Daily Search Forum Recap: February 5, 2008

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.

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

Search Engine Roundtable Celebrates Mardi Gras
Today is Mardi Gras. In celebration, we Search Engine Roundtable folks have put up a nice pretty theme for your enjoyment. I don't believe there are any special decorations on Google, Yahoo, Dogpile, or Ask's site, so we alone at Search Engine Roundtable wish you a very happy day! Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.
Can You Click on a Google Listing to Increase Your Rankings?
This question gets asked time and time again, but it's always helpful to enlighten our newcomers and refresh our seasoned folks. Over at High Rankings Forum, someone asks if you can increase your rankings by clicking like mad on the search result. The answer, quite simply, is no. Do you really think Google would make it that easy to get rankings? Utilizing this method would make the system too easy to be gamed and spam
Google Files Known Highly-Ranked Queries Patent Application
Marcia at WebmasterWorld discovered a patent application filed by Google about known highly-ranked queries. The abstract is complex, but in case you want a read: An information retrieval system includes a query revision architecture providing one or more query revisers, each of which implements a query revision strategy. A query rank reviser suggests known highly-ranked queries as revisions to a first query by initially assigning a rank to all queries, and identifying a set of

Webmasters Report February 2008 SERP Changes

Following our January SERP changes report, we're back with the WebmasterWorld account of the changes observed at the beginning of this month. Here's one new piece of information which has been confirmed by numerous webmasters: Since the 'rollback' to fix #6 glitch my site dissapeared back to the sandbox but still shows up well on all the other DCs ....[Google] has discounted all links with less than 6 months of age. Others, however, dispute the

Do You Get Warning Signs Before a Penalty?

A WebmasterWorld member wants to know if you're alerted if your website has any penalties. According to tedster, you might get it in your Google Webmaster Central account, provided your site is registered with Google. (If it isn't, now's a good time to get it set up! What are you waiting for?) Some webmasters get an email or a notice in their webmaster tools account, especially when the penalty is for something that might even