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's "I'm Feeling Lucky" Button Counts Down To New Year
If you go to Google.com and click on the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, Google will show you a countdown to the new year. You cannot type anything into the search box for this to work, just click on the button with an empty search box. Here is a video of it working just minutes ago, on my screen: Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help and DigitalPoint Forums. - Bug When Updating Google Maps Local Listing
Starting over the weekend, if you tried to update a Google Maps business listing in the Google Local Business Center, you would get a weird error. We have many reports in the Google Maps forums, many. The error sometimes looks like this: System Error We're sorry, but we are unable to serve your request at this time. Please try back in a few minutes. Try again document.write("|\n\x3ca href\x3d\x22/local/add/businessCenter?hl\x3den-US\x26amp;gl\x3dUS\x22 onclick\x3d\x22history.go(-1); return false;\x22\x3e Return to previous page\x3c/a\x3e"); - You Can Now Block Your YouTube Subscribers
Liz from YouTube Support announced in a YouTube Help thread that a long requested feature is now available - the ability to block subscribers from your channel. Why would you want to block specific subscribers? Maybe you got 'pervs' watching your videos? Maybe you don't like certain commentators on your videos? Maybe you are anti-social? How do you do it? 1. Sign into your YouTube account 2. Go to https://www.youtube.com/profile?user=[YOURUSERNAME]&view=subscribers 3. On this page you'll - Mass Google Toolbar PageRank Penalty of December 2009???
Let me start off by saying that I used not only one question mark in the title, but three to express how confident I am about this title. There is almost a 100 posts in a single weekend DigitalPoint Forums thread with people reporting their Google Toolbar PageRank has dropped. A long time ago, Google had batch Toolbar PageRank penalties for sites that sold or bought links. The first batch was in November 2007, then - Google Images Trying Bing's "Infinite Scroll"?
I may be totally misunderstanding a post from swainzy in Cre8asite Forums, but maybe not. Swainzy is upset that she cannot change the number of results shown in Google Image Search, just like this person at the Google Web Search Help thread. But what Swainzy added later seemed to imply to me that Google is testing Bing's infinite scroll feature, which continues to show you more and more pictures as you scroll the page. She - Google Alerts Gone Wild?
I am a big time user of Google Alerts, I just don't use them via email - but rather via RSS. Some users are reporting in both a DigitalPoint Forums thread and WebmasterWorld thread that Google Alerts seemed to have just gone a bit out of hand. Tedster from WebmasterWorld said: I've also been getting some peculiar Alerts again - and in some cases they are things that should have been sent a while back. - Video Recap of Weekly Search Buzz :: December 11, 2009
Just a reminder, we did not do a video recap last week, we did a text one - so if you missed it, check it out. This week was the SES Chicago conference and we covered tons of sessions. Google switched personalized search on by default and SEOs are freaking out. Google and Yahoo both added real time Twitter results to the search results. Google launched image based search with Google Goggles. Google will add
Other Great Search Forum Threads:
- .htaccess blocking Googlebot, Google Webmaster Help
- Bing: The Cleaner Engine?, Cre8asite Forums
- Google Actively Promoting the Content Network, WebmasterWorld
- How Smart is Google.honestly?, WebmasterWorld
- How to Build Links without Paying for them?, WebmasterWorld
- Insert Keywords = UNEXPECTED INTERNAL API ERROR, AdWords API Forum
- The Psychology Behind Link Giving, Sphinn
- AdWords Features: IP Exclusion, Google AdWords Help
- Blogger of the Week: Greg Meyers (Back to the PPC Classroom), Google AdWords Help
- CEO Eric Schmidt on Google and Personal Data (Surprising!), DigitalPoint Forums
- Link Bait - Valid Strategy or Social Engineering Scheme?, WebmasterWorld
- Why is Google not honoring Hanukkah with a doodle?, Google Web Search Help
- Why is the inclusion of the "Offensive Search Results" box so selective and biased?, Google Web Search Help
