To compete Google, Yahoo will be making some changes to their crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms. Read more at Yahoo! Search Index Update

Yahoo Blog says "The Yahoo! Local team had that in mind when they rolled out a new feature to help everyone from the consummate explorer to the geographically-challenged find local businesses quicker and more easily"

Benchmarking only works if people can opt to share their data into the system, so google also introduce a new data-sharing settings page. On this page, customers can choose whether to opt in or opt out of sharing their Analytics data.

Benchmarking lets you compare your metrics against industry verticals.

To enable this optional new feature, an administrator on Google analytics account will need to make the following selections on the Google Analytics data sharing settings page:

1. Log into your account. You'll see the yellow data sharing settings box on
the Analytics Settings page.

2. Click the "More data sharing options" link within the yellow box.

3. Select the second checkbox to specify that you want to share your data
"Anonymously with Google products and the benchmarking service". You can
also choose to share your data "With Google products only" to take advantage
of advanced Google advertising products and services as they become
available.

Read More at
: Benchmarking now available plus additional opt-in settings

Yahoo says it has increased its excluded keyword limits from 50 to 250 to improve relevance in search results.

On the Yahoo Search Marketing Blog it explains what words types of keywords to exclude. "Identify the keywords that do not apply to your business but may be commonly used by potential customers."

Read More about this SEO SEM News at Yahoo Raises Limits On Excluded Keywords

Baidu.com Inc led China's search engine market in last year's fourth quarter with a 60.1 percent share, research firm Analysys International said on Friday.

Google Inc came second with a 25.9 percent share, followed by Yahoo China with 9.6 percent, it said in a statement

China's search engine market reached 946.6 million yuan ($131.3 million) in the fourth quarter -- almost double from a year earlier -- and was dominated by Baidu, Google and Yahoo China with a combined share of nearly 96 percent.

Source / Read More : Baidu leads China Web search market in Q4

Position 6 Penalty : When your website come at 1 or 2 Rank on a keyword shift downwards to rank position number 6 in Google search engine. Lots of webmaster saw this penalty in mid of December month.

My Website is effected with Position 6 Penalty ?

Tedster on webmasterworld says

Here are the main signs --

1. Well established site with a long history.
2. Long time good rankings for a big search term - usually #1
3. Other searches that returned the same url at #1 may also be sent to #6, but not all of them
4. Some reports of a #2 result going to #6.

What we can identify so far

A. It's search term specific (usually the biggest and best converting phrase)
B. Therefore, not a url or domain-wide penalty on all terms
C. A little testing on one site seems to show it's not an on-page problem
D. That leaves off-page but on-site, or off-site, or posibly backlink issues

If your website was facing position 6 penalty a lot of keywords then you need to read How I Got My Google Ranking #6 Filter Removed.

For 2007, Search Engine Roundtable’s team of Barry Schwartz and Tamar Weinberg continuously bring excellent coverage of SEO and webmaster issues as discussed in the various search marketing forums that they cover.

Search Engine Roundtable does an excellent job of covering SEO, SEM and Contextual Publishing...

Source / Read more at Search Engine Roundtable : Best SEO Blog of 2007

With the recent admission by Matt Cutts to Stephan Spencer that Google is using Adobe Systems' Search Engine SDK technology, a new set of optimization opportunities opened up.

That fairly definite confirmation of how Google reads text within Flash files makes it possible to create Flash .swf files with some level of search engine optimization.

"It used to be the case that we had our own, home-brew code to pull the text out of Flash, but I think that we have moved to the Search Engine SDK tool that Adobe Macromedia offers," Cutts said. "So my hunch is that most of the search engines will standardize on using that Search Engine SDK tool to pull out the text."

Source / Read more at Google reads Flash text, so optimize it | Searchlight