Source: Official Google Webmaster Central Blog
Are you the owner of a .yu domain? Then you might have heard the news: as of September 30, all .yu domains will stop working, regardless of their renewal date. This means that any content you're hosting on a .yu domain will no longer be online. For those of you who would still like to have your site online, we've prepared some recommendations to make sure that Google keeps crawling, indexing, and serving your content appropriately.

• Check your backlinks. Since it won't be possible to set up a redirection from the old .yu domain to your new one, all links pointing to .yu domains will lead to dead ends. This means that it will be increasingly difficult for search engines to retrieve your new content. To find out who is linking to you, sign up with Google Webmaster Tools and check the links to your site (you can also download this list as a "comma separated value" -- .csv -- file for ease of use). Then read through the list for sites that you recognize as important and contact their webmasters to make sure that they update their links to your new website.
•  Check your internal links. If you are planning to simply move your content in bulk from the old to the new site, make sure that the new internal navigation is up to date. For example, if you are renaming pages on your site from "www.example.yu/home.htm" to "www.example.com/home.htm" make sure that your internal navigation reflects such changes to prevent broken links.
•  Start moving the site to your new domain. It's a good idea to start moving while you can still maintain control of your old domain, so don't wait! As mentioned in our best practices when moving your site, we recommend starting by moving a single directory or subdomain, and testing the results before completing the move. Remember that you will not be able to keep a 301 redirection on your old domain after September 30, so start your test early.

While you're moving your site, you can test how Google crawls and indexes your new site at its new location by submitting a Sitemap via Google Webmaster Tools. Although we may not crawl or index all the pages listed in each Sitemap, we recommend that you submit one because doing so helps Google understand your site better. You can read more on this topic in our answers to the most frequently asked questions on Sitemaps. And remember that for any question or concerns we're waiting for you in the Google Webmaster Help Forum!

Written by Luisella Mazza, Search Quality Senior Analyst

Working through the holidays is hard work. Today we put the final touches on our new revamped email marketing reporting framework  which we will be adding to our eBiz platform. To give some background, email marketing has been a part of our plaform for a few months now and the reporting is definitely due for a face lift. But in that time we've launched our Goals Framework which acts like a brain for all eBiz customers. The new reporting framework will provide customers with information previously near impossible or too time consuming to collect.

Email marketing is a commodity and you can expect reports such as: open rates, bounces, popular links, subscriptions and unsubscriptions from almost any provider. Now imagine without having to add a single line of code to your eBiz website, you get stats like:

Of those who opened the email:

• 10% bought product x, 22% bought product y
• 23% filled in your "December Sales Enquiry Form"
• 5% subscribed to your other monthly newsletter
• 22% made a comment on your blog
• Average sale price via the online shop was $344
• and the list goes on..

I'm pretty excited about this improvement and what it'll mean for our customers and partners. I know it'll turn the email marketing game upside down!

I was thinking today about the uphill battle that many small business owners face. They're fighting for business against larger, better funded competitors. How can you win?

In war, you can amass the biggest army and throw your soldiers at the enemy. The bigger the enemy is, the more soldiers you'll need - but hey, it works. Mostly.

In business, if you want to solve a problem, you can throw money at it. The bigger the problem, the more money you'll need to throw - but hey, it works. Mostly.

Big companies tend to throw money at problems, just like big guys are more likely to muscle their way through conflict. Little guys prefer to talk their way out of conflicts, like little companies attack their competitors with smart and efficient marketing.

When I say "marketing" I'm not talking about advertising and spending money on billboards. I'm talking about having a conversation with your customers; about making deals with like minded companies; about letting your customers spread the word for you; about making your product that much better than anyone elses; about making your service shine and delight.

History shows us that the biggest armies can fall to superior strategy and tactics; think Henry V and the battle of Agincourt. History also shows us that diplomacy and negotiation can achieve better outcomes than any war, and hence the saying that "the pen is mightier than the sword."

Well, I say Marketing is mightier than Money.

Right now, times are tough. And I've heard many business owners wish that they had more funding, or the resources of their larger competitors, so that they could weather the storm more comfortably.

That's fair. But the true winners out of this are going to be the smart, little companies who figure out that this a storm that they can talk themselves out of.

In this climate, smart marketing is a thousand times better than deep pockets.

We've added 2 new credit card options to our web forms feature that'll help you streamline and automate your online business. Currently we have one credit card option that simply allows you to collect and process payments in real-time, e.g. collect donations. The 2 new options allow you to:

• Process existing invoices - If you are using the Order/Invoicing framework in this system, then you can manually or automatically send invoices to your customers and have them visit a specific page on your website, enter the relevant invoice number and pay for it in real-time using their credit card.
• Update credit card details - This feature is particularly useful if you are using our recurring billing engine. You can now put the 'Update Credit Card Details' form on any web page and have your customers visit this web page as and when they need to update their credit card details.

To learn more please go to: Modules->Web Forms.

It's been in the works for some time but our first release of QuickBooks integration is now live and running. This new feature allows you to push all your online sales and related customer information directly into QuickBooks as required. To learn more please refer to the QuickBooks article in the Wiki.

To get started go to: eCommerce->QuickBooks.

Some customers may have experienced receiving a handful of workflow notifications emails which may have seemed out of place. This was due to a small error in an upgrade we made earlier and for a period of around 5 minutes workflow emails were duplicated to a handful of users, possibly including you.

Please accept our apology. And rest assured that we are already improving our processes so that such a mishap won't take place again!

You can safely delete these emails.

Ever wanted to sell recurring products in your online shop? Now you can. For any given product you can choose its recurring cycle and have the system automatically create orders that recur when a customer purchases such products.

To take advantage of this new and exciting feature:

• Go to eCommerce->Products and choose a product
• Click on "Show More Options" and locate "Cycle Type" drop down
• Set the appropriate recurring frequency for this product, you can choose between Once, Daily, Weekly, Fortnightly, Monthly, Quarterly, Half Yearly and Yearly

Now for example if a customer buys a handful of products in which a couple have a monthly recurring cycle, then upon successfully paying for the order the system will create a new recurring order with the recurring products. The system will use payment details from the initial order for subsequent recurring orders. Also the original shipping charges will apply to subsequent orders.