changes

Update: eBay is starting to test the badges. The company made the following announcement: Over the next few weeks you may see a new seller badge appearing on some item pages and in search results. This badge is part of the new eBay Top-rated seller status announced last week and launching in October. Starting this week and over the next few weeks, we'll be testing the badge in search results and item pages for a small percentage of eBay traffic.

Hulu has made a few changes to how it presents its search results, as well as the site's "most popular" and "recently added" pages. Most noticeably, Hulu has abandoned the two-column approach in favor of a more "prominent placement of the show Hulu thinks you are looking for.

 Rather then a big splashy make-over, YouTube has been rolling out an ongoing series of changes and improvements that marketers and uses should pay attention to.

We made a video at SMX Advanced with Stephen Spencer recently where we discussed (among other things) some changes expected(?) to be coming to Google in terms of the no-follow attribute.  These no-follow changes have some pretty significant implications for lots of things, first and foremost though it seems these changes are specifically geared to mitigate, to some degree, the effectiveness of PR sculpting.

Last Tuesday, we discussed the idea of Google potentially making some changes to PageRank and it’s relationship to no-follow - particularly in the context of PageRank sculpting.

Earlier this year, Google laid off about 200 employees in the sales and marketing department. Head of Sales, Tim Armstrong also left the company to become CEO of AOL. Armstrong then got Senior Google sales executive Jeff Levick to go with him.

On Friday, eBay released a revised version of its user agreement. The changes deal with situations where a buyer has alleged receipt of a counterfeit item. eBay Senior Counsel Scot Shipman discusses the changes in a company blog post. He says that under the changes:

Update 2: Biz posted on the blog again showing that Twitter is taking users' feelings on the matter seriously: So here's what we're planning to do. First, we're making a change such that any updates beginning with @username (that are not explicitly created by clicking on the reply icon) will be seen by everyone following that account. This will bring back some serendipity and discovery and we can do this very soon.