November 2006 Archives

Brett has posted in the Webmaster Supporters forum asking for help with picking a 3-4 word mission statement for WebmasterWorld. He might be getting jealous of all those trendy brand name taglines that are so cool (Fedex: peace of mind, etc..) Maybe not though. Some companies (eBay, CNN, Amazon) which have acheived common word status can get away without a mission statement. I think WebmasterWorld might qualify for that. Regardless, its never to late to add a clever mission statement for fun.

Brett asks:

So Guy says that you should have a 3-4 word mission statement. He used examples:

Fedex: peace of mind.
Wendys: healthy fast food.
Nike: genuine athletic performance.

What would webmasterworld's be?

Help WebmasterWorld pick a mission statement in the Supporters Forum (Paid Reg required).

Danny Sullivan just posted his last thread as a moderator at Search Engine Watch Forums. He named the post Best Wishes, Search Engine Watch!

As you all probably know already, Danny is leaving Search Engine Watch after not being able to agree to contract renewal terms with Incisive. He will be involved in the next three or so Search Engine Strategies conferences. Danny wrote a long goodbye post at SEW Blog named Goodbye Search Engine Watch & Best Wishes!

The post answers some of the questions we may have, it looks back a bit at the history of Search Engine Watch and then gives some possible insight into the future of Search Engine Watch.

You can keep up with Danny and the SEW Blog crew at Search Engine Land.

Send Danny your best at the Best Wishes, Search Engine Watch! thread at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Microsoft has jumped on the bandwagon for allowing you to verify if the useragent, MSNBot, that is crawling your site, is truly from Microsoft or being spoofed by some content scraper. Google has released information in the past for verifying Googlebot and it is excellent to see Microsoft doing the same.

To catch fake MSNBots you can do as follows:

1. When you get a page view request, it specifies a user-agent and an IP address. As I described above, all requests from Live Search use a user agent starting with the word ‘MSNBot’.
2. If you see the MSNBot user-agent, it’s time to check the identity of the bot. Starting with the IP address (i.e. 207.46.98.149), you can use reverse DNS lookup to find out the registered name of the machine.
3. Once you have the host name (in this case, livebot-207-46-98-149.search.live.com), you can check that it really is coming from Live Search. The name of all live search crawlers will end with ‘search.live.com’. If the name doesn’t end with ‘search.live.com’, you know it’s not really our crawler.
4. Finally, you need to verify that the name is accurate. In order to do this, you can use Forward DNS to see the IP address associated with the host name. This should match the IP address you used in Step 2 – if it doesn’t, it means the name was fake.

More details at the Live Search Blog.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The Google cache typically only stored about 100KB of your page. So if you had a heavy page with lots of content, not all of that page would be seen in the Google cache. That seems to have changed at some point since I last checked, probably years ago.

Looking at the cache page of many sites, you can see Google is clearly downloading and archiving more than the first 100KB of that page.

A WebmasterWorld thread has reports where Google is caching 400KB+ pages.

I guess space is getting cheaper.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Matt Cutts of Google is known as a spam fighter, he is part of Google's Search Quality team and has a inner moral spirit to prevent web spam from creeping up in the Google search results. Watching Matt Cutts in action is something to see, when spotting out spam or just reviewing typical sites in terms of search quality. At PubCon's Thursday Interactive Site Reviews and SERP Quality Control Forum, Matt sat at the end of the table, with his laptop turned to him only, and his search quality (spam fighting) tools fired up while connected to the Google VPN.

If you want to know what goes through Matt's mind during a site review panel, then read his own review of the panel, it is pretty enlightening to read it from the horses mouth.

But if you want to see the reaction of the crowd as Matt chews on these sites, you have to go to the conference. I heard many wows, laughs and OMG! at the conference during this panel. But how did he (Matt) know that? Where did he learn about this? etc.

WebmasterWorld has a great thread with reaction to Matt and his secret search spam fighting tools. I tried my best to get a screen capture of Matts screen, but it is almost impossible. He doesn't accept bribes (why would he need to?) and he is very protective over his laptop (who isnt?).

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This is the first thread I have seen on the topic of the old 1 cent bids from back in the GoTo or Overture days are no longer going to be in affect with the new Yahoo! Search Marketing Panama release. A WebmasterWorld thread quotes an email an advertiser received that states;

Important Note Regarding Grandfathered Bids : In addition, our current minimum bid requirement of $0.10 will be enforced after an account is upgraded. This will impact your keywords that are grandfathered to bids below $0.10.

This particular advertiser has 2,000 plus keywords set at one cent per click.

If you are one of those advertisers, make sure to carefully watch your budget as you upgrade over to the new system.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The other day we reported that Google Webmaster Sitemaps Tool Back With Old Data? where I said, there was in issue with the common words. The issue is most likely old data. Vanessa Fox replied to the forum thread at WebmasterWorld saying;

As Googlebot recrawls the site, you should see the common words table updated to reflect the new content.

I then found a Google Sitemaps blog post named Unexpected Common Words that gives a few reasons why you may find "unexpected common words" in the report.

(1) Googlebot hasn't crawled all pages on your site.
(2) Your site has changed since we last crawled it.
(3) Googlebot is unable to re-crawl modified pages.
(4) Your site is not being crawled.

Continued forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yahoo!, as expected, is slowly releasing changes to the reports and tools to get search marketers up to speed with the "whats to come." What is to come? A new ad ranking algorithm that operates both on bid, ad quality and more. So what changes were made? The Yahoo! Search Blog wrote that new bidding information is coming.

First, what is leaving?

In early December some of the information you’re used to seeing on the Manage Bids page will no longer be available. The “Top 5 Max Bids,” “Position” and “Your Cost” columns will be removed from the current account interface. The View Bids tool will also no longer be available.

Second, what is coming?

Instead, you’ll see two new columns on the Sponsored Search Manage Bids page:

1. Estimated Average Position
This column provides an estimate of the average position in which your ad may be displayed on the results page, based on your max bid and the bids of other advertisers.

2. Bid Range for Top Positions
This column displays the bids for the positions at the top of the search results page for each of your keywords.

The Yahoo! Search Blog has pictures and you can learn more at the FAQ section.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums.

Google announced that Google Answers is closing up shop by years end. The old questions and answers will still be available, but they will not be accepting any new questions or answers after December 31st.

Later this week, we will stop accepting new questions in Google Answers, the very first project we worked on here. The project started with a rough idea from Larry Page, and a small 4-person team turned it into reality in less than 4 months. For two new grads, it was a crash course in building a scalable product, responding to customer requests, and discovering what questions are on people's minds.

Google Answers was a great experiment which provided us with a lot of material for developing future products to serve our users. We'll continue to look for new ways to improve the search experience and to connect people to the information they want.

Danny has a nice write up on it over here.

A WebmasterWorld thread has some comments, including this one that I liked;

Bummer. I've been a Google Answers Researcher since 2002. It was fun for a while, but my life just got too busy to spend hours researching and writing the answer to a question for $1.50.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld member reports that his AdWords account has been terminated after being in good standing for four years due to "cookie spidering." He said he spends about $100,000 per year for the past four years, and all of a sudden as his account terminated. Here is a quote:

So, for some reason my Google AdWords account was cancelled. We spend almost $100,000/year and received no notice or no reason for the cancellation. After some digging through higher ups at Google, it was determined that my account had a notice "cancelled due to cookie spidering." Does anyone know what this even is? My site is still in the Google index and I'm not aware of violating any terms of service.

It appears that they recently hired an outside PPC company to help with the campaign. But what they did is unclear.

I am not sure what "cookie spidering" is exactly. If I had to guess, maybe they built a spider that logins to the AdWords console and then scrapes data to automate the process of keyword bidding and reporting. Of course, this is not recommended, Google has an API for this.

I asked around and no one has heard of this term before, "cookie spidering."

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There are reports from WebmasterWorld that a new Google data refresh is taking place now. People are noticing both large and small shuffling of the positioning of pages for select search queries. I do not believe this is a huge update but I can be wrong.

The thread was started last night and is already two pages long.

No confirmation from Google yet on if this is a real update or not.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I am pretty sure this is not new, but just in case it is... Via WebmasterWorld, Yahoo!'s Alta Vista and AllTheWeb are now showing different results when compared to Yahoo! Search.

WebmasterWorld Member, beren, said:

For the past year or two, AltaVista.com and Alltheweb.com have produced the same results as Yahoo.com for a given search. Today, they don't. AltaVista.com and Alltheweb.com still show the same results as each other, but they are different from Yahoo.com. I tried several searches on terms I don't usually monitor. In each case, the results were different.

Could it be that Yahoo is using alltheweb.com and altavista.com as a test search site?

Could be...

Some history for you...

Very early 2004, Yahoo! was shopping for search engines to buy, so they no longer have to be dependent on Google's search engine. They were expected to use Inktomi which an engine they bought earlier, but then they bought AllTheWeb and Alta Vista. They made changed to both engines and released their own flavor of Yahoo! Search.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Kim Krause Berg at Cre8asite Forums informed us that long time moderator, ILoveJackDaniels, Dave Childs Child, is stepping down from his moderator position at Cre8asite Forums.

ILoveJackDaniels has been the technical administrator for the forums for years. Ammon Johns, BlackKnight, brought him on as a moderator years ago, to the forums. Dave will now act as a regular member and hopefully continue to contribute to the forums on a more limited basis.

You can learn more about him at his web site: http://www.ilovejackdaniels.com/.

You can send your best wishes to Dave at Cre8asite Forums.

The tenth edition of the Search Pulse has now been archived. This is the first week in a while where we only had one weeks worth of topics. Makes it much easier to manage, and more relaxing. 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.

Program note: Next week's show will be at 7PM (EST), live from SES Chicago. So if you are in Chicago, we will be live at the WebmasterRadio.FM booth in the exhibit hall at 6PM (Chicago time).

Contest Winner Announced: More details here.

Topics we covered:

1. Contest Winner TBA on Search Pulse #10 on 11/28
   
2. Happy Thanksgiving From The Search World
   
3. Chicago 2006 Conference Schedule Posted
   
4. SES Chicago 2006 Quad Coverage Schedule
   
5. Microsoft Live.com MSN Search Turkey Day Update
   
6. AdWordsAdvisor Denies Google Uses Conversion Tracking & Analytics To Determine Minimum Bids
   
7. Danny Sullivan & Crew Moves From SE Watch to SE Land
   
8. Moving From Old To New Domains: What To Expect In Terms Of Google Traffic
   
9. Google Webmaster Sitemaps Tool Back With Old Data?
   
10. More Google Map Quick Links in Search Results
    
11. Google Recommends Using Meta Description Tag
    
12. Google Spam Filters Not Working As Planned?
    
13. Google AdSense Gift 2006: Digital Photo Frame
    
14. Photo of Google AdSense Gift Digital Picture Frame
    
15. Google & Belgium: Google Goes to Court Over News Inclusion

Lightening Round:

Continue reading "Search Pulse 10: Turkey Day, Google Spam, SES Chicago, MSN Update, AdWords Denial, Holiday Gifts, Yahoo Jobs & More"

As I posted at Cartoon Barry, Chris's comment has been selected by Ben P., Chris B. and myself as the winning contest idea.

Chris's idea was that;

the person who can take as many pictures of different people holding a piece of paper with your url on it over a 24 hour period? That would make a cool page on your site, many different people/ages/nationalities etc.

Ben picked this one, and we all agreed it was a very good idea.

So in the upcoming weeks, I will announce the final rules for this next contest.

Congrats to Chris and thank you for such a great idea!

I often hate reporting on threads that do not have any direct link to examples but sometimes you have to trust certain members. A thread at WebmasterWorld has senior member crobb305 claiming that for many searches he is finding "loads of junk and subdomains moving back in" the top results at Google. This is something we have seen with MSN search in the past.

crobb305 continues by explaining;

I sent about 8 "spam" reports in through the Webmaster Tools console. I rarely report stuff, but these urls are junk redirects. One was a blank page!

The thread does have some examples of searches and more discussion backing crobb305's feelings.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

As we reported last week, the Google AdSense Gift 2006: Digital Photo Frame. We finally have some pictures of the photo frame. Here it is, with a little of the picture blocked out...

A DigitalPoint member posted a thread and picture of it, which I used here.

Shawn Hogan of DigitalPoint also received his photo frame and took a picture of all the pieces of the present. You can see it at his post named Google Christmas Present where he explains;

Comes with a mini USB cable, power cord, batteries, and an international power adapter. The international power adapter will really come in handy for some other stuff.

According to the instructions, it's a 960x240 screen and supports JPG images, MP3, WMA or WAV audio files and AVI movies. It also has a SD card reader for extra memory.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

The popular Microsoft bCentral directory has announced they closed their doors to new business.

As of November 15, 2006 Microsoft will no longer accept new sign-ups for select Microsoft Online Small Business Services.

This means that those who were in the directory before, will continue to be there and be allowed to renew.

Matt McGee writes that going to the add url page, will then redirect you to the announcement page after clicking forward.

The WebmasterWorld community is a bit surprised and upset that the directory is going away.

But moderator stuntdubl said;

That was absolutely the worst directory to submit to in terms of usability - it was always in my top quality "bang for the buck" submission list though - shame they're doing away with it. It'd be nice to see something new and improved launched on the live domain.

Again, if you are already included, you should get renewal notices and ways to keep your current listings.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Some people are noticing Google referrals from search strings that look like:

https://www.google.com/evaluation/search/rating/task-edit?task=XXXXXX

This comes from Google's http://eval.google.com/ which only available to those part of the "EWOQ group." SearchBistro has a ton of details with demos of it in action named Google Secret Lab, Prelude.

There is some old forum discussion on it at Search Engine Watch Forums.

When I tried accessing one of the referral strings I was prompted with a 403 forbidden code saying:

Forbidden

The user [username]@gmail.com is not a member of EWOQ. Please contact the ratingprojects@google.com for access.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums and Google Blogoscoped Forums.

I just posted our coverage schedule for the Chicago Search Engine Strategies conference here. As you can see, we have two new names to add to the crew working on this coverage for you. As usual, we have Chris Boggs from Avenue A RazorFish. Our new additions include Kim Krause from the esteemed Cre8asite Forums and Rob Kerry a SEW moderator also known as evilgreenmonkey. More details about these contributors at the authors section. If you have any suggestions or questions, feel free to post them.

Please be aware, that our coverage is is almost in real time. The conference coverage is basically note taking. The grammar and spelling will not be 100%, we aim for speed, comprehensiveness and timelines.

If you see any of us, please free to stop us. Maybe you will get a Free YoYo.

The winner of the contest has been decided by Ben, Chris and I - we are all in agreement on the winner. But we won't be announcing the winner until Tuesday night, 11/28 at 5pm (EST) live on the Search Pulse. So how do you tune in?

Ben, Chris and I hope you can tune in. And if you want to chat live while listening, we will all be live in the chat room during the show. To access the chat room go here.

To tune in visit WebmasterRadio.FM or tune in at 128k connection via your streaming media player at 5pm (EST).

If you cannot tune in, we will be posting the winner here and on my personal blog at Cartoon Barry.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Reports via WebmasterWorld that Microsoft released a new update for its MSN Search, Windows Live Search product over Thanksgiving weekend. Senior member, crobb305, was the first to report it, stating;

In the top 20, on a financial term I watch, I only see 4 blogspots, versus 8+ a few days ago.

In short, it looks like, to many, that Microsoft pulled many of the splog (spam blogs) from the search results.

In the past, Microsoft said they Won't Do a Search Index Update on holidays or weekends, but they are known to have broken that rule.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Like any new tool, there are bugs, and Google's Webmaster Central tools, including their powerful Sitemaps tool, seems to have its share of bugs. Two different reports come from WebmasterWorld with possible bugs in the tool over the weekend.

The first report was that there are Many Strange Reports in Google Webmaster Tools - Sitemaps. And I quote:

As of midnight Friday, G Sitemap tools is showing "no pages are indexed" for 11 domains that were just fine Friday afternoon. A site: search returns the same miserable results I've had all week after getting whacked in this latest data push.

Page with the highest PageRank has changed and shows www.example.com/?PHPSESSID=1c9eb347d770d93ad076f8ae3106319a although googlebot is filtered not to see sessions and if it goes to page with session server will return 404 error. This filter is up from start of November.

The second report says that there are Completely wrong common words in GWT?. I'll quote again;

When I look at the keywords for the new site in the Google webmaster tools, the list is packed full of words... that have nothing to do with my site! They seem to be about cruises, sports, casinos, and various commercial and financial matters.

WebmasterWorld administrator Tedster believes that this is a reporting bug only and possibly old data is being presented in just the reports.

Past Sitemaps bugs include; Google's Sitemap Tool Showing Random Pages in Highest PageRank Stat and Google Sitemaps Tools Sends All Sites Back into Pending Verification?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld here and here.

Last week, I was nervous that possibly Did MSNdude Get Fired? Darren commented saying that MSNDude is "Greg H." and that he was promoted. He said;

The very active & helpful msndude was Greg H. He said msndude is a rotating title/responsibility. Maybe it got passed on to a less attentive MSN employee. Hope not, Greg is a good guy.

But on Thanksgiving, MSNDude came back to make a post at WebmasterWorld. MSNDude said;

At this point there is no way to specifically say "do not index this piece of text". Something you could consider doing is only putting the survey on a specific set of pages and then using a robots.txt to block that set of pages.

Good to know he is well and still kicking. As for GoogleGuy...Still no signs of him posting since August 30th. We know Matt Cutts is alive, because he posts and writes on his blog almost daily, but GoogleGuy?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There has always been confusion on if Google uses the meta tag data. Some say Google uses the meta description tag, some say they don't. Most say, Google doesn't use the meta keywords tag. In any event, Google's Vanessa Fox said that you should use the meta description tag.

In a Google Groups post, Vanessa responded to a perceived indexing issue as follows:

Looking at your site in the search results, it appears that your pages would be well served by meta description tags. For most queries, the generated snippet is based on where the query terms are found on the page, and in those cases, your results are fine. But for some more generic queries, where a logical snippet isn't found in the text, the generated snippet seems to be coming from the first bits of text from the page -- in this case, boilerplate navigation that is the same for every page.

In summary, by adding a meta description tag, a unique one, for each page, Google will use that information as extra criteria to determine the uniqueness of the page. That is how I understand it. Otherwise, Google will use the top text of your page's content, and that can potentially be your top navigation or worse. This comes in handy for conducting site: command searches with no keyword specific data given after the site command.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

I have been covering the Google & Belgium legal issues at Search Engine Watch for a while now and I thought it would be a good time to give a short summary for you here. Belgium publishers sued Google for including their news sources in the Google News index. They found that it was a violation of their copyright rights. Yea, shocking that a news source would ask to be delisted for the Google New index. But it is true. After a long to do, as Danny reported, Google Settles With Some Belgian Publishers Over Belgium News Inclusion. Danny has an excellent roundup of the past coverage and where it as lead to. Google is not done with Belgium...

The Belgium Court is to rule on the legality of Google including their content in the index. The ruling won't come before the end of this year, so time will tell.

You can see some of the reaction at WebmasterWorld.

I'm endlessly amazed by the number of people who insist that search engine's practice of copying data and then displaying snippets is wrong/should be made illegal/is illegal. The internet as we know it would not exist if search engines didn't do this. That, at least, is one thing upon which there can be no reasonable debate.

This is not just going in in Belgium. It is also taking place in Norway and France to some extent.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google released a Sitemaps protocol and reporting engine for the Google News index. I am lucky enough to be included in Google News, so I am able to share with you some of the reports I have in my Sitemaps account. For a top level "News crawl," you can see the full screen capture by clicking here.

The first "News-specific errors" it shows me is from Nov 15, 2006, with the error message, Title not found. Google links all errors to pages with more details, so the Title not found message says;

We were unable to extract a title for the article from the HTML page. Try setting the <title> tag on the HTML page to the title of the article, and repeating the title in a prominent place on the HTML page, such as in an <h1> tag. Also ensure that the title is not too long or too short. Currently, the title is required to be between 2 and 22 words, inclusive.

The page that had "title not found" was an old article written by Ben back on March 9, 2005 named Eye Tracking and Search Combine To Show Us The Golden Triangle. The title looks ok to me, so I am not sure if this is a valid error or not.

Other errors I have in my report include; Article disproportionately short, Article fragmented and No sentences found. The no sentence found was for this page which makes sense.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google has begun giving out their AdSense gifts for the 2006 holiday season. WebmasterWorld senior member, incrediBILL, said he received his two days ago. The gift appears to be a digital photo frame, he posted the specification:

Looking for Digital Photo Frame? If you are here to buy a digital photo or picture frame, via Google, we do not sell them, but Buy.com does and here is a link to Buy.com. Find Digital Photo Frames at Buy.com

* 3.6 inch TFT digital photo frame
* 960 x 240 TFT screen, 16 mega-color
* Picture: JPG format
* Audio: MP3, WMA, WAV and records WAV itself
* Video: ASF only
* Media: Internal memory and SD card, comes with sample slideshow in memory
* USB 1.1 interface
* Power: 4 AA batteries or USB 5V or AC/DC power adapter

There are no pictures of the photo frame as of yet, as soon as I get one, Ill update this post or write a new one.

Last year, Google gave out holiday gifts with a wireless mouse, usb memory stick, 4 port hub, and more, he is a picture.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Find Digital Photo Frames at Buy.com

Last week the search engines, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! united to provide one standard sitemaps protocol for submission to the search engines for page inclusion. But there is confusion as to where one would submit a sitemaps file to Microsoft.

With Google, you submit your sitemaps file at Google Sitemaps. With Yahoo!, you submit your sitemaps file at Site Explorer.

But where do you submit your sitemaps at Microsoft (aka Live.com)?

That is the discussion of confusion at Cre8asite Forums.

Probably most of you know that Danny has announced his plans for moving beyond Search Engine Watch. He is starting a new blog named Search Engine Land.

Will it become a success? I would count on it. Proof? Well, how about the reaction Danny received when he announced he would be leaving Search Engine Watch.

At last week's PubCon Danny announced towards the end of his keynote that he will be starting Search Engine Land and that Chris Sherman and I would be joining him and also leaving Search Engine Watch. Soon after, Danny announced that all the other search correspondents who write at SEW Blog will also be coming over to Search Engine Land.

It is less than 10 months since I joined blogging at Search Engine Watch. I enjoy it, but I enjoy working with Danny on a daily basis. Waking up a bit earlier is well worth the experience I get from this.

Why did I not stay at Search Engine Watch? Well, that gets a bit personal, so I posted it at Cartoon Barry. I am touched by the community response towards my contributions to Search Engine Watch and their support with Search Engine Land. Nathan Weinberg of InsideGoogle wrote in a comment;

Barry, I think you don't understand how important you were to SEW. Gary Price, then you, were the workhorses of SEW. Danny was the big name and Chris appears to be the glue, but you (and previously Gary) were the real reason to read the site: To get the news every day. A person who can do that well is hard to replace, and if SEW had lost only you, they'd already be in a tough place. I mean, when Gary left, they got lucky that you were able to jump right in and keep it going, but there's no way they'd get lucky a second time this year.

Wow, now that means a ton to me. Of course, I don't think I am the reason people come to Search Engine Watch. I know Danny and Chris are the reason, I just try to pitch in with short, quick stories related to search - so that we have a place to reference back when Danny or Chris want to do a bigger write up. Sometimes, I may do a big opinionated write up, but it is often not my style to write that way at a blog that I do not own. :)

In any event, the community is very excited for the new site. I have no idea what will happen over at Search Engine Watch. I do wish them the best. But I am looking forward to something a bit new.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Last night, I was at