Near the end of June 2008, Yahoo! had dispatched a letter to its stockholders, focusing primarily on Microsoft and Google issues. However, it also contained heavy references to the proxy war that had been brewing between Yahoo! shareholder & private equity investor Carl Icahn and Yahoo! Inc.

(Image Courtesy: AfterMarketNews)

Things just don't seem to be going in the right direction for the Webmasters. At the end of June 2008, we had reported that Yahoo! was about to begin its 'Weather Update' for the month of June. Now this particular update was immediately followed by the Google SERP changes for July 2008.

In March this year, I had reported to my readers about the Yahoo! and Click Forensics joining forces to combat the ever growing threat of 'Click Fraud'.

Now according to New.com, Click Forensics, that is one of the biggest independent click-fraud auditors, along with Yahoo! Inc. has taken the fight straight to 'Click Fraud' with the launch of its new software, known as 'Factr'or short for 'Fully Automated Click Tracking Reconciliation'. This is one of the newest weapons that both companies are going to use to handle click fraud cases, swiftly and decisively. This service will be available to the Yahoo! Advertisers at $250 monthly and thousands of dollars a month, depending on the account's size.

Via the Yahoo! Search Blog, Yahoo! has announced that, it has launched Yahoo! Search BOSS, an acronym for 'Build Your Own Search Engine'. It is a web services platform that allows developers and companies to create and launch web-scale search products by utilizing the same infrastructure and technology that powers Yahoo! Search.

For those who are unfamiliar with the name Priyank Garg, he is the Director of Yahoo! Search Team. The throne of the Yahoo! Search, the team that is responsible for the functionality of Yahoo!'s Web search engine including crawling, indexing, ranking, summarizing and spelling Web search functions along with products for Webmasters, such as Site Explorer. Recently, Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting had the opportunity of conducting an interview with Priyank Garg. In a similar fashion, Eric Enge had also interviewed Google Webspam Team Head, Matt Cutts last month, who also shared his views about link building. Below is the transcript of the interview with Priyank Garg, in all its entirety.

Yahoo! seems to be in a never-ending loop of troubles and misfortunes. A couple of days ago I had mentioned it to my readers that Yahoo! had lost two more high level executives and later on, keeping the upcoming Yahoo! Annual stockholders meeting scheduled for later this year in mind, Yahoo! had announced a major reshuffle in their management structure.

According to Webmaster World , numerous Webmasters, after bearing inconsistent Yahoo! crawl rate and odd site traffic, have finally decided to take the ultimate step and are banning Yahoo! Slurp altogether from crawling their websites.

Many Webmasters believe that, Yahoo! might take action against such Webmasters, by marking their websites as 'harmful' via the Yahoo! SearchScan .

If you too are looking for ways to ban Yahoo! Slurp altogether, here is how you can achieve that:

Yahoo! has announced that it would be rolling out its 'Weather Update', that would include changes in the crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms. The expected update will continue for a couple of days, but Yahoo! expects to finish it soon.

As expected, there might be some unusual ranking changes and page shuffling in the index, but Yahoo! Hopes to finish the update as soon as possible and that should surely keep the confusion and concerns among the Webmasters to a bare minimum.

It has been a long time coming and especially with all the problems creeping up in Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool, the shut down for this tool was long overdue. According to Webmaster World, Yahoo! has finally pulled the plug on Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool.

If your try to visit inventory.overture.com, you'll be redirected to http://sem.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/searchenginemarketing/. This redirection is slated permanent as per URI Valet tool. When I keyed in inventory.overture.com, it showed a message like this,

Last week I had informed my readers about the departure of three top Yahoo! Executives, including the Yahoo! VP for Networks Division, Mr. Jeff Weiner followed by founders of Flickr Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake leaving Yahoo!.

Now Yahoo has officially announced the restructuring of their organization and given it a fancy name of “Realignment to Support Core Strategies.” The empty position of Senior Vice President that was once occupied by Brad Garlinghouse will now be replaced by Scott Dietzen (CTO, Zimbra).