You would think that when Microsoft and Yahoo got their deal approved for the US that they should have made sure that it could scale out globally?

Apparently not. B2B mag announced yesterday that Yahoo Japan is going with Google!

Tokyo—Spurning the pending Yahoo-Microsoft search implementation in the U.S. and other countries later this summer, Yahoo Japan Corp. has rejected Microsoft Corp.’s Bing in favor of Google as its default search engine.

This is going to be a short post just pointing out a new change recently with the Google algorithm.

But first I wanted to mention an update on my last post about Google Buzz. There were a lot of concerns about some of the privacy settings and how your information was being used. Google has made various updates and they mention the changes on their blog. Enough said.

A few days ago on the official Google blog they made a post about how webmasters and web site owners could specify your canonical. One of the biggest concerns for anyone that does SEO is that of duplicate content on their website. Now that Google, Yahoo and MSN (Bing) are going to start supporting the rel=”canonical” tag in the header it makes it easy for Google and the others to slap your website around if you have duplicate content.

For those that aren’t sure what I am referring to here is an example:

• http://micaljohnson.com
• http://www.micaljohnson.com
• http://micaljohnson.com/index.htm

All this links point to the same page and would cause a duplicate content penalty to be served. This is a very simple example. I’ll share more in a moment.

Those of us that use WordPress blogs should be familiar with this because of the way the link structure of the blog works we often times end up with duplicate content. Thankfully the genius wordpress plugin creator Joost de Valk at Yoast.com made a great wordpress plugin to canonical your blog and help eliminate that problem.

Here are a few places to check out to get up to speed on this:

• Yoast.com: Canonical URL links
• Google Blog: About rel=”canonical”

Here is also a video of Google’s Matt Cutts explaining it a little better

From time to time I will get asked the question “If I use a subdomain can I get that ranked with my regular domain url in the SERP (search engine results page)”

What do you think? 

Your opinon counts: leave a comment below

Microsoft’s adCenter is finally coming out of beta…uh I mean closing. That’s right adcenter has finally thrown in the towel for now it seems. With great statements on their blog like:

Please note that all hosted services, data collection, and technical support will end at that time

but don’t worry they did list 28 (at last count) companies that offer web analytics. Google gets listed twice, once for Google Analytics and another time for Urchin Software

I guess now they can focus getting better in search.

If  want to read everything MSN wrote check out their blog