+ The pulse of the search marketing community

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: May 14, 2008"

Dosh Dosh has just written an excellent piece on how to get more Twitter followers. He cites a lot of reasons, but drives it down to the power of your brand. Still, even if you're not a powerful brand, you can benefit from Twitter in the same way that many popular web celebrities do. For example, if you create a tool and promote yourself with it, you can gain a lot of followers. You can also use your website real estate to link to your Twitter profile, such as through banner ads, a Twitter link, and more.

Additionally, your friends can vouch for you or you can run contests. Really, the possibilities are endless and Dosh Dosh touches upon the surface. Your creativity doesn't have to run out with this one.

The article is a must-read (and so is the blog), and forum members think so too. :)

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

There are two Google AdWords updates that readers should take note of.

First, AdWords Editor 5.0.1 has been released. The only change is a small one, but it may help users:

The four tabs for ads (text, image, local business, and mobile) are now grouped under a single 'Ads' tab. This release addresses a space issue that only affected some users. If you aren't experiencing any difficulty, it isn't necessary to upgrade.

Forum members recommend that you export all data before you upgrade because you'll lose your comments from doing the simple upgrade.

On a related note, Google AdWords will have systemwide maintenance on May 17th (Saturday) from 10AM until 2PM PST. Ads will run but the API will not.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and Google Groups.

When you're a webmaster, it's important to check your analytics to ensure that everything there is looking good. You can get a good sense of where your traffic is coming from, be it search traffic or uh, porn site traffic, and you can overall get ideas of where you may be able to improve your website for more visitor consumption.

So when one of our forum regulars checked his statistics, he was a little shocked to see that he's getting more than 3000 visits from a porn site. Is this damaging to his site? Can he get penalized?

Well, the one thing is that he's mentioning that he had 3000 visits, not links. Regardless, if they were links, the only "risk" involved here is that there's a possibility that Google will consider that your site has adult content (even if it doesn't). Of course, if only a small percentage of your inbound links are coming from porn sites, you have a lot less to worry about, but the key here is percentage. There's no exact percentage, here, though. Just keep in mind that if the majority of your links are coming from adult-themed sites, you might trigger an "adult" filter even if your content isn't adult.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

Your Google AdWords display URL may impact your AdWords quality score, but to what extent is the question? A Google Groups thread has discussion on the topic, where AdWordsPro.Jordan, an official Google representative, says that it may have an impact.

Jordan writes, "Display URL can have an effect on your Quality Score." Jordan goes on to explain that it depends, the "effect depends on the context in which your Quality Score is being used and in some cases, the Display URL is not even considered at all." Jordan then links us to a AdWords FAQ page that Google does look at the "historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group." But does Google match the keywords used in the display URL to increase the quality of the ad?

I.e. if you are selling cars, does it help to have the word car in your URL? Jordan explains that since Google bolds the search term in the ad, including the display URL, it may increase your CTR, which helps your quality score. Here is a picture of an ad in Google for a search on car, notice how the word "Car" is bolded in the display URL.

So how should you structure your display URLs? Jordan says the "difference between ‘MyDomain.com/Apple-Juice’ and ‘…/Apple_Juice’ is negligible as we should be able to detect the keyword ‘apple juice’ in either case."

Having the keyword in the display URL can increase your CTR, which has a major influence on your ads Quality Score. But does having the keyword in the URL help Google match on relevancy of your ad and thus increase your quality score?

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Cloud computing is becoming more and more popular amongst webmasters and site owners. In short, companies like Amazon, RackSpace, Google and others are offering hosting services where you upload your content (html, images, videos, pdfs, etc.) to a web server, that web server then replicates that content onto other web servers - so if you think about it, your content is not just on one server, with limited resources and bandwidth, but on dozens (or more) of servers with virtually unlimited bandwidth and resources.

Duplicate content issue? Nope. There is only one URL for that content (unless you generate multiple URLs for the same content yourself) but Amazon S3, for example, doesn't create a duplicate content issue.

One webmaster at WebmasterWorld is complaining that Google Image search doesn't seem to be indexing the images he has hosted over at Amazon S3. But honestly, I think it is just a timing issue for him.

If you conduct a site command on site:s3.amazonaws.com, the location of the S3 content, you will find hundreds of thousands of results returned. If you conduct the same site command search at Google Image search, you find many images from S3 included in the Google Image Search index.

So, it does appear Google is indexing content in the cloud. Specifically from Amazon S3. Does something have to happen on the Amazon side for Google to index your content? I personally cannot find any hints to Amazon blocking any content from search engines on the technical docs or the FAQs. So maybe it is just a timing thing?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Before beginning, I know a few of you will be upset I wrote this at all. But I want to show you the history here.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks what is the story with the noarchive META tag and the likelihood that it may hurt your Google rankings or rankings in other search engines. Let me first give you my opinion for the year 2008. I do not think the noarchive tag will hurt you in any way, unless you are spamming the search engines and hiding something from them. If you are not spamming, then you have nothing to worry about and you can use the noarchive tag for good.

So why is there concern over using the tag and having your rankings drop? As the thread shows, historically, we had reports all the way back in 2001, yes seven years ago, that sites that utilized the noarchive tag saw a drop in their Google ranks. WebmasterWorld's founder and owner, Brett Tabke, said back then, and I quote:

We've tested on 12 domains. All 12 domains dropped in rankings the following update after adding noarchive.

But Brett adds that even back then, there was opposition to the theory.

What about in 2008? Like I said above, I think its a non-issue for virtually all webmasters, of course there are exceptions. The new WebmasterWorld thread discusses just that. As you can see by reading the thread, there is still some concern over using the META tag.

WebmasterWorld's administrator, Tedster, first explains that there is nothing wrong with using the tag. Google has never said it will hurt your rankings. But he does add, that if there are "borderline spammy signs" on your pages, "then a noarchive tag can be one more bad sign and possibly contribute to a ranking problem. Matt Cutts [of Google] has mentioned this several times at conferences."

WebmasterWorld moderator, Receptional Andy, adds to Tedster's warning, saying, "Only a small percentage of sites will use noarchive; so, it puts your site in a slightly different group, and one that is more likely to be closely-scrutinised." But I love how moderator, PageOnResults, follows up to that post saying, "What percentage of Internet surfers actually use the Cached link?" Meaning, just like a small percent of sites use the noarchive tag, so to, a small percent of searches use the cache link.

For those curious, that was the basis of the argument behind Does Using a NoFollow Attribute Raise a Red Flag at Google?

Take Aways:
(1) If you are spamming or it may look like you are spamming, be safe and don't use the noarchive META tag.
(2) Otherwise, go for it!

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Folks at WebmasterWorld have been complaining that their Google Analytics data seemed off for weeks now. Well, they were dead on. If you go to Google Analytics, you will now notice that they have admitted to having data processing issues between the dates of April 30th to May 5th. Google promised to recover most of the data but all some of the e-commerce data between those date ranges are gone. (New Info: Google tells me that those with e-commerce reporting are more impacted by the data loss, but not all e-commerce data is loss.)

Here is the exact notification from Google:

Google Analytics experienced a data processing error from April 30th to May 5th. Almost all of the data has been recovered and is currently being reprocessed. The recovered data will be reflected in your reports within a few days. Please note that a small percentage of data, particularly in the area of e-commerce reporting, was not recoverable from those dates.

The Google Analytics team promised to take "every precaution to prevent such disruptions from occurring again in the future." But what do Analytics users get for the loss? Nothing. Should you expect something? I don't think so - it is a free service. In my opinion, if you need someone to take the heat, you need to pay.

There is no exact ETA on when the data that Google was able to recover will be represented in the reports. So keep an eye out on your stats for those date ranges.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: May 13, 2008"

At the recent Web 2.0 expo (which I totally wish I went to), Matt Cutts presented on "what Google knows about spam." I actually watched the 9+ minute video (yay me!) and found it informative. Basically, he summarizes a few key points: you should build reputation and trust into your system, you can thwart and frustrate spammers (as they're people), and you should try to make your system hard to infiltrate by spammers.

He even added a slide (so that he wouldn't be "burned in effigy," as he put it), to acknowledge that SEO is not spam and that if you work with whitehat SEOs, they'll be pretty open in terms of what they're doing to optimize your site.

Here's the video, or you can go to Matt's site to watch the video, see the slides, and read the tons of comments he received.

Thanks Matt for the useful presentation. You did a good job. :)

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn and WebmasterWorld.

The Google News Blog has announced that it is now incorporating YouTube videos with Google News results. As the blog post explains, "You'll see the prefix "Video" next to story titles, and clicking on these video links will open a video player directly on the page so you can watch the video right there."

While this was announced in August of 2007, it seems that forum members are starting to see this more often, though not enough. As one member writes:

Our site is a contributer for Google News and I've been tracking our articles by doing a search of "site:example.com". While counting the links, I uncovered some unused JavaScript in the Google News code. It seems to indicate the possibility of YouTube results mixed within Google News results.

It seems that YouTube videos within Google News is still not mainstream. Only a few carriers as of the August post (CBS, Reuters, and some Hearst TV properties) were offering video.

Meanwhile, the forum member suggests that it's possible that YouTube and Google accounts will be merged in the future, as he says that when you sign up for a new YouTube account, you're asked to confirm your Google account data, including Webmaster Tools information. It'd be interesting to see if this is incorporated in Google News results.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday, the Internets were abuzz with news that Google has launched Friend Connect, which appears to be "APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites," according to TechCrunch.

Google's own press release mentions that Friend Connect makes websites social.

The move is applauded by many forum members, who feel that it's great that Google is taking the initiative to make the web more social. Others are a bit skeptical for a variety of reasons, including the fact that if Google's code snippet is on every page on the web, they can learn your habits quickly. Further, another concern lies in the numerous personas assumed by some individuals on the web. If you accept the terms, you're no longer separating your different personalities; instead, the web will be a "big bucket of shared data."

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums.

About a week ago I ran a poll that asked Can Someone Hurt A Competitors Google Rankings With Links? I ran the poll because there is a lot of debate around this topic. So I figured, why not ask you guys and you guys said that yes, competitors can hurt your Google rankings. Here are the details of the poll.

In short, 70% of the 135 responses said that yes, a competitor can hurt my Google rankings. 19% said, no, competitors cannot and 11% said they have no idea either way.

Here is the break down:
:: Yes said 94 respondents or 70%
:: No said 26 respondents or 19%
:: I Have No Idea said 15 respondents or 11%

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

Try it, a search on bowling or lawyers and so on all may return a fourth line to the search ads at Yahoo Search. The fourth line might show a geo-location. Here are some pictures:

If the advertiser is geo-targeting the location of where you are searching for, then the fourth line may show the location. As I explained at BrandVerity Blog on this. This seems to be a new behavior from Yahoo, but yes, Google has been doing this for a while.

Google has been doing this at least since July 2004 and has even tried showing your exact address under the ad, on occassion - which is neat.

Here are Google ads for plumbers:

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Update: Yahoo has sent me a statement:

Yahoo! started labeling the location of ads last just week with the roll out of a new “geo labels” feature. The labeling is displayed primarily for localized queries, like restaurants, florists, mechanics, etc. and is based on the advertiser’s geo targeting preferences and the user’s location of interest.

Google has moved the location of the "Saved Locations" feature in Google Maps. Now, you should see an arrow down on the right hand side of the search box, in Google Maps. Clicking on that arrow will show you your saved locations. It is in that area where you can find the "Edit saved locations" feature, as well.

Here are screen shots to illustrate:

(1) Click on the arrow down:

(2) Will trigger a box to open up below with your saved locations and a way to manage them:

Maps Guide Brian explains in a Google Groups thread:

I understand that it's a bit inconvenient for those of you loyal "Saved Locations" users, but assuming the drop-down arrow remains, any suggestions on how we can improve this feature? I'd love to hear everyone's feedback!

Forum discussion at Google Groups.