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

And guess what, the upgrade is to take place beginning this weekend.

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.

It's clear, from the comments at Cre8asiteforums, that there are those who are fiddling with the data as best they can figure, and many more who don't know what to do with this pony.

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

The topics we did not get to, include;

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.