September 2006 Archives

A WebmasterWorld thread discusses the update to Google Reader, Google's RSS Reader. I am not going to do the review, but I wanted to link to Matt Cutts's review of the product. He does a great job comparing the reader between Google Reader Old, Bloglines and Google Reader New. The screen captures are awesome, but one thing Matt notes, I need to clarify.

Matt said, "I couldn’t agree more, Barry." When I blasted SEW's feed, I could of simply changed my preferences for Bloglines to not show updates for "updated items" and just show updates for "new items" for each individual feed that annoyed me. He notes that "Google Reader doesn’t have this issue," but it then has an other issue. I prefer to know when some posts are updated with additional information, but not all feeds - does Google Reader have that option?

In any event, Google Reader is much improved in terms of usability and features, making it a serious competitor now in the RSS reader market. Unfortunately, Google Reader runs a tad slow on my Mac and Bloglines is much faster and takes up a tiny fraction of the CPU processes. Nathan claims that on his system it "hogs 100% of the CPU when open in IE7 on Windows Vista, even when completely idle."

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Vanessa Fox of the Google Sitemaps team has posted at the blog that you should be expecting fresher query stats in your Google Webmaster Central area.

Specifically, every Monday, you should expect the data in the query stats page to be updated with fresh data.

Vanessa wrote;

Previously, we showed data that was averaged over a period of three weeks. Now, we show data that is averaged over a period of one week.

Discussion of this recent Google Sitemaps update at the bottom of this WebmasterWorld thread.

MediaPost reported a week ago about Ask.com's plans to release a new platform for their sponsored search platform. Last night a thread went up at WebmasterWorld with the new feature list.

1. Improvements in cost and budget control
2. New ad structure improves content management
3. Streamlined UI simplifies common tasks
4. More flexible reporting
5. Enhanced Bulk Upload tool

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: More details here there is a link to a "ASL 2.0 Webinar" with the launch details.

BlackbeardSEO writes that when he tried to bulk upload 3,000 keywords to Microsoft adCenter, it returned an error and does not upload the keywords. BlackbeardSEO explained that this only started happening with the new update of the adCenter product this weekend. He also posted this at DigitalPoint Forums, where he confirms that he "called Microsoft about it and they are working to fix it." Microsoft told him that there "is no ETA on when this will be done, but hoepfully soon."

WebmasterWorld explains exactly how many keywords can be uploaded.

You are limited to adding around 500 keywords per time using the normal way.

So the bulk upload feature is not too bulk these days.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums & WebmasterWorld.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread reports that MSN Search (aka Live.com) is indexing permanent 301 redirects. What this means is that if you search on a term or command that triggers the domain that is 301ed to show up, it will show something like the following in the search results.

Moved Permanently

The document has moved here.
Apache/2.2.0 (Fedora) Server at www.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.com Port 80

Some members have confirmed this to be true, but I personally tested serveral domains that I know are 301 redirected and was not able to reproduce it.

I am thinking it may be about the server type, the configuration and so on. But also, related to how Live.com handles those server responses.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Yes, an other Google PageRank update is underway. For example DigitalPoint.com has some data centers reporting a PageRank of 8, when it is currently at a PageRank on 7. Check the DigitalPoint's pagerank at this tool.

The data centers with the new PR at this point in time are:
DC: 66.102.7.99
DC: 66.102.7.104
DC: 66.102.7.147

As far as SEO, does this really matter? Again, the visible PR in that toolbar does not mean as much as it did 4 years ago.

You can also see our forums jumping up from a PR4 to a PR6.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Matt Cutts of Google has agreed to come on the show here and there to talk about one or two of the topics we covered the past week at the Search Engine Roundtable. Matt Cutts will be live for the first time on The Search Pulse this Tuesday, between 5pm - 6pm (EST) October 3rd. Currently, I do not know exactly what time Matt will be on exactly, but it will be between 5 and 6pm during the show.

I have one topic at hand that Matt will respond to directly. I only am giving Matt 5 minutes max to talk about the topic. Then I may ask Matt one more topic and then move on to other topics without Matt.

It is possible that we get other guests on from different search engines during the same show. I am working on Tim Mayer from Yahoo, Jim Lanzone or Gary Price from Ask.com and Ramez Naam from MSN (now Live) Search.

The goal is to get a bit more information directly from the "horses mouth," if you will, on the topic at hand.

One thing for sure is that I won't reveal which topics we will discuss prior to the show. I also won't be telling you in the future when these guest will be coming on the air. My goal is to have at least one search engine representative come on for at least five minutes each show. Who will it be? When will it be? Will there be several representatives? What are the topics? All questions I won't address prior to the show.

Why? Because (1) the content is fresh, we only discuss topics that are less than one week old. I may not know until a few hours before who will be on the air and what topics they will talk about. (2) I like the element of surprise.

So here is a free one... Matt Cutts on The Search Pulse this Tuesday, 10/3 between 5-6PM (EST). At that time, go to WebmasterRadio.FM and click on the listen now link at the top left of the page.

What's your favorite music? Why am I banned in supplemental hell? What can't I rank? Who is Google Guy? Do you know Sergey? What this business about the "trustbox"? Does Google hate me?

There is a very interesting thread on WMW about a member on the board who claims he is having an hour meeting with a Google Engineer today. He says he gets to ask about anything regarding organic search and is asking members of the forum for questions he could use. Now, I don't know how he got to be so rewarded with an hour meeting with a Google Engineer but it will be interesting to see what happens as a result. Additionally, I know not all Google Engineers work on the organic search algorithm, so the Google employee may not know more than an anyone else. I know I meet a lot of Google engineers at the SES Google Dance party and pretty much all of them were not allowed to know specifics about the organic algo.

So what is on webmasters minds these days? This thread offers a unique chance to see what people are really concerned about with Google. What is causing confusion and things they are looking for clarity on.

From the thread here are some of the most common questions people are wanting to get asked and answered by Google. Matt Cutts has answered some of these questions via his blog and some of these topics do have answers, why others do not.

• 1. Ask them what they are doing about subdomain spam that keeps coming back into the index.


• 2. Our site is in supplemental results due to redirect, canonicalisation, ur rewritting, duplicate contents etc. and has been fixed by webmaster (page has been 301 redirected etc.) how do we get those pages out of supplemental results?


• 3. Ask this engineer if pages can be pushed into supplemental because of lack of inbound links.


• 4. Please ask if the meta tag "noarchive", applied to every page in a site, causes any degradation in ranking at all.


• 5. Does server location influence rankings on specific datacenters?


• 6. I would like to know what google is doing to combat the site scrapers.

There seems to be a lot of questions regarding supplemental results, sites disappearing from the index, redirects, and links. To be fair, #5 from the list we answered in the Search Pulse show from Tuesday.

Continued discussion at Webmaster World

When I mean serious, I mean serious. Google Maps has a huge bug. And by bug, I don't mean a technical glitch, I mean a real bug. Take a look at this map of Germany, zoomed in, and you will notice what bug I am talking about. Yea, that is a huge bug, taking over the German landscape.

As I said at Search Engine Watch Blog;

Don't worry, it is not some alien from outer-space. It appears that a bug got stuck between the "glass plate and the film during the scanning process."

Discovered at Google Sightseeing..

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Several folks at WebmasterWorld have reported an issue when using Microsoft's adCenter product. The issue they reported was that when they change a bid and hit the save button, an error message is returned, saying;

Microsoft AdCenter cannot process your request. Please try again. If the error continues please contact MSN adcenter support.

Official adCenter411 Microsoft representative confirmed the issue last night and said that "they're (Microsoft tech team) working to resolve it. I don't have an ETA yet but I will keep you posted as I learn more."

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

We all know that Google uses geographic-IP technology to determine what ads to show you. For example, if you enter in hotel into Google, you most likely will get listings of hotels in your geo-specific location (not always but sometimes). But this geo technology can and is overridden when searchers use specific geo-qualifying terms such as "new york hotels" in their queries.

A WebmasterWorld thread has confirmation from AdWordsAdvisor2 that this is indeed the case.

You are correct in that there are certain geo-related terms that the ads system will use as qualifiers for determining which ads are displayed. If it is recognized as a specific location, you will see ads that have the remainder of your query as a keyword and are targeted to the region specified in your query.

Our favorite example is 'new york hotels'. Chances are pretty good that when you enter that as a query, you're not looking for hotels in whatever city you may be in. You will see ads that have the keyword 'hotels' and are geo-targeted to New York, as well as the standard ads that have 'new york hotels' or 'hotels' and are nationally targeted.

This also doesn't work across international borders, as you've all noticed.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

News come DigitalPoint Forums that Yahoo! Search Marketing is coming to India soon.

The thread links to searchmarketing.yahoo.com/downloads/india.php that says;

Yahoo! Search Marketing will be expanding its global presence with an offering in India soon!

The thread creator said that this version will be lacking Geo-targetting features.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Getting people to click on your ads get harder and harder each and every day. The other week we discussed methods on how to Rotating Ad Blocks To Reduce Ad Blindness. We basically wrote that rotating in and out content and blank space where the ads appear can help increase one's click through rate on those ads. There are other things you can do to also help, if you don't want to pull out an ad from a web visitor.

One solution is mentioned in a DigitalPoint Forum thread, on how to rotate the background colors of your ads. I do that already on this site, on the individual article pages, on the left side. One of the ad blocks kind of blend into the side bar, whereas the others are a white and ugly background. But using bright neon, red, hot pink and other colors to make them stand out may help. Rotating several colors also help.

How can you do this?

(1) You can use PHPAdsNew like I did here. How do you set it up? I wrote that at Dynamically Delivering AdSense & YPN Ads on Rotation.

(2) Use one of the scripts mentioned in the DigitalPoint Forums thread, make sure to ensure they are in accordance with the AdSense TOS.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A Cre8asite Forums thread discusses the importance of obtaining links for ranking well within a specific geo-specific search engine. For example, you want to rank well for in Google Canada, you can try to (1) host your site in Canada, (2) get a Canadian top level domain (TLD), (3) Use specific Canadian attributes on the page (addresses, phone numbers, meta information, etc.), and (4) get links from other Canadian sites.

It is possible that your site be hosted in the US with a .com address and still rank well in Google Canada. Search engines may look at the number and quality of links you have from sites that are (1) hosted in Canada, (2) have a Canadian top level domain (TLD), (3) use specific Canadian attributes on the page (addresses, phone numbers, meta information, etc.), and (4) get links from other Canadian sites.

At what level does a search engine weigh the links compared to the other three factors mentioned above (those are not all the factors by the way, just the most important, I believe)? I do not know for sure. I think 1 and 2 are more important that 3 and 4 - but 4 alone may be good enough for some terms.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

If you were lost on an island, with only a computer and some mysteriously awesome wireless Internet connection, and wanted to send an S.O.S. message inside a tool, and, you were a woman and therefore, nobody in their right mind would ever dream you'd code for help. Well. What would you do?

This fantastic thread, that threatened to be deleted because it was thought to be embarressing, has the stuff anyone dying of boredom would love to see. It has binary and bit shifting stuff, Google analytics, extensions, programmer lingo, a fiesty female who was forced to show herself, detective programmers, the stupid forum owner, and if you bear with it, you may wish someone ran off with the Butler or married somebody's cousin. It would certainly fit into the thread.

Cre8asiteforums: Google Analytics And Secret Messages is dedicated to all the brilliant programmers among you, and Jennifer, Steve and John.

Or maybe I should change that to "Did you know that site search data has a story to tell?"

I found it interesting that there may be a lack of education on the part of SEO/M's, site designers, programmers and site owners (okay, all of us), on the value of website search. I'd come across a search analytics survey by Lou Rosenfeld and Rich Wiggins and decided to present it for discussion in What are the barriers to taking advantage of search analytics?

The reported verbatim answers to the survey on search analytics fascinated me, and so has the resulting conversation in the forum. Seems as though there's room for education on site search and its value, for those who offer site-wide searches. There are also tools that tell you what people are searching for that led to your site, but not much support on what you actually do with that information.

Every search phrase has a story. The survey supports the theory that there are "barriers" to "taking advantage of search analytics." Ammon Johns wrote:

"There were thousands of searches per day made, and trust me that the long tail was very visible.

A WebmasterWorld has discussion from SEOs on mostly noticing traffic shifts from Ask.com. Webmasters are noticing an increase in referrals from the Ask.com search engines.

Encouraging results turn sour:

For the last few months it has been a rising source of traffic for me. Up to Friday I was getting about 1000-1200 vistors a day from it. Now down to about 10.

Confirmation from the above by Senior Member BillyS:

Something seems to be going on with Ask recently. I don't get a lot of traffic from Ask but at one point I saw three or four referals from Ask in a row - all in a short timeframe.

Marcia, ex-WMW moderator:

Ask is up to 9.8% for one of my sites that fits their demographic, and that's not even relevant to the overall percentage of search engine traffic sources. I've noticed a steady stream of referrals throughout the day.

Good to see some life from Ask.com in the search forums. I also took a quick look at how Ask.com Image Search Gets Smarter, really, I was impressed. Oh, I am not posting this because they gave me some cool Ask.com Schwag recently. There is true discussion taking place on Ask.com recently.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Reports via DigitalPoint Forums that Yahoo! Publisher Network publishers are noticing an other deduction in their balance reports (the money Yahoo! said they owe the publishers). We had similar reports on September 13th, which was confirmed to be a YPN Balance Reporting Error that was soon fixed after, the next day.

The new reports shows people dropping $300 and some 30% of their earned income.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and also in an other DigitalPoint thread.

Today is Google's 8th birthday, at least we think so. Last year it was on September 7th, the year before it was also on September 7th. Why did it change this year? Well, looking at the revised When is Google's birthday? it now reads;

Google opened its doors in September 1998. The exact date when we celebrate our birthday has moved around over the years, depending on when people feel like having cake. For more on Google's history: http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html

Today's Google Logo:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Can you imagine, Google, along with other web sites, went black, for many Comcast users in the north east portion of the United States. A DNS server went offline for a "few hours" due to a hardware failure. A PC Advisor article writes;

The failure of a DNS (domain name system) server at Comcast caused problems for some web surfers in the north east section of the US yesterday, making several websites, including Google, inaccessible.

Google did help Comcast trouble shoot the issue, probably running traceroutes or something :).

WebmasterWorld forum asks Is Google down?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Brett Tabke posted a featured thread at WebmasterWorld named "Incisive Media Sold to Apax for $377m." In short; Apax Partners has bought Incisive Media, "backing a £199m management buyout of the publisher of business titles including Legal Week and Investment Week." Yes, Incisive Media bought Search Engine Strategies and Search Engine Watch from JupiterMedia back in August 2005, and they turned around and sold it.

As far as I know, things will remain the same - including Danny going on his own. From my understanding the same people are going to be working on a day to day basis at Incisive and SES and SEW - so again, I am not sure what this means - outside of a new company owning it.

The WebmasterWorld thread has thoughts on both sides of the fence. One said,

Saw it last week, found it interesting, moved on to bigger and better things :)

An other said;

it would be very interesting news to all of us if something similar to what we owed can sell for $tens of millions so don't blame Brett :)

I don't blame Brett. It was a nice catch and I honestly was surprised that there was not a thread at WebmasterWorld on this topic until yesterday.

Danny Sullivan came into the thread to address some questions, here is a quote, where he replies to some questions:

> Why didn't Danny or Barry inform us about this?

I hope it's clear we did inform you about it. We didn't do a standalone post because (1) it's unclear how big of news this is to the search space, given that as I said, the company structure seems to be the same, though the name and going private will change and (2) it's frankly difficult for me to write much about a company that I'm also still working for.

> What impact does this have upon the SES conferences?

No idea. Again, that's part of the reason I don't have much more to say on it.

> Barry and Danny are still employed by whatever company owns and operates Incisive and thus they are likely being asked not to mention the topic

Incisive has not given me any instructions on what to post or not post on Search Engine Watch. So I still weigh up everything and try to deal with it as best I can. Again, in this case, the main fact people are mainly focusing on is whether the sale meant Incisive decided not to negotiate better with me or not. That's a good point, but it wasn't one I feel comfortable raising. I'll leave that analysis to others. And when Joe did one such analysis, a few days after we reported the sale of the news, you'll see in our headlines yesterday that I pointed to him.

Simple why we didn't cover this news until now at the Search Engine Roundtable. If there is no thread at a forum, we won't cover it. Last night a thread went up, so we are now covering it.

Honestly, I am confused as to what this means for the future of SEW and SES. I got an email last week from Incisive about it, that email confused me. But things tend to just be going on as they were a week ago. Danny Sullivan leaving SEW is more of an impact to SEW and SES than Incisive being acquired, IMO.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The fourth edition of the Search Pulse has now been archived. In this show we covered a tool to check results as if you were in any geographic location, Live.com fixed the referrals bug, Canadians not feeling welcome, Danny's birthday, Yahoo! ad growth slowing and much much more. The topics we covered are listed below, in order of priority (based on search community buzz). You can download the MP3 file here and listen at your convenience.

Topics we covered:

1. Check Your Google Results in Any Country
2. Microsoft Fixes Referral Bug in Windows Live Search
3. Canadians Not Welcome in Google Advertising Professionals Program
4. Yahoo! Says They Love Canadians
5. Happy Belated Birthday Danny Sullivan
6. Why Does Yahoo! See Ad Growth Slowing?
7. Google Product Searches To Be Upgraded Prior To Holiday Season
8. Google AdSense Adds 200x200 Ad Unit
9. New Code Added To AdSense Setup Code
10. Yahoo! Publisher Network Reporting Bug
11. Yahoo! Improves YPN Ads
12. The GooglePray META Tag
13. Rotating Ad Blocks To Reduce Ad Blindness
14. Google Fixes OneBox Extractor Code

Continue reading "Search Pulse 4: Google.com Rankings Anywhere, Live.com Fixed, Canada Not Welcome, Danny's B-Day, Yahoo! Ad Growth, Google Product Search Changes & More"

Google has added a new line of code to the AdSense Code setup page. If you login to AdSense to copy and paste new revised code to your pages, you will see the new code. The old code still works, so there is no need to update your code (at least, not yet). JenSense has her thoughts on this from Sunday. For example, I have a channel named "Cartoon Barry", the date I generated the new code was on the 26th of September, 2006. You can see that Google inserted "//2006-09-26: Cartoon Barry" between the google_ad_type and google_ad_channel code.

google_ad_type = "text_image";
//2006-09-26: Cartoon Barry
google_ad_channel ="3343792610";

So this tells people that the ad channel id 3343792610 is named by me as the Cartoon Barry channel.

We have to threads talking about this change, and some people are worried.

The difficulty for us is the severe paranoia Google have about telling us anything - even stuff as simple as this. Thanks to the paranoia at Googleplex this simple change will no doubt have all of the conspiracy theorists (including me :) ) running off at a tangent for a while. Whereas coming forward with information that clearly has no reason to be held secret would be a positive step.

One person thinks that this will lead to:

This it would seem, is a move by Google in preparing to perhaps hide Publisher IDs and perhaps require Publishers to indicate where they are displaying Ads......

Until we know more, speculation at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

This Sunday was Danny Sullivan's 41st birthday. We covered when Danny turned 40 and also 39. As many of you know, this year a ton of things changed or will change with Danny - what exactly, we are not too sure.

We all wish Danny the best this year.

In good SEW moderator tradition, the mods put together a card.

Happy Birthday Danny.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread is discussing a PC Advisor article named Google plans upgrade for search engine.

Google plans to extend the product search capabilities on its main Google.com search engine in the fourth quarter, in time for the holiday shopping season.

When people search for products on Google.com, the system will present them with another search box so that they can refine their query, according to Bear Stearns & Co analysts.

After people refine their query, Google takes them to a second page populated with product results from the Google Base listings service.

Part of the move Danny wrote about yesterday, Goodbye Froogle; Hello Google Product Results In Web Search.

Sounds exciting to me, but webmasters, SEOs, SEMs, and site owners are worried.

I just hate it when Google plays with things just before the holidays season. It became very difficult to build a strategy for ecommerce during the holidays season as serps are far from being solid and usually change just after you finished loading your stock for the holidays.

Just great .. so now on top of maintaining our own systems and data .. now we have to upload tens of thousands of items into google base?!?!

Google Base is here and it will be here for the foreseeable future, whatever that is in Internet days.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Just after we learned that Canadians Not Welcome in Google Advertising Professionals Program we see that Yahoo! has taken this time to let us know, in a Google thread that they love Canadians.

Martin Byrne the Director of Yahoo! Search Marketing Canada said;

I've just moved to Yahoo Canada from Sympatico/MSN, specifically to launch an in country management and operations team for Yahoo! Search Marketing. We will launch in Canada soon (just can’t say exactly when right now), Canadian businesses will be able to advertise to Canadians with us, we will have a Canadian email address and we will have a Canadian phone number that will be answered by a Canadian.

What is weird about this is that you never ever see this. Someone from Yahoo!, coming into a Google thread, saying, hey guys we are better than Google.

In any event, we do have a lot of past Canadian specific SEM content at SES Toronto 2006 and SES Toronto 2005.

Forum discussion continued at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Tracking your metrics is vital in today's world of marketing, no one would argue with that. But when it comes to tracking PPC campaigns down to the phone call, it can get expensive and cumbersome.

Discovery, Moderator at SEW Forums said in a Search Engine Watch Forums mobile ad thread;

We apply this same method to all of our marketing campaigns down to a pretty granular level. We have a unique phone number tied to every marketing campaign. In PPC and at Google for example we tie it down to the campaign level, in some circumstances down to the ad group level. The webpages dynamically display the proper number based on passed variables.

It is import, so import, you should probably also automatically associate that call to your PPC metrics, through integration of that data.

Today, it is really doable by most quality developers to get this done at a reasonable cost.

With open source phone systems and PBXs such as the Asterisk solution, you can easily build out a custom solution for your dynamic PPC campaign, even your organic campaigns.

Dynamically, your web pages can assign a unique phone number or phone extension to dial, that will automatically route and track that call for what it truly is. Setting a cookie, can be done over the phone in this sense and it doesn't have to cost you a million dollars to set up.

Who knows, maybe I or someone else will come out with a plugin for Asterisk that does this?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

The Google Sandbox - what it was on day one, i.e. New Sites = Poor Results in Google, from when it was coined the Sandbox Effect to when Matt Cutts confirmed the Sandbox after much debate over the Sandbox, if it existed or not. In any event, most experienced SEMs understand the goal behind the "sandbox" and how it is more about the "trust" of a site (yes a site, not necessarily a specific page, imo) then about how old the site is.

Trust trust trust.

In any even, Andy Hagans has an excellent write up on how to earn more trust for your site. Heck, he named the article Secrets to Beating the Sandbox 2.0 REVEALED: The Ultimate Guide. That name, itself, is a link baiting art - a method of earning more trust, at this point in time. This article is worth a read.

Forum discussion at JimWorld and WickedFire.

Reports via WebmasterWorld that German based Google AdSense publishers have been receiving books in the mail from Google. The books are similar to optimization tip books given to US based publishers. These books are written in German and are said to be good overviews.

It's mostly a summary of the optimization tips of the last month. Nothing really new, but nice to have it as a book with 64 pages.

64 pages!

I got it too, in German language. A good reference, nice layout and some optimization tips. However, if you are reading here at WW and have been with the program for a few months, there is not too much new stuff for you to discover.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This article was written the night before, and scheduled to go live at this time.

Last week, Ben spotted, and I reported on a Google OneBox Q&A Adult Spam. Matt Cutts confirmed the issue and said it has been fixed, which it appears to have been done.

Matt said:

I checked into this, and it was an issue in the Onebox extractor code. I think it's fixed now; thanks for mentioning this.

Continued forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

This article was written the night before, and scheduled to go live at this time.

Login to your Google AdWords center and check your statistics. A WebmasterWorld thread reports a "2nd Adwords Billing System Problem." Like we had in late August where Credit Card Processing Errors Halt AdWords Buyers from Advertising, a similar issue has occurred yesterday and was fixed quickly the same day.

1) The billing system has not begun charging me at regular intervals again, and pending charges are racking up way beyond what is normal (this also happened right before the last billing glitch too).

2) I'm also showing that the "authorization" from yesterday is not actually being closed out into the billing summary today (and my account is still adding up 5 days worth of charges in my "pending" total).

AdWordsAdvisor confirmed the issue and stated it should be fixed;

AWA and I have been working on this one with our billing team. They think this issue should be resolved, so if you are still seeing it in your accounts, could you StickyMail me your account IDs?

So check your stats and view the WebmasterWorld for more details.

This article was written the night before, and scheduled to go live at this time.

Google has a form up for you to request to become a "User Experience Research" at services.google.com/inquiry/user_study. Google is "currently looking for Google Page Creator users to participate in a user study to improve our product."

So if you love Google, like to test things, and enjoy Page Creator, then fill out the form.

Regina of Google, posted this request in the Google Groups forum.

She adds,

Just to let you know, filling out the survey doesn't guarantee you'll be contacted.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

This article was written the night before, and scheduled to go live at this time.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread notes that Google AdSense has added a new ad unit. The new ad unit is 200x200 pixels, which was most likely a much requested size.

If you login to the AdSense console, you should see a message on the top right that reads;

NEW We've added one additional format for your text, image, and video ad units. Learn more...

When I tested the "Learn more..." link above at the time I wrote this, it took me to a page that read;

We're sorry, but the information you've requested cannot be found.

Here is a live AdSense ad:

JenSense notes that this ad unit is so "new, in fact, that AdSense hasn't announced it yet, and it hasn't yet made it into their ad format page yet."

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

This article was written the night before, and scheduled to go live at this time.

OvertureRep confirms a recently reported bug in the Yahoo! Publisher Network reporting engine. Complaints came in over at WebmasterWorld stating that publishers are noting very low impressions, compared to other days, in their YPN console.

OvertureRep (YahooSarah) said;

Thanks for reporting your findings here. Today, we found an error in our YPN portal that caused inaccurate reporting of Ad Unit Impressions, CTR, CPM and Average RPC data for some of our publishers.

Number of clicks and Revenue reporting for all publishers is accurate and was not impacted by this error. We have issued a fix for this error and you will see accurate data going forward within the next 24 hrs.

Sorry for the inconvenience and we appreciate your patience.

YahooSarah

So it appears they were not able to fix the bad "Ad Unit Impressions, CTR, CPM and Average RPC data" but it has not been fixed going forward. In addition, clicks and revenue figures were not affected.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums.

This article was written the night before, and scheduled to go live at this time.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks what happened to the reinclusion request option is on the webmaster feedback form.

In the past, if your site was banned and delisted from the index. The way back into the Google search index was to go to google.com/support/bin/request.py and select the reinclusion request option.

That option has been moved to Google Webmaster Central.

Adam Lasnik of Google said;

Putting the reinclusion request within Sitemaps has actually been quite helpful in a lot of ways; in particular, it's prompted Webmasters to do some self-troubleshooting with our new tools, often highlighting simple steps they can take to fix problems that have prevented their sites from getting crawled, and saving them from the futility of filing a reinclusion request when they weren't "unincluded" intentionally, though it hasn't as of yet prevented Google employees from writing run-on sentences. Unfortunately.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This article was written the night before, and scheduled to go live at this time.

It is the Jewish holiday season and over the next few weeks, I won't be able to post as timely as I normally do. Tomorrow morning I am flying to St. Louis, so tomorrow, blogging may be a bit sporadic. I have asked Ben, Chris and Kim to chip in while I am away, they have agreed. Monday morning, I fly back and won't be back on the blog until after 11am (EST).

I have posted more details on the Rosh Hashanah Trip here.

On September 15th we reported that Live.com Is Not Passing Referer Information, then on September 18th we reported that MSN Says Live.com Referral Bug "Not By Design". Today I am happy to report that Microsoft has fixed the referral error, and is now passing referer data.

A post by MSNdude at WebmasterWorld forums, see message number 3091162 says;

The fix went out a few hours ago, and it's nice to see that it appears to work. We do know this information is important to webmasters, and we regret the inconvenience.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks the members what is this "GooglePray" META tag he is finding on some Web page's source code? The bottom-line is that this META tag is an inside joke between some search spammers.

Spamhuntress has dug into this, after receiving a ton of guest book spam from the user.

The tag looks like:

<meta name="GooglePray" content="Google, please rate me high by keyword UmaxSearch">

Spam Chongqing takes a deeper look into the code used on this guys site. One blogger has boycotted UMAX scanners because of this spammer.

This is an old joke and there is an old forum thread at EV1 Servers Forums and a new forum thread at WebmasterWorld.

On September 12th, I reported that Google's Site Operator Shows Sites Off Domain. Matt Cutts replied to this post saying,

I think I commented on this in a comment over on my blog--I think once the supplemental results folks saw this happen, they quickly fixed it. The screenshot you mention has the search [site:alacrastore.com voxant] and doing that search now looks fine; everything is from alacrastore.com.

Aha, here it is:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/video-crawl-dates-in-the-google-cache/#comment-83727
"TxRex, they’re aware of this and it’s not a huge deal, but the supplemental results team is fixing it as we speak."

So it was reported a few days ago. Let me know if you see any other examples like that--thanks Barry!

But the reports of this weird phenomenon continue. A new thread at DigitalPoint Forums with the same issue. And the WebmasterWorld thread continues to have reports of the issue.

I hope Google Webmaster Central team is on this issue.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums & WebmasterWorld.

Google began testing "Click to Call" (i.e. pay per call) features back in November 2005. It appears from a DigitalPoint Forums thread that they have launched this solution in India.

Google has launched their much talked about pay per call service in India.

I clicked an ad and got a call from the advertister in 10 seconds.

With their VOIP deals this can work virtually everywhere. It is nice to see these features stick and expand.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

WebmasterWorld has a new Microsoft representative named adCenterEU who will be the European arm of adCenter411. adCenterEU explains his/her role...

I've just joined the Microsoft adCenter Community Team and will be based out of our London office. The idea is to make sure the support we offer is on a global scale and that our adCenter Community programs are run in all markets.

So I'll be helping adCenter411 support you where I can, basically while they're asleep!

Having been on the adCenter client service team for over a year now and having seen the product launch in France, the US and now the UK, I'm thrilled to be taking up this new role. I'm also looking forward to meeting a lot of you at the Trade Shows we'll be attending in the UK/FR over the coming months.

Cheers

adCenterEU

Very cool.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I reported two nights ago at the SEW blog that Yahoo CEO Says Ad Growth Slowing Down, and then Danny did a follow up restating the Need For Search Ad Revenue To Stand Alone. So we technically do not know if they are search ads, contextual ads, banner ads, email ads... you get my point. But if they were search and contextual ads, why would Yahoo! say they are seeing the ad growth curve begin to flatten out in certain industries?

Let's have a look at what the forums have to say about this. These are Webmasters, advertisers, publishers and SEOs:

The web is changing, and Yahoo! tends to be right there in the mix... consistently. Slowing ad sales is probably more a result of the poor traffic (social traffic and people who frequent sticky and / or fun sites tend to convert poorly).

Its their own fault. I'm in austalia, got sites that combined get 4 million page views from the US alone per month, yes I don;t qualify for a YPN account.

I don't have any sympathy for Yahoo! 1. Their DTC has been more or less the same since launch, when it was GoTo!

2. There are a large number of dubious search partners that don't get kicked off the program.

3. YPN is US only, they are so far behind AdSense.

I could go on and on...

they must make the sign up process easier. i have tried 3 times so far and i never completed it due to number of questions arising. i guess i am simply too dumb. thus, they should make their system more usable for idiots like me.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld & also an other thread at WebmasterWorld.

Cre8asite Forums Administrator, Ammon Johns, AKA Black Knight, launched a new "SEO Intern Training Programme." The details of the program are here where Ammon explains that this program differs from other SEO training programs, in where you actually work in person on real projects with Ammon and the SEO Director of Fresh Egg, Lee Colbran.

The program is divided into two options:

(1) SEO Internship Training; you pay £500 per week, for the full 2 week course. Included is bed and breakfast accommodation from Sunday night to Friday morning. You then go through training and real life working experience.

(2) SEO Intern Scholarship; you pay nothing, you don't get bed and breakfast, but you do learn. What does it really cost? Well, you work for them for a month for free. Which basically means to me that this is a free 6 weeks course. :)

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

A Cre8asite Forum thread has a discussion on a new tool by oy-oy.eu that allows you to specify the location and data center you want to search in and it will show you a side by side comparison of your Google results between the two locations/data centers you selected.

The tool is located at http://oy-oy.eu/google/world/.

You type in a search query, then specify one set including a location and a data center. The available locations include; (local), Belgium, Canada, China, Denmarkm India, Iran, Italy, Korea, Latvia, Mexico, N/A, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, Thailand, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States, or Uruguay. There are a number of data centers to choose from as well.

Have questions or feature requests? Join the discussion at Cre8asite Forum.

One of the major complaints about Yahoo!'s contextual ad program, the Yahoo! Publisher Network, was that the ads did not load as quickly as Google's contextual ad program, Google AdSense. Yahoo! has announced that they have made performance and style changes to the ads.

The changes you’re likely to see include the removal of ellipses (…) and truncated words, the inclusion of 40-character titles on certain ad units, and a change in the number of ads displayed on certain ad layouts.

Here is a screen capture of the before and after of the small banner ads, I have on some of the pages on this site.

Notice how they cleaned it up a bit and also dropped out the description part of the ad, for this specific ad block size.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums.

Update: Search Engine Journal has a list of the changes made for each ad block.

* 234 x 60 and 468 x 60 ad unit size will no longer display a description
* Number of listings will change based on the following:
160 x 600 = 5 listings
180 x 150 = 1 listing
300 x 250 = 3 listings
336 x 280 = 4 listings
728 x 90 = 3 listings

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread reveals the shocking truth that Google has excluded Canadians from qualifying for the Google Advertising Professionals program. Which countries qualify? Well there is a list here of the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) locations "are eligible to participate in the Google Advertising Professionals programme." Yup, no Canada.

JenSense, a Canadian, is upset about this, and rightly so. Heck, some of the most well-known and respected AdWords experts are based in Canada. She said, bolded for emphasis;

Why are non-US and non-EMEA countries excluded from becoming a Qualfied Company? I have no idea, but for whatever reason, it wasn't simply an oversight. I wouldn't have thought that Canadian advertisers would have been considered small enough fish that they'd chose to ignore all of them!

One of the most well known AdWords experts, Andrew Goodman, replied to the thread, yes he is a Canadian;

Oh, it's retarded alright. I suppose that's one of the reasons we're not all madly passing the test right now. For company/agency level folks, it's insulting to be told that all you need to do to be qualified is to write a test that any old individual could write. But when you can't even qualify as a group, that's even sillier.

He wants an apology an an explanation from Google. Rightly so...

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

The third edition of the Search Pulse has now been archived. In this show we covered the Live.com launch, AdWords tests, Yahoo!'s marketing blitz, Google & Intuit's partnership, Google's supplemental command, the Belgian court ruling, OneBox spam, Adam Lasnik on links and much more. The topics we covered are listed below, in order of priority (based on search community buzz). You can download the MP3 file here, hope you enjoy it, it was much fun.

Topics we covered:

1. Live.com Is Not Passing Referer Information
2. MSN Search Redirects to Live.com
3. MSN Search to Switch to Live.com: What Is The Difference?
4. MSN Says Live.com Referral Bug "Not By Design"
5. Is Live.com A New Threat To Google?
6. Google Testing Removing Top Blue Ads Based on User Behavior
7. Intuit & Google Partnership :: Huge For Google
8. Checking a Site's Supplemental Results in Google
9. Yahoo! to Spend Big to Compete
10. Google Cache & Google News Not Allowed in Belgium
11. Google Search Update
12. Another Meaningless Google Backlink Update
13. Google OneBox Q&A Adult Spam
14. Google Personalized Home Page Adds Custom Tabs
15. Google's Adam Lasnik Knocks on Paid Links

The topics we did not get to, include;

Continue reading "Search Pulse 3: Live.com, AdWords Test, Intuit & Google, Yahoo! Ads, Supplementals, Belgian Cache, OneBox Spam, Adam Lasnik on Links"

A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion on an Inside AdSense tip telling people to try rotating in and out your AdSense blocks with non-ads. Google specifically recommends Related Links;

And if you're feeling especially creative, try alternating between Google ads and Google Related Links in a given space on your page. This will encourage people to look in that space for interesting dynamic content.

To be honest, I don't think, that if I would do the rotating tip, that I would use Related Links as what I rotate in. Why? Because when related links were first launched, people thought that these were ads, they confused them with an other AdSense product. By rotating out the ads with what may appear to be different ads, may not be too wise, IMO.

What I would suggest is to rotate the ads out with real free content (related links generated internally, related images, user comments, etc.). Real content that appears to be related to your content and not something that appears to be ads.

The question is then, what percentage of users to you show ads and what percentage of users do you show real content? At what point are you making the maximum amount on your ads? That is for you to test and test with your metrics.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I reported a week ago today, September 12th, that Google AdWords Statistics Mixing the Search & Content Network. In message number 3087767 posted yesterday afternoon at WebmasterWorld, AdWordsAdvisor confirmed that the bug has been fixed.

I've received word that this is now resolved - as of Friday night, 9/15. My apology for any inconvenience which this may have caused.

So it was only a bug for about 8 days, at least.

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

WebmasterWorld has a bug report that describes how since last Friday morning, September 15th, adCenter had a security issue. Basically, as I understand it, the conversion tracking script from Microsoft was using an expired secure site certificate. What happens when you go to a URL with an expired secure site certificate? You may get a security warning pop up on your browser. What do people do when they get a security warning? Either ignore it or close the browser.

Yesterday afternoon, adCenter411, the adCenter representative confirmed it was an issue and said it has now been resolved.

The adCenter support team has confirmed that the security certificate issue is now fixed. If any of you are still experiencing this, please let me know. I'm sorry about this inconvenience.

Almost four full days? Seems pretty big to me... It happened only to those merchants using the conversion tracking script.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: Actually been an issue since the 14th... A second forum thread at WebmasterWorld with more discussion.

I reported yesterday at the SEW Blog that Yahoo is To Run Huge Global Advertising Campaign.

Yahoo is going to be running a multimillion-dollar global advertising campaign consisting of television, radio, cinema and online advertising.

Yes, they will be even bribing people with coffee and donuts from Dunkin Donuts, with a iced coffee giveaway for Yahoo visitors on Friday, September 22.

The advertising campaign is to begin this Thursday.

Folks in the forums are discussing this advertising strategy. A WebmasterWorld thread has the following quotes;

Yes, a doughnut and coffee would be nice. I still remember the Yahoo commercial with the man living in a trailer in the middle of nowhere, who ordered pillows online to avoid damage from a comet. I don't know why I remember that one, but it doesn't matter, because I rarely search with Yahoo.

Perhaps the advertising money should be spent elsewhere. It wouldn't be a bad idea to learn from other's mistakes. For example GM (and Ford) has tried hard to bribe people into buying their cars, but it hasn't worked. But I bet if they invested their time and money into making better cars, overtime the momentum would shift. Same idea goes for Yahoo!, or does it?

You might hate to admit it, but advertising works. But, you have to have a good product and it's not like throwing a light switch, either. Ask's campaign got them some brand awareness. I think it might have been, longer-term, worthwhile. This should pay off for Yahoo. They are building on a strong brand already. Beside, you got a better idea?

The Yahoo! campaign should be a humorous one, looking back at Yahoo!'s old campaigns and you may even hear some yodeling!

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

So Microsoft launched a new engine last week, well, not really - they just redirected MSN Search to Live.com. And now people are asking if this is going to pose a threat to Google...

- MSN Search results are pretty much the same as the Live.com results.
- MSN Search didn't truly compete, in fact they lost share.
- Changing a sticker on a package, might not do it.
- Placing a sticker over someone's eyes may be the trick.

A Cre8asite Forums thread has some interesting discussion on the topic. I like how Adrian put it;

To me, in my techy world, live search is where you get the results as you type in a query, not just another 'enter keyword, hit enter' type search.

What's 'live' about it?

Plus, interestingly, it doesn't actually have a submit button or anything, just a vague magnifying glass thing at the end of the form field.

Interesting take.

So I personally await the release of Vista to see how restricting that sticker is...

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Ben Pfeiffer spotted possibly the first OneBox Q&A adult spam in the Google results, that I have personally seen. Ben posted the details in a Search Engine Watch Forums thread, describing the result set one gets for a search on dating services sites. Try it, and at this moment in time, you will get the following result.

The link leads here and the more sources link leads here, but here is a screen capture of the more sources just in case it gets pulled.

It also works for religious dating sites. Looking at the site itself, one may consider them to be pushing the envelop on search spam.

Now the question in many SEOs minds, is how they broke the algorithm to get their site included?

That is the the 2nd set on OneBox style spam we have located. The first was package tracking spam but those results were found in the organic listings and not in the OneBox area.

I notified Google about this yesterday afternoon, I have yet to receive a response on the matter.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Friday we reported that Live.com Is Not Passing Referer Information, the realization about this in the SEO and Webmaster community sent ripples throughout many of the forums. MSNdude replied to the thread at WebmasterWorld stating that this was a bug.

This is NOT by design. We're looking into it. Thanks for telling us.

So rest assured, I am sure there will be a fix pretty quickly. Well, not over the weekend, but hopefully some time today or early this week.

Continued forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Need some help with learning AdWords? Well, you can get direct help from Google, if you feel they are best to teach you how to have the best success with AdWords. Google is running seminars across the US for both "Beginner & Intermediate, and Intermediate & Advanced." They named this seminar AdWords Seminars for Success.

On Friday, September 22, 2006 there will be a seminar in Los Angeles, CA. Then on Monday, September 25, 2006 an other seminar in San Mateo, CA, (San Francisco Bay Area). Followed by Tuesday, October 10, 2006 in Chicago; Tuesday, October 17, 2006 in NYC; Tuesday, October 24, 2006 in Miami, Florida; and finally on Monday, October 30, 2006 in Boston. Sign up here.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

It appears from a DigitalPoint Forums thread that some Google AdSense publishers are allowed to place ads within email newsletters or other emails, with permission from Google.

Google explicitly does not allow ads in email.

From the Google AdSense Program Policies:

No Google ad or Google search box may be displayed on any domain parking websites, pop-ups, pop-unders, or in any email.

But it appears some publishers, with special permission from Google, are allowed to place AdSense ads in their emails.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

It appears that over the weekend a search update that affected the search results began taking place. A WebmasterWorld has a thread where folks are discussing the changes.

Senior Member steveb said yesterday;

Still at least two main indexes... the apparently being replaced that had tons of freehost spam, and the newer on with much less freehost spam but different data-refresh/lost/screwed-up sites.

Where are people noticing the changes? One member documents the data centers.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread shows that a Belgian court has ruled that the Google Cache and Google News is in violation of "particular the laws on copyright and ancillary rights (1994) and the law on data bases (1998)." Google has to remove "the articles, photographs and graphic representations of Belgian publishers of the French - and German-speaking daily press" or pay a daily fine of 1,000,000.- €.

The full details are at Chilling Effects.org.

So Belgium will require an opt in for caching, should the rest of the world?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

It has been a while since a Googler knocked on buying links in a while. But recently, mini-Matt, Adam Lasnik, of Google, wrote in a WebmasterWorld thread saying;

Advertising's fine
Buying links for PR: bad
Google senses much ;)

So buy links for advertising and not for building your PR. Got that?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports that the top blue AdWords ads have been removed from the Google search results page. But in fact, it seems to be a user by user setting. Some users will see the top blue ads and some users will not. What does it depend on? It seems it is based on your ad clicking behavior.

Check out this quote from the thread:

I spoke to my account rep. They are testing a new feature whereby when a user performs multiple searches and does not click an ad, the ads are all moved to the right side of the page. The rationale is that the user does not want to see the ads anyway and it lessens the chance of a poor prospect clicking on an ad. If you clear your cookies, the results will go back to normal.

Very interesting... First I heard of this.

I tested this myself by refreshing over and over again until the top blue ads dropped off and they did after about 10 refreshes for a search on ipod.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

So MSN Search Switched to Live.com the other night. Guess what... Live.com is not passing referer data. I.e. you will not know what type of traffic you are getting from live.com. You won't know you got 10 or 100 or 1,000 visitors from Live.com. You won't know what keywords they searched on in Live.com to find you in the free results. You won't know!

MSN Search did pass referer information, but Live.com is not, at the moment at least.

I verified this with my stats from yesterday, nothing from Live.com and I know I used to get some MSN Search traffic (which has now been replaced by Live.com).

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread reports that all blogspot, blogger, blogs were not accessible starting around 5:20 am (EST) this morning. The first reports of the blogs coming back online was at 6:55 am. So the downtime was at least 1.5 hours, but probably more.

I have not seen other reports of this outside in the press yet. So nothing more to report to you now.

Update: The blogger status site said;

Blogspot was down for about 30 minutes. It has been restored now, but some blog pages are still returning an error page. We are working on resolving the problem.

Update, 4:25AM: This issue has been fixed.

Um, this was longer than 30 minutes!

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Google has added a feature to the Google Personalized Home Page that allows you to add a number of customized tabs to your home page. I don't use Google Personalized Home page much at all, but I can see how this can be extremely helpful, in terms of people being able to better organized their content.

I set up a "Feeds" tab on my Google Personalized home page, it looks like this...

I just added six feeds to it, based on my ranked blogs order (which I seriously need to update now, since things change with this).

Forum discussion on this feature at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums and Search Engine Watch Forums.

You ever want a way to determine the number of supplemental results a particular site may have? In the past, you did a site command and sifted through the available pages to get an idea on that number. Now, Google appears to allow you to see those results by entering in the syntax [site:www.domain.com ***].

So for example, this site has 806 supplemental pages in the Google Supplemental index. How do I know? I search at Google on site:www.seroundtable.com/ ***.

But what about check each and every Google data center for supplemental results? There is a tool at oy-oy.eu that goes through each data center at Google, plugs in this operator and returns the number of supplemental results.

Further discussion at SEOMoz.org and Cre8asite Forums.

Reports via WebmasterWorld that backlinks have been updated over night at Google. What does this mean? I suspect not much, just like it meant very little for the August 25th Back Link update. That update was coined "Pluto" but was pretty much knocked down as insignificant by GoogleGuy.

Great quote from that post;

I agree this one isn't anything to write home about. Like Pluto, I think this would be a shrinking update; the SERPs aren't really changing. :)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & Search Engine Roundtable Forums which adds that nofollow links are found in the results. :)

I am honestly not sure why this is not getting more play in the forums. Google has a huge reach with small businesses, but guess who has a larger reach with small businesses? Yup, I believe it is Intuit. Intuit has huge market share, in terms of small businesses using their accounting software. Many of QuickBooks, the accounting software for small businesses, users may not be a Google AdWords customer. Well, with the partnership between Google and Intuit, that may change.

Intuit may have the most detailed press release on this announcement. By scrolling down, you can see the screen captures of the new QuickBooks, to be released within a month. Guess what, right on the dashboard is a button for "Google Marketing Tools." Huge real estate there, I personally may find it annoying, but it will be there.

Not only do we see that button but if you have inventory and products, there will be a method to export your data directly from QuickBooks to Google Base / Froogle. Wow! Plus integrated with AdWords and Local business ads, since QuickBooks has your information - they can make this as seamless as possible for the new (possibly) non-tech savvy user.

Finally, Google Desktop integration will enable QB users to search QB data with Google Desktop. Honestly, that kind of scares me.

In any event, I feel this is a huge deal for Google. Very smart move, IMO.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Last night, MSN Search began redirecting to Live.com. Try it, go to http://search.msn.com/ and notice the 302 redirect (a.k.a temporary redirect) pointing to http://www.live.com/?searchonly=true.

So what is done is done... or is it? i.e. 302? :)

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums, WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums.

Via a DigitalPoint Forums thread, someone posted a link to a true Google mirror. It reverses everything, I mean everything, in Google, as if you are looking at Google through a glass mirror.

Kinda weird, but thought it was somewhat funny.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Update: Danny Sullivan told me this was not new. Check out more information on this at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Www.elgoog.com.

Yesterday we reported that Yahoo! Publishers Noticing Balance Reductions Last Night. Basically, for example, it showed me having a balance of let's say, $1,000, and then all of a sudden my balance dropped to $500. The problem has been fixed.

YahooSarah said;

Hey there,

Yesterday, a limited number of publishers were impacted by an error in the reporting of their Account Balance. We have identified the error, and the balance information for these publishers will be updated over the next 24 hours.

We apologize for any inconvenience we caused with these publishers.

YahooSarah

Forum discussion continued at DigitalPoint Forums.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread accounts for several recent cases of Yahoo! Publisher Network publishers losing a substantial amount of money, that was reported due to them, last night.

Last night my Total Balance was $2700.... now Im at $1700.

My Total Balance just went from $26,000 to around $18,000

I just looked at my account, and it showed it as around $2,000 less than what was in there!

Many are suggesting that Yahoo! has refunded advertisers money, and as a result, took back invalid clicks that appeared to have been earned by some publishers. I'll try to get word from Yahoo! on this to clear things up.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Kim Krause, founder of Cre8asite, has posted a thread at Cre8asite Forums announcing the latest addition of emoticons (aka smilies) to their arsenal of emoticons database.

Yes, it is "Mr. Lederhosen. In honor of Danny Sullivan" as Kim describes.

Why Mr. Lederhosen? Good question. Well, at SES San Jose '06, Danny had to put on Lederhosen at the last session he moderated, in front of all the people in the audience. The real picture can be found at my coverage of Organic Listing Forums.

Here are more images that I took of Danny pre Lederhosen and post:

www.flickr.com More of rustybrick's photos tagged with Lederhosen

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

We have been tracking how long it would take Yahoo! to fix the accessibility issues at some locations, on loading the Yahoo! Publisher Network ads. We first reported problems on September 8th and then again Yesterday, we said it was still an issue.

Well, not any more. It appears from late posts at WebmasterWorld that at 8:23PM (EST), the ads began working again.

Again, this was first reported on Aug. 31, 2006.

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

Brett Tabke posted a thread at WebmasterWorld linking to a Village Voice article named Google: The New Port Authority. In short, Google won't comment now, but it appears Google is looking to occupy 111 Eighth Avenue (link to Google Maps & Birds Eye view at Live Local, a building built in 1932 to house the Port Authority - it is huge.

Eustace left out the part about the 300,000 square feet of space that Google plans to occupy in the heart of the city. It's a poorly kept secret that the company will soon open a huge new office and networking facility at 111 Eighth Avenue. Google's new base in the city will dump a sizable influx of Google employees into the social and professional environment of Chelsea and the West Village.

Honestly, I have walked and driven by that building a bunch of times, I didn't even notice it.

But folks at WebmasterWorld are impressed with the building and the rumors that Google will move their NY offices their, in order to expand.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Microsoft announced that search.msn.com will be soon replaced by www.live.com, and that live.com is out of beta. Whooopeee, being sarcastic. Ok, past the press release, what does this mean for search engine marketers? Well, not incredibly much.

First we have the forum threads from Search Engine Watch Forums and WebmasterWorld. They discuss primarily the release and the news about this change. Again, I am not jumping for joy.

But what is the difference from a SEOs or SEMs perspective? That is the question of an other Search Engine Watch Forums thread. And there is an older thread from WebmasterWorld asking the differences between the two.

In both threads, there are not major differences. We do not that Windows Live More Strict on Adult Content When Compared with MSN Search, that is clear. But otherwise, outside of the user interface? Well, not much.

Continued forum discussion at the above threads.

The second edition of the Search Pulse has now been archived. In this show we covered a slew of topics from last week. The topics we covered are listed below, in order of priority (based on search community buzz). You can download the MP3 file here, hope you enjoy it, it was much fun.

Topics we covered:

1. Google News Archive Search - Search Our History


2. Google Names Web Categories "Sitelinks"


3. Preview Your Google AdWords Ads Here & There


4. Danny Sullivan to Keynote at WebmasterWorld's PubCon Vegas


5. Microsoft Behavioral Targeting :: Where Is It?


6. Is The Yahoo! Directory Worth The Money?


7. AdWords Statistics Mixing the Search & Content Network


8. ChaCha's Human Guided Search


9. Yahoo! Shows Different Site's Title & Description For Google.com


10. Google's Site Operator Shows Sites Off Domain


11. How Do Search Engines Treat Accented Words & Characters

The topics we did not get to, include;

Continue reading "Search Pulse 2: Google News Archive, Sitelinks, AdWords Preview, Sullivan PubCon, ChaCha & More..."

Appearing within the top pages of search engine results is very important to many businesses, which is the main reason behind the tremendous growth in Search Advertising and Search Engine Optimization. Since the top page listings are a mix of paid and organic (free or "merit") listings, it is possible to achieve multiple positions. Brand name searches aside, it is generally accepted that it is harder to achieve the organic listings, and they are certainly volatile in nature. One month of top listings can easily give way to a month or more of less-than desirable exposure.

A 100+ post thread at WebMasterWorld that started a few weeks ago asks the question Is It Realistic To Base A Business Around Free SERPs? Excellent discussion follows, including some of the following statements:

It would seem unwise to build a business on something that may some day disappear through no fault of your own. Some might say that a business model which relies on free traffic is no business model at all.

I have a pretty successful online-only mail order company. I, like many others, was suddenly dropped from Google one day. It comes and it goes. I use PPC to see me through the good and bad times...I also started a 4 day a week job at the beginning of the year because I wanted the security that if the database died, site died or I was dropped totally from search engines I still had an income to pay the mortgage and feed the kids.

It's funny .. here recently I shut down all advertising for three days (to make sure there weren't residual ads running)... just to see just what our natural search results brought in...

Brett Tabke just announced at WebmasterWorld that Danny Sullivan will be keynoting at the next PubCon, in Vegas 2006.

WebmasterWorld is proud to announce that Danny Sullivan will keynote WebmasterWorld's PubCon Las Vegas this November. Sullivan said he was looking forward to addressing the PubCon audience, "Many of them I know are independent, small shops, focused more on organic listings. I think some of this group often feel they aren't as important or attended to when all the cash flows with search ads. I think they are very important, so that's something I want to address."

The title of Brett's post, as featured on the homepage right now, make it sound like Danny has agreed to work for WebmasterWorld. But I doubt that.

Wonder what exactly is up... But I think that is the point.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld (subscription, of course, required for this thread).

Update: Danny wrote at Daggle.com that he has not been hired by WebmasterWorld or PubCon.

No, I haven't been hired to work for WebmasterWorld, in case that's what you're thinking. But I am going to be keynoting at WebmasterWorld's PubCon in Las Vegas on the last day of the show, on November 16.

A short thread at WebmasterWorld has confirmation from AdWordsAdvisor that the data you see in AdWords, may not be 100% accurate. I do not want to take this out of context, but here is the issue reported in the thread.

You can have a campaign that is only suppose to run in the content network (i.e. AdSense). The AdWords stats will then show that you have content network impressions and clicks, but it will also show, for that campaign, that you have search impressions and clicks for it. This should not be happening, since those campaigns are set to only run for the content network.

AdWordsAdvisor said that "'I've consulted with the tech team on this, and they're aware of it as an issue that is showing up for a tiny number of advertisers." So it appears that this is a "tiny" issue but it is something they are aware of. They are asking you to email AdWords with more details, if you see it in the future.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The AdSenseAdvisor posted a thread last night at WebmasterWorld asking for feedback on the Google Referrals buttons.

They're especially interested in your thoughts and suggestions on colors, formats, styles...

So here is your chance to get the button you think would be best for your sites.

Add your feedback at WebmasterWorld.

The Inside AdSense blog confirmed rumors in WebmasterWorld that the Google Pack referral program is now available internationally.

Here is a live Google Pack ad for your pleasure:

How much can one earn for this?

When a Windows user you've referred to Pack downloads and installs the product, you'll receive up to US$2 in your account.

Some international AdSense publishers noticed this available in their account on September 8th. It was official, last night.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I received an email from the fine folks over at the Alacra Blog asking Is Google [site:] command broken? I did my own tests and it seemed fine when I tested it, but they had proof, an image with the results showing external sites, domain names, for a search conducted at Google.com, using the site: command properly.

At first, I thought it was just possibly his computer, maybe some weird spyware, but now I see it was more wide spread.

A WebmasterWorld thread accounts for the same thing by a dozen other users.

The thing is, the problem seems to be have lingering since September 6th and as you can see the thread is still getting activity and the blog post with the image, was posted on the 10th. So there seems to be sporadic issues, the linger, with the Google site command.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I reported last Friday that many ISPs can not resolve the DNS information of the Yahoo! Publisher Network ads, making the ads not load, and slowing down page loads. Well, the issue, which was first reported back almost two weeks ago, on August 31st, is still an issue today. Yahoo! knows about the issue, they said they would have it fixed shortly, but it must be something serious, because it is not resolved.

Some publishers are actually liking what they are seeing. Why?

You know what's funny, my earnings have been up 200% since this 'dns' issue. I reccon it has something to do with ad inventory...

Interesting... Anyway, I doubt it is directly related.

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread asks how can one prevent scraping of his site's content by a non-authorized spider, while not hurting his rankings in search engines?

This is a serious issue, serious enough that there was a session about this named The Bot Obedience Course at SES San Jose 2006. In that session, Bill Atchison from CrawlWall.com gave an excellent presentation.

Robert Charlton at the thread notes that Bill will be releasing a software tool that helps do just that. He said there is a "Beta version coming soon." The crawlwall.com/technology.html page has details of the technology developed by CrawlWall.com.

CrawlWall uses the following technology to secure your website and protect your content. All of the various methods are designed to work together in harmony to make sure that all of the spiders with permission and legitimate visitors get into your website without issue and all of the rogue crawlers get stopped and never gain admission.

Tactics such as dynamic robots.txt files, whitelist opt-in permissions, "second pass filters," ip banning or/and address banning, proxy blocking, creating certain obstacles, and a quarantine list for those uncertain IPs.

I am looking forward to seeing how it works in the real world.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Today is 9/11, most of us will never forget the details of those days. I remember that I was off from school that day, and hearing something happened via the computer. I went to turn on the TV and I saw the first tower on fire, watching home footage of the tragedy happening over and over again. I also remember watching live footage of the second tower getting hit. Then the disaster of the second and then first tower falling. It was on TV, it just didn't look real - but it was.

The Internet slowed to a halt, web sites stalled, news sites didn't load, too much traffic to those sites. I communicated with friends and family via IM, since phones both analog and mobile were not working in NYC. And Google Systems reminds us of the Google Home page that aggregated some of the latest news.

The search community has started some threads on 9/11 today. Here are some threads I found right now.

• Search Engine Watch Forums
• DigitalPoint Forums
• Cre8asite Forums
• V7N Forums

I suspect other forums to start threads soon, Ill update this post as I see them. Also, Wikipedia has a comprehensive page on 9/11.

Update: Ask.com posted a major change to their homepage for the night of 9/11. The screen capture can be seen here, or you can just view the background image here.

A featured WebmasterWorld thread has a discussion about the rational that triggers people to click on a Google AdSense ad. There are many possible answers to the question listed in the thread, here they are summarized.

1. "Compelling on topic or relevant supplemental information"
2. "They don't know it's an ad (well "blended")"
3. "They know it's an ad but want to get the hell out (MFA)"
4. "Just boredom"
5. "because they are basically stoopid!"
6. "they want to buy something the ad represents"
7. " If they get something for FREE"
8. "If they find the caption of the ad attractive"
9. "If they trust your site they feel the ads are also genuine."
10. "Plain old laziness"
11. By "mistake"

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There are reports at DigitalPoint Forums of some publishers noticing adult oriented ads being delivered via Google AdSense on sites. I personally have never seen an ad with adult content on it within AdSense (yes, AdWords but not AdSense). One example ad read;

Hustler VIP
Hottest quality babes doing the nasty

There are two reasons why these types of ads should not be displayed on Google's AdSense ads.

(1) There should be no content that would contextual match such type of adult ads. It is against the program policies for a site's content to contain any "pornography, adult, or mature content." So without the content, the ad should not match.

(2) Also, I believe it is against Google's own policy to display adult oriented ads in AdSense. This is in order to protect the publisher's readers, audience and reputation.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread accounts a Microsoft adCenter advertiser getting billed over $1,500 after having paused an ad he was running. Not only that, he paused the ad over 60 hours ago and the ad has yet to be paused. This means, that until the ad pauses and is removed from MSN Search and Windows Live Search, the advertiser will continue to be billed.

The advice given?

get aggressive! Just cancel your credit card. Or take a much more drastic action, close down your account and contact help center to open a new account.

Wow!

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Update: Also more frustration at WebmasterWorld.

Google has given their advertisers the ability to safely view their ads, without it costing them anything. A feature request that has been on advertisers most desired for a long time. How does it work?

The Inside AdWords Blog says you can test your ads at www.google.com/adpreview. Give it a try, if you attempt to click on an ad you will get a prompt stating "Links are not available on this test page."

Warning: This page is a tool for AdWords advertisers to test their ads. For full Google functionality return to the Google homepage.

What about testing if your ads are shown in different locations, countries or US states? The blog says that this URL will do the trick for displaying ads for camping tents in Chicago, IL.

There is slight confusion about that location based test, because of the URL parameter.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Extremely weird, conduct a search at Yahoo! for Google and right now, what comes up is google.com but with the title that reads, "Elisha Morgan Gemologists." The click does take you to Google but still, the title is not Google's title. In fact it belongs to this site listed in the Yahoo! Directory.

Here is a picture for proof.

So weird. You will notice that www.emgemologist.com, the site that's title is displayed, goes to google.com.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A WebmasterWorld member in the AdWords forum documented that after clicking on a link two times quickly, Google spit back a funny error message. The message read;

Give your mouse a break. It looks like you may have clicked the same link twice. Relax for a moment, give us a chance to respond to your first request, and then click your browser back button and try again. Thanks for your patience. -- a Google engineer Error 409

Now, that is funny.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A thread at WebmasterWorld reports that many people cannot see or display the Yahoo! Publisher Network ads on their site. The reports came as early as August 31st saying that there ads are down.

Upon further investigation, it looks like yahoo is blocking our DNS name server from querying the ypn-js.overture.com IP address on their DNS server. If I use a different name server the ads show up.

OvertureRep (needs a name change) confirmed this in message 3075193 saying;

I wanted to let you know that we have confirmed that certain ISPs have been intermittently unable to access the domain that serves Yahoo! ads on your site. We are currently working with the affected ISPs to fix this problem. Feel free to contact customer support if you are experiencing this issue.

We expect to resolve the issue shortly and appreciate your patience.

YahooSarah

Hope they fix it soon. Also, Brett, can you change her name to YahooSarah? :)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

We have been covering what I and many others have been calling "Web Categories" for a while now. They look like this in the Google search results pages.

They went under several revisions, but this is the look that seems to be sticking, for now.

In addition, we explored several speculative reasons as to why a site or query may show those links.

But driven by more discussion in the forums, Vanessa Fox from Google has decided to give us Google's perspective on them. She posted an entry she named Information about Sitelinks, which links to a new page in the Webmaster help center on How do you compile the list of links shown below some search results?

(1) Well, now we know it is not called "Web Categories" it is called "Sitelinks."

The links shown below some sites in our search results, called Sitelinks, are meant to help users navigate your site.

(2) How do you get them? By your site structure and navigation.

Our systems analyze the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they're looking for.

We only show Sitelinks for results when we think they'll be useful to the user. If the structure of your site doesn't allow our algorithms to find good Sitelinks, or we don't think that the Sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user's query, we won't show them.

At the moment, Sitelinks are completely automated. We're always working to improve our Sitelinks algorithms, and we may incorporate webmaster input in the future.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Local Launch has been officially acquired by R.H. Donnelley.

Local Launch! is a privately held company and terms of the transaction were not disclosed. R.H. Donnelley does not expect this acquisition to affect the current guidance for full-year 2006 revenue, EBITDA, free cash flow or debt at year-end.

This is huge news for the search community because Local Launch was run by two WebmasterWorld mods. Justin known at WebmasterWorld as Chicago and Brad know at WebmasterWorld as eWhisper(blog here) sold the company to R.H. Donnelley.

It is kinda funny, because bakedjake, Jake Baillie, owner of TrueLocal and also a WebmasterWorld mod said in a joking manner, "Justin and Brad - want a job? :-D"

Everyone is happy for them, even AdWordsAdvisor popped into say congrats!

Justin (Chicago) and Brad (eWhisper) did pop in to thank the community.

Chicago said;

Thanks guys. We appreciate it.
We aren't going anywhere. This is our space. LocalLaunch is our company. And this is our community.

We'll see you in Vegas if not sooner.

Justin

eWhisper said;

Thank you for all the support. It's been a great day.
A big thanks to the entire LocalLaunch family. Many hang out, read, and post here at WebmasterWorld.

See everyone in Vegas.

Brad

Huge congrats to them!

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The local paid search industry is expected to double in a year, according to a MediaPost report on a Borrell Associates study.

Paid local search is expected to remain the fastest-growing ad category, nearly doubling to $1.8 billion and accounting for almost a quarter of local online ad spending.

So where will the money go? Online Yellow Pages? Major Search Engines (Google Local, Yahoo Local, MSN Local, Ask Local)? Local Search Engines (TrueLocal, LocalLaunch, etc)?

Also where are the ad dollars coming from?

A WebmasterWorld member said;

My spending on local advertising has migrated from traditional print sources to the web.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday, I reported at the SEW Blog that Microsoft Adds Behavioral Targeting Features To adCenter;

MediaPost reports that Microsoft has added behavioral targeting features to the adCenter product. Microsoft has broken down Internet surfers into 18 audience segments including; mobile users, Internet power users, gamers, movie watchers, new/expecting moms, parents, and several categories encompassing travel searchers, and auto buyers and researchers. This now helps Microsoft stand apart from Google's AdWords product and Yahoo's Search Marketing product, PPC engines that currently do not have integrated behavioral targeting capabilities.

There is barely zero buzz about this in the forums, go figure - a ground breaking feature in the PPC market and virtually no one is talking about it except for a starter thread at WebmasterWorld.

Hey! You are now able to say, I want to target those interested in travel with my travel ads, at this time during the week, for males between the age of 30 and 40, who earn between $50,000 and $115,000 per year. How much better can it get? They reportedly added the behavioral component, i.e. "those interested in travel" based on their web surfing behavior.

So where is it? I logged into my adCenter account and I cannot find the feature for the life of me. I did everything, started a new campaign, a new order, new keyword or ads - I even edited old ones. I cannot find the answer. Maybe that is why the buzz is low? Or is it because of all the adCenter bugs or maybe it is because they drive a fraction of the traffic Google does?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: Well, I didn't see it in adCenter because this story from MediaPost was a mistake. I got an email from MSN just a short white ago saying, "The incorrect information is that you state BT (Behavioral Targeting) is available through adCenter, our paid search platform, where as BT (Behavioral Targeting) is only available for display ads." So I take back everything I said. :)

A WebmasterWorld thread reports many advertisers upset with recent changes they saw applied to their Google AdWords. Many saw a bunch of their keywords drop automatically into the "inactive keywords" bucket. Here are some of those reports;

I left with 23,000 inactive keywords. Today, I have 35,000. Traffic dropped 30% from what it used to be.

I had about 23,000 active and today I have only about 12,000 active.

AdWordsAdvisor comes in and gives the explanation as to why this has happened yesterday;

The primary component of the change is that, in non-USD currencies, we've "rounded" many of the minimum CPC amounts so that they'll no longer appear as rather odd amounts - as requested by many advertisers, globally. Note that this change effects 'lower quality ads' (i.e. those at high minimum CPCs) more than high quality ads - thus, for example, a keyword at 0.04 wouldn't have been rounded to 0.05, but a keyword at 4.14 would have been rounded to 4.00.

Related to this change, we've added more 'granular' minimum CPCs between $0.05 and $0.20, specifically at $0.06, $0.08, and $0.15. Some advertisers have been frustrated by the jump in minimum CPCs above $0.05, so this should help alleviate that frustration. As a result, some advertisers will see small increases in their minimum CPC, as has been noted in this thread.

Overall, this change is very small, although some individual advertisers may see bigger changes.

Please note that this is not related to landing page quality.

I guess some folks noticed this very small change.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Name Squeezing is the practice of creating a one page web site that requires a user to provide their email address for them to obtain the desired promotion or benefit from that site. Often the key to pages like these to obtain these email addresses, is for them to be short on content and entice the user to give up their email address.

These pages are found all over the web. Some are not exclusive to being name squeezing pages but have special "call to actions" within the pages of the site to get your email address. But typically, name squeeze pages, are individual landing pages that have a sole purpose, to get your email address.

So can these name squeeze pages rank well in search engines?

That is the question of a WebmasterWorld thread. The answers provided are clear and true.

There are challenges a name squeeze page has, they include;

• Little content
  
• Single page
  
• Less links
  
• They may tend to look spammy to an algorithm
  

If you can avoid those challenges and turn them around, then you possibly can rank those pages well.

But typically, a search engine wants the searcher to get to a page with the desired action already presented on the page. They do not want their searcher to have to dig deeper to get it. So if there are two alternatives a search engine can provide, one without a barrier to entry and one with a barrier to entry, which one would you think they will want to present first to the searcher?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Greg Sterling has a detailed write up on the much recently talked about human guided search engine named ChaCha at the SEW Blog. In short; ChaCha "offers users two ways to search: traditional algorithmic results or help from live "guides."" Here is a guided search that Greg conducted (I tried it on Safari and it did not work);

My query was "Best LA hotel to stay in with kids?"

Guide: Welcome to ChaCha! Please wait a moment while I search for your results.
Guide: Please hold a moment.
Guide: I will find a good result for you.
You: still looking?
Guide: I appreciate your patience while I find exactly what you need.
Guide: I am looking for details on kid-friendly hotels.
You: thanks
Guide: I have found several but will soon have one that is well-suited for your search.
Guide: Do you want 5, 4, or 3 stars?
Guide: hotel rating that is.
You: how about most stars for under $200 per night
Guide: OK - one moment.
Guide: how many beds?
You: 2
Guide: ok.
Guide: Kids stay free at these.
You: okay, thanks
Guide: Let me check on the rates.
Guide: The nice thing is that these both have full suites.
Guide: So if you are with kids, you have refridge, etc...
Guide: Is that good for you?

So do you find a guided search useful?

We have threads at WebmasterWorld and at Search Engine Watch Forums with the answers from the community.

SEW Moderator David Wallace said;

I feel it is something that may have been useful before search engines came into being. Nowadays... why would someone want to wait while someone else searches for them when search engines can deliver results in nano seconds?

Brett Tabke of WebmasterWorld said;

This is is a surpising first time human powered. No one has ever tried anything like this before. Especially someone with money and resources. Looks like they are currently bird dogging for more of the later ($$). Once this puppy comes out, I think it will be very significant. This is just day one of the story I think is going to be very big about March of next year.

It also stands to win the relevance race.

For many, the results brought back were not satisfactory but for (at least) this one user, he was happy with the result set:

Guide: Hi there. I will be helping with your search. Guide: Hello, what kind of internet marketing are you looking for? Guide: SEO, advertising, etc...? Info Seeker: internet marketing tip Info Seeker: about SEO good tip for free and effective Guide: Ok let me find some sites with tips on SEO Guide: The first listing is Webmasterworld.com Guide: A online community of webmasters with fantastic resources about SEO and everything you could want to know about marketing and building a website! Guide: Are these links of help? Info Seeker: great thanks

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & Search Engine Watch Forums.

There is a thread on WMW talking about an advertising deal between Facebook and Myspace that will allow those using MSN Adcenter in the future to reach the audience on Facebook. Like the Google and Myspace deal, this is good news for SEM's and advertisers.

Also regarding Facebook there is a lot upheavel and discussion going on from its membership base about new changes that they put in place over the last few days. The users are protesting new changes made by Facebook to include more detailed tracking of friends in users networks. How this applies to search marketers is maybe helping them to understand the social networking space a little better and how to leverage it with their SEO strategy. There has been good discussion recently, especially recently at the SES San Jose about how to gain links and traffic from some of these sites. It makes complete sense that as social networking sites become more and more part of what people do on the internet it will be inherent that search marketers get to know these social networking hotspots in order to leverage them. This recent incident is more a lesson on learning to identify the right people that are first movers or trendsetters which will introduce new features, websites, and products to the user base. This method applies in a link building strategy as well both for traffic and for spiderable inbound links marketers can use to grow sites. You can't force or shove new features/websites/links onto to people, they have to be introduced and it then spread by word of mouth or virally to others. SEO and Youtube is another example of how an SEO's can gain some free links from learning to leverage this site correctly.

The major story about Facebook has to relate to major changes taking place over at Facebook resulting in a brand new News Feeds of sorts that updates you on every single thing that your friends are doing on your Facebook network. One would think that people would love new features and appreciate the addition. Wrong, they hate it with a passion. The News Feeds track EVERYTHING from who your friends added as friends, who left what comment, who of your friends joined a group, posting image comments, who deleted you as a friend, when you login in and off and so on. It's become utterly creepy in a terrible peeping tom type way to watch your friends every single move on Facebook. Privacy was partly lost and there was no way to turn off the feature. The users felt betrayed in some small way.

So what did the users do? They started a new petition online and they resisted to this new change, by creating a group within facebook of over 250,000 people protesting the recent changes. Facebook is large, there is no doubt about that. I am a user of Facebook user, so luckily I can see a lot of what is going on that others can't since its a closed network.

Their message to Facebook:

You went a bit too far this time, facebook. Very few of us want everyone automatically knowing what we update. We want to feel just a LITTLE bit of privacy, even if it is facebook. News Feed is just too creepy, too stalker-esque, and a feature that has to go.

We demand that either the feature goes, or that we have an option to remove ourselves from the feature. Nothing people write on our walls, or what we write, or what we update goes up on the "News Feed." These are small demands of your users, but we are here to complain and protect our privacy.

We understand that they want to hold dear their new feature, and we respect that. But there are thousands of us, hundreds of thousands, who want either one of two things

1) Removal of the news feed program
2) A simple, one-click way to remove our presence COMPLETELY from News Feed. Not clicking x every time we have an action, but an easy option that will make it so that others, yes, even our friends, don't see what irrelevant thing we posted on someone else's wall.

Now's the time to give them constructive criticism and to let them know that we're not going to go quietly in the night.

Pretty powerful words from the groups on Facebook. As a user of Facebook myself, I can't say I am fond of the new changes either and hope that they allow users to opt-out of the new features. I have heard also that Facebook is thinking about opening up the profiles on Facebook to let people see them who don't have a facebook account. With something like this News Feed tracking enabled and anyone anywhere can see profiles, it will reveal a lot about the people who use Facebook and incidentially destroy some of the privacy that Facebook users so much love about the site.

I am proud to inform you that the first edition of the Search Pulse is now archived and available for download and listening at WebmasterRadio.FM. You can listen also by clicking on the link to the MP3 file or opening it with your favorite music player.

On this show we were not able to get to all the topics on our list but we did discuss the following topics, in this order.

1. The Search Pulse Live, Sept. 5th at 5PM EST
2. Reaction from the Search Community on Danny Sullivan's Departure
3. Bradley Sues Google AdSense Over Ban & Violation of TOS
4. Yahoo! Temporarily Removes Blog Search for Retooling
5. Keywords in File Names & URLs Do Help
6. Google Flags Sites That Add Too Many New URLs
7. Google Changes Handling of Domain (Navigational) Search
8. Google Launches Applications for Businesses & Domains

Continue reading "First Edition of Search Pulse Live: Sullivan Leaves SEW, AdSense Lawsuit, Yahoo Blog Search, Keywords in URLs, New URLs, Navigational Search, Google Apps & More"

Google today has launched Google News Archive Search a very impressive database of over 200 Years of News as Chris Sherman put it. Philipp at Google Blogoscoped has an excellent working example of a search in action. I am sure Gary Price at Resource Shelf will have a boat load to say about this when he has time to compile his thoughts.

How does it work? The Google News Archive Search Help page has a great overview of the page features for you to read. Did you know the first mention of Danny Sullivan in a newspaper (indexed by Google) was on Jul 31, 1883 by Olean Democrat.

Danny Sullivan was severely bitten on the arm by Quinn's dog last Thursday. Dr Eddy dressed the wound and the little fel- low is doing well.

Hope you feel better Danny.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & WebmasterWorld Featured.

Update: Asked Gary for some link, relevant to other options when it comes to searching newspaper and magazine archives and he did this Saturday and a new post Today.

A thread at WebmasterWorld has a recent chronological time line of the technical issues Microsoft adCenter advertisers had to deal with since August 28th. It got better and then got worse and then got better.

The system went down again yesterday at 11:30am and came back online about 1:30PM the same day.

I guess these things are just beginner kinks that still need to get out of the system.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday, we reported that Google Giving Search Engine Optimization Classes. Adam Lasnik commented about the seminar he is giving to the governmental agencies, saying that he doesn't feel that those who read WebmasterWorld would benefit much from it.

While I'm excited about this upcoming presentation to government manager folks -- I think that the generally very-tech-savvy WebmasterWorld audience would be disappointed with the depth and focus of information presented. The primary emphasis will be on accessibility, not ranking, and the needs (and limitations) of government sites are often quite distinct from those of for-profit sites.

So I guess save your $30 and continue optimizing your sites.

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

Andy Hagans at the Link Building Blog wrote his Final Word on the Yahoo! Directory, saying the $299 per year for the listing is well worth the money. I tend to agree, I feel that the listing does add some level of trust to your organic results, be it Google, MSN or Yahoo!

There are some down sides to having the listing, if they screw up your title in the Directory, then you are stuck with it not just for the directory, but also for your the listing in the Yahoo! Search results. That is why I am still pleading with Yahoo! to please enable a No Yahoo! Directory Tag, I assume one day they will - maybe part of Yahoo! Site Explorer.

WE have also seen evidence that a listing may not be automatically removed after one year. Earlier this year, we had reports that Yahoo! Directory Listings Last Longer Then a Year for good or bad. If for some reason, a person find the Yahoo! Directory page, and you have a high popularity rank, you can outrank some of your competitors on that long list, because Yahoo! Directory Ranks Pages by Popularity. Heck, I am number three on the main category I am listed on, and I am number one in the New York region, outranking huge Web consulting firms like Agency.com, Razorfish, and others.

There were also loopholes to getting into the Yahoo! Directory, but if that doesn't work for you. There is a guy at DigitalPoint Forums who is guaranteeing listings in the Yahoo! Directory for only $60 and yes, people have been saying that this guy is delivering.

So the final word on the Yahoo! Directory, I agree - it is worth it, especially for $60.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums and DigitalPoint Forums.

A Cre8asite Forums thread asks how do search engines treat accented words? The question itself was worded as follows;

How do search engines deal with the accents commonly used in Spanish, German and other languages? Do they index them? Do people use them in their query strings?

Timely topic, since Google just recently posted at the Google Webmaster Central blog an entry named How search results may differ based on accented characters and interface languages. In short, like I covered at SEW blog;

A search on Mexico will return results for both "Mexico" and "México" and the same is if a searcher enters in México, Google will return results for both "Mexico" and "México." It is clear that the results differ in ranking order, but what makes that order change - well, to me, it is not clear from the post.

There is also some hints on this topic at the SES Latino Show I covered a few months ago. Two specific sessions of interest on this topic may be SEO & Spanish / Portuguese Language Issues & Translate Or Create: Strategies For Those With English-Language Sites.

Cre8asite Moderator Ruud also explains that "most of these languages have their own keyboard layout." Interesting topic.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Just a reminder that the much anticipated Search Pulse will be live later today at 5pm (EST). Ben, Chris and I will discuss the hottest topics of the past week. I hope to drive some arguments and controversy, but we will see.

More details on the show here.

Also, it is a slow day in the forums, well, technically, yesterday was a slow day, I covered most of the weekend topics yesterday.

Update: We now have ourselves an icon for the show. It is listed on the Our Shows page at WebmasterRadio.FM.

Currently the descriptor of the show reads;

The Pulse

Host(s): Barry Schwartz, Chris Boggs, and Ben Pfeiffer

Time: Tuesday @ 5pm EST GMT - 5

The Pulse with Barry Schwartz and co-hosts Ben Pfeiffer and Chris Boggs covers search topics that receive the most buzz from within the search community. Each Tuesday, The Pulse will recap those important search topics in a roundtable style format, allowing the hosts to debate and argue some of the latest trends and stories in the search industry.

Getting excited, but I have this annoying cold today, hope it goes away.

Update: Posted archive podcast here.

A WebmasterWorld thread has several AdSense publishers complaining that the Google AdSense Competitive Ad Filters does not seem to be working 100% of the time.

I've been noticing that several competitive Urls that we've had blocked for some time are starting to show back up on the site. I've dumped the list for a couple of days, then put them back in, next day there back on the site! Is anyone else seeing this?

The folks in the thread understand that it "may take up to 4 hours for ads linking to these URLs to be filtered from your pages." But the ads sometimes still show. Are they typing in the URLs wrong? Who knows...

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

WebmasterWorld has discussion of an SEO class being given by Adam Lasnik of Google. The class is named Optimizing Your Websites for Google Search and is to take place at Catholic University, on September 18, 2006 at 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm. It appears that this particular session is open to everyone, so you can register here for that session, more details on the session here.

Also, Google seems to be offering optimization classes in Israel according to Globes.com. At this conference will be Google Israel country manager Meir Brand and Google head of B2B Vertical Markets Russ Cohn. "The conference is designed to help Israeli exporters optimize the Internet as a marketing tool."

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: Adam Lasnik of Google Tells SEOs Not to Attend His SEO Seminar, read more...

I am not sure if this is 100% new in the UK or not. But it appears that from a Search Engine Watch Forums thread that moderator EvilGreenMonkey started, Google has now implemented Click-To-Call features in the UK.

A search on jet2 at Google.co.uk brings up this ad.

If you click on the green phone icon, it opens the ad up to enter your phone number;

I am not sure if they launched this in the UK before, but I believe they haven't. This has been launched in the US a while back. Hat tip to Sami Kasap.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Google released this thing known as Google Image Labeler, it basically pins user vs. user to label images from Google images. The way you score points is if you both label the image with the same label.

Here is my live demo of it in action (should be live soon):

How does it work?

You'll be randomly paired with a partner who's online and using the feature. Over a 90-second period, you and your partner will be shown the same set of images and asked to provide as many labels as possible to describe each image you see. When your label matches your partner's label, you'll earn some points and move on to the next image until time runs out. After time expires, you can explore the images you've seen and the websites where those images were found. And we'll show you the points you've earned throughout the session.

The game is somewhat addictive, especially if the one you are partnered with is as quick as you are.

This is a great way for Google to label their images in a short amount of time.

Danny has a huge write up on it in a deeper sense named Google Images Labeler: Google's Challenge To Flickr?

Pretty cool stuff.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums.

It appears that Matt Cutts of Google has added a tidbit to his already mind-swimming post named Scoble visiting the Plex, Matt added;

By the way, it looks like the primary issue with the Windows Live Writer blog was the large-scale migration from spaces.msn.com to spaces.live.com about a month ago. We saw so many urls suddenly showing up on spaces.live.com that it triggered a flag in our system which requires more trust in individual urls in order for them to rank (this is despite the crawl guys trying to increase our hostload thresholds and taking similar measures to make the migration go smoothly for Spaces). We cleared that flag, and things look much better now.

A sudden increase of URLs on spaces.live.com triggered a Google flag, once they cleared "that flag," things began to "look much better."

So adding new URLs or Sub domains can trigger such a flag? Google has flags that bring up manual review?

Sites with seasonal products that add hundreds of products during that season can be affected? I doubt it.
Revamping a site's URL structure can trigger a flag? Depends on if this is a subdomain thing or not...

There are just now so many questions an SEO may have from this post.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

We thought in the past that the keyword limit at adCenter was about 40-50 thousand keywords per account. We now know that the limit is 100,000 keywords and 20 ads per order. Of course, like last time, you are allowed to request up to "3 account per credit card, which may include one or more campaigns and one or more orders." You may also request an increase to the 100,000 keyword limit. Here is an email posted in WebmasterWorld from a Microsoft adCenter representative.

At this time, Microsoft adCenter will allow 3 account per credit card, which may include one or more campaigns and one or more orders. The limit for keywords is 100,000.00 and 20 ads per order. You may submit a request to increase the keyword limit. To do this, I will need the following information:

1. Customer name and account number

2. Customer service level (Standard, Select or Premium)

3. Requested limit

4. Business justification for request

Once we have received your request, it will be looked into and will take up to and including 7 business days to complete.

You also may create another account using the same credit card. You would then have an additional 3 accounts to use and create additional campaigns and orders. You would still have a keyword limit of 100,000.00 in total for this new account.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Reports via WebmasterWorld are that Google's ad diagnostic tool will indeed not work properly in all cases at this moment.

The reported case is;

Searching for our ads via a few specific kw's, I notice they aren't showing. Diagnostic tool - both elements of it - state that there are no ads matching these search terms. Stats, this month and last, say otherwise (in fact they are long-standing kw's).

AdWordsAdvisor explains that there is an issue with the tool and it won't be fully fixed for several days.

There is currently an issue with the Ads Diagnostic Tool which will cause it to return the message you are describing in at least some cases. Due to interdependencies with other stuff, it's likely to be several days at least before this is resolved.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A very small but yet somewhat interesting observation has been made at Search Engine Watch Forums. You know how when you click on the "cache" link in the Google.com search results and Google will highlight the keywords you searched on, within the page copy?

For example a search on site:www.seroundtable.com danny sullivan brings back Reaction from the Search Community on Danny Sullivan's Departure post I did the other day. If you click on the cache link from Google.com, you will get to here and you will see that it highlights both Danny and Sullivan in yellow and light blue colors, respectively.

Now, if a result that is found within Google's supplemental results, and you click on the cache link, it will not show those keywords in highlights. An example, but there are many, is when you search on site:www.seroundtable.com TrackBack URL "Discussion on Google Indexing Itself?", the Google cache for that page should highlight the words "Google Indexing Itself" but it doesn't.

I have looked at several other examples, all tend to follow the rule. If your pages are in the supplemental results, and you click on the cache link from Google.com, it will not highlight the query terms you entered into Google.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

What steps should one take to cultivate a popular blog? For some, simply being who you are is enough (although he does a great job and would get traffic even if he wasn't working for Big G), and others have the fortune of being able to gain respect by providing introduction and some analysis of popular topics related to a specific industry. Yet with the thousands of blogs added to the Internet every week, there have to be some best practices to help the not-so-privileged grow their blog into something buzz worthy.

A recent thread at Cre8asite Forums introduces some excellent pointers to those thinking about starting a blog. Titled: Do's and Do NOTs of Blogging member SEOIgloo asks others for "Your 2 Cents." Senior member Joe Dolson lists some very valuables Do's and Don'ts, and then Kim Krause reminds everyone not to forget about Usability. She provides an excellent hint:

A page in blogs that's commonly overlooked is the About Me page. It's often the most obvious difference between a true blog, and a spam blog.

Find the thread at Cre8asite Forums, and forward it along to any blogger-wannabees out there.

Brett Tabke of WebmasterWorld has started an interesting thread at the WMW Forums discussing a recent policy shift at PBS regarding the manner in which visitors can access pages linked-to from within Google contextual ads hosted on the domain. He cites a post by John Eggerton at Broadcastingcable.com, who reports that PBS will be adding verbiage onto the existing interim page (seen between the site and the ad destination page) essentially disclaiming any responsibility for the content found on the destination page.

Brett questions:

After all, PBS is the king of public content and public subsidized content via tax dollars. Should they have any relationship to advertisers at all? Let alone having to disclaim them?

I see nothing wrong with them using AdSense or banners to help support their site and their work. I'm all for something that takes a little burden off the Feds and our taxes.

Join the discussion at WebMasterWorld Forums and share your thoughts on this interesting mixture of Internet marketing and State...

(I just noticed we just scored a natural hat trick with AdSense topics)

Google AdSense is the Internet marketing platform that allows people to place ads on topically-related websites. Using the operating system within AdWords, Google's paid search engine service that places the sponsored listings above and to the right of popular search results pages, advertisers can distribute their ads throughout Google contextual network of advertisers. The process is almost instantaneous: when publishers go live with a new web page that has the Google AdSense code within, the system finds advertisements that match the content and place them in webmaster-defined areas. These ads are available on thousands of websites.

A recent thread at Digital Point Forums discusses the practice by some publishers of removing the "Advertise on this Site" call-to-action that is embedded in the ad layout. Some interesting reasons and thresholds are given, including one participant who advises:

My advise is take it off if you're getting less than 5000 impressions per day per ad. Leave it on if it's more. High impressions ads tends to attract bidders to sponsor the ad space.

For those of you in the game, you may want to see some of the arguments behind this Google-allowed layout edit. The discussion is found at Digital Point Forums.

There is a WebmasterWorld thread with almost 100 messages already named Reporting violations, the Ethical Dilemma. It has a discussion of which types, the characteristics, of sites that run AdSense should be reported and which ones should not be reported for AdSense violation. As you know, often there is a gray area when it comes to pushing the line with the AdSense TOS.

For one, some folks may feel a bad or guilty feeling reporting some of these sites. On the other hand, some may not be sure if they have stepped over that line. The rules are simply not 100% clear and they cannot be, or should they be? Heck, look at Google Domain Parking, if those sites don't look worthy of reporting and they are approved by Google - you get my point.

The folks in the forums are struggling back and forth with questions like these.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A thread at DigitalPoint Forums points out that Google has changed how they handle navigational like queries, such as typing into Google, www.seroundtable.com. I am sure other threads have it since that Google update, but I have never seen it.

In the past, Google only showed one result and gave you options such as find similar pages, see the cache, links to the page and so on. They used to look like:

Show Google's cache of www.seroundtable.com
Find web pages that are similar to www.seroundtable.com
Find web pages that link to www.seroundtable.com
Find web pages from the site www.seroundtable.com
Find web pages that contain the term "www.seroundtable.com

That no longer is the case, Google now seems to be matching it as a normal search on that keyword phrase. So it looks for pages that contain a keyword match for www.seroundtable.com. It seems it may favor sites with the www.seroundtable.com in the URL, file name, etc. but it also matches pages with that string within the body copy.

Yahoo! Search handles www.seroundtable.com search with a site command like function, that lists all the pages on the seroundtable.com domain.

Ask.com handles the search similar to Google, but they place a Smart RSS Answer at the top.

MSN handles the search like Yahoo, a site command search style.

Will this change the landscape of navigational searches? How many people go to Google to type in homedepot.com? And now when they do that, they may find competitors?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

We initially thought the fees for using the Google AdWords API would begin July 1st but that didn't happen. New reports via WebmasterWorld say Google has sent out emails to AdWords API users that the fees are to begin this October 1st.

I received notice today that there is a transition in September to this new system ($.25 per 1000 quota units) and charging will begin Oct 1.

The AdWords API is at google.com/apis/adwords. How much will it cost you? Well for that you have to check the rate sheet.

For one advertiser who uses 30M calls, it will cost each month $7,500 in additional expenses.

Now it is still unclear to me if this fee will be charged to everyone including advertisers, tool aggregators and agencies. I am sure there will be discounts made available to some.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

As we state time and time again, vertical creep into the search results are becoming ever more so important each and every day. This time, we see a Threadwatch thread with a picture of Yahoo! Answers being added to the search results in a much bigger way then normal.

Here is the way it looks now for a search on beer:

Here is the way it looks from a screen shot at Threadwatch, both are placed directly under the main organic results:

I personally like the current state of integration, but the second picture does stand out a lot more.

Forum discussion at Threadwatch.

We have confirmation over the long debated topic on if the keywords in the URL or file names help with rankings. Some SEOs say it does not help, some SEOs say it may hurt (still true - be smart), some said it helps but a little and some say it helps a lot. Well, at least with Google, we now know, that it does help, at least a little. Like I covered yesterday at the SEW blog, Matt Cutts of Google posted and I quote;

Most bloggy sites tend to have words from the title of a post in the url; having keywords from the post title in the url also can help search engines judge the quality of a page.

He then clarified afterwards in the comments area;

including the keyword in the url just gives another chance for that keyword to match the user’s query in some way. That’s the way I’d put it.

Important enough to mention in that post. So now, we speculate.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.