May 1, 2007 Archives

Gabs, a moderator at Search Engine Roundtable Forums, discovered an interesting way of determining how to find supplemental results on .co.uk domains.

According to his blog post, if you click on "Search for Pages from the UK," you will see the Supplemental Results only. If you click on the "Search the Web" radio button, you will see all regular non-Supplemental results:

Ok so you have a .co.uk and your using the site command to check the number of indexed page but by mistake you have the “pages from the uk” selected.. Bammm.. Only sup’s are returned..

The problem is that google.co.uk is pretty much filtering out the UK results into the supplemental index.

I was able to reproduce this instance with one of the leading e-commerce sites in the UK. In the first screenshot, there are 7.1 million results that are not in the supplemental index:

But in this second result, where only pages in the UK are being searched, there are over 44 million results. Notice how all of them are tagged as a supplemental result.

This is indeed a nice find, but I don't think google.co.uk was meant to work this way. It would be neat if we can have a tool that does this more easily though, so for now, this will suffice for UK folks.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Members from Search Engine Watch Forums and WebmasterWorld received troubling information from Microsoft adCenter regarding yesterday's new Terms and Conditions.

We're writing to notify you that your Microsoft adCenter Terms and Conditions are updated. The changes take effect on April 30, 2007.

Some of the key adjustments to your Terms and Conditions include:

Microsoft may use matching criteria other than keyword searches to display your advertisements.
Microsoft may display your advertisements on its network of advertising channels operated by the Microsoft network of participating websites and other distribution outlets.
The payment and reporting terms in your adCenter agreement have been clarified to describe your rights.

adCenter advertisers are relatively disgruntled about this "matching criteria" given the fact that it is important for them to understand the criteria being used in Microsoft's refinements. Their hard work into the PPC campaigns are being challenged by this new policy. Some are planning on terminating their agreement with MSN.

The reason that ppc is popular is because it's extremely targeted advertising - I decide which search terms / ads are working and continue to refine them. I do not want Microsoft to 'use matching criteria other than keyword searches' WITHOUT my opt-in.

No word from the adCenter rep on these new changes.

Barry offers some possible suggestions as to why Microsoft changed their Terms of Services. He told me:

This is not the first time Microsoft automatically added their advertisers to the content network program without their consent. When Microsoft launched their content network they did so by switching their advertisers into the program and then requiring them to opt out after the fact. In this case, I believe it may be similar, in that Microsoft wants to cover themselves by saying they "may" display their ads in other areas and via non-keyword searches (hence the content network and possibly via behavioral targeting methods).

That seems to fit with the sentiment at WebmasterWorld:

what it means is that they couldn't sell their content distribution, so it is now bundled into their search product. Plummeting ROI will ensue.

First they auto-opt you in to content, and you have to go in and opt out - if you are aware. Then the choice is taken away.

Discussion continues at Search Engine Watch and WebmasterWorld.

A DigitalPoint Forums calls to attention Ziff Davis Media's Top 100 Most Influential People in IT, where Sergey Brin and Larry Page have scored the #1 spot as "World Conquerors." Eric Schmidt is in position #23. Brin and Page are said to not be slowing down, and with net worths apiece of over $14 billion, they shouldn't have to.

...they realized that "the area we were in, search, was too important to the world for a small company to really succeed in it. To fulfill that mission, we had to grow. Now we really are accomplishing a lot by making information more accessible."

Is this undeserved? Hardly. Forum members are happy for them.

Congrats to them! they had a good idea and turned it into a billion dollar company, their success is well deserved.

Not a single person thinks otherwise.

Discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

This weekend we has a PageRank update and many noticed a drop in their toolbar PageRank scores. Earlier, on Friday, we reported some were noticing possible buggy PageRank values.

Where some noticed their PageRank drop from a number to zero but not lose any traffic at all.

Adam Lasnik, of Google, came into the WebmasterWorld thread yesterday in message number 3326575 and said they will look into it.

If you've seen your PR adjusted to a non-zero number OR you've lost significant traffic, this thread does not really apply to you.

If, however, your PR has dropped to zero AND you've not seen any significant loss in traffic from Google, rest assured that this is most likely a PR-reporting (PR on Toolbar) error; while admittedly alarming at first site, it's nothing to worry about. The tail does not wag the dog in these circumstances :)

With that said, I'll be chatting with some colleagues again today to hash out what might be occurring, and I'll report back here with any news.

Have a good week everyone.

I will keep you updated on any updates from Adam over the course of the week.

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports a member seeing a new tab within the Google AdWords Keyword Tool.

The new tab is for "Negative Keywords" and reportedly "will come up with potential negative keywords for your campaign."

I hope to obtain a screen capture from the member who reported it and post it here, I will update this post if I get it.

The first feedback is:

What I really had hoped it would allow me to do is to use negative keywords right in the Keyword Variations tab, i.e., tell it I was targeting, say, [card games] and then add [-pokemon].

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: Here is the screen capture from "Winooski", a longtime WebmasterWorld user, thank you:

Full size screen capture here.

Google launched at yesterday's Google Personalization Workshop iGoogle. iGoogle is basically the rebranding of the Google Personalized home page and all that goes along with Google and personalization.

The best coverage I have seen of the announcement was at Google Blogoscoped. I also linked to several bits of coverage over at Search Engine Land last night.

iGoogle is now live and you can see it at http://www.google.com/ig/. In addition, you can make your own gadgets at http://www.google.com/ig/gmchoices or select preexisting ones.

As you add gadgets and people start using your gadget, you will start to see people in the My Community section of iGoogle.

My first thoughts on the news was, are you kidding? iGoogle? But, heck, it has a ring to it.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Via DigitalPoint Forums, someone spotted, what appears to be a geo-targetted, Google AdWords ad for a search on Google Checkout that looks like this.

You can see the full size image at DigitalPoint Forums or a copy of it at Flickr.

I personally do not see this ad, it was probably pulled by now - but funny nevertheless.

Hopefully that will lighten up the day a bit.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A Cre8asite Forums thread tells the perfect story of someone who wants a page they own to be removed from the search engines.

One of my clients is an attorney and all of his partners have their own biography page on his website. One of the partners just left the firm and I removed her file from the server.

Now when her name shows up in the SE's, it's linked to a 404 error page I created, "Page cannot be found..."

My client doesn't want her name showing up at all in the SE's with a link to his website, even if it's to an error page.

With Google or Yahoo, there are ways to expedite the removal of the cache page and URL from the search engine. Recently, Google announced a new way to remove content from Google. You basically login to your verified Google Webmaster Central account and use the remove page tool. Yahoo also has a delete URL feature that allows verified site owners to remove URLs from their search index.

But the problem here is that this specific client, in the example above, wants the page removed from MSN Search. Microsoft has not given us a way to expedite the removal of a page or the cache results. Nor has Ask.com.

So what can a person do?

Softplus in the forums offers some suggestions:

(1) 404 the page, but that may take a pretty long time to impact the search results.
(2) Just change the content of that page and the next time Mr. Spider comes to crawl the page, the cache will be updated and the content you want removed will be gone.
(3) 301 the page to a different but related page.

Here are some other ideas:
- Block the page using a robots.txt command
- Add the nocache tag to the page

I personally think option two might be the quickest method outside of using a tool to remove the page, which is not offered by Microsoft of Ask.com.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.