June 27, 2007 Archives

The world is still spinning, and people are still digging. There have been happy reports on Digg and sad reports on Digg. Little known facts are now more widespread, and rumors are circulating. Such is life.

A few weeks ago, the new version of Google Analytics left beta . With this came some new features, especially the highly desired hourly reporting. I'm glad about that.

SEO.com is rumored to have sold for $5 million which is a pretty substantial amount of money. Personally, while the three-letter domain is helpful, I know where the best SEO sites are already, so I don't know if it will do much for me. The cost, however, is not surprising, though it really is a rumor at this point as indicated by the update by Mike Mann himself in the comments of that blog announcement.

With Google Docs and Spreadsheets getting better and better each day, you should be aware that there are some lesser known features within Google Docs and spreadsheet. Here are 5 things you may not know: there's live lookup via Google Finance, you can perform Google searches within a spreadsheet, there are color-coded live comments, Google Docs supports revisioning, and documents are backed up in multiple places at once to avoid possible loss of data.

Dave Naylor reported that YouTube is giving FTP information away . This was discovered after we realized that Google Video is exposing usernames and passwords and is doing so on an unsecure (HTTP) protocol. Pretty scary stuff for those concerned about privacy.

Business owners, rejoice! You can now verify your business on Google Maps . Life for you has just gotten much easier.

Just a few days ago, we heard that Google has purchased GrandCentral , a phone service that allows people with multiple phone lines to combine them into one line.

Earlier this week, Aaron Wall announced that Threadwatch is closing . There's been an overwhelming response to the closure, and many people hope Aaron will reconsider. He hasn't responded to them yet. Best of luck, Aaron.

In May, we reported that Bill Gates is interested in focusing and bettering their search engine. A WebmasterWorld thread highlights an article in BusinessWeek that emphasizes Microsoft's resolve to focus its energy on acquiring companies that specialize in vertical search.

The article mentions Microsoft's recent acquisitions:

• February 2007: MotionBridge - search for mobile phones
• February 2007: Medostry - health care information database
• March 2007: TellMe Networks - voice recognition for mobile search

The acquisitions—along with Microsoft's efforts to build its own niche search engines to find images, classified ads, and other content—are aimed at finding a chink in Google's seemingly impenetrable armor. "There's a lot of opportunity in domain-specific areas," said Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie at a February investment conference highlighting the Medstory purchase. "That search technology is first being woven into MSN Health & Fitness, and ultimately it will be woven into the mainline search."

It is true that Google is the web search giant, but there's potential to break that into verticals, just as there is potential to create social sites that appeal to a different type of audience.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld member is reporting that she has purchased a domain from a third-party domain provider and has built a website upon the domain that seems to be pretty Kosher. Her site, however, is not being indexed.

What she does know is that the Internet Wayback Machine indicates that the domain was spammy prior to her ownership of the domain. She, therefore, needs to submit a reinclusion request.

How do you do a reinclusion request? Go to Google Webmaster Central and click on Webmaster Tools. You will then see a list of sites you maintain and there is an option to "Submit a reconsideration request." This will only work if your site is verified.

On the next screen, you are instructed to only utilize the reconsideration request if your site had previously violated the guidelines (but was subsequently cleaned up) or if you recently acquired a domain which may have previously violated these guidelines. This appears to be the case for the WebmasterWorld member.

You can then select your verified site from the drop down and fill out information regarding why Google should reconsider it and you should be seeing a change within the next few weeks.

Google specifically has an option for submitting "reconsideration requests" for sites that you "recently acquired which you suspect may have previously violated" Google's webmaster guidelines.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

We covered Google's Click to Call feature which adds an image of a phone next to an AdWords ad and gets users in touch with advertisers on Google's dime. In a Google Groups thread, a new advertiser is eager to sign up.

Unfortunately, however, she is unable to.

AdWordsPro writes in to say that Google is not accepting any new advertisers for the time being.

I am sorry to say that the click-to-call program is not accepting new advertisers at this point - and I am not yet aware of when this might change.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

A Google Groups thread announces a new interface for Google Docs which happens to be miles better than the older interface. The Google Docs and Spreadsheets blog also covers the launch and redesign.

What has changed?

• There's a great new appearance.
• There are now folders for easy organization.
• The search function has improved.
• The interface now lets you view documents based on chronology, so you can see documents edited "today," "yesterday," "earlier this month," or "earlier this year."
• You can also sort by collaborator in shared documents.

Here's a screenshot of the new look of Google Docs:

This interface is much improved over the old one. Great job, guys.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

In mid April, Google released a new way to remove content from Google. Since then, people have been using it but there has been a lot of confusion on how it works and doesn't work.

A Google Group thread has dozens of posts with questions on why pages they remove, still appear. Or why it may take so long to remove a page.

Due to that, Susan Moskwa, of Google Webmaster Central, promised clearer instructions on the Google URL removal tool and also provided more details on what you should do to remove content from Google's index.

I'm sorry that you've been frustrated by the URL removal process! Just to clarify, here's what's required in order to get a URL successfully removed:

If you want to remove an individual file (a web page, an image, etc.), you can do any one of the following:
-Make sure that the URL returns an HTTP 404 or 410 status code
-Block the URL using a meta noindex tag
-Block the URL using a robots.txt file

However, if you want to remove an entire directory (or an entire website), you have to block that content using a robots.txt file. Just returning a 404 isn't enough; this is because it's possible for a directory to return a 404 status code, but still serve out files underneath it. Robotting out the entire directory ensures that all of its children are disallowed as well.

Forum discussion at Google Group.

Was Google AdSense a bit too square for you? Well, now you can opt for rounded corners.

The Google AdSense Blog announced two types of rounded corners. The first is "slightly rounded corners" and the second is "very rounded corners."

Here is a screen capture of the new feature in the AdSense publisher console that enables publishers to select the roundness of their ads.

And here is a "very rounded corners" ad, that is live:

So far the feedback in the forums are very positive towards this new addition and element of control. There is only one post with feedback on the impact on earnings, but I won't quote that until we get some more feedback from a larger set of publishers.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread has discussion about a service one member was offered.

In short, the service is composed of two offerings:

(1) Damage your competitor's search engine rankings
(2) Protect your own search engine rankings

They use threats in their email marketing message, such as "Pay up or have your forum spammed!" and "Your forum will be spammed in the next few days" and then "Pay up to this url or have your forum heavily spam."

What should you do if you get such an email? Forward it to Google or let me know.

But seriously, all you need to do is "just hit the delete button," as forum administrator, Robert Kerry said.

The big question is, can a competitor hurt your rankings? We discussed this most recently in August 2006 and October 2006. I mentioned that Google has a FAQ that addresses just that.

What can I do if I'm afraid my competitor is harming my ranking in Google?
There's almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you're concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don't control the content of these pages.

"Almost nothing" are the words used here, so technically, it is possible.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

In late 2004 and early 2005, page hijacks were a huge concern with Google. Back then, sites used a 302 redirect to take over a susceptible page within the search results.

Marcia reports at Search Engine Watch Forums that the hijacks are still an issue.

I found this just this week when doing an inurl: search for one of my domains, and it's the OTHER site that shows up instead of my homepage. A search for that site by name has always brought the site up - but no more, it's nowhere to be found.

One domain causing it to happen has over 50K hijacked pages duplicated and in the index on their domain, and another has many, many thousands and is running Adsense. They're both anonymous proxies.

DaveN concurs that he has been seeing these proxy sites; "I have seen anonproxy sites rotating IP address, and cloaking the real one that google gets..."

There are not many examples showing this in the thread so it is hard to pinpoint for you guys. But there are respected SEOs discussing the issue.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Update: WebmasterWorld also has a thread on this topic. The post shares a lot more information, so I will quote most of it.

Over the weekend my index page and now some internal pages were proxy hijacked within Google's results. My well ranked index page dropped from the results and has no title, description or cache. A search for "My Company Name" brings up (now two) listings of the malicious proxy at the top of the results.

The URL of the proxy is formatted as such:
https://www.scumbagproxy.com/cgi-bin/nph-ssl.cgi/000100A/http/www.mysite.com

A quick search in Google for "cgi-bin/nph-ssl.cgi/000100A/" brings up now 55,000+ results when Saturday it was 13,000 and Sunday it was 30,000. The number of sites affected are increasing exponentially and your site could be next.

Take preventative action now by doing the following...

1. Add this to all of your headers:
<base href="http://www.yoursite.com/" />

and if you see an attempted hijack...

2. Block the site via .htaccess:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} yourproblemproxy\.com

3. Block the IP address of the proxy
order allow,deny
deny from 11.22.33.44
allow from all

4. Do your research and file a spam report with Google.
http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html