After years of rumors, assumptions and agressive take-over strategies, the deal finally seems to succeed after all. Several news sites like 24/7 Wall Street are reporting this on Friday. The news came out around sources beyond ThinkEquity, an investment house.

At this moment Microsoft top-executives are in Silicon Valley to discuss the remaining open issues of the deal, which would focus on search and advertising.... read more

Computers were not ment to last. Mine crashed after attending the SMX, so I have some catching up to do on blogposts, therefore this is SMX London recovered.

The first day of SMX London covered lot's of great sessions. One of the most informative one was "Searchscape: Latest stats about the Search Engines".

Speakers during this session were:

Linus Gregoriadis, Research Director, Econsultancy
Richard Gregory, COO, Latitude
Merinda Peppard, Vice President Sales - Europe, Efficient Frontier
Nigel Townend, Business Development Manager, Guava
Bas van den Beld, Chief Editor Searchcowboys, Searchcowboys

Although this session discussed a lot of great facts and figures, I've taken out a list of 17 most remarkable statements.... read more

One of the sessions to look forward to the most on the second day of SMX London, was "Analytics Every SEO Needs To Know". Beforehand Rand Fishkin already challenged Distilleds Will Critchlow for a real presentation-off on this topic. The session did live up to it's expectations.... read more

Recently some searchers from the US reported that Google is testing the implementation of AJAX technology to the SERP's. Where the use of AJAX could be a huge step forward in speed and user experience, it could be a killer for analytics and ranking software.... read more

Today Google announced they introduced a new generator which can automatically process sitemaps. It's open-source and able to run on both Windows and Linux web servers. This new sitemap generator replaces the "old" Python based generator.

With the sitemap generator you can create:

• XML Sitemaps for Web Search according to the sitemaps.org standard
• Mobile Sitemaps for mobile-friendly websites
• Code Search Sitemaps for source code that you make available to users