues asks how, when a firm has such a global business, it can be effectively regulated.

A woman has filed a lawsuit against Yahoo! over allegations that search engine optimisation led her to a spam site with her name on it.

Reported in Eric Goldman's blog, he explains that Bev Stayart claims to be the only person with that name on the internet and therefore any reference to this name must be a reference to her.

Social media - and in particular online communities - can be "very valuable" to businesses, one expert has told.

Ben Heald, chief executive officer of Sift, explained that this was because from a business perspective, such online spaces were a trusted intermediary between advertisers and the community users.

Google's approach to product design has struck one search engine optimisation professional as "Darwinian".

Writing on the online pages of Search Engine Land, Greg Sterling came to this conclusion due to the search engine's trend of releasing new products with little promotion and then let them evolve under the survival of the fittest pattern.

There’s a lot of noise in the marketplace about Twitter. Could this be used by businesses to extend their online reach?

For those not in the know, Twitter is a micro-blogging platform. In its simplest form it allows users to tell the world, in no less than 140 characters, what they’re up to (tweets), similar to the status update on Facebook. You can however append things such as images, or links to other sites, to support whatever it is you’re ranting about at that moment in time.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a tool that can be used to make quality publishing business model profitable and it is a mistake to think it is used simply to "temporarily promote garbage".

Such is the assertion of SEO Book's Aaron Wall, who was once again responding to the recent John Dvorak article for PC Mag, in which he likened SEO to snake oil.

A recent article denouncing the value of search engine optimisation (SEO) has been labelled "ignorant" by one SEO expert.

Writing on the online pages of PC Mag, John Dvorak likened SEO to snake oil and claimed that at worst it was "screwing up the elegance of the web".

Despite being search engine competitors, when it comes to search engine optimisation Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! are putting on a united front.

The three have joined together in a bid to rid the web of duplicate content by implementing a new canonical tag.

Google has removed its search web option from its email service Gmail, it has been noted.

Writing on the online pages of Search Engine Watch, Frank Watson noted that the search engine made the move silently and questioned whether that was the reason for the tool being "so buggy" yesterday (February 11th).

This year businesses are putting more of a focus on their return on investment (ROI) and search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay per click (PPC) may be the way to realise this goal, according to one sector commentator.

Alison Fennah, executive director of the European Interactive Advertising Association, said that some companies put all of their focus for ROI on direct response advertising, a process she would not necessarily advise.

The Yahoo! oneSearch shortcut has been improved and expanded, according to the search engine's official blog.

Joy Ghanekar, of Yahoo! Mobile, announced the launch of several new features, including an auto-locate feature that uses cell tower triangulation and Wi-Fi to detect the user's location.

Looking to the future of Google AdWords, Quality Score is likely to be a "huge challenge" due to its complexities, according to one commentator.

SEO Book's Aaron Wall recently had the opportunity to interview Andrew Goodman, author of books including Winning Results with Google AdWords - and a man that Mr Wall calls the world's number one Google AdWords expert.

Is the web better when it is social?

Well, Google certainly think so and has launched its 80th official blog as a result - the Social Web Blog.

In addition, the search engine group is developing tools that will make any application, any friends and any site "a reality", after noting that currently people will have friends on more than one site, applications that only work in one network and multiple passwords and usernames.

The culture of the internet is that people want information now and they want it quickly, it has been claimed.

As a result, Martin Warner, chief executive officer and co-founder of business networking platform Talkbiznow.com, has said that organisations should make use of such websites to deliver users the information they want in the quickest time possible.

Reports of impending changes to the Google AdWords web interface, to help give advertisers clearer insights into their ad campaigns, appear to be premature – however, an updated web interface is said to be in the early beta stages.

The beta version is being rolled out to a limited number of UK advertisers on February 10th 2009.

There are strategies still being used to boost search engine optimisation (SEO) which could be "cleaned up" by Google taking action, it has been claimed.

In a post for Blog Storm, Patrick Altoft argues that he expected the first thing Google could fix, but as yet had not, was the use of link spam and network of sites to get the highest rankings for keywords.

YouTube garnered six billion video views during the month of December, once again coming out on the top of the online video field, according to recent figures.

Businesses considering using video content to improve their own search engine optimisation may wish to use the Google-owned site after comScore data revealed that 99 per cent of video viewing on the search engine's pages was conducted through the video hosting website.

Although not creating unique content themselves, search engines are beginning to attract income that sustain online content providers, it has been claimed.

Carolyn McCall, chief executive of Guardian Media Group, said that this meant that value was increasingly flowing away from the creators.

Businesses concentrating on creating unique content to increase their search engine optimisation have been urged to remember to make sure their websites can cope with any spikes in web traffic.

Ben Camm-Jones, news editor at Web-User Magazine, said that when peaks are very high, site performance was likely to suffer if the owner had not taken the time to invest in enough server capacity to deal with it.

Google is currently testing on a limited basis new AJAX-based search results, which if rolled out could have "big ramifications" on search engine optimisation (SEO).

Search Engine Land's Matt McGee explains that should Google opt to implement the test, SEO rank checkers may be rendered useless.

Yahoo! has applied for a patent that lays out its plans to automatically optimise web pages for search engines, it has been noted.

Bill Slawski, in a blog post for SEO By The Sea, explains that the process will involve examining search queries and potentially users' browsing activities in the search engine log files.

A group of black hats has "poisoned" some 400,000 Google Video search results which could lead users to download malware, it has been reported.

According to The Register, researchers at Trend Micro discovered that searchers were being directed to websites posing as an Adobe Flash Player update which then loaded malware on to Windows PCs should they be vulnerable.

On Saturday (January 31st) website owners and searchers from across the globe were surprised to find that Google had labelled all of its search results as malware.

This will almost certainly have had a knock-on effect on search engine optimisation, as every user who clicked on a link was directed to a "do you really want to go to this site" page.