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:
- Google Suggest Becomes Search Default
The Official Google Blog has acknowledged that it will begin rolling out Google Suggest, which will let you formulate queries with more ease, reduce spelling errors, and save keystrokes. An example screenshot is below: It's about time, but one wonders if this is happening because of Yahoo's success with Search Assist. While Google has had this technology for years, are they playing "catch up"? In terms of SEO, there are concerns that this will affect - What is the Black Hat Definition for Search Engine Optimization?
Vanessa Fox blogged about her experience at SES San Jose last week. She attended the highly talked about White Hat, Black Hat session and explained her findings from the perspective of an individual who worked at a search engine. When it comes to white hat, she says that there are guidelines to follow and if they are violated, you may suffer penalties. When dabbling in shades of gray, she talks about the specific guidelines and - Does the Encoding of a Web Site Matter for Google?
In a Google Groups thread, a forum member worries that Google is spotting the wrong character encoding for his web site. In particular, he states that Google is finding that the site is US-ASCII rather than UTF-8. JohnMu says that this is not a problem, however. In general, especially for mostly English language content, there is no big difference since US-ASCII (7-bit ASCII) is a subset of UTF-8. English language content can be seen as - Eric Enge Interviews Maile Ohye of the Google Webmaster Central Team
Eric Enge interviewed Googler Maile Ohye relatively recently and provided an interesting summary of the interview on his blog. In the interview, Maile talks about the WebmasterTools API (especially with regards to extracting link data), using sitemaps for discovery, spam reports, paid links and PageRank, Flash indexing, and geographic targeting. Of particular importance to forum members was Maile's statement that Flash indexing has improved and now links that Google is able to discern actually pass - Google AdSense to Be Migrated into Google Analytics
Are you a Google AdSense publisher? Do you have a Google Analytics account? If so, you may be in for a surprise, since there's a rumor circulating that Google Analytics may soon include Google AdSense data. This information comes from thegooglecache.com (where the post has been pulled) and Amit Agarwal, and this has subsequently been reported on Search Engine Land, where screenshots are available. One such screenshot is shown below: Many forum members are excited
Other Great Search Forum Threads:
- Google AdWords API Sunsetting V11 on August 26th, 2008, Google Groups
- Pip August 2008, WebmasterWorld
- God Hates Link Sellers: saw the sign at SES San Jose? [PHOTO], Sphinn
- How to Get Google to Index Your Site Deeper, Sphinn
- SEO Champion's Chaos at SES San Jose, Sphinn
