Earlier today Nielsen Online (pdf) released the latest search share rankings. Figures are pretty much what one would expect, Google far in the lead followed by Yahoo and MSN, but this past month Google has taken another small hit. April and May of 2009 each saw Google lose a bit of ground. Back in March their search share was 64.2%, and in April it was down to 64%. May has seen another drop, bringing them down to 63.2%, a full percentage point in 2 months.

[Cross-posted from the Google Blog ] As you might have noticed, there's a lot of fascinating stuff that happens on YouTube every day. For example, did you know that a nine-year-old recently used YouTube to successfully campaign to save his local kickball lot? Have you seen the video of a Guatemalan lawyer who predicted his own assassination on YouTube moments before it happened?

Earlier this month, Matt Cutts shared with search marketers that Google had begun treating nofollow differently , especially in regards to "PageRank sculpting," the advanced SEO tactic that aims to control where PageRank flows around a site. Today, he goes into detail on how Google views PageRank sculpting , and how it treats the nofollow attribute in regards to PageRank flow. Cutts offers a simplified description of the PageRank process,

AOL-owned MapQuest has been available as a free application for Blackberry users and now iPhone users are getting the goods as well . While MapQuest has been available on the mobile web , apps are usually faster and more user-friendly. One of the highlights of the app is a "carousel" of options shown at the bottom of a map. It offers icons for things like gas stations and hotels. Click on an icon and find nearby locations of the selected category.

Exactly how much ad revenue has been derived through Yahoo's relationships with its growing newspaper consortium is unknown. But, the partnerships seem to be getting more solidified as Yahoo reveals a few results, and new members join the gang. Yahoo added two Freedom Communications papers and two North Jersey Media Group papers to its list. It also finally signed up The San Diego Union-Tribune - that's SignOnSanDiego.com. Last July,

A sampling of what ClickZ's editors are reading this morning: - -Microsoft Sues Three in Click-Fraud Scheme (NYT) Filing follows year-long investigation. - P&G Viral Video Attempt Replaces 'Guy Parts' with 'Girl Parts (AdAge) Risque effort for Tampax is a surprise coming from CPG giant. - Facebook dethrones MySpace in the U.S. (LA Times) Comscore's latest numbers show News Corp.'s dominant social media reach has been usurped.

Microsoft has filed a click fraud suit against brothers Eric and Gordon Lam and their mother Melanie Suen. The suit was filed in the Western District Court of Washington and involves click fraud pertaining to a scheme involving auto insurance and the video game World of Warcraft. The adCenter blog offered up a visual representation of what click fraud looks like. The image below maps IP sources and the clusters indicate automated traffic.

At SMX Advanced a couple weeks ago there was a huge hullabaloo about Matt Cutt's saying that PageRank Sculpting using nofollow tags is no longer effective and it should no longer be used. I haven't posted anything about this until now because frankly there is enough people making a stink about this topic. That said, I think I am ready to weigh in on the subject especially since Matt Cutts just posted his own take on PageRank Sculpting a few hours ago.

Posted by randfish The blog post - PageRank Sculpting - from the head Google's Web Spam team is a critical read for SEOs worldwide: So what happens when you have a page with ten PageRank points and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Lets leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question. Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence,

Today is day two in our is social media future proof online poll series. Yesterday we received an excellent response when asking which social media website is most likely to still be around in 2020? Today's question is: If you are reading this in an RSS reader or email you may need to click through to view the poll. If you have any additional comments, please leave them in the comments section below or tweet them to @seoptimise .