April 16, 2007 Archives

The Yahoo! Search Blog has announced that Yahoo! Site Explorer is out of beta. Yahoo has also announced that Site Explorer has added functionality for users to submit sitemaps for their mobile device-friendly websites through the control panel. WebmasterWorld has discussion on the mobile-friendly submission and a WebmasterWorld member also notes that authenticated users are also able to report suspicious spam sites sites through the tool as well.

I have included screenshots of both new features.

In Yahoo! Site Explorer, when you view your submitted sites, you can click on Manage to add feeds for mobile browsers:

When you view your site's Inlinks and hover over a specific link, you will see the "Report Spam" button as such:

The spam report feature is being received well, but some question whether this could hurt site rankings if too biased:

The report spam does sound interesting and it was mentioned before who is to say what is not related content?

Webmasters could easily harm their rankings by reporting sites that they do not see as being quality sites or relevant links, however, Yahoo could see that site much differently. Subsequently rankings could suffer as a result.

I sure hope there is a human element to review the spam reports in the backend.

Discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

We had a tremendous amount of coverage during the Search Engine Strategies conference, and every time we were in the Press Room, we saw another WebProNews video being filmed. Members at Cre8asite Forums and DigitalPoint forums discovered this particularly interesting interview between Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz interviewing Vanessa Fox of Google's Webmaster Central.

The interview covered many different topics which are summarized below.

Is Google Base worth it? Vanessa says yes for sites with structured data, such as real estate listings or recipes. It is a separate searching system and you can refine your results. Google Base is a great product for results that can be refined.

Getting on Google News: If you're accepted to the program, you can submit a news sitemap through Google's Webmaster Tools.

Google Sitemaps Initiative Offering Sitemaps in 18 New Languages: This has always been available, but now the content is available in 18 languages so people can learn more about it without having to learn English.

Sitemaps Support through robots.txt: The syntax of this is:

Sitemap: http://yoursite.com/sitemapfile.xml

Vanessa says that it is still recommended that you initially submit your sitemap through Google Webmaster Tools so that webmasters can determine whether their sitemap file has any errors.

What does Vanessa think about other search engine "Webmaster Central" portals? It's great. Yahoo SiteExplorer just went out of beta, and it works well. All engines should have such tools.

Can we get support for the following in Google Webmaster Central?

• Delete URL: We've had a URL removal tool for about 6 years. It's certainly a possibility to port to Webmaster Central.


• Live PR Score: I'm not sure about that one.


• Will Google ever compete with Alexa? Not likely due to privacy concerns.


• Link sorting: Vanessa says that she will pass the request on.


• Seeing supplemental results and why they are supplemental: Vanessa can see the expansion into determining where pages have problems but not getting too specific.


• Will we see penalties for people who buy links in Google Webmaster Central? We'll start paying more attention to paid links. (Days after this interview, Matt Cutts addressed the issue of paid links.)


• Information on who is linking to 404 pages: It's possible, but the best way to deal with this is with a redirect, because you may not be able to get that broken link fixed.

Is it possible that submitting a sitemap can get an orphaned page -- that has no pages linked to it -- indexed in Google? Possibly, but it probably won't rank well. It might rank for non-competitive terms.

What about results that are not wanted by a user? Will sitemaps affect that? The most important thing is about user experience. Is this page what they wanted, or is it a hop to get to pages that they want?

What happens if I want to move to another site through a 301 redirect? If I verify both of the sites in Webmaster Central, is there a way to keep the rankings? It is possible if we are able to verify ownership for both sites. Other things you can do now is that you take the pages from the old site and put them on the new site as-is and redirect one-to-one. A lot of people who do this move restructure the content, so it gets harder to pinpoint the issue. While it is a natural time to redo your site, just do everything a step at a time.

With regards to parasite hosting and I host my content on an .edu site, do you think that there may be too much trust that Google is putting in this domains, and do you think that that might slide in the future? We're always looking at our algorithms. We always look at improving user experience and spamming the search engines is not the best user experience. We have a team that works on this, and we have an authenticated spam reporting tool in Webmaster Central. Hopefully, you will see these results improve.

You can watch the video here:

Discussion continues at Cre8aSite Forums and DigitalPoint Forums.

Friday's announcement of Google's acquisition of Doubleclick has created a storm of posts in a variety of forums about the challenges this acquisition will pose to competitors and Google AdSense and AdWords publishers. A DigitalPoint Forums user asks how the purchase, if at all, will affect Google AdSense and AdWords Publishers.

Do you think it will boost Adsense's publisher's earning, as we all know that DoubleClick is market Giant in Advertising services?

What's the short term answer? Most members feel that the acquisition will not affect AdSense publishers.

For the long term solution, this might actually help them:

Ithink they will open a new way of advertising. Like said in another thread, they will use the research & tools to diplay ads that users are more likely to click, thus increasing ctr and eleminating some fraud. When CTR is naturally high, I don'tthink people will cheat the system as much. They may even track AdSense related websites to see if such things do happen.

Do you agree? Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

In one of Google's costliest acquisitions, on Friday, the Google blog announced (as did the Google AdSense Blog and the Google AdWords blog) that they were acquiring the DoubleClick online advertising firm for $3.1 billion. A WebmasterWorld thread discusses the acquisition more closely.

Is Google an ad agency or a search giant? One reader feels that as Google continues pursuing advertising channels, advertising is its primary focus:

Wow, changes the whole makeup. Guess Google is now officially an ad agency that just happens to dabble in search.

Not everybody is optimistic:

The conflicts of interest are almost too many to list. This should make a lot of people nervous about their data.

Google's strategy is heavily questioned. Did were they trying to sink Microsoft? Many readers felt that way, especially feeling that Google is challenging anti-trust laws.

Obviously Google overpaid (in all cash too), but its more of a strategic move & Sergey's thinking would be in the big picture $3.1 billion dont matter much.

Wow, thowing away 3.1 billion just to shut MS out on a temporary basis. Google is completely insane.

Can anyone say anti-trust? If the Dept. of Justice lets this go through, they will be creating what Microsoft has on OS's. It will be too late to stop them after this. Hopefully someone there is listening. Even though, the EU would probably also have objections. I would be surprised if their competitors do not submit anti-trust issues too. Google not evil? Yea, right.

It certainly feels that Google, with its finances, can control a lot of online properties. How much is too much? Another WebmasterWorld forums thread shows that Google is already being scrutinized for the purchase.

According to a Marketwatch article, competitors are asking the government to look more closely at the purchase.

"Google's purchase of DoubleClick combines the two largest providers of online advertising delivery and is going to reduce substantially the market competition on which Web sites rely on to provide advertising," The Journal quoted Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, as saying. Smith said that, taken together, Google and DoubleClick would handle more than 80% of the advertisements served up to third-party Web sites when a user pulls up a page, the Journal reported.

Forum members see that this may be a valid argument. In fact, Techmeme already covers a number of blogs that are reporting about Microsoft's desire to have an extensive antitrust review.

Forum discussion regarding the acquisition continues at WebmasterWorld. You can discuss the competitor challenge at this WebmasterWorld thread.

About a week and a half ago Google Turns AdWords Yellow & Changes Click Behavior. In short, Google changed the top sponsored results background color from blue to yellow and only counted a click of that ad if it was on the title of the ad itself.

I wanted to wait a bit to see how this may be impacting advertisers. I have some information for you now.

A WebmasterWorld thread has continued discussion on the impact.

One member named lynnemezine said that they are seeing "both a decline in CTR on all ads and fewer clicks on any positioned T1-T3." He is frustrated because he doesn't know if the drop off is due to the yellow background or the change in click behavior required to be taken to the advertiser's page.

Advertiser, "Israel," said that although his clicks are down "quite a bit" his sales remain the same. This member is happy about the click through change, because it drops the number of "accidental" clicks on those ads - which I personally agree with.

SanDiegoChicken said that he has seen a "20% drop in CTR, across 12+ campaigns with over 400,000 impressions this month.

Overall, it appears there are now less clicks in those top ad spots. The big question is why? Is it due to the ad color change or the click behavior change or both? Everyone agrees that CTR is lower, which does impact one's ad ranking in AdWords. But are sales less?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Last week, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft & Ask.com To All Support Sitemaps Autodiscovery. So how do you ping these services to notify the search engines of an update to your Sitemaps, if you do not want to wait for them to find it themselves?

Softplus at Cre8asite Forums posted the URLs you can use to ping the various engines. Here they are:

Ask.com: http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.domain.com/sitemap.xml
Google: http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http:%3A//www.domain.com/sitemap.xml
Yahoo: http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=YahooDemo&url=http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml

I did not test these myself, but they seem accurate.

Note, there is no URL listed for Microsoft's Live search. Why? I suspect they currently do not support Sitemaps. Which brings me back to my lingering question, Is Microsoft's Live Search Ever Going to Add Sitemaps Support? They have been promising it since November 15, 2006.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

It is 2007 and we have yet to have the big debate on paid links this year. Matt Cutts of Google has changed that with his dual post on how to report paid links and hidden links. Let me quickly summarize:

(1) Matt explains you can and should report paid links via the Google spam report forms.
(2) Matt said there may be a new form out in the future to just report specifically paid links.
(3) Google is trying out "some ideas" to "augment" Google's "existing algorithms" with paid links.
(4) Matt explains in the hidden links blog post that you should "at least" provide a machine readable way to disclose you have paid links (i.e. redirect link or nofollow).
(5) It seems the preferred way is to have a human readable way to disclose paid links (i.e. label text links as paid or sponsored).

I think I covered the guts of Matt's posts in those five points above.

As you would imagine, there is a ton of discussion brewing over these posts. You can see a lot of the blog discussion referenced at Techmeme. Let me summarize the forum discussion for you.

WebmasterWorld has some recent discussion on the topic and here are the posts that jump out at me.

Matt didn't address paid directories. Yahoo directory & BOTW (and maybe a few others) charge for submission reviews not inclusion. Not every site is accepted. The reason those directories are regarded as quality resources is because of their strict editorial policies.

I don't see a difference between the above, but I do at the same time. Some directories take high editorial discretion such as those mentioned. Others will take anything. Some bloggers paid for reviews won't do a review on a site or product they aren't pleased with, showing the same editorial discretion. Some publishers won't link to sites (aka advertisers) they don't review and approve of. Others will link to anything.

Google has a problem with paid links messing up their algorithm. Then they need to fix the problem instead of trying to scare the hell out of publishers hoping they'll fix it for them.

There is a clear distinction between a directory which charges for a review, and a blog that is simply a list of paid links. Simply put, a directory becomes "trusted" as a hub or authority on the subject. It does not mean a blog cannot be an authority, however, it's been made clear that selling links is a no-no.

Search Engine Watch Forums has some nice discussion on the topic as well. Here are some quotes for you.

I think the fact so many people are so angry tends to indicate that it is a good idea.

DigitalPoint Forums has two different threads, one here and the other here. In both, you can read the fear in the SEOs and Webmasters posts. In bright red...

Google is going to be looking at paid links more closely in the future

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

The twenty-fifth edition of the Search Pulse is now available for download. Ben and Chris chatted about how the search community celebrated April Fools Day. They also brought in Rebecca from SEOmoz to discuss their new Ranking Factors document. They discussed Google changing the AdWords from blue to yellow (I think). They talked about how Yahoo! has shortened the search ad descriptions. The search engines united with auto-discovery on Sitemaps; including Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Ask.com. Plus many more topics. The topics we covered are listed below, in order of priority (based on search community buzz). You can download the MP3 file and listen at your convenience.

You can listen to the MP3 file with our new player directly below:

Topics We Covered:

1. Search Engine Community & April Fools Day
   
2. SEOmoz Ranking Factors Version 2.0 is Released
   
3. Yahoo! To Require Shorter Descriptions in May/June 2007
   
4. How Important to Search Engines is Site Age?
   
5. Does "Freshness" Mean More in Google?
   
6. Google Turns AdWords Yellow & Changes Click Behavior: How Will It Change CTR?
   
7. Sitemaps & URL Submission (Sitemaps Adds Ask.com & Autodiscovery)
   
8. Google Personalizes Maps by Adding "My Maps" Feature
   
9. Google Undergoing Fundamental Search Changes?
   
10. Should You Outsource Link Development in SEO?
    
11. Sneaking Around Buying Links
    
12. New Google Logo on AdSense Now Official
    
13. Is There Any Benefit to Google Checkout Badges?
    
14. Yahoo Announces Alpha Personalized Search
    

Continue reading "Search Pulse 25: April 1, SEOmoz Factors, Google Yellow Ads, Yahoo Shorter Descriptions, Sitemaps Autodiscovery & Microsoft and Ask.com Join Google and Yahoo, & More"

Chris Boggs, our Associate Editor, has a new column at Search Engine Watch. The first article he wrote he named Just One Agency Point of View in the "outsourced" section.

Chris explains:

In this new column, I hope to be able to provide an insight into the world of big agency workflow processes, of course without ever being so specific that I'd get myself in trouble, especially with regards to clients. I imagine I'll get to occasionally brand our successes, but we do leave more of that to our weekly newsletter, Avenue A | Razorfish's Search Marketing Trends.

The article is being discussed at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Good job Chris!