To kick off the 2010, Google is currently exporting the PageRank values to the Google Toolbar. Yes, there are major reports of a Google Toolbar PageRank update taking place right now.

This may become a New Years tradition for Google. Last year, Google pushed out a PageRank update for New Years 2009. I wonder why they make the push right before New Years? Maybe because it is slower for Googlers and less going on? I am not sure.

In any event, I hope that most of you can add this to your new years celebration. If not, I wouldn’t fret, see our explanation of Toolbar PageRank vs. real PageRank.

While analysts and practitioners have been prognosticating the imminent arrival of local search for the last several years, 2009 was finally the year that proved us right. A number of innovations and developments in mobile search, such as the widespread adoption of the iPhone, the release of Android, and a burgeoning number of location-based apps like Foursquare have certainly helped fuel local search’s rise. But local has gained mind share among SEO’s, marketers, business owners, and perhaps most importantly, searchers, in its own right as well.

Let’s take a look at some of the most significant developments that have contributed to the evolution of local search in the last year:

You may never have heard of Alibaba — the e-commerce search engine, not the hero of the 40 thieves. Yahoo owns 40 percent of the company, which runs Yahoo in China. Last year, comScore placed Alibaba Corp. as the fifth-largest online property in Asia-Pacific, and in January the Financial Times described it as “the world’s largest platform for trade between businesses.”

If Alibaba continues growing at its current pace, it could be on par with Baidu within three years, according to Citi analysts. Now Chairman Jack Ma, the Chinese Internet grandee and one of the TIME 100 world’s most influential people, is offering western businesses search marketing opportunities to sell their products globally.

The Nexus One aka Gphone will only be sold by Google when it is offered to the public next month, according to T Mobile. The two companies will share support for the phone and T Mobile will be the carrier for the phone.

This should provide an interesting test of Google’s ability to sell a physical product and manage support for it. Given the limited support for their other products, this could be the challenge of the year for Google.

Credits to: Search Engine Watch

Here’s an interesting report speculating that Google might actually be planning to make YouTube as a hosted gaming site.  Sometime in February 19, 2009 Google applied for a patent which carries the title – “Web-Based System for Generation of Interactive Games Based on Digital Videos.” The patent application which was published earlier this month states that:

“the collaborative generation of interactive features for digital videos, and in particular to interactive video annotations enabling control of video playback locations and creations of interactive games.”

This seems like somehow games would be built atop videos that are being submitted to hosting sites such as YouTube.

What could be a better way of starting the new year but with a new Google Phone?Well, Google surely knows how to create the hype and the buzz to build the excitement over the Google Phone, which up to know is tentatively called Nexus One. What started out as a rumor, has been blown out of proportion.

So, are you excited about the Google Phone or Nexus One? I was telling Loren over IM that it’s one thing that’s making me excited about the new year simply because words on the street say that Google might actually ship the Nexus One outside the U.S. If that is true, I’ll make sure to be the first to have it here in Manila.

Historically, I’ve been fairly narrow in what I read in the blogosphere and tech arena (almost all SEO-centric stuff). You can see my Firefox sidebar list here, which  hasn’t changed much since 2008 with the exception of the blogs and news sections. But, over the past 6 months, I’ve been broadening out considerably and found that it adds a great deal to the conversations I’m able to participate in and contribute to, especially as SEOmoz itself has expanded from the SEO world to the larger technology and startup world. For the New Year, I thought I’d share some of the sources that have contributed most on this front and some of my favorite posts/contributions from those sources.

It’s that time of year again where we tend to reflect on the past year and look forward to a fresh start.

People are already writing some amazing content about great B2B articles in 2009, B2B social media predictions for 2010, and ideas for improving your B2B search results in 2010.

I am going to take a slightly different spin looking ahead into the next year, and share my own personal wish list for B2B search and social media marketing in 2010:

1) Flexible budgets

Hitwise tweeted this morning that Facebook reached the number one most visited site in the US for the first time ever over the Christmas holiday, pushing past Google. But digging a little deeper, that might not be so. It all depends on what you consider “Google” to be.

From the tweet:

Facebook was the most visited site in the US on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. 1st time the site has been the #1 visited US site ever.

We followed up to get some actual numbers and go beyond this 140 character tidbit. Hitwise kindly responded, telling us:

Ever since Google Chrome blog announced the launch of Google Chrome Extensions, people have never stopped talking when this move is going to kill FireFox.

Well, you might know how much I love FireFox (even despite the fact that because of my experiments with addons it sometimes becomes dead slow) and how hardcore I may become wen it comes to something that I love, but even I couldn’t ignore those talks any longer.

So yes, I went ahead, did some research, tried Google Chrome extensions and here’s what I came up with:

Chrome Extensions vs FireFox Addons

Quick Scroll is a new little tool from Google for Google Chrome. It basically helps to navigate to the part of the document that you saw when clicking on Google search result.

After you click on a Google search result, Quick Scroll may appear on the bottom-right corner of the page, showing one or more bits of text from the page that are relevant to your query. Clicking on the text will take you to that part of the page.

What it means is the following:

As you work toward a program of building links to your site, one important factor to consider is “who” will be doing the work.

According to Sage Lewis’s “Re-Thinking Link Building” column, many businesses resort to letting their interns take care of link building. Others outsource the task. Clearly, people think this job is tedious and trivial.

Lewis correctly suggests dropping the term “link building” because it implies “quantity over quality.” It’s important to focus instead on the idea of reaching out to others and building quality connections that make sense.

Last week, while you were doing your last minute shopping, Google and Bing were going head to head – over their Webmaster FAQs.

First, Bing took to their Webmaster blog to introduce the new, official Webmaster Center FAQ. They already had FAQ content in the help section and in the forums. The new FAQ compiles that content plus additional questions into a downloadable PDF document.

Three days later, Google said “Oh yeah? Me too” with a post about the FAQ on Webmaster Central. It has been compiled and maintained by high-participating users in the forums, affectionately referred to as “Bionic Posters.”

Picking the right goals is key to the success of any SEO effort. A surprising number of companies focus on what they think are the right goals, but end up being dead wrong.

When the wrong goal is selected, SEO energy gets invested in the wrong ways and the ROI on the SEO project ends up being lower. Let’s look at a few examples of non-optimal goals.

Rankings

This remains a popular goal for many businesses. People frequently contact us and let us know that their goal is to rank number one for a particular search term. The problem with this goal: new businesses generally don’t get top rankings.

As SEOmoz has matured as a company, our SEO team has shifted away from treating SEO purely as an art and more toward treating it as a science. There is certainly the necessity for both perspectives but I believe we are now much more centered.

As a result of this shift, we have been running more tests and analyzing more data. Before I get into the topic of our latest test results, let me provide some important points to establish context.

Following October’s release of Google Analytics new features, Google has just released another set of very cool new features. Among them is “Annotations,” a tremendously useful new feature both to analysts as well as executives, who are usually not up to date on granular details about website activity.

The annotations feature basically allows users to make comments on graphs regarding events that happened on specific days. For example, have you ever used Snagit or some other screen capture utility to create an snapshot image like the one below to explain what happened on a specific analytics graph?