Google is making many changes to its Help Forums. Many new features have been incorporated within the same. Some of these features are:

• A new algorithm that enables improved search results. These search results would include posts from current as well as new forums.
• Forum members who contribute heavily will be designated as 'Top Contributors'.
• A new ranking system that marks reputation as well.

Despite recent clarifications by Google, regarding the ad deal with Yahoo!, Google has finally decided to terminate its advertising partnership with Yahoo! without providing any clear answer!

Here’s a statement, just released by Yahoo….

Google is now clearly showing whether the keywords are trademarked or not. The aspect is visible directly in the Google AdWords Keyword Tool.

For example, if a keyword: "iphone" is searched and it is returned with a little ™ symbol near the term, i.e. iphone™, then it trademarked. Here is a picture:

A lot of discussion has been going on at one of the threads of the Official Webmaster World.

Webmasters are discussing about speculations that Google is not promoting the PageRank indicator on its toolbar that has been recently launched.

In fact the PageRank indicator is not even shown on the marketing image that is present on the Toolbar Page! Strange… It seems that the users would find it really difficult to turn on the PageRank indicator within the toolbar itself.

SUNNYVALE, Calif., November 5, 2008 – Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO), a leading global Internet company, today announced that Google has terminated the advertising services agreement the companies announced in June. Yahoo! continues to believe in the benefits of the agreement and is disappointed that Google has elected to withdraw from the agreement rather than defend it in court. Google notified Yahoo! of its refusal to move forward with implementation of the agreement following indication from the Department of Justice that it would seek to block it, despite Yahoo!’s proposed revisions to address the DOJ’s concerns.

It all happened during this weekend, when some of us started noticing major changes with the Google search results and the rankings of our sites…

In short, no one is happy with this sudden and unexpected move. The webmasters are noticing low quality sites come into the search results as they are crawling the web to search their once high-ranked site!

Matt Cutts of Google put a post on the Webmaster Thread.

Knol that is the Wikipedia-slayer of Google, has shown signs of expansion. This collectively build encyclopedia is now available in three different languages to suit the language preference of users. The languages are:

• French
• German
• Italian

Just to let you know, Knol is an online encyclopedia that provides users with the permission to author their own articles as against Wikipedia that allows the users to edit the online text. Knol also allows the users to display their own photographs as an author!

Google seems to have recently rolled out certain holiday season penalties and filters. As a result a lot of webmasters are noticing a major shake up in the SERPS that are being monitored by them. Let us look at some of the reviews:

In some of the comments, the results are devastating:

I see chaos. Major keywords look ok here. I might be seeing some site-wide penalties on some sites (not necessarily my niche though)- I thought they were retired apart from serious transgressions. - Shaddows

Recently a popular strategy has been used by a number of websites to offer a free gifts if the bloggers would review and give links to a product! Sounds strange but the grapevine is that these tactics are considered acceptable by Google now! But after looking at the given example below, I don't think that the grapevine is true at all.

Earlier the user had to create a PDF(text based and not image based) in order to make a PDF file indexed by Google. Otherwise it was not possible for Googlebot to recognize the content.

According to an official announcement done by Google, the case is no longer the same.

Google says: “This Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology lets us convert a picture (of a thousand words) into a thousand words — words that can be searched and indexed, so that these valuable documents are more easily found.