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 Maps Can't Handle Two Plus Businesses With Same Phone Number
Remember, a few months ago, I wrote how some Google Maps reviews were being posted on competitors Google Local Business listings? In summary, a Doctor was complaining that his competitors were obtaining his reviews, even though his business has a different name. What I did not see then was that his competitor(s) have the same phone number as he does. Yes, there are many doctors share an office and the office staff with their competitors - SEO ≠ Search Engine Optimization, Rather Strategically Elevating Optimization
Yesterday, the HuoMah blog uncovered a new person trying to trademark the term SEO. Yes, this was not the first person, see here for the other. I then wrote about it, with Danny Sullivan, at Search Engine Land. It turns out that this guy is not looking to trademark the term SEO as Search Engine Optimization. Even though this guy's company is under the DBA of "Search Engine Partner." Instead, he is claiming that he - Google Increases Sitemaps Limit to 50,000 from 1,000
I am not sure when this happened, but fairly recently, Google has changed the number of Sitemaps you can reference in a Sitemap index file. The number use to be 1,000 sitemaps can be referenced in a Sitemap index file, now the number is 50,000 Sitemaps. This is a huge increase in capacity. Still, each Sitemap file can contain up to 50,000 URLs, so technically 50,000 multiplied by 50,000 is 2,500,000,000 or 2.5 billion URLs - Google's Matt Cutt's State of the Index 2009
If you missed Matt Cutts at PubCon this year and you didn't catch our coverage you are in luck. He "re-created" his presentation given at PubCon in November 2009, on the State of the Index 2009. Here is the 25 minute video: Here are the slides: As a bonus, here are Matt's predictions for 2010 (3 minute video): Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld. - Google Continues The Cash Drive: Revenue Up, Profits Up, Everything up (GOOG)
Last night, Google announced their 4th quarter earnings. Guess what? They beat expectations and overall, everything was up. Greg Sterling posted the key highlights and nice graphs: Revenues – Google reported revenues of $6.67 billion in the fourth quarter of 2009, representing a 17% increase over fourth quarter 2008 revenues of $5.70 billion.Google Sites Revenues – Google-owned sites generated revenues of $4.42 billion, or 66% of total revenues, in the fourth quarter of 2009. This
Other Great Search Forum Threads:
- SeoQuake 0.4.2 for Google Chrome is released!, Sphinn
- US calls for China Google Probe, WebmasterWorld
- What to do when a competitor is spamming and it works, WebmasterWorld
- Google showing video thumbnails in results - just sometimes., WebmasterWorld
- How can I discriminate punctuation in Google?, Google Web Search Help
- New TestTube option -- Disco!, YouTube Help
- SEO 101 Common Mistakes, Sphinn
- Try out the redesigned video page!, YouTube Help
