Yahoo! has announced coming updates that will affect the algorithms that impact crawling, indexing, and ranking web pages.

From Yahoo! Search:

"The Yahoo! Search engineering teams are rolling out updates to crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms. Similar to previous updates, you may notice some ranking changes and page shuffling during the process."

Yahoo! expects the update to complete over the next few days.

A user asked the Google Webmaster team, "How many changes did Google make to their primary search algorithm in 2009". Matt Cutts' most recent video post answered this question and confirmed what many have speculated about Google algorithm updates for some time now.

Matt stated that Google "makes a change to their core search algorithm at least once a day." He further mentions that in 2009 Google "updated the search algorithm 350 to 400 times.

The video can be seen in its entirety at Google Webmaster Help YouTube channel.

Matt Cutts is the head of Google’s Webspam team.

Sloan Implement Company needed a channel to keep visitors on their site and drive more search engine traffic. Their site was not ranking well on targeted, equipment related keyword searches because their equipment inventory was maintained on a separate domain.

For this situation NPS enhanced their website to browse, query, and view detailed information about the available equipment inventory held by Sloan Implement.  The development added a fully automated system that constantly updates content to their site from an XML feed of their external managed equipment inventory data. NPS fetches the XML file, parses the data, and outputs the HTML for the display on www.sloans.com. The programming methodology ensures quick page load speeds and no site down time to refresh the XML data.

The new development greatly improved the performance goals desired by Sloan Implement. As compared to pre development web statistics, site operation improvements are as follows:

• Traffic from Search Engines:  + 14%
• Visits:  + 6%
• Pageviews:  + 182%
• Pages/Visit:  + 167%
• Bounce Rate:  - 33%
• Average Time on Site:  + 36%

On top of the website statistical improvements, the search engine ranking for the targeted, equipment related keyword searches also improved dramatically.  For example, www.sloans.com went from not on the top 10 pages for the term “john deere 5055d” to page 1 on Google in less than a week.  This improved search engine placement will help drive a greater number of targeted customers to their website.

The "search used equipment" development launched on April 8, 2010. Headquarted in Assumption, IL, Sloan Implement Company is one of the largest John Deere Dealerships in the world.

If you would be interested in discussing how Norlight Professional Services can assist you with a website redesign, SEO, usability improvements, or a custom application please contact us: nps@norlight.com; on Twitter @nps_norlight; facebook.com/nps.norlight.

"The Twitter username I want is already taken" is the likely cry of a lot of people who have just recently decided to join the Twittersphere. If this describes your Twitter signup experience your fortunes may change in the coming weeks.

In recent post on by Danny Sullivan on Search Engine Land, Danny caught up with Ev Williams (Twitter cofounder) at the Chirp conference and asked him if/when will Twitter release inactive usernames in bulk.

Williams replied that Twitter hopes to release "deleted names" for reuse within the next few weeks.

While this news doesn't return all "inactive" usernames back into the wild, it should help some Twitter newbies to obtain that username relevant to their personal brand.

More details on the Twitter username status can be found in Danny's write up at searchengineland.com.

This article is a follow up to an earlier post we made "The Twitter Name I Want is Taken but Not Being Used"