December 2006 Archives

Google had a method of converting your Froogle feed to an AdWords campaign by using something named "Ads Automator." We first wrote about Ads Automator in September 2004 but ClickZ had one of the first write ups on it on May 10, 2004.

Via a WebmasterWorld thread, we learn that Google has removed the Ads Automator feature with the recent changes to the Froogle / Google Base format.

AdWordsAdvisor2 said:

With the change to the Base upload, Ads Automator has been removed as an option for new campaigns. I am not sure that it will come back, at least in the near future.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

We have reported time after time again the issues with Google's Webmaster Central tools, specifically Sitemaps. It is a wonderful tool, it allows you to see a ton of data about your site plus submit data back to Google. But some folks are losing trust in the information Google is sending back to you via Webmaster Central.

A thread at WebmasterWorld recounts some of the issues people have repeatedly had with the Sitemaps tool. They include (but not limited to):

• Robots.txt Google Sitemaps Bug Fixed
• Google Webmaster Sitemaps Tool Back With Old Data?
• Google's Sitemap Tool Showing Random Pages in Highest PageRank Stat
• Google Sitemaps Tools Sends All Sites Back into Pending Verification?
• Google Sitemaps Robots.txt Validator Does Not Properly Validate

A recent report at WebmasterWorld shows that some people are noticing that the "Home page crawl" that shows the last time Googlebot crawled your home page in Google Webmaster Central, is not on par with the Google Cache date. Now, Google explained this before, the cache date is different that the crawl date, but it should say so on this page - so Webmasters don't lose trust in that data.

I am seeing the same thing here. "Home page crawl: Googlebot last successfully accessed your home page on Nov 18, 2006." Yet my logs show that the googlebot has been downloading my home page several times in the last days.

This causes some Webmasters to lose trust in these tools.

Especially some of the reports that show Webmasters that there are no pages of their site in the index, when in fact they are and they are ranking just fine. Yes, that is an other bug people have noticed, but I did not report.

I personally give new software a lot of time to mature and get the kinks out. But how much time is too much time?

I haven't trusted Webmaster Tools to reflect accurate information for some time. There are ongoing issues with site verification, where previously verified sites suddenly need to be verified again, then when verification is attempted, it won't work.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Pretty much every webmaster runs into this once a year. Someone publishes something on the Web and they did not mean to put it up on the Web. Google crawls it and someone finds this information while searching on Google. The content is now easily accessible to the world. So you take down the page, but it is still in the Google cache and you need it removed asap.

Vanessa Fox in a Google Groups thread tells a user that they can expedite the removal of content in Google by using this form.

That form specifically states:

If you've worked with the site's webmaster to have the live content changed, and you need us to expedite the removal of our cached copy, please provide us with the URL(s). We'll follow up with you only if we require more info or we have additional info to share.

I never gave it a try myself, but I would love to hear the response time on that form.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks how can an advertiser get his Google video ad to show up in the content network (AdSense). AdWordsAdvisor2 responds to the thread that video ads are CPM based so you have to ensure your CPM bid is high enough to warrant the ad to show up.

The CPM for video ads is based on how many times it appears on the network, not how many times it is actually played. Video ads are definitely live, so you may just need to adjust your CPM to be closer to what you'd expect to pay for an image ad on the same content sites.

It is clear that if someone plays the video, it does not cost more. But what is not clear is does it cost more if they click? I assume so.

My question in the thread is "if your a publisher, you get paid by impression and also by click? Not anything extra if they play it?"

I'll keep you updated on any response.

Update: That was quick, AdWordAdvisor2 responded shortly after saying:

If the ad being displayed is a CPM ad, then the publisher gets paid based on the CPM the advertiser is paying. The publisher won't get any additional revenue if the ad is clicked on as we don't charge the advertiser anything for those clicks.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Member PPC started a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums describing what can be a serious design flaw within Yahoo!'s new search marketing application, Panama. When you edit keywords in bulk by going to clicking on the ad group and then checking off the keywords you want to edit the keyword bids for, you are presented with substantially less data on those keywords than if you were at other pages. PPC says, the data on these screens makes it "very inefficient" for him to manage multiple keywords at once.

For example, on the primary keyword screen you see Avg. CPC (USD), Avg. Position, Impressions, CTR (%), Clicks Cost (USD), Conversions, Revenue (USD), CPA (USD), and ROAS (%) for that keyword phrase. Plus you get more data, here is a screen capture:

Now, if you select to edit multiple keywords, you are only presented with Current Bid (USD), New Bid (USD), and Prime Placement Range of Bids. You can also click on a link for "Bid Range for Top Positions" that opens up an AJAX box with more information. It looks like this:

I suspect it can't be too hard to add some columns of data to the edit keywords screen?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Brett Tabke posted a WebmasterWorld thread linking to a new survey by Convera that polled 1,112 professionals in various industries in November. The article is at The Enquirer by the AP and it reveals the following:

• Only 21 percent of professionals feel that their search query is always understood.
• Just one in 10 professionals always finds exactly what he or she is looking for on the first attempt.
• About 70 percent admit getting sidetracked during the search process and end up on sites they didn’t expect to visit and are not relevant to their work.
• When searches do not return precise information, more than half of professionals believe the information they’re seeking exists, but they do not have the skills to find it.
• One third of professionals will make decisions without all the facts they need after a series of search attempts fails to help them.

If they can't find the results, what do they do?

• 90 percent will try the same search engine using a slightly different term
  
• 60 percent will try another popular search engine
  
• More than half will turn to a topic-specific search engine
  

I was a bit surprised by this finding;

Nearly 90 percent of professionals think that search engines developed by trade publications or professional organizations would yield more relevant content than popular consumer engines.

Just realized that this was also posted at Search Engine Land a couple weeks ago.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Since so many SEM/SEO bloggers are doing it, I figured, I do it also. Here are some stats from the 2006 year for the seroundtable.com domain, not including the forums.

Top Requested Pages:
(1) Home Page - 14.73%
(2) Google Earth - Free Download - 3.27% (um, yea)
(3) Google.com beats MSN.com according to Alexa - 1.62%
(4) A Serious Google Maps Bug - 1.35%
(5) Google AdWords Showing Same Two Ads On Search Results Pages at Google.com - 1.03%
(6) Google Testing AdSense Cost Per Action (CPA) - 0.86%
(7) Pages Coming In & Out of the Google.com Results & Google Index - 0.72%
(8) Google.com & The Da Vinci Code Quest - 0.67%
(9) New MSN Beta Live? - 0.67%
(10) Google Payments (GBuy) Coming Soon to Public? - 0.60%

Top Referrals:
(1) Google - 25.27%
(2) Direct - 22.01%
(3) Yahoo Search - 9.56%
(4) Google UK - 3.26%
(5) Google News - 2.20%
(6) MSN Search - 1.91%
(7) Search Engine Watch Blog - 1.75%
(8) Google Canada - 1.60%
(9) Bloglines - 1.39%
(10) StumbleUpon - 1.17%

Top Time Zones:
(1) -0400 - 19.25%
(2) -0500 - 18.63%
(3) -0700 - 14.27%
(4) +0100 - 10.46%
(5) +0200 - 9.22%
(6) -0600 - 5.92%
(7) -0800 - 5.80%
(8)+0000 - 2.86%
(9)+0530 - 2.70%
(10) +0800 - 2.48%

Top Screen Resolutions:
(1) 1024x768 - 45.09%
(2) 1280x1024 - 20.61%
(3) 800x600 - 9.53%
(4) 1280x800 - 5.72%
(5) 1152x864 - 3.85%
(6) 1400x1050 - 2.38%
(7) 1440x900 - 2.29%
(8) 1680x1050 - 2.20%
(9) 1600x1200 - 1.99%
(10) 1920x1200 - 1.51%

Feedburner Stats:
5,491 subscribers (combined my two feeds)

Top RSS Readers (via Feedburner based on short feed)
(1) Bloglines
(2) Firefox Live Bookmarks
(3) Netvibes
(4) Rojo
(5) NewsGator Online
(6) FeedReader
(7) Google Desktop
(8) Windows RSS Platform
(9) Safari RSS (OS X Tiger)
(10) Thunderbird

Email Subscriptions:
699 Active Readers powered by FeedBlitz

Visits:
I will just say I average consistently well-over 150,000 visits per month.

Articles Count Summary:
Total in 2006 (to date): 1,777
Average per Work Day: ~7 (depending on how you count work days)

For some of our highlighted events and articles over the past year, read our We Are Three: Search Engine Roundtable's 3rd Birthday post.

Let me start off by saying, I am having a really hard time finding juicy threads this week and this morning, I am digging really deep, but still can't find good ones. It must be the holiday season...

Two posts, with no one backing them up, are reporting shifts in Yahoo! search results.

The first is an update to a WebmasterWorld thread, a post yesterday, post number 3201071. He says:

Beginning today, my referrals have soared... up about 8X... looks great for me!

The second post is from SEO Refugee from the day before, saying;

Something Happened At Y Yesterday for me it would seem because Y is suddenly very fond of one of my sites that it was previously ignoring up until yesterday... or maybe this is some sort of isolated flukey ... anyone else seeing some super-tremendous Y movements?

Honestly, I doubt this is a major update. Just some changes to some individual sites, IMO.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & SEO Refugee.

I'll keep looking for threads, but if I can't find, it will be a slow day...

A WebmasterWorld thread asks "How does Google determine which pages to crawl?" Google didn't always crawl and index pages as they do now. With the Big Daddy update Google adapted their crawl priorities, which was around April 2006.

Google now bases the crawl priorities based on several factors, one of those factors includes PageRank. As far as I understand it, pages with higher PageRank will be crawled and indexed quicker than pages with lower PageRank, as a general rule.

That is one of the reasons people recommend placing links to your most important pages on your highest PageRank pages (i.e. homepage). One it will increase the PageRank of those pages and it will also give the bot easier access (higher level access) to the page.

Back in the older days, it was easier to get Google to index and rank all your pages on your huge dynamic site, if the pages were search engine friendly. Now even indexing requires page popularity and trust factors. Don't even get the SEO community started about being indexed but being in the supplemental index. :)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There are two recent threads that I found at forums I typically do not cover much on the topic of pay per post reviews. The posts are at HighRankings Forums and at SEO Refugee Forums. I am going to pull in all sources I know of, to give you the perspective of the search engines, advertiser, SEO and the blog writer.

Search Engines View of Pay Per Post Reviews:
Earlier this month, I reported at Search Engine Land on Pay Per Post Reviews Acceptable By Some Search Engines where I quote SEOMoz's coverage of a SES Chicago session.

Specifically, Tim Converse from Yahoo starts off saying that "there would be no discount of link value for paid blog material." The rest of the search engines, including Google, represented by Adam Lasnik nodded their heads, according to Rand. Now, this was not just shocking to Rand, I was shocked by the response after Rand told me this on Thursday.

Yes, shocking... would Matt Cutts of Google say something like that. No! And I quote his comment at SEOMoz and at Search Engine Land:

Just to chime in and expand on Adam's comment: Google wants to do a good job of detecting paid links. Paid links that affect search engines (whether paid text links or a paid review) can cause a site to lose trust in Google.

The specific guideline for doing paid reviews or paid links is to make sure that your links don't affect search engines. You can do that via a nofollow attribute on your links, or an internal redirect which goes through a page which is robot.txt'ed out, or several other methods.

So in short, Google doesn't like this model but the other search engines haven't commented much on it. Perhaps because it is not a huge issue right now, in terms of hurting the current state of search relevancy algorithms. They know it can be an issue but currently they cannot do much about links within the main copy of the site, without removing or devaluing trust side-wide, which may be extreme in some cases.

Advertisers View of Pay Per Post Reviews:
Bottom line, they want their message, product, or service in the public eye. Be it on a blog, forum, radio, TV, or billboard - they want people to know about what they have. Blogs tend to do a good job spreading this stuff. So a little money to encourage some bloggers to review your product/service can't hurt the advertiser. Unless, they give a poor review for the product or service.

SEOs View of Pay Per Post Reviews:
An SEO wants the link, it is a link building strategy, and its one of the best types of links. They do not care if the review is positive or negative, they are perfectly happy with the link. In reality, the more extreme the review (positive or negative) the better off they are. More eyes catch it, more bloggers pick it up and you get free viral links out of it. Adding a nofollow attribute to those links, will make the links worthless.

Bloggers View of Pay Per Post Reviews:
Well, a blogger, by nature, writes about items they buy, try out or consider buying. DazzlinDonna puts it well from the blogger's point of view...

Over the years, I've had a ton of people email me and ask me to review some seo tool or something, and most of the time, I would (for free). It gave me something to blog about for one thing, without me having to rack my brain, and it also was of interest to the readers. So I figure I've earned the right to get paid every now and then for a review, and I'll continue to also do free reviews when I want. Either way, I'll state my opinion of the product, good or bad, and money doesn't play into it. I don't mind disclosing the payment, although I have to also agree that it's kinda weird considering all of the celebrity endorsements that have inundated us for decades (as Robert Paulson brought up). But Dave's point is well made. I think (hope) that over the years, my straightforwardness has come through on my blog, and I assume people will know that I'm telling it like it is - paid or not. But I imagine there's probably a million or so bloggers out there who may not have that same level of trust because they just don't care one way or another. So, I can see how it could be useful. If I stumbled upon a blog from someone I didn't have any kind of trust relationship with, I might want to be reassured that the review I'm reading is an honest opinion - paid or not. Of course, who's to say whether I could believe that or not. I dunno. I think the big bru-ha-hah is a little silly, but whatever....

In short, I tend to do a lot of reviews of products I am personally interested in at my personal blog. I also review products I have bought in the past, and I write the good and the bad. I rarely ever nofollow a link, unless I am trying to make a point. A blogger's job sometimes goes unappreciated and for granted. Pay Per Post and ReviewME offers models where, at least, they can review products and services they find interesting and give a fair assessment of those products, while being appreciated ($$$) for it.

In Summary:
That is a tough one... Let's look back... E-mail is a great thing, but spammers got to it and make it tough to use sometimes. The Web is a great thing, but spammers got to it (spyware, adware) and make it tough to use sometimes. Search engines are a great thing, but spammers got to it... Blogs are a great thing, but comment spammers got to it, making it tough... Paid blogger reviews are a great thing, but they can and will be used by people with bad intentions. As a blogger, I believe you can judge for yourself if a review is for a link or for a review. It is up to you if you are willing to risk a site-wide trust devaluation by Google or other engines. You are the only one who can judge, but don't let Google scare you - do what you know is right.

FYI - this was not a paid review of anything.

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forums & SEO Refugee Forums.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread links to a story named Microsoft adCenter can't bill correctly. It goes through how the individual used a $100 promo, ran up a bill of $111 or so and was billed the whole $111 instead of just the $11 (i.e. $100 minus the $100 promo).

December 21st - Spoke to a customer service rep (CSR) who thought that I had to pay the full $111.85, and then I'd get another account credit of $100. He really wasn't sure, however, so after arguing with him on how to read an invoice, I was finally transferred to a supervisor. The supervisor told me the same exact thing that the first CSR told me about paying the full $111.85 and not $11.85.

If you want a laugh, go read that post, kinda incredible.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Yesterday, I reported that the Google AdSense Competitive Ad Filter Not Working. That meant, if you had a list of ads you wanted to block, i.e. MFAs, competitors, etc. those ads were running, even though you blocked them.

Matt Cutts commented telling us he notified an AdSense representative.

It appears that AdSense has fixed the issues, one WebmasterWorld member received an email response back from AdSense saying;

I just received a reply to the email I sent to AdSense Support last night. They said they've resolved the filtering issue but to allow up to 24 hours for it to take effect and if I'm still seeing filtered sites after 24 hours, to let them know.

So hopefully soon, you should no longer see those ads you don't want, running on your sites.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

On December 21st, Ben reported a Google Data Refresh - Rankings Fluctuations Before Christmas via a WebmasterWorld thread. Now, I have been tracking that original thread, along with two additional WebmasterWorld threads named part 2 and Is there any point in adding new content?

So what have I got from this? Honestly, not much. One person wants this update to be coined "The Google Xmas Debacle." Sounds cool to me, but too many people are reporting not seeing anything. On the other hand, many people that I know and trust are reporting serious changes.

But what patterns or commonalities do we find with those changes? Again, not much. Some things I pulled out of the thread include:

• Affecting AdSense sites
• Affecting new pages
• Supplemental results increase dramatically
• Less results found in the site operator
• Suggestions of a bad data push

But these are all individual cases. Most of the posts say, I lost 50% of my traffic. Some say, my competitor dropped off from the number one spot and is no where to be found. Some say, everything looks fine and dandy.

So something is going on, but without evidence and actual results to look at, it is hard to reproduce. But I do believe something has happened - to what extent, I honestly do not know. What can be done to reverse it? Again, I do not know.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Kim Krause started a thread at Cre8asite Forums detailing that Cre8asite Forums has collected $1,600 to give to various SEO/SEM organizations. The money came from when they began adding ads to the site, almost a year ago. So how do they decide which organizations should get the money? Since it is a community, they have started a poll to allow the community to have a say in that decision.

You can vote here for the various organization including; SEMPO, Search Engine College Certification , Bruce Clay's SEO ToolSet, Fresh Egg Internship, Web Design Training Program, Human Factors Intl, SEOPros or enter in one not on the list in the other field.

Select up to four, since each of the top four will get $400 each. Also, the poll closes January 15, 2007.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Don't think we don't notice, Adam Lasnik and Vanessa Fox at Google spent a portion of their Christmas Day working.

Vanessa posted six posts at Google Groups, here they are:

• Can Matt Cutts be this arrogant??? Touch one to respond to...
• Removing dead link from Google
• Supplemental Results - What does it mean?
• Still have Penalty - Help Required
• Supplemental Results - What does it mean?
• Penalty on our Danish shop sites? Vanessa?

Adam Lasnik posted two threads on Sunday and one post Monday, they were:

• Excluded after today's discussion in here which was a bit of a parental post, followed by a response to someone about it
• Excluded after today's discussion in here being a mod is not always fun...
• Founder of Wikipedia plans search engine to rival Google see post # 3199741 for his response

Thanks Adam and Vanessa!

A WebmasterWorld thread reports that URLs added to the Competitive Ad Filter in Google AdSense, are not blocking those URLs.

There are five posts at the thread all this morning reporting the same thing.

I can't believe the timing of your post. I just emailed AdSense Support because this is happening to me as well. One of the domains that is now appearing in AdSense ads on my site has been in my competitive ad filter for over 3 years. And there are others as well. I hope that everyone experiencing this will email adsense-support@google.com.

More details on the competitive ad filter at this page.

This is not good, if true. I did not test it myself.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread admits to possibly making a bidding mistake. For example, this user wanted to bid $0.01 instead of $1.00, but either the individual entered in $1.00 or it was a computer glitch. The same thing happened in an older thread at WebmasterWorld where someone wanted to bid $0.21 but accidently placed a bid of $21.00.

Now, in the later thread the advertiser was refunded the money. Why? Well, no one knows for sure.

AdWordsRep responded to the thread in post number 3174050 saying;

I have seen no details of this particular situation at all, so can't say for sure - but based on four years in AdWords support this sounds to me like a one-time 'courtesy credit' made, on occasion, when an advertiser has made a costly error. Hopefully, surf4soul will correct me if I am mistaken.

Since that November 30th post, no correction has been made, so I will assume it was a one-time courtesy credit.

But what can Google do to help advertisers not make this mistake in the future?

Why not make the two input boxes one for dollars and one for cents. IMHO a lot of advertisers use bids in decimals and this would avoid mistakes with the "." or ",".

It is now officially in the Google AdWords suggestion box and hopefully will be an option for some. But yet others may not like to have to enter in the price into two different boxes, who knows.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

We have talked about the topic of dynamic keyword insertion plenty of times here. Basically, if you bid on hundreds of keywords, creating an ad that contained each keyword phrase you are bidding on, can take a long time. That is where dynamic keyword insertion comes into play. You tell the ad network to replace a parameter in your ad, normally [keyword], with the user's search query, if your ad comes up.

A recent thread at WebmasterWorld asks if the same works for adding dynamic keywords to the URL string. So for example, if I wanted my ad to read;

Buy Blue Widgets
The best blue widgets in the forests of Europe.
www.smurfs.com/blue-widgets/

It appears that adding dynamic keyword insertion techniques to the display URL of your ads in Google has been around since about September 14, 2004. BakedJake posted a thread back then, based on nuclei's findings, and then it appeared to only be limited test.

The question in the new thread is, does the display URL actually have to work?

Honestly, I do not think so, I think as long as the destination URL works, it is fine, but I can be wrong. It is obviously important to make sure your display URLs work and with a little mod_rewrite and fancy database coding, you can easily make those URLs work. But if not, will Google allow it?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Early this month we reported that Google Testing Showing AdWords Quality Score Data to Advertisers, well, I finally found a screen shot. A DigitalPoint Forums thread has a member posting a screen shot of the quality score being shown to him in the AdWords reports. It looks like this.

The question mark leads to the Google AdWords help page;

Quality Score Column

The Quality Score column displays your keyword's Quality Score to help you monitor your keyword relevance. This is a customizable column that is disabled by default for new accounts. It can be enabled at any time.

Each keyword will be labelled with one of three possible Quality Score states: Great, OK, or Poor. Your ads may be performing effectively and with lower costs if your keywords have Great or OK Quality Scores. However, keywords with a Poor Quality Score may need to be replaced with more specific keyword choices. If you don't want to replace poor quality keywords, you can try optimizing their associated ad text and landing pages.

To learn more about optimizing your ads, keywords, and landing pages, visit our Tips for Success page.

So you have three statuses, Great, OK and Poor. I guess that shows you something to work on, better than nothing.

This is still a limited user test, so all of us do not have this data.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Wow, tons of buzz over the weekend over a new search engine started by Jimmy Wales, founder of the Wikipedia. The new engine is to be named wikiasari. The story was broken on The Times in the UK, where it describes how the engine will leverage the community.

“But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves,” he added. “We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that.”

Techcrunch has claimed to post an exclusive screen capture, which was rejected;

The TechCrunch story is also wrong. This project has nothing to do with the screenshot they are running, and this search project has nothing to do with Wikipedia.

Also, this is not an Amazon powered engine, but Amazon is funding part of a large part of the project.

We currently have a lot of discussion in the forums on this topic. The Google killer? :)

Brett Tabke came in Christmas eve to comment:

Lets try some math:

If you have 1000 people making editorial decisions at the rate of 3-4 pages a minute for 400 minutes a day = 1600 pages per person per day - or about 1.5 million pages per day. If you have 5000 people doing that - you have about 7.5million pages per day, or about 150million pages per month.

Strangely enough, I have heard the figure 150 million pages used in reference to the bulk of the long tail in the top two search engines. Meaning that the top 150million pages on the web comprise 95-98% of the search engine listings popping up in search engines on any given day.

That said, I would rather have machine based results. Humans are easy to manipulate (Ever hear of Dmoz? lol).

Also, Li Evans does a good job summarizing things.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums.

An Adam Lasnik post in Google Groups sprung a post at Cre8asite Forums explaining that if you have bad HTML, Google will be OK with it.

Yes, that is the case, your code does not need to be 100% validated or 100% proper syntax. Pretty much, if the code renders on the browser, Google will be able to crawl the page to some extent.

Bill Slawski wrote;

Here's a blog post I wrote a while back about how Google might handle navigation when trying to take large pages and put them on small screens:

Google Indentifies Navigation Bars for Small Screens, Snippets, and Indexing

Here's a snippet:

QUOTE
The primary focus of this patent is on identifying navigation bars on a page that can safely be re-written or changed in some manner for display on a smaller screen. An integral part of the process involves actually identifying navigation bars. It’s probably important that the patent mentions (briefly) that this identification can be helpful in indexing a page and deciding upon which text to use to provide snippets to searchers, which goes beyond the reauthoring process.

Considering the ways in which search engines may want to manipulate the content of a site, and possibly even rewrite parts of it, I want as much control over the code as possible.

So yes, search engine spiders are forgiving of bad code. But, how much control do you want to turn over to them in their ranking and presentation of your site to others?

So when Adam says; "I'm betting that in the vast majority of cases in which folks have indexing or ranking concerns, the core issue is NOT that their site doesn't perfectly validate," I would nod my head and move on.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums and Google Groups.

The holiday season is here and most of the search engines are already sporting holiday season logos. Tonight is the last night of Chanukah, so we took down our logo for Chanukah and put up the Christmas logo. Here it is:

Google is changing their logo daily, this is the second logo, but make sure to track them here.

Yahoo! has a very cute one, that is flash, they skate around the logo, I took a static image of one frame.

Dogpile is sporting a shopping search engine theme.

Ask.com doesn't have anything yet, but I am sure they will (I'll update the post when it is added). Update: Ask.com does the background change...

Cre8asite Forums sports a holiday logo:

I wanted to wish you all a happy and healthy holidays!

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums and DigitalPoint Forums.

A Google Groups thread suggests that Google should not only show the URL, the type of error and the date of the error in the web crawl error report within Google Sitemaps. It should also referrer data, so that the webmaster can better diagnose the issue. That will tell the webmaster the source of the error and be able to better resolve the issue.

Adam Lasnik who is currently on a roll, answering questions this morning, wrote;

we've indeed heard this request before, and so it's definitely on the Webmaster Tools folks' radar!

Good to hear, I wonder how soon it will come?

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

On November 20th, Yahoo! announced they will be a bit more transparent by providing something they call Compliance Manager. What does it do? It tells you if there are problem areas on your site, stuff you have done on purpose or by accident that warrants your ads to be taken down. Compliance manager gives publishers a way to take corrective action, something not done before in the contextual ad game.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread notes that people are now seeing it work. People with problem areas are being notified via the compliance manager of problems on their pages or sites. Some said that it was presented to them, but was a bug and was soon fixed. Some said that it was helpful in correcting the issue. So what does it look like? Well, there is one screen capture at the thread but Yahoo sent me samples in the past.

The portal homepage will show you this message, if you have compliance issues:

You can then click on a link in the message to see the compliance manager report that looks like this:

I think this is great, the transparency supersedes all other programs to date.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

As Danny wrote Google Pushing New Blogger In Search Results searching on anything with the term "blog" in it our part of it (i.e. blogging, blogs X, etc) will bring up this special one box result promoting Google's Blogger application.

There was recently a lot of stink over Google using AdWords to promote their own products. Danny said that he has "no problem with the tip." Danny adds that he "wants Google to do promos like this outside of the ad units, so advertisers aren't to lose a spot to Google itself."

Let's take a look:

Now, that is some pretty real estate that is not for sale. Why is a search on prenatal care bloggers or barry schwartz blogging related to Blogger or even at all relevant?

I think Google should use AdWords, like they said they do and pay like the rest of the world. I believe Yahoo! has totally separate divisions that market their products and they keep them totally off limits to the search side of things. I know, Google is a search company, Yahoo is a media company, so it makes it hard. But it is possible.

I much rather they play in the fair ground then insert a one box result, which has much higher visibility then the ads (I would assume).

We have a thread on this at Search Engine Roundtable Forums since December 20th and member PPCblogger makes a very valid point:

I just find it amusing after Matt Cutts recent comments about hard coding products into search results after the whole should Google advertise on Google argument - http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/im-on-debunking-duty/.

"I agree that buying ads where other people can outbid you is much better than hard-coding the search results page to favor someone. That’s what Yahoo does with searches like [online advertising]."

Thats pretty much what Google are doing with their 'tip'.

Of course, as Phillip noted, they do the same thing for calendar or barry's calendar.

It just seems wrong to me.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread reports that Microsoft adCenter is inflating the conversion metrics by 30 to 40 percent.

Member, PPC, says:

For those that track conversions at MSN, does anyone else see inflated numbers? MSN consistently reports 40-50% more conversions than we are actually getting from MSN. I don't see how this is possible since the conversion code is only on our confirmation page and that page only displays for successful orders. Yet every day, MSN reports tell me that I have sold more units through this outlet than I actually have. Sometimes, one term will show 8 sales when in fact only only one unit of that specific product has been sold and there actually was only 1 click on that term!

Another member came in to confirm the same bug.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Google tweaking rankings once again before the holidays? Some people are crying foul at the disruptions going on this holiday season. How could they!? Members on Webmasterworld are talking about some recent changes over yesterday and today that have occured recently to change search rankings. Some are wondering if it has to do with a penalty or just some general reshuffling going on? I had a new client call me a few minutes ago that overnight lost its rankings for a relatively uncompetitive term and wanted to know why all the sites changed in the top 10. Call it an early christmas present from Google maybe?

A senior member on WMW said "Looks like some kind of data refresh to me. I'm seeing lots of movement in what's normally a quiet sector." Whether he is right or not, I am not sure, but I don't think it has to do with any penalties and is more the normal flux we usually see. People are just a bit hyped and sensitive right about now to what is happening with their traffic. Any disruptions seem to be cause for panic. I would recommend those webmasters effected to have a nice frothy egg nog and wait it out.

Continued discussion on Webmaster World - 20 Dec 2006 - Data Refresh or Penalty?

Much of what I cover and write about every day is inspired and tailored to you guys. The design, the emails, the RSS feeds, the categories and tagging are all done to help improve the accessibility of the content and our buzz coverage.

I figured the new year is almost here, so it is a good time to open things up to suggestions from the readers again.

Please feel free to comment below or email me at barry.schwartz@gmail.com to make suggestions, comments, and bug reports for the Search Engine Roundtable.

We will listen to all your submitted feedback, because you make this site what it is.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread discusses Yahoo!'s gift for the 2006 holiday season. Yahoo! sent all publishers and advertisers a email holiday card, which you can see at http://brand.yahoo.com/snow/. Yahoo! sent some advertisers a Yahoo! sweatshirt and USB drink cooler. It looks like:

Yahoo! also sent some bigger advertisers a "fancy corkscrew kit from Leeds."

I have more details on Yahoo!'s gift to me at my personal blog, Cartoon Barry.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread notes that Google has changed their AdSense feedback form. In the past, clicking on an ad's "Ads by Goooogle" link would take you to a special page. Now it takes you to product promotional page that looks like this.

You can then scroll down and click on the blue link that reads "Send Google your thoughts on the ads you just saw." That will open up a DHTML form, where you can give feedback on the ad or report violations.

Here is a screen capture if you don't see it.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks if one's ad position affects the CTR value in the quality score. In short, you do not have to worry to much, Google thought of this.

AdWordsAdvisor said:

CTR is normalized for position when we are calculating your quality score.

Exactly how is it normalized? Well, we are not too sure, but it is.

Forum discussion WebmasterWorld.