Michael Jackson’s legacy came to an end after his unfortunate demise. Popularly known as The King of Pop, his death brought the world to a standstill; just like his music did.

The internet virtually collapsed due to the death of MJ. Popular news sites like CNN and Google News were inaccessible due to their failure to deliver the updated news. Another popular site, Twitter was constantly showing the whale images, indicating the huge amount of traffic on the site. Even Wikipedia, was not behind. In less than 24 hours, the site saw more than 500 people edit MJs page on Wikipedia.

Facebook and YouTube were also heavily loaded with people trying to share the information about the incidence. You Tube was flooded with people searching for MJs famous Moonwalk step.

Techcrunch and CNN provides an exhaustive report about how the internet almost came to a standstill following the demise of MJ.

Search and advertising, we are a small share….It’s all about Google. They have share, we don’t have share.

These were the words of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer back in February. He did accept that nobody has any competitive edge in the search and advertising space other than Google. Its a complete monopoly by Google, but now Microsoft has come up with their new search engine – Bing. Here’s the video of Steve Ballmer announcing the debut of Bing from the D7 stage.

So, how much of an impact does the arrival of a new search engine makes to Google? Well only time will tell. But one thing is sure that its gonna take something out of the world to beat Google in their game.

Social Media – The word that is driving many people crazy is actually unpopular amongst the  CEOs of Fortune 100 companies. In a recent survey carried by ÜBERCEO, it was revealed that very few CEOs have ever touched the social media sites. And the ones who did create an account, never came back to update or manage their profiles on the social media sites.

The popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Flickr, etc. have failed to lure the top bosses to use them. Take a look at the presentation from ÜBERCEO and get to know the real stats.

What did this presentation tell you? Do you think that the top bosses are lazy in not maintaining their social media profiles? Will their active participation help their companies to fare better than others?

Share your opinions and you might just be able to make a difference.

Recently I read that Google understands flash files in a better way now. Until now, Google was not completely able to understands the script in the flash file and hence was facing difficulties in indexing them. Until now, if there was some supporting content which was relevant to the content of the flash, then Google used to establish a relationship between the content and rank it accordingly for the keywords.

But now, with an enhancement to their search quality, Google can also understand the content within the flash file and  index it so that it can be returned for relevant search queries.

To date, when Google encounters SWF files on the web, it can:

• Index textual content displayed as a user interacts with the file.
• Discover links within Flash files.
• Load external resources and associate the content with the parent file.
• Support common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, such as SWFObject and SWFObject2.
• Index sites scripted with AS1, AS2 and  AS3 in addition to the older versions of AS.

This new capability will ensure that Google is able to provide keyword relevant results that may contain flash animations or flash videos. Its interesting to note that Google has come up with this enhancement to their search quality so late. Should we term this as the Bing Effect?

Probably the arrival of Bing has created lot of ripples in the industry. Every day there is so much spoken and written about Bing, its positives, its negatives, its features and many more points. Almost everyone associated with the search engines has been publishing their views, thoughts and reviews about Bing and whether it can displace Google as the #1 search engine.

But Paul Savage, a web programmer and SEO specialist had other ideas to when Bing was launched. Instead of reviewing it, he developed a cool tool which allows you to compare search results for Bing and Google at the same time.

I tried searching for the keyword – ‘i am sam’ and here is the screen shot of what I could see.

Now its interesting to note that both these search engines are giving different search results. I won’t dwell into the review part, but one thing is for sure that Microsoft has made it very clear that they are not going to allow Google to play the monopoly. It has been a long time that Google has been the most used search engine, and Yahoo and Microsoft have been fighting for the remaining bits and pieces, but not any more. MS has taken the first step to make this search industry more competitive and I am happy about it. This is so because this competition will give us a chance to witness some great innovations that may be round the corner.

By the way, if you are a Yahoo faithful, you are not lucky enough to compare the results for Yahoo and Bing. I am afraid, you will have to stay contented with search results for Google and Yahoo for the time being.

Bing – Microsoft’s popular search engine which was launched couple of weeks ago has earned a PageRank for itself. Managing a comfortable PR 2 in just 20 odd days is amazing. Many webmasters struggle for months to start their PR counter.

Another striking feature is that if you type the keyword Bing in Google, you will see that www.bing.com occupies the top position on the SERP, displacing www.bing.org. Displacing an .org site in 20 days is not easy.

Also, the backlinks that Google show for Bing are well above 24,000. Whoa! Thats quite a number.

All these happening have left me ponder over a few questions.

1. Google’s Sandbox – Why did it not apply to Bing?

2. If Bing attracted more than 24,000 backlinks in less than 20 days, then it is OK with Google. But if any other website earns even more than 10 backlinks in a day, then it is treated as SPAM. Why this partiality?

3. For the keyword – ‘Microsoft’, Bing rank on the first page of the Google SERP. Mind you that Bing has been stripped off the meta tags and only contains the keyword once on its home page. So how did Google’s algo determine the relevance of Bing with Microsoft?

I have many such questions which will be always puzzle for  SEO Company or firm. I am still trying to find answers to them, but if you are lucky enough to find them before me, feel free to share them via your comments.

After nearly 9 months of exile, Google co-founder Sergey Brin updated his blog last week.

This time he chose to write about his friend, advisor and mentor – Rajeev Motwani. Few days back, Rajeev was found dead in his pool and this shocked many people, especially the Stanford University fraternity. Sergey highlights how Rajeev helped him and Larry during their student days and also during the formation of Google. Though the post is not emotional but it does add the 4th post to Sergey’s blog.

Now all of you might be thinking what is so special about Sergey’s blog and his updation cycle. Right?

Well, thinking from an SEO standpoint, it is a very interesting topic. Let us consider some stats about his blog:

1. Sergey Brin started blogging from September 2008.
2. So far he has managed to write only 4 posts.
3. The PageRank of his blog is 7. (Dont drop your jaws!)
4. Google shows more than 480 backlinks to his blog.

Now considering all these stats, it is difficult to ascertain how Sergey managed to get such a high PR within such a less time. As per Google, which gives lot of importance to content, Sergeys blog does not have it in plenty. Also, there is no presence of comments (probably Sergey is too busy to approve them), which means there is neither freshness of content nor any interaction amongst people. Another important factor is his blog is running on a free blogger account, i.e. he does not qualify for the benefits that self hosted blogs win.

Its understandable that Sergey being a popular person will attract lot of eyeballs, which is indicated by the number of inbound links to his blog. But I am still wondering on how he achieved a PR of 7 in merely 9 months. I would love to hear from you if you know the answer, so please comment and share your thoughts.