A very surprising news story on Bing's newest evil plans on Google on offering money to site owners who are listed with Google to be de-indexed

8 Interesting reasons why google is great for SEO geeks

Today it was announced that Google product listing ads display in the google search results, a cost-per-action ad program: Product Listing Ads is part of our effort to simplify the advertising process for merchants with large product inventories.

Happy Halloween! Here are the logos from the search community including Google, Yahoo, Bing, AOL, Ask, Dogpile, and so many more. For the past years logos, see 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005 and 2004 logos.

There seems to be a Google Toolbar PageRank update going on right now. We have threads on the topic at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums and HighRankings Forum. The update seemed to have started sometime yesterday afternoon and many SEOs and webmasters are chatting about it now.

Today is Halloween and the search engines have logos up for the special day. Before I post the logos, here are some posts from others in the community on Halloween.

Google has temporarily removed the time line feature from search options. The new Google search options went live in early May. We have a screen shot from even before that shows the time line feature. But it has now been removed.

Google announced that its Google Custom Search tool, which enables website owners to add customized search boxes to their pages, now formats query results for mobile phones. "If you own a web site and add a Google Custom Search box to it, when your users access the site on an Android-powered phone, iPhone, iPod Touch, or Palm Pre, they will see optimized search results formatted for these devices," writes Google Search group product manager Rajat Mukherjee on the Official Google Mobile Blog. "When they search on your website, they are redirected to a Google-hosted Custom Search results page created specifically for your Custom Search engine. If you'd like to serve these mobile results from your own web site, you can host your own version of the mobile Custom Search home page."

Google has removed the PageRank section in the crawl statistics in Google Webmaster Tools. This has gone mostly unnoticed, with the release of the labs feature, until now. A Google Webmaster Help thread reports the PageRank values shown in Webmaster Tools has now been completely removed. I have verified this and it is true.

Since its inception, Google Maps has always rolling out little tweaks and new features that are useful. But today comes the first large-scale overhaul of the look and feel of the service in quite a while. But you may not even notice it. The reason is that almost all of the changes are very subtle. And unless you spend hours looking at Google Maps everyday, you probably aren’t going to realize when a road outline has been toned down, for example. But looking at the side-by-side images, it’s clear to see that the new look is much nice. Gone is much of the clutter cause by darkened street outlines.