As most site owners should have noticed by now, there has been an update going on with Google's Toolbar PR since last Thursday. After verifying results for a week in our technical SEO lab, it seems to have stabilized by now, and as some others have previously pointed, there is nothing to worry about with this one.

What I mean is that even if the PR value has decreased for your site, your rankings should be steady if you have been following the webmaster guidelines. This update mostly has to do with spamindexing (or depending on how you look at it, de-indexing).

Average PR for most testing sites dropped 0.3 points overall, but is a 40% drop if taking off 0-2 PR domains out of the calculations. Still rankings are unchanged, which confirms another "cleanup" type update.

Matt Cutts confirms on his blog: "I’m expecting that also in the next few days that we’ll be expiring some older penalties on websites." So these "penalties" which are being shown right now should be lifted by the time Search Engine Strategies hits in late August.

How have your site withstand the latest update? How many points has it dropped, if any? What about your rankings?

We get asked quite often... If we only got to choose 2 elements to optimize on-page, what those would be?
Well, wishing the answer was more technical than this, the fact remains that we would pick the Title tag and the meta Description.

Title tag - The most important one. This is what the searcher will click on to arrive at your site. And it is were all starts in terms of converting that visitor into a customer, member, affiliate, supporter, or whatever you want your site to accomplish. It should satisfy both your visitor and search engines in terms of relevancy. Therefore it needs to be "clickable". Target terms should be considered in terms of co-occurrence, prominence, and proximity. We recommend to include your target terms once in it, at the beginning (prominence) following with a call to action (click through). The last issues are length and separators. If your title exceeds 67 characters, it could be trimmed out in the SERPs, which not only does look bad, but also wouldn't allow the searcher to see your entire message. Separators help increase visual relevancy of your terms.

Description meta - You need to optimize this. It should "describe" the Title tag further, detailing any additional information that would further increase the chances of being chosen as the most relevant and appealing search result. It should also include the target terms at the beginning, but branding terms are not necessary, instead focus more on why this would be a better listing to click on that your competitor's. Then you have achieved its goal.

What about your own titles and descriptions? What have you found to be effective?

Nothing big happened, but there were a lot of small updates
across the index, in what I could call a "cleanup" type of update.

Just as it was 6-8 month ago, PR is back for a lot of web directories.
This is important for the ones that do pass link value from their listing.

The most remarkable thing is that after losing thousands of links,
many sites still have their PageRank intact. Link Quality, anyone?

If you have been seen a flux in Google Toolbar PR, it is an update, they are doing an "incremental" PageRank toolbar update. It started some days ago, and it is not fully completed yet. This is a minor update compared to the big one back in November.

Because of this, it has low impact for most sites. Have you seen any changes on the Google toolbar? Would you mind to share?

New update from Yahoo for crawling, indexing and rankings. Lots of sites experiencing the update as of this morning.

The last update was about a month ago. Yahoo Search Blog has confirmed the new update saying:

"Over the last few days, we've been rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms. While we expect the update will be completed soon, as you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index."

As announced, some major re-indexing is reported on many sites. So far, this update is giving more weight to older or established sites and larger sites. Even more so than Google currently does.

Have you noticed any Yahoo crawling changes on your site's activity or in your rankings?