We just confirmed that google has been updating toolbar pagerank and backlinks, and it has been just over 3 months since the last update.

Since pagerank is one of the most important factors to determine the position of a site in the google search results, you may notice some change of your keywords performance as well.

We also found some interesting updates:

1. CNN.com has a pagerank of 10 (People show respect to the online news industry now )
2. Twitter.com has a pagerank of 9 (It deserves it, doesn’t it? )
3. Wordpress.com has a pagerank of 9 (Well, It takes a long time climbing up from pagerank 8 )
4. Wikipedia.org has a pagerank of 9 (Hmm.. Highest rank for human editing websites ever)
5. XiaoNei.com has a pagerank of 7 (It is a clone of Facebook )
6. Yammer.com has a pagerank of 6 (It went up from pagerank 2 )
7. W3Schools.com has a pagerank of 8 (Google punished this website for paid footer links, but it just went up again now )

Back to February 1st, Microsoft offered $44.6 billion ($31 per share) to acquire all Yahoo’s outstanding shares, and Yahoo rejected it. Since then Yahoo’s share price has dropped to $9 per share over 9 months time, and Jerry Yang, Yahoo ex-CEO had to step down when facing intense pressure from shareholders. Later on, in November, Microsoft made a proposal to acquire Yahoo’s online search business for $20 billion.

Today, Microsoft is hiring former Yahoo VP engineering Qi Lu as President of Microsoft online services group. Lu was at Yahoo for 10 years, most recently served as executive vice president of engineering for all of Yahoo’s search and advertising development efforts. Before Yahoo, Lu was at the IBM Almaden Research Center.

There is no doubt that Microsoft needs Yahoo to rescue their online services arm as they are slipping behind Google in the online advertising market, which is worth $25 billion and growing. Google has a market share of 78.2% compared with Yahoo’s 17% and Microsoft’s 6%. Microsoft is desperate to change the current situation, and after unsuccessful attempt to acquire Yahoo, Microsoft is now trying to get Yahoo’s tech stars, who built the Yahoo empire, and they believe that the most valuable assets of software companies are their talented people.

We’ve signed up a Twitter account recently. After playing with it for a while, we found twitter is really cool and useful. To be honest, we didn’t see its beauty and power for the first few days, we thought it was too simple to receive such a lot of applause from the world. I have to remind myself, however, that all great ideas are simple.

Now, we really enjoy using twitter and found some simple ways to get valuable information for our business, and here are some tips.

Read industry’s break news:

Twitter is arguably the best place to find and follow the industry’s news you care. It’s designed in such a way to avoid spam, because you can pick and mix the messages from the news providers you trust.

Keep up with your customers:

I believe you all understand the importance of customers loyalty, which would make them into your evangelists. For that reason, it would be ideal to know what they are talking about in real-time. Twitter, again, makes all these possible!

Help your colleague:

We live in a world where information is overloaded. But, we also need to get things done in an easy and straight forward way. Twitter is quick in the way of post-n-reply, which can be applied in our working environment. Got a question? Post! Got an answer? Reply! Simple as that.

Turn conversations to leads:

Twitter is a platform and a community, where you can find potential customers. If you go to search.twitter.com, and search the products/services related to your business, you can soon find people looking for help and recommendations. Bingo! Now, you can kick off the conversations with your knowledge. Please please remember, you are there to help and to build your reputation. Focus on the long-term relationships but not the direct quick sales.

Understand your competitors better:

Time to turn your attention to your competitors. It is always smart to keep on eye on them, isn’t it? Again, you can either follow them or search their name on search.twitter.com.

Some people hate their competitors and they’d like to do things to damage their competitors’ businesses, while others try to build decent relationships with the competitors by not being too aggressive. Well, it may surprise you if you respect your competitors and say some good things about them sincerely.

Follow Bizroof On Twitter

Google now allows us to reorder and annotate search results. If you log into google account, you can see 3 buttons next to each search result, including: Promote, Remove and Comment. But, any changes you made will ONLY be saved into your Google account and won’t affect others, at least for now.

Google obviously understand the beauty and power of human-editing community (e.g. Wikipedia, DMOZ), and they now encourage their massive user base to contribute to the search engine. Although Google haven’t directly linked their search algorithm with this new feature yet, they might do that in the future if they are able to collect solid and substentcial evidence to show human-editing leads to better search quality.

Microsoft today launched SearchPerks, which gives users points when they use msn live search, and then the points can be redeemed for all sorts of rewards.

The new CashBack programme encourages people to use Live Search,  and they believe it will work in terms of increasing market share of online search.

To participate the SearchPerks, you have to download a special browser add-on, and you must use Internet Explorer. So, Microsoft is trying to kill three birds with one stone:

1. To get more Live Search users
2. To get more IE users
3. To have a better understanding of what people are searching for

We just noticed that another large PageRank and backlinks update taking place in the Google Toolbar. It has been just over 2 months since last PageRank update. We’ve found that many google competitors’ websites PageRank increased quit a lot, including: cuil.com, fireeagle.yahoo.net, delicious.com, maps.live.com and many others.

Google uses PageRank to identify the importance of web pages. Although there are more than a hundred parameters affecting google search results, PageRank is still one of the most critical factors.

Cisco just announced that it acquired an open-source IM protocol, Jabber. Cisco will use this new weapon to fight in the enterprise collaboration market, which is currently dominated by Microsoft Office Communications, AOL AIM, and Google Talk.

Enterprise Instant messaging (IM) plateforms need to be integrated with their business process and existed operation system. In such a way, the communication between people will be improved.