June 26, 2007 Archives

In what may be a response to Terry Semel's departure from Yahoo, WebmasterWorld moderator martinibuster reports that Wenda Harris Millard, Yahoo's Chief Sales Officer, has left the company. Search Engine Land reports that Millard will be working at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.

This is also part of a Yahoo initiative to combine search and display advertising teams under the leadership of David Karnstedt, according to a June 24 press release. Yahoo has written in the press release that Millard is leaving "effective immediately."

However, Millard has told the Wall Street Journal that it appears that they misrepresented her departure.

"I feel badly that Yahoo has had such a tough time lately," said Ms. Millard in an interview. "And I'm sorry they announced the story this way because clearly I resigned and I have a great new job," she added.

According to forum members, Millard is "going to be missed big-time."

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Update: Kara Swisher has interviewed Wenda Harris Millard regarding the recent change in management. [Thanks, Christine Mohan!]

Last week, I wrote about how to see geotargeted Google ads from another location. The solution, for Google, is relatively simple: add location attributes and values to the Google ad preview page. However, this time, a DigitalPoint Forums member asks how you can see geotargeted Yahoo ads from another location.

The solution to this is tougher, since there is no Yahoo ad preview option. The only way I am aware of is to use a USA proxy server to view the ads. I'd love to hear it if other people have additional suggestions.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

According to a Google Groups post, Maps Guide Brian has informed us that users can now write reviews for businesses in eleven countries. The catch: you need a Google account to do so.

To write a review for a business, just search for it, expand the information window by clicking on the "+" sign, and click on "Write a review" at the top. You can also expand the window by clicking on "more info" in the left panel. Once you submit your review, it'll appear on Google Maps right away.

Barry experimented with this feature and tried it out on our company, as you can see in his Search Engine Land post on June 19th. He walked us through the process of creating a review, and I just checked -- it's still there on June 26:

Cool stuff. I guess the reputation management police might be after the real negative reviews, but positive reviews won't get hit so hard.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Yesterday, users reported that Google Reader was not refreshing feeds and TechCrunch picked up the story. A Google Groups thread has also been monitoring the downtime, eventually with Mihai Parparita, a Google Reader Engineer, informing the community that the problem has been resolved.

Very sorry about this, feeds should be correctly refreshing again. They will catch up on updates over the next few hours.

Google Reader also suffered from an outage on June 12th.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

The SEO community is suffering a big loss. Aaron Wall has announced on Threadwatch that he is closing down the site on Friday for a number of reasons: bad publicity, edgy news, gossip, decentralization, spam, and having other priorities in life.

Aaron is happily in a relationship now, so I really cannot blame him. However, the news has come as a shock to the Threadwatch community, many of whom are asking Aaron to change his mind.

Threadwatch was nearly three years old, having been founded on October 5, 2004 by Nick Wilson who then sold it to Aaron Wall in November of 2005. Over the course of time, Threadwatch has been a centralized part of many SEOs/SEMs to find the latest news and discuss some of the more controversial topics of the industry. It was a hub with some very good information, and I personally am sad to see it go.

I wish Aaron and the other Threadwatch moderators the best.

Threadwatch forum discussion continues at Threadwatch -- until Friday, I suppose.

I have been tracking a Google AdWords bug via a WebmasterWorld thread for several days now. The bug is that AdWords professionals who have linked client accounts within the My Client Center (MCC) are unlinking - so AdWords managers cannot access those accounts easily.

The bug was first reported on June 16th. AdWordsAdvisor confirmed the bug on June 18th. Yesterday, June 25th, the bug seemed to have gotten worse, by spreading to many more AdWords advertisers and professionals.

In addition to the unlinking of client accounts, some AdWords professionals are noticing this message:

Your qualification is at risk.
You are at risk of losing your qualification due to low account spending. To retain your qualification, you must maintain the minimum account spending level.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

If you are logged into any Google property (Gmail, AdWords, AdSense, Docs, etc.) while doing a Google search, your results may be personalized, without you really knowing it.

A WebmasterWorld thread discusses just that. It is funny, because often you visit your own sites more than your competitor's site. So when you do "ego" searches, the personalized results may rank your site higher, because Google knows you visit your site more often. This leads to confusion for those who want to see how well they rank in Google.

How can you see Google search results without the personalization? Two options.

(1) Log out of Google
(2) Append &pws=0 to the end of your search in the URL bar

The example I gave in the WebmasterWorld thread is http://www.google.com/search?q=keyword%20phrase&pws=0

By appending that, the results won't be personalized. Yea, it may be a pain in the neck to do this. Joost de Valk released a OpenSearch plugin you can add to Internet Explorer or Firefox to make it easier. I did something similar for Safari users. It basically adds a search option to your browser search bar, which you can easily select. Here is how it looks like in Safari, but works similarly in Firefox or Internet Explorer.

I just select the Google-P and presto, I got Google results without a personalized taste. I explain more on how to set it up for Safari at my personal blog, but if you use Firefox or Internet Explorer, you will want to see Joost de Valk.

I personally keep personalized results on, but I often need to check with personalized results off. So this toolbar comes in handy. Personalization is all over the place now. In fact, I just got my July edition of Wired and noticed I was on the front cover. Personalization at its best!

I would just like to add one more thing, a bit unrelated to this post. I placed an example of how adding &pws=0 to the URL would change the results from personalized to non-personalized results. But my example, which was a search on [keyword phrase] turned out to rank my corporate site in the first position. It was totally unintentional and I had no idea I was in the first result for a search on [keyword phrase] until after I put the example in the WebmasterWorld thread. Funny, unintentional forum spam.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Cre8asite Forums is holding a small poll of their members, asking if it is harder to optimize for Google's Universal Search as opposed to OneBox results?

Right now, the majority of people feel it is not harder because it "follows similar rules as OneBox Optimization."

Well, does it? While OneBox results were almost guaranteed to be at the number one spot on the page, a Google Universal vertical result may not show up at the top or at all.

While Universal Search may take results as if would the OneBox extractor, but the logic in how and when these vertical results are placed within the Google web search results differ from before.

But SEOs and SEMs are up for the challenge and they are excited.

Ben Pfeiffer wrote an excellent article on How To Capitalize on Google Universal Search, which should be read, if you missed it.

I am glad to see most SEOs in Cre8asite Forums smiling over the change as opposed to being upset with it. They are seeing this change as an opportunity and are thus more likely to benefit and be ahead of the curve.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

A Cre8asite Forums thread asks what are the search engine optimization implications of switching from ASP to PHP?

This is a fairly basic SEO question but it is a good one. This question applies to changing any URLs, not just from ASP to PHP. It is also from HTML to CFM or CFM to ASP and so on. It also includes changing a file name from abc.html to cba.html.

Search engines index pages. Pages are determined by their file name and extension and domain name. If you change any of them, it is considered a new page. So if you have a page at domain.com/filename.html and change it to domain.com/filename.php - it is a new page in the eyes of a search engine. If you have domain.com/filename.html and change it to domain.com/newfilename.html - it is a new page in the eyes of a search engine. If you have a page at domain.com/filename.html and you change it to domain.net/filename.html 0 it is a new page in the eyes of a search engine. By now, I assume you get my point.

What can you do? I would follow the same steps I laid out in Version 2: Relaunching a Site: SEO Considerations. You must set up 301 redirects from the old pages to the new pages, with dynamic sites, it may be easier, since there may be some database logic that you can set these 301 redirects up dynamically. You must set up custom 404 page not found error pages up for those pages you simply can't 301 or for the pages that you forget to 301.

Those are some of the basics when it comes to switching page extensions or pages in general.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.