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As reported last week, Google updated its Panda for October, and throughout the week, feedback from many webmasters across the board lead to stating that this update was deemed very significant. Despite initial reports that suggested this update was going to be minor, this update was rather significant for all SEO and webmasters online. Interesting to see how this update to play out, and although, only time will tell, major updates are important to adapt to.

In case you are wondering, and like following the progress of Google Panda, Google did some minor updates to Google Panda for October. The latest came just last week, tahnks to a tweet by Matt Cutts all but confirming the update, bringing the total to 2 for this month. Interesting stuff happening with Google Panda and the updates, let's see how this plays out in the long run.

In an era when the giant Google uses its homepage to pay homage to people of history, it was only fitting that they mentioned the passing of Steve Jobs on their website on Wednesday night. Same too for the company that Jobs helped build into the conglomorate that it is today, Apple, with a memorable tribute the possibly one of the greatest CEOs of our generation. Steve Job, RIP

In case any of you missed it this week, Google celebrated its 13th birthday, and with it, possible global domination online. Now, while Apple continues to carve its piece of online global domination, Google has become a staple online over the last 13 years. Starting out as a simple and straightforward search engine to becoming a resources for so many things online, Google will only continue to grow, and grow, and grow, and grow!

If you are looking to catch up with the latest from Matt Cutts, the man with all the answers from Google, someone that I enjoy listening to on a regular basis, be sure to hit it here as we will have regular links of Matt Cutts and any question and answer sessions online.

If you have a situation where you have one articles that is covering several topics, that further will be covered by others pages that you are creating within your website, this is a problem, when it comes to ranking all of your pages.

Google will not know which one to rank the highest, until now. There are steps being made by Google in order to rectify any issues that result from pagination. Stay tuned to this blog once Google has listed these solutions, we will have them here for you.

Carol Bartz, on Tuesday was relieved on her duties as CEO of the online directory giant, Yahoo. The dismissal, however, is not what is making headwaves, it is how the firing was done. The was not dismissed in a formal way, she unfortunately, was relieved of her duties by a simple phone call.

Being with the company for less than 3 years, she was brought on to try to spearhead the company to bigger growth, and to grow with new product and service offering with no success in the eyes of the board of directors. I guess with Yahoo, when you can't get things done, you will get the boot as quickly and maliciously as possible!

Yahoo Mail, announced this past week that is hit a milestone, reaching a number thought unheard of at one time. They have officially 100 million email accounts registered to individuals. Now, while there are those accounts that are multiple in numbers that are held by one person, for example, someone having 5 yahoo acocunts, however, the numbers are real, and reaching 100 million is an achievement that Yahoo should be proud of.

Also announced this week, is that they have hit 500,000 Facebook fans, another accomplishment that they should be proud of. Going back to the e-mail news, Yahoo recently tweaked their platform last month, so look for more numbers, and it is a matter of time before you see them hitting 200 million.

With the news this week that Steve Jobs has resigned from Apples top post, it begs the question if Apple will suffer the same fate that it did when Steve left the company back in the early 90s. In the 80s, Apple with the introduction of the Machintosh 64, they were well on there way to dominate the home PC market in the US, light years ahead of anyone else. Some say, that the internet would have destroyed the music industry if it were not the vision of Apple and its iTunes program. Only time will tell what happens, but a big day none the less.

This week, Google made it official and purchased Motorola Mobility for $12.5 Billion dollars. This sale is expected to clear the way for Google to possibly begin their strive towards succeeding in the hardware market. With so many things right with Google these days, is this something that makes sense?

Well, only time will tell, however, with all the success that Google has based on its other moves, positioning within the internet market, this is a step in the right direction. Some anticipate, along with the Android, that Google's share can reach 50%! Very big numbers, with so many different phone vendors out there, makes it interesting as to how this will all play out down the road?

With the recent launch and continuous tweaking of the Google +1 social networking engagement tool, there has been many positive review thus far. IT has been a consistent growth and one that Google understands that will take time to expand to many webmasters and users.

Google +1 creators and engineers agree and have seen the growth come. With so many different social networking tools out there from Twitter, to blogs to Facebook, there is a lot that is needed to make a splash. That is why Google is taking it slow and feels in time, with its globally recognized brand, the +1 tool will be well on its way to find sudden success within the social networking world on the web!

Yahoo has decided to put an end to its Site Explorer by the end of the year, something that will put a real dent in the way webmasters and SEO experts rely on using the tools for references.

Site Explorer officially went live back in 2005, however, after being online for 6 years, the company has decided to do away with it. Eventually, it will migrate to the Bing platform and the Microsoft Webmaster Tools, a tool by the way, which is not that bad, it is just that we have all come acustomed to having Yahoo crawl and index our websites. Will be interesting to see what happens down the road, only time will tell and we will be here to let you know how this affects the way search is performed and focused on.

Back on July 12, Google honoured the 450th anniversary of one of the older and most recognized churhces in the world, St. Basil's Cathedral church in Moscow, built on the Red Square between 1555–61.

This doodle got us to thinking, that with religious dates of recognition, how does Google decide what is worthy of getting the attention, and what religions or holidays do not. This particular doodle was posted in Canada, where there are many Russians to celebrate, however, there is always a fine line between religion and the online activity of Google, that makes the debate very interesting in terms of what is worthy of mentioning and what is not!

Once again, the giant company known as Google continues to tweak the way it displays content to viewers, this time, focusing on images and the image source that you have crawled and having it be displayed within your search results. Simply put, if you type "&surl=1" within the URL of the link request in the Google Images page, then Google will have the link of the image searched within the thumbnail URL. Something that can be useful when looking to do a search of images within Google. This is becoming very popular and with this tweak, only affirms that Google understands what is needed to ensure that visitors are constantly getting imporvements and user experiences that are better ever!

From all the web marketing, SEO specialists and project managers here at Rank High in Toronto, we would like to wish every Canadian from coast to coast a special and happy Canada's Day. Enjoy this occasion because not only is it the 144^th edition of the holiday, but this year, it makes for a long weekend! One other note, look for the Google Doodle to see how creative the folks at Google were this year.

For the month of May, 2011, Google became the first website to get to 1 billion visitors, a feat that was assumed to have been accomplished by Facebook. Now, although the 1 Billion visitors collectively is tabulated from all the Google sites, such as Google.com, YouTube.com, Gmail and all the other websites that fall under the Google umbrella, it is still a feat worht commending.

Facebook still is the leader in terms of longevity of users staying on the website for a long period of time, however, the social networking website ranked behind Microsoft's family of websites, however, the social media icon surpassed Yahoo back in October/2010 and has consistently generated more monthly traffic the the directory icon. Rounding out the top 5 is the group of Wikimedia websites, as shown in the graph highlighted above.

It seems like just yesterday that we were blogging about the release of Google Panda and actually, we did, just a couple of months ago, however, fast forward to two months later and Google has decided that it will upgrade the Panda algorithm anyday now. Although the launch date should be very soon, the release has not happened yet, and with the many websites that have been affected over the few months from Panda, any recoveries do not seem imimate.

One of the many reasons that Panda is being upgraded so quickly, is similar to all those Windows upgrades, because the way that the product operates is lacking, and the Panda is not exempted from this. It appears that many websites got hit hard from the Panda algorithm, meaning that there were false positives (those websites that got hit by Panda and should not have). The hope is that this is reversed, however, as of this post going live, it does not appear to, time will tell.

Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) - was is it? Why is it so important now? Well, first off, as we all know the internet to simply be websites, with www. and social media pages to upload pictures, send a message in 140 characters or less, however, there is a lot more to the internet then tagging your best friend in the picture you just uploaded. By that we mean IP addresses (Internet Protocol) the way that servers and the world wide web communicate and provide you with the beautiful images you see on your Mac!

As the internet has grown over the last 15 years, there are simply no more IP addresses, and the original setup IPv4, is running out of IP addresses. So while engineers are working to provide servers all over the world with IP addresses, we should not be too concerned, however, this is a process that will take a while and is in the works. Great, now if we can figure out how to relay this message in less than 140 characters, we will be geniuses!

The buzz surrounding Google this week was the launch of the +1 website button, a new little tool for all website owners and webmasters to place and link on within their web pages. However what exactly is this +1 website button? Well for starters, you can get the button and code here: http://www.google.com/+1/button/

Some people are asking what is the difference between this and Google Buzz. Buzz buttons are typically utilized to start a conversation about cool and funky WEB CONTENT. The +1 website buttons allows you to suggest web content to friends and family within the confines of a search result, and +1's more robust adaption to social platforms have improved the importance and connection for its results as well. Try it out and see how good and bad Google's latest gadget work. Enjoy!

Are you noticing a slight delay with your search results from Google lately? Furthermore, are you seeing a foggy screen when you are searching for something and you need it quick, when you have come to expect things reported quickly by the major search engine? Well, if this is you, just to let you know that you are not alone, and that you need to clean up your cache on your computer!

For those that use Google on a regular basis, over a period of time, the cached files that are stored on your computer will effect how quicly your search results come up. Why is that you ask? In all fairness, it is actually a combination of trying to clear your cache, however, it is also a Google bug, that is appearing from time to time regarding both search results, images and maps. As far as we know, the problem is being looked after, however, there are other search engines, Yahoo, Bing, is one is not working to your speed, try something else!

In a recent tweet by Matt Cutts, Google Panda is a manual process, at least for now, this was the basis of Matt Cutts plug for the algorithm: "Short version is that it's not data that's updated daily right now. More like when we re-run the algorithms to regen the data. So far we feel we had 3 runs, the first roll out, the international rollout and then Panda 3.0 or some calling it Panda 2.1. Those were all probably pushed manually by Google - keep in mind, by manual I do not mean people do anything manually outside of hitting the go button for the algorithm to run."

For all the webmasters and SEO experts out there that are looking to get the upper hand with your index page, be sure that you are keeping up with the continuous algorithms that are running live updates constantly, however, be cognisant that Google Panda, at least verion 3.0, is potentially a manual update and that may be a consistent thing moving forward. Lots of good things happening with Google and its Panda.

As we continue to grow and evolve online, the use of flash sites is becoming more apparent that they, ever slower than HTML sites, are getting more recognition with Google. There was a time when nothing was able to be indexed in terms of content within a flash file, however, with some guidelines that Google has put into place, following them will help your flash site get indexed better than in the past.

Again, we are not saying that flash sites get better indexed for SEO than HTML sites with content, however, the improvement is there. Another step in the right direction is the preview source that Googel introduced a while ago, the little magnifying glass that you click you preview the home page of a site, an example is below:

There was a time when a full flash site was not visible with the Google preview, however, with some tweaking on Google's end, which requires a little tweaking on your flash file, you will be able to view the preview.

If you are a webmaster responsible for a full flash file, this is something we recommend to do as it gives your site the option to compete with other HTML websites in Toronto.

Have you ever been victim of creating a website with dreamweaver, where you use a standard HTML code with some CSS to align the site up nicely and to make it look clean. Then, once you have completed the design, have you tried uploading it to test on either, Internet Explorer, Firefox or Google Chrome, where each browser has a different variation of the layout, where text may appear different and so on?

If this is you, and you are confused as to what to do, the problem is that as browsers keep popping up with new version without any governing body to make sure that standards are in place, one thing has come together to make sure that you can alleviate these concerns, HTML 5. This type of code is the latest in making sure that you have all browsers configuring the same HTML code, thus displaying it properly. Where do you see where to make changes, on the top of the dreamweaver code:

"DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd - html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"

This is an example of HTML 5:

"DOCTYPE html - html lang="en" - head - meta charset="utf-8"

Start learning online of how to code with HTML 5, and check back with our blog and we will have updated tutorials on HTML 5 in the coming weeks and months.

So in case you are living under a rock, the British royal family will display their Royal Wedding extravaganza like no other wedding before it. It is estimated that over 2 billion people all over the world will be watching this wedding, in some way. However, there is an expectancy that the royal wedding will be all the buzz online on the 29th of April. From social media, Twitter, Facebook, blog updates and video streaming, many are forecasting to expect delays online.

With video of the event being uploaded and updated throughout the day, along with providing constant updates, the world wide web will have activity so intense, that the only thing that may rival it was the tragic attacks of September 11/2001. Go enjoy the royal wedding on April 29, because you will be able to watch it from any point, even online!

In case you are wondering how Bing is doing within the North American search engine showdown versus Google, quite well actually. Although Google is still the leader, that share of the pie Google has held on to for quite some time is slipping, and the numbers prove it. Ken Gumbs of Fresh Giant, a regular blogger for the state of the competitive market share landscape involving Google, Bing, Yahoo and other major players, said that the gap is dwindling.

It is also believed that once Microsoft is able to get businesses to start advertsing within the Bing PPC areas, the revenue of Google will drop, thus beginning the first true war online that rivals the Big 3 car makers of the '70s and '80s and all the major computer makers of the late '80s and '90s.

Who benefits because of this in the long run? You, the user or course. While Bing will try to cut into the Google market share, and Google will try to keep it, there will be many upgrades, tools that both will implement and it will be a matter of time before we can get all we are looking for from a search online...Enjoy!

Content can take your website a long way through the Google search engines. Maybe that is why, copying content from other sources has become common practice. It may be common practice, but it is not right, and you will pay dearly. Your site can be punished and ultimately banned if you are deemed to have copied someone else's content. What are some ways around it you ask? Write something on your own for crying out loud! If you get writer's block, find something that can write. It does not take a lot and you will be happy in the long run.

The plagarism is done mostly off of Wikipedia! Guys, if you are going to copy content, I suggest something more credible than Wikipedia, like, come on! Wikipedia; that is like copying the graffitti from the washroom of a stall. A lot of it, is in simple english "CRAP"

What to do you ask? Search online for content writers in your local area and chances are you will find someone that will be able to provide you with something that is legible, decent and will get indexed properly.

Have you tried typing something into Google lately, only to get a dropdown menu of suggestions like this:

This technology can definitely be manipulated by Google and it controls what it is that you want to search for. Such things like a history of google suggestions, which highlights what has the most popular searches. Another factor is that Google uses real searches to list its suggestions, factoring what is displayed. All of this can vary by Region & Language, which is another algorithm that Google factors into.

Try it yourself to see how it works, it is a great tool, but be careful as you may end up clicking the wrong terms by mistake which will get you the wrong result, and this usually happens when you are not paying attention.

Updates are always being made to tweek, so make sure your site is properly optimized and nothing with be wrong and you will get the proper placement that you may be looking for.

If your site has recently been affected in terms of Google placement due to the latest update from Google, with the Google Panda / Farmer technology, this is no joke.

Aside from the rumours that are being circulated online that PPC revenue is down for Google, the harsh reality is that you need to make sure that your website is fully optimized and has unique content so you know for sure that your website will not be hindered and lose Google rankings in the Search Engines in the future.

Make sure every page has unique meta tag information, have unique content on each page, do what is needed to avoid any future update downward spiralling from Google.

There will always be updates, make sure your website is not affected, and if you cannot do this yourself, hire an SEO company to do it for you.