July 2007 Archives

AccuraCast reports on the Search Engine Watch Forums that Google is testing a new ad format that has expandable local results.

Here's an example of what AccuraCast has found with additional screenshots posted on Search Daily News:

When you click on the Map, it expands to show an address.

I tried to reproduce this but was unable to do so, so they must be rolling it out to a select set of individuals.

People are wondering and hoping there's an opt-out feature -- additional map links could draw attention to the ad and cause clicks that don't convert. I hear that.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Postscript: Statement from Google:

We did want to clarify that this Google Maps plusbox experiment is not a closed beta. It's actually shown for all advertisers that provide a local address to Google. However, since this feature is an experiment, we are only showing this plusbox to a small fraction of our users. Also, advertisers are not charged for any clicks inside the plus box. We consider this experiment to be another example of how we are constantly looking for ways to improve our advertising offerings and provide additional benefit to both our users and advertisers.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks why when you do a search at Google.com on a phrase, why does Google return results with that phrase of words scattered around the page, as opposed to a page that matches that exact phrase.

The abstract example given in the thread was a search for "blue fussy widgets." Why does Google return pages that have the words "blue," "fussy," and "widgets" scattered through the document returned by Google, and not rank a document that contains the "blue fussy widgets" as one phrase, in that order. This is called an exact match, and it seems Google may not be returning exact matches in documents as highly as they once did.

WebmasterWorld moderator, Robert Charlton, shared his opinion:

In general, I've found that Google likes exact matches on the page... just not too many of them... but there are several hundred other variables. I can imagine various off-page/on-page scenarios that might cause a page containing the three-words separated on the page to rank higher... probably less likely to happen as the three word phrase is more competitive and purposefully targeted by others.

However, some people feel that this is an anti-web-spam measure taken by Google:

Nowadays I can feel like I have to use 'almost' but never quite 'perfect' keyword phrases in page titles because of Google's paranoia or increased hypersensivity to e-vil optimizers. As a perfectionist by personality, I find this rather annoying.

I am not saying this theory is true. I don't have the specific examples to reproduce these results. I tried several random searches and found some that may support this theory, while others do not. Bottom line, there are hundreds of factors why one page might rank above another page, even if exact match comes into play. The SEOs here are upset that exact match doesn't have more of a weight in making this decision.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The Google Docs & Spreadsheets blog announced that Google has been listening to user feedback and has added two highly requested features: the ability to hide documents from view and to sort by name, date modified, starred/unstarred, and who the documents are shared with.

Syd of the Google Docs & Spreadsheets team also updates Google Groups with this information.

He adds that this is how you sort documents:

From here, you can sort alphabetically or in chronological order.

- To sort by document/spreadsheet name, click "Name".
- To sort by document/spreadsheet owner, click "Folders/Sharing".
- To sort by date last modified, click "Date".

And this is how you hide them:

From the Docs list: to hide a document or spreadsheet, check the box to the right of the document/spreadsheet title and click "Hide" from among the toolbar options. All of your hidden documents will be available in the "Hidden" category, listed below "All items" in the sidebar.

The Hide feature works well. However, I couldn't get the alphabetical sort to work. Here's what happened when I tried an alphabetical sort:

And here's the "reverse" alphabetical sort:

I was able to reproduce this on other existing documents (that I've hidden, naturally) ;)

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

After several complaints on many forums, including DigitalPoint Forums, High Rankings Forums, and WebmasterWorld, and from the fingers of Andy Beal, Google has officially acknowledged a reporting delay with Google Analytics.

As of 5pm PST this evening, some users will start to see part or all of the data from the period between Saturday and now appear in reports. We expect updates for all accounts to continue through Monday night into tomorrow and will update this blog when reporting is fully restored.

Many forum members reported later that evening that their statistics were up to date.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums, High Rankings Forums, and WebmasterWorld.

EGOL started a thread at Cre8asite Forums asking how using the various robots.txt command or META noindex nofollow commands will impact the flow of PageRank and link popularity.

Several members go through some detailed examples and what-if scenarios. However, Ammon sums it up nicely.

Ammon explains that a page that is that is not in the Google index but the links are picked up to that page, won't count. Why? Well, the original PageRank document has a concept called "dangling links," which reads:

Dangling links are simply links that point to any page with no outgoing links. They affect the model because it is not clear where their weight should be distributed, and there are a large number of them. Often these dangling links are simply pages that we have not downloaded yet.

Because dangling links do not affect the ranking of any other page directly, we simply remove them from the system until all the PageRanks are calculated. After all the PageRanks are calculated they can be added back in without affecting things significantly.

This may be a classic example of what a "dangling link" is. And if this original paragraph in the PageRank paper is still valid, then there is your answer. But is it still valid?

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Over a week ago Yahoo announced a search update, telling us to expect "fresh web data and crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the last few days."

New reports are coming from WebmasterWorld of more changes to the Yahoo Search index.

The ones chatting right now are not too thrilled with these changes.

Seeing some more changes that look really bad. A major step backwards.

I think (hope) that this newest change reverts back to the original update. What I am seeing today, I saw for a few hours last week.

Although the current update is not the greatest, it is much better than what I am seeing today. The top ten for some competetive terms are flooded with suspended free hosting accounts.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A web designer at Cre8asite Forums has an interesting predicament. She has a client who has a local store and a headquarters both located in two different states. Would it be bad to put two addresses in the footer of the website? Could it negatively affect organic and local rankings where it previously helped?

Nobody knows for sure. One member suggests that you should not put two addresses in the footer but the other address should be posted somewhere, like on the Contact Us page.

Or you can use Google Trends to see which location is more popular. Ultimately, the visitors come first.

But moderator EGOL says that this is a good question to experiment upon.

You have a chance to do a great experiment here.... run analytics to see what search queries come in for the current state, then tally the google rankings for those queries, and then run rankings for matching queries for the new state.... upload the new footer and see what happens to the ranks.

This reminds me of adding your address to Google's Local Business Center, which can also help.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

Over at Google Groups, Gmail Guide has announced that Google is seeking videos that show how email travels from one end of the world to another.

They have provided a cute video here:

The deadline to participate in this video collaboration effort is August 13, according to the official Behind the Scenes Video page. So far, there's some pretty cool stuff, as Nathan Weinberg has highlighted in his blog post.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

As we've discussed before, Google has been planning an unavailable_after tag that would enable webmasters to alert Google to when content should no longer be crawled by the Googlebot. A Google Blog post by Dan Crow announces that this feature is now live. Additionally, Google is now accepting a META tag to be associated with any file. This allows webmasters to control access to PDFs, graphics, video, and audio files.

WebmasterWorld members are glad that Google is embracing additions to the robots.txt protocol, but they're concerned that other search engines won't follow suit. This is great for Google, but webmasters still need to be in control over the META elements as before for Yahoo, Ask, and MSN.

Barry over at Search Engine Land also announces the news, and beu at Search Engine Watch Forums alerts the community of this addendum as well.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums.

According to reports in the San Jose Mercury News, Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, is looking to build a "a community-programmed search engine that competes with Google." His company, Wikia, has just purchased technology to create such an engine.

As you know, many SEO type folks do not like Wikipedia. Can this open source search engine really compete with Google?

Moderator EGOL at Cre8asite Forums puts his thoughts quite succinctly:

Have you watched the content of a wikipedia topic? Lots of goals, lots of agendas, some extremely competent get edited by idiots.....

..... let that compete with a company that is highly motivated by performance, assessment and profits.

The doubt is echoed at Search Engine Watch Forums. Many people feel that it's not going to be much better than Mahalo, which is already being ridiculed by the SEO community.

More information is posted at GigaOM.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums and Search Engine Watch Forums.

Google AdSense Publishers are sharing data on what types of sites they are filtering within their Google AdSense Competitive list filter.

Here is a set of one publisher's data from his filter list:

TLD Filtered:

• .com 47,5%
• .info 15,0%
• .net 12,5%
• .biz 4,5%
• .org 6,5%
• other 14,0%

Countries:

• USA 25%
• private registration 24%
• UK 17%
• Canada 13%
• Rest of World 21%

All agree that 200 line limit within the Google AdSense filter is not enough.

What does your filter list look like?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The other day, I reported that Google Drops Supplemental Results Query Command. I suspected that Google will drop the supplemental results command and possibly the supplemental results label forever. I still feel this will happen but a new way to find supplemental results have been discovered.

A search for site:http://www.seroundtable.com/& will return supplemental results for this site.

So the syntax is currently www.domain.com/&

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

The other day I reported on several SEO glossaries at Search Engine Land.

Over the weekend, a new WebmasterWorld thread began a group effort at building out a new SEO dictionary. The list is pretty impressive and is expected to keep growing.

It would be nice if the moderators cleaned it up after the postings settled down a bit and made it a sticky thread.

The dictionary goes from well-known people at Google, to the definition of an authority site, to canonical issues.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

When you login to Google AdSense as a publisher, the first screen you are shown is a summary of earnings and clicks.

The top left shows "Today's Earnings: $00.00," replace the zeros with real numbers. Then by default the reporting under the earnings summary is for today and shows your earnings broken down by the content network, referrals network and AdSense for search product. At the bottom of that report, it shows the "Total Earnings" for that view. Typically, the "Total Earnings" for that view, which is for today, should equal the "Today's Earnings" figure.

For me it does.

But for some publishers it does not.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread has a couple screen captures showing the numbers reporting differently. Some suggest the publisher should wait to see if the earning figures balance out in a few hours. But they waited and the numbers still don't add up for them.

Is this a bug or just a timing issue?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

OH HAI GUYS! I have perfected my LOLcats speak thanks to Danny at Sphinn who decided he'd be so kind as to share the LOLcat translator with us. Great. Now I'm in trouble.

Search Engine Roundtable Themes

Did you know that Friday was Moon Day? Or that Monday was Hot Dog Day? Well, if you're only reading our site through your feed reader, you probably didn't realize that we changed the Search Engine Roundtable themes for these celebratory days.

This was our design on Monday:

This was our Friday design:

What do you think? Will Barry put up a theme for me for my birthday? (psst... it's in January.)

Search Engine Watch Redesign

Speaking of themes, Search Engine Watch has redesigned their site entirely. It's gone from dark to brighter. I must say I like it a lot. Great work, guys.

Yahoo Search Assists You

Yahoo is trying out pretty cool functionality called Yahoo Search Assist. It guesses what you're searching for by opening a box of the most frequent searches -- especially if you stopped typing. It also shows related searches when you find the results. Pretty cool. Search Engine Land has a lot more information about this feature.

Digg Drops Google, Grabs Microsoft

Digg and Microsoft have signed up for a three-year exclusive ad deal to begin in August of this year. No more Google? That's right. Will the Digg users start preferring Microsoft over Google? It's possible. Everyone loves Kevin Rose's choices.

Green Google

Did you know about Google's Solar Panel Project? Apparently, neither did a lot of people. I know it was covered on Boing Boing in October of last year, but even the guys at Digg didn't know about it until May. Where's the solar pride?

Some Business People Just Get Lucky

Business.com was sold for $345 million this week. Can we say rich? These guys bought the domain for $7.5 million dollars in 1999 and were ridiculed for wasting that amount of money. Well who's laughing now?

The Lisa Spots Something New

My BFF found something awesome yesterday. Google Maps has apparently added a popular searches feature to every search result. For example, if you search for something in New York City, you'll typically find that other people are searching for a Duane Reade pharmacy (because there are hundreds of these in Manhattan). Famous landmarks and other popular locations often show up for a particular map location. Here, try it out.

SES San Jose and RustyBudget!

First of all, we got kudos in TechCrunch over the weekend for our new project, RustyBudget. Essentially, this is an author and writer's budget that allows easy management of multiple topics. But Barry and I were talking about the upcoming Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, and he suggested that we use the budget for conference coverage. And that we did. Yesterday, I added all the sessions to the budget, and our conference reporters (me, Barry, Kim Krause Berg, David Wallace, Steve Krull, and Carolyn Shelby) started grabbing the sessions. I mean grab in the literal sense, too. Here's how we manage our conference coverage with RustyBudget. The video is sweet too. By the way, Ben Pfeiffer won't be at the conference as you may have noticed in the screen caps, but we'll miss him!

Good to Know

Apparently, if Google AdSense impressions are not inflated by bots such as Snap.com or Ask.com. AdSenseAdvisor confirms that the reports are accurate and that such crawls will not negatively affect you.

Yahoo Update, July 2007

It has been confirmed that Yahoo did a July 2007 update. There has been a minor change in rankings and the Yahoo Search Blog discusses the algorithmic changes related to crawling, ranking, and indexing.

Microsoft Supports Sitemaps, Reads it from Robots.txt

Guess what? Now Microsoft is supporting Sitemaps. Microsoft will also employ autodiscovery to find your sitemaps file if it's included within your robots.txt. It's real this time!

Google Forcing Advertisers into Pay Per Action

It seems that Google is opting users into PPA without their consent. But why? Nobody knows, but everyone seems to be pretty disappointed.

Google Drops Supplemental Results Query

Goodbye, Google's Supplemental Results Query. You can no longer do a search that will show supplemental pages. Is this the end of supplemental pages?

Matt Cutts Wants You to Suggest Google Webmaster Central Improvements

Matt Cutts posted on his blog that he's looking for suggestons for Google Webmaster Central. He has a poll which you should all vote on if you haven't already. So far, there are over 2000 votes.

Hyphens and Underscores are all Treated Equal

Google has confirmed that it is now treating URLs with hypens and underscores equally. This was broken by Matt, of course, at WordCamp last weekend. Now, you no longer need to worry about how you delimit your URLs; Google will treat both naming conventions the same.

BAI EVERYONE! HAS GREAT WEEKEND!

On a Search Engine Watch Forums thread, AussieWebmaster asks if any advertisers have noticed an increase in impressions but a decrease in conversions. He believes that there is some "serious" expanded matching going on, especially as he found this tidbit at Yahoo's Search Marketing Help Section:

The Advanced match type displays your ads for a broader range of searches relevant to your keywords, titles and descriptions and/or web content. If you use the Advanced match type, and to help maximize the relevancy of your listings to search users, make sure you take advantage of Excluded Words, which are words or phrases that prevent a listing from matching a search query.

It's possible, some say, but the other possibility is that the Yahoo! network has added new partners.

Mel66 believes the problem is a combination of the two:

I think you're both correct - Advanced Match is too expanded for my liking; and you definitely have to watch for low-quality partners coming in and out of the network. We had one pop up a few weeks ago that sent us hundreds of bad clicks in a few days. By the time I contacted Yahoo about them, they'd shut down their site.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A Search Engine Roundtable Forums member wonders if there is any consequence of having his IP changed on a website that ranks pretty well. Will the rankings plummet? Is this risky?

Members believe that a simple IP address change should not have any impact. However, moving to another hosting provider can be risky in terms of script execution and operation (you wouldn't necessarily want to have a PHP5 compatible site be moved to a server that runs PHP4, for example). You also may not want to move to an IP that hosts banned sites. That's a given.

Last year, Barry wrote about this and says that when moving providers, you should follow these three steps:

(1) Make sure all files are properly moved
(2) Make sure the site functions properly
(3) Try and keep your old site running on the old IP for two weeks after switching

Number 3 is most important . As he says, "search engines run their own domain name servers (DNS), and those servers don't always update their records as quickly as other DNSs."

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Roundtable.

In WebmasterWorld, a Google AdWords advertiser mentions that he's having difficulty tracking his ads because it appears that Google has mixed his uniquely tagged keyword ads with creative ads.

I have both creatives and keywords all individually and uniquely tagged. Since Tuesday, July 24th, an increasing percentage of clicks that should have gone through a keyword destination URL instead go through a creative URL.

This issue is said to be confirmed by another member who has already contacted his Google rep for a fix.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Last October, Google announced that it was installing 1.6 megawatts of solar photovoltaic panels at the Mountain
View Googleplex.

The amount of electricity that will be generated is equivalent to powering about 1,000 average California homes. We’ll use that electricity to power several of our Mountain View office facilities, offsetting approximately 30% of our peak electricity consumption at those buildings.

Google now has a Solar Panel Project Page dedicated to their efforts. The page shows a graph of the amount of solar energy generated at the Googleplex, features a photo gallery of the solar panels, and compares solar energy kilowatt hours to appliance energy consumption. For example, did you know that 7,482 kilowatt hours is equivalent to 62,350 hours of flat-TV screen viewing or 2,720 loads of laundry? Now you do.

This is what the Googleplex looks like with the solar panels installed.

DigitalPoint Forums members are pleased. One believes that other companies should follow Google's example.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

An article in the Wall Street Journal says that Business.com, an online marketing directory, was sold for $345 million.

Business.com works as a kind of online yellow pages. It allows users to search for business services, while collecting a bounty for sending Internet traffic to individual merchants.

WebmasterWorld members react to the purchase. The price tag is quite high. Will it be worth it?

They'll need a great strategy to turn a quick profit on this investment.

Maybe.

If the owner of utube.com can generate $162k a year from the ads and traffic they get, one can only imagine what business.com must be pulling in...

Would you ever invest in a domain that is that costly?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports that Google has dropped a search command that used to show a site's pages that were included in the supplemental index.

The command that worked was site:www.seroundtable.com **** -asssdsd but that seems to no longer be working.

The last time I tested it was when I wrote at Search Engine Land, Is Google Gearing Up To Drop The Supplemental Result Label? I guess they were gearing up to drop the supplemental results command and possibly the supplemental results label is next to go.

This is not the first time Google dropped the ability for us to locate the supplemental results of our pages in the Google index. The very old supplemental results check stop working sometime after September 2006.

As Tamar reported earlier this week, Matt Cutts of Google is taking suggestions on what should be the next feature for Google Webmaster Central Tools? One of those items on the poll is a way to list supplemental result pages within the tool.

So maybe Google will drop it from the index and allow SEOs and Webmasters find this information in Webmaster Central?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Lisa Barone of Bruce Clay, Inc. spotted a cool feature on Google Maps. The feature shows you what the popular searches are for places near the location you are in.

For example, a search on NY, NY in Google Maps, returns these popular searches; penn station, port authority, duane reade, bloomingdales, w hotel, madison square garden, moma, car service and soho. Of course, each popular search is hyperlinked, so if you click on madison square garden, you are shown a map for MSG.

Here is a screen shot of the NY, NY Google Map search:

It does not seem to work internationally yet. It works in most popular U.S. cities.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Reports are coming from Search Engine Watch Forums and WebmasterWorld of issues with Google's AdWords Editor.

The issues appear to be connectivity issues, causing issues with making changes to campaigns. This is only impacting those campaigns with position preference enabled, said Google.

One advertiser received a response from Google on the issue:

After we ended our call, I escalated this issue to our Technical Team. While reviewing your account, they recognized that you have been unable to download your campaign into Editor because it has position preference enabled. Fortunately, they are aware that some users are currently having this technical problem with AdWords Editor, and it affects all campaigns which have position preference enabled. Due to this technical issue, campaigns with position preference enabled cannot be downloaded in AdWords Editor right now.

We regret any inconvenience this has caused you, but please be assured that our engineering team is working hard on the problem, and we hope to have it fixed very shortly.

A couple weeks ago we reported similar issues with the AdWords Editor, but they seemed to then have been resolved. These may be lingering issues from that issue?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums and WebmasterWorld.

One of the Search Engine Roundtable's trademark features is our extensive, quick and comprehensive coverage of the major search marketing conferences available to the community.

Most of our readers see the hard work we put in time and time again to type up and publish our notes on this site. In fact, we have covered 26 conferences dating back to 2003. In fact, we have covered 546 sessions over those 26 conferences. We have done so across America, and globally, including places like San Jose, New York City, Chicago, Miami, Las Vegas, Seattle, New Orleans, Sweden, Toronto, London, Germany, China, and more. We have had dozens of hard working contributors type away hard at their keyboards to get this done for you. You can find our past conference coverage by scrolling through our search conference archives.

As we prepare to cover the approximate 75 sessions at the upcoming Search Engine Strategies San Jose conference, I thought I share a little behind the scenes on how we prepare to cover such a huge conference amongst several authors.

I recently released RustyBudget a tool to help coordinate the stories bloggers and authors write about on a daily basis. We are now using it to coordinate the sessions each of our writers will be covering while at the Search Engine Strategies conference. For more information about this tool, which I use to manage the topics here, at Search Engine Land, my personal blog and other places, read the RustyBrick press release named RustyBudget - the Writers Budget, see my personal blog post on it, or read TechCrunch's review.

The screen shot below shows a screen shot of the budgeting system:

As you can somewhat see, we place all the sessions into a folder named "Available Sessions." On a first come first serve basis, the authors login and drag the topics from the "Available Sessions" folder to their own folder, titled by their first name. Here is a video of me dragging a topic into my folder.

That is what goes into preparing to schedule several authors over a four day conference with 75 sessions.

We hope to cover all 75 sessions. We currently have about 40 to go, but I suspect we will have no problem covering 90% of the sessions. If you are interested in helping with the coverage, please contact us.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

This morning, we got a hat tip from Jon West about a Google AdWords campaign feature that has been added to allow campaigns to run virtually forever (or until Google dies, but does anyone see that end in sight?)

Here's a screenshot of the feature:

The Google AdWords Help Center confirms that advertisers can now either set an end date for their ads or let their ads run indefinitely.

Advertisers now have two choices: set a specific end date when their campaign will stop running, or select 'no end date' to have their campaign run indefinitely. Campaigns set to 'no end date' don't have to run forever -- they simply run until the advertiser decides to pause or delete the campaign manually, or resets the campaign to a specific end date. You can make those changes at any time. If you want to create a campaign and let it run until you decide to make changes, 'no end date' is a good choice.

What do you think of this feature? Do you want your ads to run forever?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Guess what, everyone? According to Google Docs and Spreadsheets Guide on Google Groups, a new feature has been added to Google Docs. You can now create a Google Calendar event from within a document. This feature is explained in further detail at the Google Docs & Spreadsheet Help Center.

The goal is collaboration, according to Google.

As you can imagine, this feature is great for those of us who enjoy Google Docs & Spreadsheets as a collaborative resource for collaborative events -- think of all the times a document becomes a meeting -- scheduling a get-together to review a proposal, sending an agenda in advance, or just keeping score for your Wednesday night backgammon club.

Here's where you find the new feature:

Nice.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Danny over at Search Engine Land breaks some news about the Yahoo! Search Engine. Yahoo has come out with Search Assist, which is a smart and selective tool to suggest particular search terms and appears when you need it (like when you've stopped typing). It also shows related topics.

Danny's screencast shows what it's all about.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Yesterday, Digg made an announcement that it dropped Google as its advertising partner and has chosen to sign a three-year exclusive advertising deal with Microsoft. Search Engine Land quotes Microsoft's Steve Berkowitz about the move:

Our collaboration with Digg is about bringing our advertising technology and sales force to one of the fastest-growing sites on the Web and a true innovator in user-generated content. We believe advertisers will welcome Microsoft and Digg's combined strengths to forge more meaningful connections online.

DigitalPoint Forums members believe that this might mean that Microsoft will acquire Digg, but I'm not so sure.

WebmasterWorld takes a more rational approach. They have an understanding of the Digg community (Digg loves Google but is not so keen on Microsoft), and the story on Digg initially reflected that but people started simmering down as their comments got buried. ;)

Cre8asite Forums members echo the anti-Microsoft sentiment. And what Administrator Adrian said is very true:

I expect a lot of Digg fans will find some way to rationalise it. It's how they are, they're a big crowd of sheep in a way. If someone like Kevin Rose says "Microsoft's cool, we're going to use them for our ads", I reckon a decent sized portion of the Digg crowd would go with it.

I totally see that. Everyone follows Kevin Rose. Even I do.

On Sphinn, the story is a bit different. Search Engine Land writers had the story as did many other prominent blogs. But they were embargoed until 3PM EST. Did Kevin Rose break his embargo? It seems that he did -- two hours earlier. Oops.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint, WebmasterWorld, Cre8asite Forums, and Sphinn.

Google recently launched pay per action for all US AdSense to try out.

Reports from DigitalPoint Forums show that some publishers are being opted into the program automatically.

One publisher said that Google emailed him saying he "has been selected to" be automatically entered into his ads showing Pay Per Action ads. Within five days, Google will dynamically replace 5% or less of his normal AdSense ads with Pay Per Action ads.

The only way for him to opt out is to email Google, requesting to be opted out.

People find this outrageous. Why would Google force publishers into this program, when it is clearly available for them to select under the referrals section of AdSense? Why require an opt out, just let them opt in?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A Cre8asite Forums thread asks why is this person's private Facebook profile listed in the Google index?

In this case, Google really did not fully index this person's profile. They just crawled a link to this person's Facebook profile, but could not access the private profile and index the content on that page.

This is something everyone needs to keep in mind. You can disallow search engines from accessing your content, but if some public page is linking to that content, Google can pick up on that link. So if you want zero traces of a URL being available, you need to ensure that there are no public ways to get to that URL.

This is exactly that case. The person linked to his or her profile from a blog and Google indexed the link. Google probably tried to index the content, but was denied. How do I know? Simply because the search result contains only a lowercase title and URL. There is no full title, no description and no cache link. All signs of Google having problems indexing the content on a page.

Note, there are public Facebook profiles available. Here are some examples of public Facebook profiles.

If you want to friend me, I have a Facebook profile over here. To be honest, I rarely use it, but feel free to "friend me."

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Google launched placement reports to help clarify where advertisers are seeing impressions and clicks from, for their ads they place in AdWords within the content network.

The reports provide more transparency then ever before. But the transparency is not crystal clear. There are some placement report lines of data that say "other." This is where Google is not telling you all the details about that impression and click. What can other mean?

Moderator Discovery posted an email form a Google representative which classifies most, if not all, the possible scenarios for an "other" classification. Here is the quote, it is long:

Unavailable data

In some cases, statistics provided by the Placement Performance report may not be exact. Due to the large volume of data a Placement Performance report can include, there are several factors that can affect reporting accuracy. These factors are listed below.

1. Impression cutoffs

Sites that have accrued a negligible amount of impressions per day may not be included in your report.

2. Property exclusions

Statistics from some properties that are a part of the Google Content Network may not be included by the Placement Performance report, such as Gmail.com.

3. Unidentifiable URLs

Although rare, there may be technical reasons that a specific web site does not properly pass back a domain or URL to us, resulting in an unidentifiable web site address, resulting in them not being included in your report.

4. Reporting delays

Reporting delays may also impact the accuracy of the Placement Performance report, depending on the time of day you run a report. We recommend you run this report after 3pm PST the following day to ensure you get the most accurate metrics for the previous day.

CATEGORY DEFINITIONS

You may see an 'Other' URL or even your own website in your Placement Performance report. Below are some scenarios to help illustrate why this may occur.

I. Your website's URL

At the time the user types your website address into the browser address bar, Internet service gets temporarily disrupted and your site's server simultaneously goes down. The user is directed to a page of ads that are targeted to what he entered into his browser address bar. The Placement Performance report attributes this impression to your website based on what the user typed into the browser address bar, which is why you may see your website appear in the report. This does not mean that your website is hosting ads as an AdSense partner.

II. 'Other' URL

There are two types of sites that are categorized as 'Other' in the Placement Performance report:

- Although rare, there may be technical reasons that a specific website does not properly pass back a domain or URL to us. Because these websites are not identifiable, they are aggregated under the 'Other' line item in your report.

- All pages that served your ad through our AdSense for Errors program will be categorized as 'Other' in the Placement Performance report. These pages serve users with targeted AdWords ads when they enter a search query in their browser's address bar instead of querying it through a search engine (like Google). Instead of displaying an error page, users will see a page displaying ads and relevant information. (THIS IS NOW SEPARATED INTO ERROR PAGES line item.)

We may not be able to identify the specific URL that displayed your ad through AdSense for errors. This is because the URL or search term users typed into their browser may not be a valid website address. With AdSense for Errors, when a user types a non-functional URL into their browser's address bar with the intent of reaching a website or conducting a search, the user will get redirected to a page with relevant content with or without ads. This improves the user experience because the user will see a page relevant to the content they were looking for instead of seeing an error page.

In these cases, because the domain is not a registered domain or functional website, a URL or domain is not passed back to Google. Instead, we will accumulate and report traffic from these AFE sites under the 'Other' line item in your Placement Performance report.

You can see whether the 'Other' line item is a result of error page ads under the 'Special Category' column in your report. The column will read 'Error page ads' in these cases. To include this column in your report, select the 'Special Category checkbox under 'Attributes' when creating your report from within your account.

Note: In the beta program for placement reports, users could see ALL placement URLs!!! Now the Other, Domain ads and error summary categories are used to cloak the placements!

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Towards the end of May, Yahoo launched the new Panama Search Ad platform in the UK.

Yahoo recently introduced the new ad ranking model that takes into account quality. Gabs posted at his blog an email he received from Yahoo Europe:

Dear Advertiser,

We're excited to announce that the new ranking model is now live in our UK market. The new ranking model is designed to improve user results through higher quality search ads. When users engage with these higher quality search ads, advertisers will receive more interested, valuable potential customers, helping to drive better results for your business.

As we previously announced, both bid amount and ad quality now determine an ad’s rank in search results.

Yahoo launched the quality component in the US on February 5th. It seems like Yahoo gave less time for the UK advertisers to get accustomed to the new ad platform before switching over to the new ranking model. But then, the UK advertisers have been reading the feedback from the US advertisers, so maybe they need less time to transition.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums & Search Engine Watch Forums.

It seems to be the consensus on a DigitalPoint Forums thread that if you post your URL to Yahoo! Answers, Yahoo will index your site a lot quicker than you'd normally expect.

A member asks how long it takes for sites to start being indexed in Yahoo. Apparently, not long, if you utilize this practice. That's not to say that you should spam your site URL throughout Yahoo! Answers, but if your website is related to a question being asked and can help someone find the answers, then it may be useful.

A much older WebmasterWorld thread says that without this practice of linking in Yahoo! Answers, you can simply wait the standard time of 6 months to one year to be indexed.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Last Friday, TechCrunch announced that Theseus has been given $165 million in funding to build a multimedia search engine.

Theseus, a German based project that is aiming to develop “the world’s most advanced multimedia search engine for the next-generation Internet.” will received a cash injection of $165 million from the German Government, under approval by the EU.

That's a lot of money, says DigitalPoint Forums member zman. Could it be a European Google killer?

Not really, says one.

Google is GREAT in normal search, but in multimedia and other vertical search, google is already pathetic. So those german guys won't have to kill the multimedia search business of Google afterall. It is not even alive. Look at google images, or froogle.. They should be killing like.com and not google.

Many users hope that Theseus will change its name, because http://theseus-programm.de/ is bad for branding. Google's 6 letter word that is used in conversation on a regular basis is something that everyone recognizes. This sentiment is defended by users who feel that it's only a development website and will not be the final destination for the search engine.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

Chris Winfield at Cre8asite Forums poses an interesting challenge for those of us who use social networking sites religiously. Is it a threat to your security? This question is promoted by an article where opponents of providing personal information believe that it indeed is a threat:

According to credit information provider Equifax, fraudsters could make off with users' personal information in order to commit ID theft--and the company is urging Web users to limit the amount of info they post online.

Most forum members are cautious about volunteering a lot of information. I understand that. It is rather difficult, however, for the young users of sites like MySpace and Facebook not to volunteer their personal information. The sites encourage it (if you don't enter a birthday on Facebook, for example, you get prompted to do so every time you log in until you do).

Still, that doesn't necessarily work well for some users.

[S]ecurity is a frame of mind, a way of life. You're either secure or not. To give an analogy, why lock the windows if you leave the door wide open? Lock everything!

I believe that users need to exercise caution when providing intimate details about themselves online. There's no reason to share with the world the last 4 digits of your social security number, your mother's maiden name, your father's middle name, or the name of your first pet. However, if this poses a problem in the future, and I can see that it might, it becomes a matter of credit providers to evolve, because there are millions of innocent victims whose identities are at risk on these social sites.

Neil Munroe, external affairs director for Equifax, said in a statement: "The problem is that people don't realize the significance of the kind of information they are putting out on the Web and who may be accessing it." He cited details such as date of birth, e-mail, job and marital status as the kind of data frequently posted online by unwary users.

It's time that those "minor" detail requirements are replaced by lesser known details.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

The official Microsoft Live Search representative at WebmasterWorld said that Microsoft will finally be supporting Sitemaps (for real this time) now. Microsoft will currently support autodiscovery of your sitemap file if it is included within your robots.txt file.

I have been giving Microsoft a hard time about not demonstrating how they will be using the Sitemaps protocol to help Webmasters.

Google, Yahoo and Ask.com all allow you to ping them with the Sitemaps file. Google and Yahoo have Webmaster consoles giving you a way to submit your Sitemap for upload. However, Microsoft, to this day, has nothing, but their word that they will or are supporting it.

Yesterday, Microsoft said that they have "started considering sitemaps in robots.txt and will extend this to most sites within the next few months." Meaning, they are experimenting locating Sitemaps files if they are included in your robots.txt file. But finally, they have admitted that they do not and have not offered "the ability to publish sitemaps via ping or webmaster tools." In addition, they said, they "do not necessarily take into account sitemaps listed in robots.txt files right at this moment."

When will we see Microsoft supporting the Sitemaps protocol they so happily said they would?

As of yesterday, Microsoft will use "autodiscovery for sitemaps through your robots.txt."

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

If you conduct a search for google custom search blog and look at the results, you will notice this:

Why is there just a title and url? Well, if you look closer at the home page of the blog, you will find that they have added a nofollow, noindex tag to the page.

<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW" />

Why did Google do this? We did report in the past that Google's Blogger software by default adds this tag to all new blogs. Maybe, Google forgot to remove the default option from this blog?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

There are reports across the web that Google Analytics has gone down for about 30 minutes.

First reports started coming in at about 5:30am (EST). By around 6am (EST) people started confirming that they can log into Google Analytics.

People were noticing 404, page not found, errors when trying to access reports. Many were completely unable to login to see their reports.

Nikos Kapsomenakis posted a screen capture of the issue.

All seems to be clear now.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and Google Groups.

An updated Search Engine Watch Forums thread reports one respected user finding referrals from Yahoo Search in their new Google Placement Reports.

Placement reports, are new reports from Google, that show AdWords advertisers who opt in the content network, where there ads are being displayed.

SEW Forums moderator, Discovery, said, he spotted Yahoo within his placement reports:

Started getting this in my placement report this past week

search.yahoo.com/search...

Only 12 clicks this month at a mid level CPC... no conversions!

This begs the question, is Yahoo using Google AdSense to supplemental their inventory?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

So are eCommerce sites really harder to rank than other websites? There is a thread on High Rankings Forums where one of the members asks "How do ecommerce websites, that don't have the articles and content, become successful?".

In my opinion these types of sites are not much more difficult to rank rather they just require some special attention and tactics that are different than what you would do for a blog or content website. Jill says many of these sites become successful with "Advertising, marketing, public relations. Just like any business".

If you have been doing SEO for sometime for other people, you are invariably been approached by the little known and struggling eCommerce site who desperately wants your attention to SEO their site for top rankings in Google. You know that website created by some awful excuse for an eCommerce system selling Nascar commemorative plates or better yet army knives or some dropship website from eBay that no one wants. They tell you they feel downright maligned because Google won't rank their website. How unfair! Why it may be harder for a Nascar commemorative plate site to rank in some reasonable time, most eCommerce sites are not too difficult to rank, but just require some old fashion elbow grease and dedication to get them high in the search engine results.

Torka posted some great thoughts on the subject how eCommerce sites can rank just as well as any site out there. She says

"When you talk about "ranking highly" one has to ask: for what terms? I mean, somebody has to rank well for search terms related to the products you offer. And if you're actually selling the items, then your pages should be highly relevant for those products, no? So why would you assume you can't rank well for those terms?"

IMO, one of the biggest things people have to get over is the idea that ecommerce sites can't have "content."

She makes an excellent point about the mentality some people have towards their website. Another poster follows and says: "Ecommerce owners generally spend a lot of time loading the database and can't be bothered writing their own content (the usually use manufacturers' content)".

Torka follows saying:

Exactly my point! If they can't be bothered to spend the time writing original, benefit-focused content (or justify spending the money to have a professional copywriter create it for them), then they shouldn't complain when they get mediocre results.

So its a matter of how much you want to rank and your dedication to getting the job done. Good information.

Continued discussion at High Rankings Forums.

As we mentioned earlier, WebmasterWorld has partnered with SEO Class. This is just a reminder that upcoming SEO Class will be held on 7/30 and 7/31 in New York City.

The presenters will be Greg Niland, Brad Geddes, Michael Gray, Todd Malicoat, Brett Tabke, and Joe Laratro, and the training will be held at the Affnia hotel in Manhattan.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A discussion at WebmasterWorld has users trying to determine why some PDF files don't get indexed with a "View as HTML" link whereas others do. How can you implement the same functionality?

Nobody knows if it's possible. The suspicion is that Google can process some PDF files and not others, and it's not an opt-out procedure.

I think it may not be displayed when Google actually has a hard time converting the PDF document to HTML, not because the webmaster instructed them to.

Meanwhile, a number of users are pretty disappointed that a webmaster would even want to disallow that link. They seem to hate the idea of having to open a file as a pure PDF.

If you want to publish documents on the web, put them in a web format.

Better yet would be an option to integrate a Google PDF reader instead of relying on Adobe's service, which is getting a lot of negative comments in the thread.

Maybe now Google have an online documents service, they could 'invent' a new pdf-style service.

Is there a directive that will allow this to be implemented? Nobody seems to know. Do you?

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A Cre8asite Forums poses an interesting question regarding social responsibility. If you have a site that requires age verification and you want to keep the content away from people who are not of age, what can you do?

The best solution offered is to hold true to your concerns of social responsibility and keep the content from search engines just as you would from users.

But I think that has to be carried over to the search engines, too. If you can't show your content to underage surfers then the engines shouldn't show it to underage surfers either. And that's exactly what will happen, via snippets and cached pages, if the site is indexed.

So that seems to be possible, by using the following directive:

<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOSNIPPET">

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Matt Cutts has written a blog post with a poll to get more information from all webmasters on the next feature for Google Webmaster Central, a great resource for webmasters already that is always improving.

He asks users to vote for their most important desired feature so that the Google Webmaster team can possibly integrate them in the future. He notes that they're only looking right now to get an idea of what is most important for webmasters and the winning result may not necessarily be implemented right away.

Some of the suggested improvements include:

• Providing more information about penalties
• Giving tools that report/detect duplicate content
• Show broken links to your site
• Give a way to list supplemental result pages
• Show pages that don't validate
• Provide a tool that helps move from one domain to another domain

These are good suggestions, and it's encouraged that you vote on the poll.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks if the format of a title tag matter much in terms of SEO?

Excluding your the keywords you are placing in the title tag, just thinking about the format of the keyword you put in that title tag, does it matter?

Examples:

• Red Widgets–Red Widget Supplier
• Red Widget – Red Widget Supplier
• Red Widget ¦ Red Widget Supplier
• Red Widget : Red Widget Supplier

Now, everyone in the thread is in agreement that Google will ignore all those characters. So you can technically go with any version you like. It should not make a difference in terms of how well your page ranks in the search engine if you choose a : over a -. Note, this is not the URL formatting of the page, it is the title tag.

Now, the rest is a matter of personal preference and what you think may lead to a higher click through rate from the search results.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Until today, Google treated dashes and underscores in the URL differently. A dash (hyphen) between two words in the URL (i.e. keyword-phrase) would tell Google that those are two different words (i.e. keyword +phrase). In the past, an underscore between two words in a URL (i.e. keyword_phrase) would tell Google that those words are a single word (i.e. keywordphrase). Now both underscores and hyphens in the URL are treated as word separators.

News.com reports this has now changed. They have coverage from Google's Matt Cutts at the World Camp conference saying, Google is now going to be treating underscores and dashes the same.

One key development that Matt shared with the audience was that underscores in URLs are now (or at least very soon to be) treated as word separators by Google. That's great news, because it historically hasn't been that way. Back in 2005, Matt stated that Google did not view underscores in URLs as word separators. That meant that in a URL like http://www.mysite.com/iphone_review.html Googlebot couldn't "see" the words iphone or review. Instead it read iphone_review as one word.

Yes, this appears to be a small change but this topic is one of those topics that are constantly coming up in search forums.

Again: dashes (i.e. hyphens) are now equal to underscores where both are now treated as word separators.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Yesterday, Search Engine Watch and the blog and forums, underwent a redesign and had features added. There is a Search Engine Watch Forums thread now discussing the changes. I thought I do a before and after comparison.

The Home Page
Before:

After:

A Search Day Article
Before:

After:

The Blog
Before:

After:

The Forum Home
Before:

After:

Forum Post View
Before:

After:

Those are the side by side comparisons.

Personally, the new look is a lot more "airy" due to the white new look. The homepage has this new AJAX tabbed approach to see content from SearchDay, Forums or the blog. The forum upgrade added the latest VBulletin features, which is nice - especially the quick reply. My only issue is the smaller fonts used throughout the site, and even more so on the forum thread titles within the thread views of the forum.

One other thing is that this new design reminds me a little of SEO Chat:

Overall, the feedback in the forum on the new design is positive. It will take a bit getting used to, but that will happen over time.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Google has begun allowing advertisers to test video ads within their campaigns.

We have yet to see any solid numbers on impressions, clicks, conversions and so on until now.

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread has some early numbers from one advertiser who is testing out the new video ads. Here are his early numbers for the time period of July 16 - July 22:

• Impressions: 3,114
• Play Rate: 1.41%
• CTR: 0.09%
• Ave. Position: 1.2
• Clicks: 3
• Ave. CPC: $0.74

Keep in mind that these are very early numbers.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Kim Krause Berg started a rant on her blog about how the Sphinn community was not welcoming of usability experts. Her rant became a hot topic on Sphinn and it prompted Danny to create a Usability category. Kim brought the discussion to Cre8asite Forums asking if her rant went too far.

It was unanimous; everyone felt that it did not.

In fact, what about search conferences? Everyone agreed that Usability is something that should be integrated into the agenda for future search conferences.

I think we're really seeing something different: SEO is encompassing so many different terms and ideas, and usability should be part of it.

There have been plenty of times, when SEOs have been thinking that some other angle should be considered SEO or not. I recall the same talk about copywriting, marketing, hand-coding, link baiting and now it is about usability.

As EGOL says, "Usability is the big part of the New SEO."

However, Ammon Johns disagrees. He feels that Usability is not part of the new SEO per se, but it's definitely been something that was there for awhile.

It is part of old-school marketing. We call it making a smooth presentation.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

On Thursday of last week, a number of users subscribed to Google Reader and who browse with Internet Explorer 7 were encountering problems where Google Reader would load a blank page. The issue was brought to a Google Groups discussion.

After a few hours, Mihai Parparita of the Google Reader Engineering team wrote to say that the problem was fixed and was related to posts that had embedded video.

We have now released a fix for the problem (you're right that it affected posts with embedded video). A reload of Reader should pick up the fix.

There have been other outages in the past, such as the one where feeds were not being refreshed and half Google Reader's users were not able to access feeds. Let's hope this is the last of it. :)

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Ever wanted to become a Googlebot to see what the bot sees? Now you can. While a Firefox Extension already does this, a DigitalPoint Forums thread discusses how to do this as well (for PC users).

The idea is to make some changes to the Windows registry. Be careful when doing this -- I'm inclined to recommend the Firefox extension instead of making changes that can hurt your system.

Further, another word of caution from the DigitalPoint member:

A word of warning, some sites will ban you if they do an IP range check, or a reverse DNS check and your IP doesn't match that of their stored Googlebot IP addy or DNS.

The skepticism mounts with that warning, with users considering this an attempt at hacking.

hacking is illegal so you could get kicked off your ISP, fined, or even end up with more severe legal trouble. This trick has no way of hiding your IP number so you could end up caught very easy.

Would I go so far as to say it's hacking? Probably not. But I don't think using a registry hack is a good way to go about this; it should be temporary, and the Firefox extensions are more ideal in those situations.

Indeed, many users agree that it's not hacking at all.

Changing your user agent is not hacking. It's not like there is a law mandating you use a specific user agent.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

An thread on WebmasterWorld asks an interesting question: did the availability of the Harry Potter book affect your Google AdSense earnings? It seems that a webmaster has noticed an 80% drop in traffic ever since the book release on Friday night, and I kind of understand why: I spent Saturday night and almost all of Sunday reading the book. I even got a few emails from friends asking me if I was all right. :) (Yes, I was. I was just reading Book 7!)

I wasn't the only one, it seems. AdSenseAdvisor knows a few people who have done the same thing:

What an interesting thought! I hadn't considered this, even though I know a number of people who spent all of their free time during the past few days feverishly reading the new book instead of going online.

I suppose it depends on demographics.

Gives you an interesting insight into the age group? of your visitors and / or their mental profile...

That's because not all advertisers ran into this issue:

Luckily my target audience has pretty much nothing to do with HP so I'm "safe" from that maaagic.

One of the "Adsense challenges": you never know which event will affect your traffic/earnings.

But it's possible that historical metrics have accounted for the drop of traffic on that particular site:

Much more logical answers would be huge flooding problems in northern Europe, India and China (USA?) meanwhile horrendous heatwaves in southern Europe and the USA plus school holidays in many regions have just started meaning parents/families away too.

I have nothing to do with HP nor financial planning etc and my traffic always drops at this time of year and as soon as August arrives my European traffic will fall off the edge as businesses close down for their summer breaks.

I don't know... for me, I definitely had my nose stuck in the book. :)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

In response to Google's announcement to anonymize user data after 18-24 months and possibly the response by Ask.com to launch AskEraser and also to anonymize user data after 18 months, Microsoft has taken a similar stance, according to a Reuters report and Microsoft Press Release.

Specifically, Microsoft said it would make all Web search query data anonymous after 18 months on its "Live Search" service, unless it receives user consent to store it longer. The policy changes are retroactive and worldwide, it said.

WebmasterWorld members think that it's a good step, though many would rather it be defined by the user, possibly in the browser settings.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld, and blog buzz continues at Techmeme and Search Engine Land.

The other day we asked, Should We Worry About Bots Inflating Google AdSense Impressions?

In short, there are bots that can trigger JavaScript, and since they can trigger JavaScript, they can generate clicks and impressions on ads, such as Google AdSense. This can cause spikes and anomalies in the AdSense data reports and earnings.

AdSenseAdvisor has checked this issue out with the AdSense engineers and confirmed Google is aware of these types of bots.

I've conferred with our tech specialists and engineers and they assure me that our system is already aware of the bots from sites like Ask.com and Snap.com, including those that take screenshots. We're also constantly on the lookout for new sites and services that might inflate AdSense reports, so rest assured that your reports are safe and accurate.

Good to know AdSense is on top of these bots.

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

It appears that reports from the WebmasterWorld thread are showing the Yahoo Publisher Network outage we have reported twice is now resolved.

There has not been official confirmation from a Yahoo representative, yet. But posts in the thread suggest it has been fixed.

Payment per click is about back where it was and targeting seems a little better. Keep it up, YPN....

Yahoo fixed the problem. The targeting is MUCH better.

Eeverything is back to normal again. thanx Yahoo. I think when we see some problems with yahoo we all speek and when there is some thing good there are very few responses. this is not fair.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Last Thursday, July 19th, the Yahoo! Search Blog announced that they have started rolling out an update.

We've been rolling out some changes to our fresh web data and crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the last few days. We expect the update will be completed by the weekend. So, as you know, throughout this process you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages in the index.

Since then, I have been waiting and seeking out threads discussing changes people have seen to the rankings in Yahoo. But I have yet to see any thread discussing any shifts and changes in the Yahoo Search results.

Typically, the forums spot these updates before they are announced. In this case, the announcement was made and still, there is fairly no discussion about changes in the search results.

There is a WebmasterWorld thread discussing the announcement of the update. There is one person saying he saw an increase in traffic from Yahoo, "One of my site was getting 1 or 2 daily from yahoo, suddenly it got 10 so far now." But outside of that, the only discussion in the forums I track are from the Y!Search Blog announcement.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld

Update: People are now discussing minor changes in ranking.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread asks if you can add more than 200 URLs to your Google AdSense Competitive Ad Filter list.

The ad filter tool allows a publisher to specify which advertisers they do not want to show up on their site. It was specifically designed to help you block competitors for displaying on your site, but is now used to block "MFAs." The problem for many publishers is that as time goes on, they run out of room and they need more than 200 lines to add to their block list. MFAs keep appearing and that is just the nature of the business.

Is there a way to increase your 200 maximum limit to more? I am not sure, but it is suggested that you email your AdSense representative to see what they can do on your behalf. Typically, Google can accommodate certain publishers and advertisers.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

TGIF! I'm hoping you all had an interesting week. I personally can say I have because ever since my BFF wrote about my boss not being my friend (for the record, mine is my friend!), I've been getting bombarded with Facebook friend requests. It seems that everyone has joined since Lisa blew the horn. It's kind of ... refreshing. (Hi Chris Boggs!)

Do You Sphinn It?

And so, beyond the realm of Facebook is Sphinn, a social network just for you and me! In its first week, there has been a great amount of involvement, and Sphinn even hit their 1,000th member already. (Awesome!) We are covering the discussion from Sphinn on Search Engine Roundtable as well, and my first post to that effect was on SEOing your site in less than 60 minutes, a post that was originally posted by my great friend Matt McGee. Read what he says, people. His headline draws your attention, does it not?

Google Image Ads Coming Soon

Looks like Google Universal Search has made it easier for the search engine giant to take advertising further with image advertisements in the search results. And Google is also running a contest. Can you find Bourne? Nathan Weinberg is trying to.

Google Webmaster Central Improved

Google Webmaster Central keeps getting better and better. You can now get more detailed information about your sitemap, as the Webmaster Central console will provide error reports related to problems within a submitted sitemap. Better yet, they also added a message center so that webmasters can find out about any penalties on their websites. Now that is cool.

Google: Not as Rich as You Thought

First, Google bounced some AdSense check. Their Q2 earnings were released and they seemed to have $3.87 billion to spend. Apparently, analysts are unhappy about their earnings, with one saying that "The guys have been spending like drunken sailors."

Google Print Ad Setup Walkthrough

Who cares about those analysts? Google still has solid growth and cool tools. Here's another one: Google print ads. Barry takes us on a screenshot tour of how to set up print ads. This is pretty cool stuff, advertisers.

Gmail Shirt Designer Can Win an iPhone!

Are you a designer? There's a contest for a talented artist to design a shirt for Gmail. The winner gets $2k and an iPhone, among other cool toys. If the winner comes from this blog, let us know! :)

Yahoo Sounds Like Tyroo

That's if I'm pronouncing it correctly. (We're still debating how to pronounce Sphinn.) Earlier this week, Yahoo announced that it has acquired stake in Indian advertising firm Tyroo. This strategic move allows Yahoo to capture Indian's audience through its already existent advertising channels.

Microsoft Office Live Sells Ask.com Sponsored Links

If you're an advertiser signed up on Microsoft Office Live adManager Beta, you can now display ads on both MSN and Ask.com. This gives the advertisements increased exposure, so it is great for advertisers and for the advertising networks.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

An increased amount of people are noticing that Yahoo has added search suggestions after users type more than two letters in the search field on Yahoo.com. This was first reported by Search Engine Land but was discovered recently by DigitalPoint Forums members.

(Ironic, isn't it?)

The feature, according to many, is called "Search Suggestions." In fact, according to Barry's report on Search Engine Land, you can disable it if you don't like it, which some DigitalPoint Forums members have done.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

Social media is important, as I alluded to today. Many people are finding that mainstream social sites are not always sufficient to address certain interests. Digg is a technology site. Netscape is more politically oriented. Sphinn is a search marketer's dream. What about other sites? Barry Welford starts a discussion on Cre8asite Forums to find social networks that are most suitable for a variety of alternative niches, such as food/drink, household, animals, and gardening. Do you know of any sites that appeal to these interests?

A few great sites have been shared, so I wanted to pass them on:

• 17 Niche Social Media Sites that Send Traffic
• Wikipedia's Social Networking Websites List
• 1200+ Websites in 50+ Categories

That should get you started. I'd be interested in hearing about other successful social sites in other verticals as well.

Forum discussion continues at Crea8asite Forums.

First, we reported on July 16th that the Yahoo Publisher Network was running slower than usual. The next day, we reported that Yahoo will fix the outage by next week. Now, DigitalPoint Forum members are wondering if they will get the lost revenue due to the outage.

Apparently, the answer is no.

I spoke with a manager at YPN who said they will not be making payments up to the YPN publishers as 'they lost revenue as well'. One begins to wonder if Yahoo gets it...?

The disappointment is obvious. Members think that Yahoo just doesn't get it despite their own losses.

Of course they lost revenue themselves, but they don't care about the publisher enough to accept responsibility and admit they were in the wrong.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks if anyone is doing any dynamic price changes based on their search ads.

For example, let's say you run two different ads, both pointing to the same product landing page. One ad might be targeting a more expensive set of keyword phrases while another ad might be targeting a less set of expensive keyword phrases.

Based on the ad, you can detect the referral and serve up different pricing and different content on the same product landing page.

If one ad costs more on a per click basis, you may want to shift that pricing up to cover the costs. If you did this in an extremely dynamic environment, you can determine the price of the click on each click and serve up a new price per click, based on a percentage of the price of that click.

For example, you know you can spend $1 per click for product A. If some keywords cost $2 per click, you may determine you need to increase the price of product A by 4%. Even better, you may even be able to decrease the price of your product for those ads that cost you less than what you can spend to make a profit.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google announced earnings last night, Greg Sterling covered it over at Search Engine Land. Right now, GOOG is down in the pre-market to 507.00, or down $41.59 or down 7.58%.

Google reported revenues of $3.87 billion for the quarter ended June 30, 2007, an increase of 58% compared to the second quarter of 2006 and an increase of 6% compared to the first quarter of 2007. Google reports its revenues, consistent with GAAP, on a gross basis without deducting traffic acquisition costs, or TAC. In the second quarter of 2007, TAC totaled $1.15 billion, or 30% of advertising revenues.

My first reaction when reading the release last night was, "only a 6% increase compared to the previous quarter?" That is not Google like, I thought. Soon after, the news coverage began spilling in, Techmeme has a lot of the coverage:

• Google's rapid rise disappoints market
• Google Shares Dive After Search Giant Misses Profit Views
• Google's 2Q profit lets down investors
• Google's Profit Falls Short, Shares Drop
• Google 'spending like drunken sailors'
• and more

The fact of the matter is, Google spends a lot as a company, relative to others. People cite food as the first thing to go, to save the company money. Well, I am not sure about that. But let's look at how this may impact the SEO community.

We have been pushing Google to provide support to SEOs and Webmasters for the free organic side of their business. Google has been investing heavily in Google Webmaster Central. Do they make any money from it? Does it make sense for them to keep making Webmasters happy? Are Webmasters even happy about knowing more or does it just fuel their anger?

I am not saying that Google is going to ditch Google Webmaster Central and the tools and support people that come with it. I doubt it even makes a large dent in their cost structure. But they all add up.

Google cited a major cost were AdSense publisher payments and "certain partners that were less favorable to revenues," via FT.com. But the major reason was hiring and bonuses.

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

Rand Fishkin made an interesting comment on ad optimization in a recent blog post. At the bottom of his post, he adds:

high CTR doesn't always mean better conversions, though there is often some correlation

This quote was then taken by GuyFromChicago at DigitalPoint Forums for a discussion. What are your thoughts of Rand's statement? Is he wrong? Is there a meaningful correlation between click through rates and conversion rates?

GuyFromChicago starts off with his opinion, saying that they can be a relationship between ad copy and conversions as long as the searcher will find what s/he expects beyond the ad:

While CTR and conversion rates can be related - theory being if your ad is well written (in relation to the keyword+match) and an accurate representation of what a searcher will find after clicking your ad the likelyhood of them converting will be higher - I've not seen this play out in the real world with any degree of statistical relevance.

But the problem remains that there is no statistical relevance, a thought that is echoed by other members. Some say that you can see a correlation if you have so many large advertising campaigns across a variety of niches, but this would take a long time to study. Another member feels that statistical relevance is even overrated.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Let's say that when you first built your site, you relied heavily on directories to get your name out. You've also built good content and get linked to every so often. You're now complacent with your rankings primarily because you're getting good traffic from a variety of these alternate sources, and your directory links are not doing much for you.

Do you drop the directory links, or do you continue to pay the yearly rate for these links that may do absolutely nothing for you?

A High Rankings member asks the community: what would you do?

If your content is self-sustainable, it may be perfectly fine to start trying to avoid paying these fees for directory inclusion. If the rankings take a plunge, you know that the directories you've dropped are likely to be responsible for it. And that is exactly what you can try, says member donp:

Sounds like you are doing it right, wean yourself off the directories, watch for a dip in traffic & rankings. if you are getting "x" traffic from Yahoo or whoever and it's worth it, pay the bucks.

Jill Whalen agrees.

You can drop them, and see if you notice any change in rankings. You can always re-up if you think that dropping them was the cause.

So do I. :)

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forums.

A DigitalPoint Forums member points to a vulnerability within Google Reader that enables blog owners to add code to their blog that will allow any visitor to automatically subscribe to the RSS feed. Patrick Altoft wrote about this discovery and says that if you copy certain code to your site and a user has logged into his/her account, they will automatically be subscribed to your blog:

The problem is that unscrupulous websites can copy the links to Add to Google homepage or Add to Google Reader and open them up in an IFRAME for every visitor, meaning that anybody who visits their website while signed in to a Google account will suddenly have subscribed to the RSS feed on both Google Reader and the Google homepage automatically.

I tried Patrick's demo and it seems to have been fixed. In fact, Matt Cutts responded as well and it appears that the hole has been patched.

In any event, if you want to subscribe to our feeds (and we know you do), we have two RSS feeds (a normal feed and a full feed) and one email feed. You're welcome to Subscribe to any of our feeds.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Yahoo has bought a stake in Tyroo, an online advertising agency in India, according to InfoWorld. The article says that approximately 35 to 50 percent of the company was acquired for an undisclosed amount of money. With this move, Yahoo hopes to capture more of Indian's fast-growing advertising market.

A WebmasterWorld member is not happy with this move. He says he has already been approached by Yahoo to replace his ads with Tyroo's.

Reduction of competition in this space is not good news. They had approached us with ad inventory offerring to replace adSense with Tyroo ads with a better EPC.

Given that Yahoo publisher network is non existent in India, I hope they will not interfere with the network Tyroo has created for itself.

However, the same member thinks that this move is good for India-specific traffic, which is exactly what I believe this acquisition was meant to accommodate.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Senior WebmasterWorld member, incrediBILL, started a thread at WebmasterWorld expressing his concern over bots and crawlers that may cause his ad impressions with Google AdSense be increased.

He explains that typical spiders don't run JavaScript, so those bots won't impact your AdSense impressions. But he explains that more and more bots are not running JavaScript to generate snapshots of your pages.

The new trend is to augment the SERPs with screen shots in places like Ask, Snap and others, and the screen shots are made with javascript enabled so that javascript page elements (menus, etc.) are visible. That means your AdSense ads are also being included in those screen shots and possibly skewing your statistics.

Both Ask and Snap make screen shots of various pages in your site so it's not just a single home page image we're talking about. Snap has attempted to make upwards of 40K screen shorts on my site alone before I stopped counting. Ask seems to be a little more conservative in the quantity of their screen shots, but that could be growing pains as it remains to be seen if they'll screen shot entire sites and/or all sites they index.

Since some bots are generating impressions on your ads, that will impact your CTR and possibly hurt your metrics both as a publisher and even as an advertiser.

Google's AdSenseAdvisor did come by to say he or she would get us an answer from Google soon. But another member makes a very valid point, "Why would a screenshot be taken of more than your front page?"

We will watch the thread and report back Google's response when we see it.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: Google AdSense Accounts for Bots Like Ask.com and Snap.com...

Google has released a new way for them to notify webmasters of possible penalties with their web sites.

In the past, Google sent emails, but this was abused by German hackers a couple times, so Google had to change how they handled that.

Now, if you are in violation of Google's web search TOS, you will receive a notification via Google Webmaster Tools, just one more reason to sign up and validate your site with Google Webmaster Central. If you are in violation, you will see a message indicator in the message center. It looks like this:

And if you click on a specific message, it will probably include content about search quality issues with a specific site. Google said, over time, they will also include non-search quality issue type of emails. Here is an example of a quality issue message:

If you login to your account and do not see a message, it does not mean you do not have quality search issues, at least today. Google said, "the number of sites we’re contacting is small, but we hope to expand this program over time." So, over time, hopefully all verified sites with quality issues will show a message in the message center.

Danny Sullivan explains that Google still may send out email notifications, but that will stop shortly. There is a current issue where if you get an email notification, and are not verified within Google Webmaster Central - you won't be able to see the message even after verifying your site. But Danny said they will be fixing that issue shortly.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Rob Kerry (evilgreenmonkey), the new Search Engine Watch Forums editor, has posted a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums announcing that a new design and feature upgrade is coming to the property.

He explained he visited the Incisive headquarters yesterday and received a preview of the new design. Rob said, "Well, the SEW guys will kill me for announcing this first - but we're about to receive a facelift." The new design is reportedly going to address "usability issues and cluttered pages," he added.

The Search Engine Watch Forums will be undergoing a complete redesign as well, with added features. "An exciting new array of features on the forums, including status rankings for long-serving members and some awesome prizes to the most helpful and sociable members," said Robert Kerry.

When can we see these changes? Rob said, "new look going live as soon as next Monday."

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A Google Groups thread explores whether Flash websites could be detrimental to search engine optimization efforts.

Bergy of Google offers some feedback and addresses common misconceptions.

For one, he goes into some of the concerns regarding hidden text. You should consider intent, and if you're hiding unrelated keywords, that's spam and should not be practiced. Flash developers often find themselves having to hide text behind flash animations, and as long as the same text is presented to the user and search engine, the rankings should not be affected.

The goal of our guidelines against hidden text and cloaking are to ensure that a user gets the same information as the Googlebot. However, our definition of webspam is dependent on the webmaster's intent. For example, common sense tells us that not all hidden text means webspam--e.g. hidden DIV tags for drop-down menus are probably not webspam, whereas hidden DIVs stuffed full of unrelated keywords are more likely to indicate webspam.

Bergy also reviews the webmaster's site and offers important tips regarding Googlebot's crawlability for specific links. I thought that this is important to share as well:

Googlebot deals with #anchors differently than ?arguments. Googlebot treats ?arguments as strict part of the URL string, but ignores #anchors, since in normal HTML, they all point to the same page...

Therefore, if you have a page that is www.example.com/index.html#aboutus, Google is really only sending PageRank to the index.html page, not the #aboutus anchor.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

The Gmail blog has announced a competition: design the new Gmail T-shirt and win a prize.

The chosen designer will score some awesome toys that even I would be jealous of:

• An 8GB iPhone
• A Jawbone bluetooth headset
• A $400 gift certificate from JetBlue airways
• Google schwag (I love Google schwag)
• $2,000 in cash

Now that's pretty sweet.

If only I had design skills. I'd definitely want to participate. So do a bunch of DigitalPoint Forums members. Alas, we'll be able to participate in the competition by voting on the best design at Threadless.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Microsoft Office Live's adManager Beta search advertising service will be adding Ask Sponsored Listings, allowing for advertisers to display ads on both MSN and Ask.com. Over at WebmasterWorld, martinibuster links to an InformationWeek article that has more:

The addition of Ask.com's sites to its paid search service will expose Microsoft's customer listings to an additional 5% of search traffic.

That takes Microsoft's network a step closer to Yahoo, which in June captured 25.1% of all search traffic.

Numerous advertisers are looking forward to trying out the new MSN and Ask.com and think that it could even be a competitor to Google in the future if other search engines are included in their advertising structure:

Maybe if Microsoft heaps a few more 2nd tier search engines into AdCenter, and incentivise a lot more searches outside of the gaming industry, then they might be able to contend with Yahoo for a distant second to Google.

There are definitely increased marketing opportunities for advertisers and the reach should be greater with a larger user base. As Barry quotes James Speer of IAC at Search Engine Land, the Ask.com Sponsored Network reaches 59 million people. Good stuff.

For more information, check this page.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

It's only July, but people are already talking about the highly anticipated Search Engine Strategies conference of the summer, SES San Jose, to be held on August 20 through the 23rd. Already, Jim Lanzone of Ask.com and Marissa Meyer of Google are lined up as keynote speakers, and there is a great amount of sessions, so I know that people are eagerly anticipating the conference. I'll be there, Barry will be there, and if you don't know either of us, say hello!

In any event, the forums circuit is buzzing about the conference. At the High Rankings Forum, people are already collaborating and announcing that they've made their travel accommodations. Jill Whalen says she'll be there, because after all, she's speaking.

In a Google Groups thread, Adam Lasnik says that he'll be there.

A party thread has already started in the Search Engine Watch Forums, but nobody knows of any parties just yet. I guess it's still too early. But I know Jonathan Hochman wants to know: when is the Google Dance?

Will you be there?

Forum discussion at High Rankings Forum, Google Groups, and Search Engine Watch Forums

When you have to reach a quota of building links (particularly on forums), the job can get inundating and frustrating. In a Search Engine Watch Forums, one of the members has been assigned by his company to do just that. What are the best ways to make his job an easier one? He asks for some tips and many are provided.

• Use a program like Roboform to automate the tasks.
• Use a keyword tool that will locate acceptable sites to throw in the link.
• Check backlinks of competitors using Yahoo Site Explorer and aim to get linked there too.
• It may help to focus on a "how to" article and seek links from appropriate sites.

There are some good tips here which should help the beginner link builder.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch.

Clicking on the tab from the MCC page will not do anything. You must first click on a client and then click on the print ads tab.

After you click on the print ads, while on a client, you will see the start screen for Google Print Ads. It basically tells you how to get started and offers you up to $1,000 towards your first newspaper campaign. The offer expires on August 31st and you can learn more about this offer over here.

Here is a screen capture of the page:

When I clicked the "Get Start Now" button, Google responded:

Oops! Print Ads is unavailable right now.

We apologize for the inconvenience - our engineers have been notified of this problem and are working to resolve it. Please try again later.

I then tried again and it worked. So here is a step by step screen by screen of how to set up a print ad in Google AdWords.

Here is the campaign summary page, you click create print ad from this screen.

Then you select your newspaper, I picked a local one.

Then you choose your ad size and the run dates for the ad. This is where you find out how much it will cost.

This is showing you my selection:

Finally, you need to submit the ad content and graphics:

Google Print Ads has its own FAQ section over here.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Now that Google has expanded referrals 2.0 (i.e. pay per action) to more publishers, more advertisers are giving it a try.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread goes through some of the troubles some advertisers are having with the program. So, they are helping each other overcome some of the negative aspects of PPA by using some of the features built into Google AdWords. Here are some tips from member, Micromag:

• Run a Site report and make sure where these leads are from - maybe is just a matter of filtering some publishers.
• Ask Google a refund for these invalid leads (don't know if it will work) remember to provide your report information.
• Be sure that you are not showing the conversion code multiple times for the same visitor (they charge you multiple times for it)
• Assume that you always will have fraud there and decrease your lead value -- you may increase it again as soon you have a better fraud control in a future.
• You may also implement a post processing conversion feature system that will only show the conversion for any visitor from that site as soon you verify that the lead is ok... the system will present the conversion code for the next visitor from that site to ensure to pay commission, but only if you have certified if the previous lead is ok (I know that would be a pain to design a system like that).

For more discussion around improving your chances of a desirable action from your referral ads (PPA), then join the discussion.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread asks a fairly basic SEO question. The member asked if the name of the image makes a difference in how a page might rank.

Does the name of the image(s) on your page have much of an SEO affect on Web sites? I don't mean images that act as links to other pages, but just in general does the name of standard images on a page have much of an affect on the SEO of the page?

Moderator, Ian Mcanerin, replied "yes." He explained that he tested adding an image to a page for a specific keyword phrase, and that keyword phrase was not found anywhere els eon that page. Then shortly after, he conducted a search for the keyword phrase (i.e. the name of the file) and up came the page.

Now, the question is, how much of a boost would you get from an image name on a page?

Most people feel it won't help much.

But Ian suggests using it for misspellings.

One way I use this (it's why I did the test in the first place) is for misspellings. If I can't misspell the word on the page, then I put in in the meta keywords (for Yahoo and MSN) and then name the images with the appropriate misspellings (for Google, Yahoo, and MSN).

It won't help much with anything competitive, but can be useful for long tail terms and misspellings.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A number of users on WebmasterWorld have been reporting that their Google AdWords accounts were inadvertently canceled. According to Google, this was a mistake:

Thank you for your email. I'm sorry to hear that you've had trouble with your AdWords account. We've identified a known technical issue affecting a limited number of accounts. Our engineers are currently working to solve the problem and hope to reach a resolution shortly. Also know that I have reactivated your account.

Google claims this has only affected a "limited number of accounts." They have not released percentages or numbers as to the true number of accounts that have been canceled due to this technical glitch.

[Hat Tip: PoorSEM.com]

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Gord Hotchkiss blogged about an amazing interview with usability expert Jakob Nielsen on the future of the search results. A discussion ensued on Cre8asite Forums about the interview, since Nielsen brings up a lot of really interesting points:

• He says that results may not be computed by the number of links in the future so sites like Wikipedia may no longer be in the forefront.
• He proposes changing the search results to more two-dimensional layouts.
• He believes that personalization is impossible since people may want different results depending on the time of day.
• Display ads may cause "banner blindness" which means that users may disregard other multimedia presented on the page.

Bill Slawski disagrees with much of what Nielsen says. For one, he believes that the search results have changed drastically within 3 years, whereas Nielsen believes that they haven't. He also believes that Wikipedia is useful as a starting point in conducting research -- and I'd agree with that. Wikipedia links are often relevant to the typical user.

The interview is very comprehensive but should definitely be read, and forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

After the urging of many Google users and privacy advocates, Peter Fleischer of Google's Global Privacy Counsel wrote in the Official Google Blog that cookies will auto-expire after 2 years, rather than in the year 2038 as was initially intended.

In the coming months, Google will start issuing our users cookies that will be set to auto-expire after 2 years, while auto-renewing the cookies of active users during this time period. In other words, users who do not return to Google will have their cookies auto-expire after 2 years. Regular Google users will have their cookies auto-renew, so that their preferences are not lost. And, as always, all users will still be able to control their cookies at any time via their browsers.

A WebmasterWorld user thinks that this is related to pending lawsuits:

Funny how lawsuits makes Goog more "user-feedback" oriented

I don't really know if I agree with that. They are the most user-feedback oriented of the big search engines from my experience.

In any event, for most people, two years is the life span of a computer, so if you think about it, unless you're using the same computer until 2038, your cookies would have no longer been in use. :)

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Google Custom Search Engine has launched a paid version for businesses. Chris Sherman explained that the features are all the same besides:

• You can customize the appearance of custom search engine using an XML API, which gives you more flexibility.
• You can turn off the ads.
• You get dedicated phone and email support.
• And you can remove the Google logo from the search results.

You can learn more about the business edition CSE and here are the features.

Chris Sherman details the pricing, which I cannot find on the Google site.

Google Custom Search Business Edition is available for $100 per year for sites up to 5,000 pages, $500 per year for up to 15,000 pages, and $15,000 or more for sites with a million or more pages. For smaller sites, businesses can sign up using a credit card for payment, and get a site search up and running quickly using a simple online interface.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I was browsing WebmasterWorld this morning and noticed these little video icons on the home page. They look like the image at the top right of this page.

If you click on the page, such as this example, you see this video format.

The videos seem to come from YouTube and be embedded within WebmasterWorld.

Is this a form of featured content or a new form of advertisements?

WebmasterWorld has also added new paid discussion forums including; "The Wall" and "Review My Site." "The Wall" is a forum to chat about pretty much anything.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

GuyFromChicago, a well respected personality from DigitalPoint Forums, who also runs PPC Discussions, went off on a rant in a DigitalPoint Forums thread. He called those who have a poor quality score and high minimum bid, and also blame Google, a "Google Slap."

He said, a Google Slap is a synonym for "I don't know how to use AdWords so I'll blame it on something that makes it sound like it's out of my control."

Do you agree? Are all those people complaining about having a low quality score and high minimum bid, whiners?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Yesterday, we reported that Yahoo! Publisher Network Suffers Major Ad Serving Slow Down. This has not only caused sites to load slowly due to the ads lagging some page loads, but it has also caused publisher's earnings to drop over the past few days.

Yahoo! has posted a message in the Yahoo! Publisher Network console, saying:

Network Update
You may have noticed a decrease in impressions in your Yahoo! Publisher Network account recently. This is due to a partial outage that occurred during routine maintenance. We are actively addressing the issue and expect improvements by next week. Thanks for your patience.

So by "next week" we can expect improvements, but what about this week?

YahooSarah has also come in to a WebmasterWorld thread saying:

I wanted to chime in briefly to let you know that we are aware of the problems you are experiencing and are working to resolve as soon as possible. Apologies for the inconvenience.

I'll post again when I can confirm that we have resolution.

So we wait.

Forum discussion continued at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

According to a WebmasterWorld thread, Google is sending out more Pay Per Action emails to numerous advertisers, including those in Germany and Australia. Thus, it appears that Google PPA is being rolled out to other countries since it is already available to all US publishers. These advertisers appear to be relatively big publishers for now.

Thus far, some are happy to be included, though others are a bit dissatisfied with the lack of monitoring options.

I don't mind being volunteered, however let me monitor the performance...

Others just are upset that they're advertising competitors' products.

I checked my referral product list and find G has added products of competitors I donot want to promote, on my website.

Since they're still rolling out this as a beta test, we'll hear of more of this feedback until the final product is released to everyone.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Matt McGee wrote a great post over at Small Business SEM entitled "How to SEO Your Site in Less than 60 Minutes." He makes it clear in his blog post that it's more for identifying problems rather than fixing them, since that takes a lot longer.

The post made its way to the front page of Sphinn and there's been a lot of discussion surrounding the use of his headline which can be misleading:

The reason ... that I don't like the headline is because it suggests that it is possible to do SEO in 60 minutes. Everyone here knows 60 minutes doesn't provide enough time to perform actual SEO work.

Yes, that's true, but the post itself goes into more detail that you can't do SEO in 60 minutes, as Matt mentions.

And yes, the headline is intentionally eye-catching and meant to make you say "You can't SEO a site in 60 minutes." So, I'll take that as a small victory. :-)

But why do I like this post? It goes into a lot of great tips about SEO in general - problems with redirection, review of text link navigation, home page content review, source code problems, robots.txt analysis, sitemap analysis, and other important aspects that really help users get a greater understanding of how to analyze their sites.

I recommend that you check out Matt's story and the discussion that continues at Sphinn.

Is there any mileage to the claim that it is possible to get your site spidered faster if you integrate the Google Custom Search Engine into your website? This is the question a new webmaster is asking on the High Rankings Forums.

It has no bearing or effect on the spider, according to moderator Randy. In fact, he recommends that you integrate your own search facility to better data mine the search data and provide more optimized results.

For my money, I'd rather have my own site search facility. Not only because I can tweak it to target some pages showing up higher in the results, but because when it's a my own search facility running from my own databse I can then mine the searches being conducted by real people to better optimize my site. IMO too many people take the easy way out and completely ignore this amazingly helpful and free data resource that should tell you exactly what people are looking for and give you tons of 100% free feedback.

Moderator Torka adds that it should provide the best user experience and that it doesn't matter what kind of search solution is offered given that the spider is not impacted by the integration of the Google Custom Search.

So what I'm saying is, Google will naturally index your pages as you go about the normal course of marketing and promoting your website.

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forums.

Being #3 usually sucks. People like #1 and some have learned to settle for #2. But when you're the third-most-preferred search engine, why continue competing? That's the question of the day at the Cre8asite Forums.

I see figures like 50-65% for Google. That does not leave mu[ch] for the rest. Yahoo is number 2 from far away.

Moderator eKstreme has some good insights. He suggests that one reads Don Dodge's article on why 1% of the Search Market is worth more than $1 billion. He mentions that the race is still on, especially since TechCrunch just announced that Microsoft is gaining on Yahoo.

He adds:

Why do they bother? Why does anyone bother starting a business? Simply put, they believe they can do it better. The search market is about solving people's search problems.

But what else can it be? Some people say that audience is key. You might have a site that appeals to savvier users. They're likely to be using Google. Then you have the other search engines, and back to what eKstreme said, those people think that these search engines do it better than Google.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

A search for jason bourne has an ad at the top of the page, with an image, that contains a "Watch the movie trailer" link.

Here is a screen capture:

Clicking on the ad takes you to http://www.searchforbourne.com/. Clicking on "watch the movie trailer" shows this video embedded directly in the search results.

Marrisa Mayer of Google, did suggest this might happen in the future. But I am still very shocked.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Postscript: Google has done something like this in the past, Danny covered it with NBC Scores Graphical Ads/Promos On Google in 2006.

The Google Webmaster Central Blog announced that they have expanded the error reporting to include less serious errors, which are now called "warnings."

If Google finds "minor problems in a sitemap," they will call it a "warning." If Google finds a more serious problems, they call those "errors." A warning is something that may contain "confusing or inaccurate" information in your sitemap. But an "error" may be an issue that makes your "sitemap completely unreadable."

The new set of warnings includes many problems that we had previously classified as errors, including the "incorrect namespace" and "invalid date" examples shown in the screenshot above. We also crawl a sample of the URLs listed in your sitemap and report warnings if the Googlebot runs into any trouble with them.

Here is a screen capture of a sample report, provided by Google Webmaster Central:

X-Google Webmaster Central guru, Vanessa Fox, wrote some more details on this at Sphinn and we have additional forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums.

Dozens of reports have come from both DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld that Yahoo's contextual ad network, the Yahoo! Publisher Network, was running extremely slowing this weekend.

Reportedly, the ads displayed on publisher sites were loading extremely slowly or not loading at all. Here are select quotes from the threads.

My ads have been so poorly served today, about half the time they don't show up at all and the other half only 1 or 2 ads will show up when normally 4 would.

We're removing YPN and replacing it with AdSense now to salvage some revenue until (if/when?) YPN get its act together. A note in our account letting us know what is going on would be nice. Are listening, YPN?

First reports started coming in on Saturday at 8:45 in the morning (EST). It seems like the issues with the ads began to resolve themselves the day after at around 9pm (EST). This is based on the reports at the forums. I do not have official confirmation from Yahoo on this reported outage.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Google has updated Google Webmaster Tools with a link update over the weekend. The last about was about a month ago.

There is currently discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Here is a look at our top pages, by links reported via Google Webmaster Tools:

For the past updates see:

• June 2007 Google Linkage Data
• April 2007 Google Linkage Data
• March 2007 Google Linkage Data
• February 2007 Google Linkage Data

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread links to a post at Mobile Jones describing a story that a check Google sent to her bounced when she tried to deposit it.

The story is not that simple, reportedly, the woman changed her address but Google did not get the change of address. This caused payment to go about six weeks late. She spoke with several Google AdSense representatives, then blogged about it and had Matt Cutts stop by to say someone will help her. The day later, she received a FedEx package with the check.

Then she took the check to deposit and it reportedly did not go through. She handed the check to the bank teller, the bank teller tries to deposit it, but tells her, "There aren’t sufficient funds in the account to cover your check."

Now, the blog post describing this story has almost a 100 comments. Is this true? Can a check from Google bounce? Technically, I guess so. But seriously, this is a large, wealthy company.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Search Engine Watch Forums moderator, Discovery, has been noticing weird conversions sent from Google's Pay Per Action model. He asks in a Search Engine Watch Forums thread if there are AdSense publishers gaming the referrals 2.0, i.e. Pay Per Action, model released recently?

We have seen a rash of erroneous conversions over the past few weeks from our PPC content match campaigns. I am not 100% certain as to how Adsense partners are evaluated however, I do believe that many adsense publishers feel that the better their conversion stats now, the more likelihood they will receive benefits in the future.

It would not surprise me if some Google AdSense publishers are trying to game the system. Discovery asks, "What safeguards will Google have to stop this type of activity?"

Maybe more of that information at Google AdSense PPA Help, but I don't see it specifically mentioned.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

We love it when Google Engineers spill the beans... on just about anything Google especially when it comes to revealing juicy secrets on improving your ranking position in Google. Or better yet ways that they recommend getting your site indexed that are not your typical suggestions.

A recent thread on SEW is talking about a post on High Rankings that covers what Google Engineer, Dan Crow, Director of Crawl Systems at Google has to say about getting your site lovingly indexed by the most popular search engine.

Some juicy tidbits from Dan:

New "unavailable_after" Tags - This little gem will allow webmasters the ability to tell Google when to stop indexing a page at a certain time. For example this might be useful for people with ecommerce sites with lots of coupons that have expired, older news items, and just about anything that is temporary and not permanent in nature on a site. While I really like this planning type tag, I don't see how much better it would be than just disallowing the page, or using a META robots tag to tell Google. Or better yet, using Webmaster Central URL removal feature. I see this tag probably having wide usage on news sites where there is a large number of pages that would need to expire at certain times.

Nosnippet & Noarchive tags - He details that these tags are not generally recommended, because he says "snippets are extremely helpful to visitors, as is showing the cache". Essentially these tags eliminate some problems associated with Google caching and improperly displaying the snippets below the titles in the search results. Google is fine with their use but would rather you not. This we know but its good to hear it again.

Avoid Walled Gardens - Dan used this term from the HR article and I thought it a nice way to explain how a group of pages are linked only to each other and not to anywhere else. He said you could put one of the links from that group in a sitemap and Google would index it and follow the other links. I think pointing an external link to those pages would be a much better idea. He says "those pages would be likely to be indexed via the sitemap...but considered low quality since they wouldn’t have any PageRank. Google is working on a way to change this in the future." Interesting.

For the rest of the discussion about these news see the Search Engine Watch Forums thread and the original High Rankings coverage on this. A thank you to Jill Whalen for covering this.

Happy Friday the 13th, everyone! It was super hot in the beginning of the week and I still am sporting a funky red V on my neck from the sun during the Yahoo! Search Marketing Power Lunch in the Sky that I attended on Tuesday, but it looks like this weekend will be nice.

Google Buys Postini

Google has a vested interest in just about everything. Earlier this week, they announced plans to acquire Postini, an online security company, for $625 million. That's a good chunk of money. I worked with Postini for spam filtering on an internal network several years ago, so I'm guessing they'll be doing something like that on Gmail in the future. Cool.

Should we suspect that these acquisitions mean that Google will control 90% of the market by 2017? I don't know. Microsoft Live Search is gaining momentum.

Let the race begin.

Frequent Updates and Social Media: Check!

If you have a blog, you're likely to get indexed in Google a lot quicker than a static and not-so-frequently updated site, as we're learning. Some people are seeing their content being crawled within 3 hours. I had something similar happen to me on a blog that was also recently launched. Lee Odden beats the record, though: he saw rankings within one hour. Wow. Lee, I guess yes, it's been happening to the best of us. :)

Maps Gone Wild

Google Maps got a functionality boost yesterday, including integration with Mapplets, allowing for users to personalize their maps with a great deal of little apps. Fun stuff.

Got Banned in Organic Yahoo Search? Pay Your Way In

That's right. If you've gotten banned in Yahoo for whatever reason, you can get out of that slump with some green. The Search Submit program is a guarantee that your site will be crawled just as long as you pay the dough and get approved.

Google Solves Everything ... Except Robberies

You can learn how to break open a safe. You can learn how to pick a lock. You can do a lot of things with Google, which it did earlier this week when two punks decided to steal $12,000 from an indoor amusement park. They got away with it, too. Google, where are you now?

Google Tests AdSense for Mobile Phones

Got a phone? Ads are coming soon. Google is now testing AdSense on mobile phones. Are you pumped? If so, Digg the story. If not, Digg it anyway.

Recent Patent Application Says More About Google AdWords Quality Score

Bill Slawski discovered a patent application filed for the Quality Score of Google AdWords. There's some good stuff here for AdWords advertisers to gauge their score: length of time on the ad, length of time on comparable ads, number of searches performed after looking at the ad, etc. Google has added 44 possible factors. Wow.

Google has 10,000 Human Evaluators

The algorithm is one thing. Ten thousand human evaluators is another. Relevancy can't always be computed mathematically.

However, ten thousand? That's a lot of people. Who are these people? We may never know.

Let's Watch a Search Marketing Commercial

It's Friday, what do you care? Check out this search marketing commercial on YouTube, and then play it with the sound really loud (and speakers, of course). When your boss walks by and asks why you're watching the video of a competitor, just tell him I sent you. Or tell him it's all about social media, baby. I mean, really, they used YouTube. Sweet.

Enjoy the weekend!

The forum community is buzzing about Australia's recent decision to sue Google over deceptive search ads.

WebmasterWorld goes into the suit in more detail, citing a Sydney Morning Herald news article:

The ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) said the case arose in 2005 when Google's search engine listed two car dealerships from the New South Wales city of Newcastle as sponsored links, which are paid for by companies to attract Internet users.

However, the links fed through to the website of a rival to the dealerships, the classifieds magazine "Trading Post", which competes with them for automotive sales.

"The ACCC is alleging that Google, by failing to adequately distinguish sponsored links from 'organic' search results, has engaged in and continues to engage in misleading and deceptive conduct," the regulator said in a statement.

The question is: why Google? They specifically distinguish their sponsored results from organic listings. Some people think it's an issue that can be possibly a problem for visually impaired users.

But more people see that it's a problem of trademark bidding, which is a definite problem that we've covered.

DigitalPoint Forums and Search Engine Watch Forums members point out that the ACCC is looking for "injunctions restraining Google from publishing sponsored links of advertisers representing an association, sponsorship or affiliation where one does not exist." At Search Engine Watch, Chris_D asks how Google is possibly supposed to know about these sponsorships or affiliations. I agree; whose responsibility is it? There are ways to file complaints when competitors bid on your trademarks.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums, and Search Engine Watch Forums.

Yesterday, the Google AdWords Editor team held a teleconference to give some great tips and tricks about Google AdWords Editor. I listened in myself and it was pretty informative albeit basic.

Search Engine Watch Forums members are looking to share the best AdWords Editor tips.

RadFly shares an important tip:

My best tip would be to use AE even if you are happy with the standard web frontend. The Grouper and Duplicate tools are essential.

psurplus also links to some screenshots of the event.

They also complained about the annoyance of having to dial in while watching the conference on your computer monitor. I agree; it would have been far more convenient to listen through my speakers (I even brought headphones to work!). As it was, I was holding a phone handset and eating lunch at the same time. :)

All in all, however, it was a good conference and should really get any beginner started using the graphical user tool rather than the web backend. I guess that's my next stop.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Yesterday, Danny announced the launch of Sphinn, a brand new social site for internet marketing professionals. Features include a forum discussion, a story/comments voting system, and story submission somewhat like Digg. This time, however, you can submit your stories related to SEO without fear of the consequences. :)

I walked through some of the features of Sphinn to show you what it's like. First, the obligatory photo of the homepage:

It's not *only* about SEO, my friends. :) That top story fits in with the internet marketer's theme of viral marketing.

I then decided to submit a story, but as you can tell, you are able to start a discussion (without an associated URL) too.

You should then choose an appropriate eye-catching headline and description:

...then you preview it and submit it!

All in all, very good stuff. That story was submitted yesterday and is now a hot topic. :)

There's already an impressive list of members and even RSS feeds. Also, the Search Engine Land commenting system will support the logins from this system.

We will begin treating Sphinn as a forum and discussing the best topics from it, so stay tuned. Also, be sure to befriend me and Barry, because we love you. :)

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Google is currently sending invite emails to some publishers, to give AdSense for Mobile a try. Part of the email reads:

As part of our efforts to develop new and improved AdSense products for our partners, we will begin a limited beta test for AdSense for mobile. AdSense for mobile allows publishers to monetize their mobile websites through the placement of targeted text ads. Publishers can take advantage of the fast-growing mobile advertising market and benefit from our targeting technology.

I can't wait to hear some feedback on this.

There is currently methods for AdWords advertisers to create mobile search ads, more on that here and from AdSense over here.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Did you know that if you wanted to ensure that zero supplemental results come up for a site command at Google, you can type your query in the syntax of site:www.example.com/*

I speculated over at Search Engine Land that Google Gearing Up To Drop The Supplemental Result Label. Is this one step towards that?

Tedster, WebmasterWorld administrator, added that "the site: command has been so flakey that I wonder what these many hack-type site: queries I read about actually return." However, he still finds this command fun and useful.

Reseller adds:

The following site: operator "version" shows results without supplemental

site:www.example.*

So is this truly removing the supplemental results or showing a subset of different results?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Ever want to see what people in other countries are seeing for a particular search in Google? For example, let's say you are based in the U.K. and you want to know what people in the U.S. are seeing for a search on big blue pineapple chair.

You can now install a Firefox extension to easily switch from country to country.

RedFly Marketing created a Google Global Firefox Extension that makes this possible.

To install this extension, go to this page and click "install now." Then select “Search Google Global” and select what country you would like to see the results from.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports a recent change in how Yahoo handles displaying a banned site within Yahoo Site Explorer.

In the past, Yahoo showed only the home page of a banned site in Yahoo Site Explorer. Now, there are early reports that Yahoo is changing that behavior. They are now starting to show all the pages they have in their index, but lowercasing the title of those pages.

It used to be that when these domains were entered to SiteExplorer, only one page was reported. Yahoo clearly knew about the other pages, since you could enter the URL for those pages and get a result. But putting the home page in resulted in only one page. I deduced that this meant the site was banned. Neither of the two sites placed anywhere in the top 1000 for terms they did well on in other engines, so I'm sure Yahoo was banning them.

Now I've noticed that SiteExplorer does show all the pages, but with noncapitalized page titles (other than for the home page.) This is a change and I have seen it only for these two sites that I think are banned. For other sites, SiteExplorer reports the page titles as listed on the page, which is usually with capitalization.

Senior member, crobb305, confirmed that he has seen some of this behavior recently as well. But he added that "for most others that are banned, only the homepage shows on a site: search."

So is this a new way Yahoo is handling showing banned sites or is this something totally different?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Reports have come from WebmasterWorld that Google is now not going to allow advertisers to bid on ephedra and ephedrine related keywords.

This is reportedly going to start happening "in the coming weeks."

One advertiser said,

It actually surprises me that it took this long for Google to make the move. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

Brett Tabke added, "I am real surprised that it took this long."

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google is gaining momentum in the search sphere, but Microsoft seems to be picking up the pace. According to a Chicago Tribune article, financial analysts expect that over the next decade, Google will take a whopping 90% of the market "through increased spending on research and development."

WebmasterWorld members are not convinced.

10 years ago Google didn't even exist (at least not as a commercial company), what did the analysts back then predict for 2007?

In fact, another WebmasterWorld thread says that Microsoft's search share is increasing. Was that predicted by financial analysts? I don't think it was.

Still, as Danny writes on Search Engine Land, Microsoft is picking up the pace. Could we see them controlling the market in a decade, at least more so than is expected?

For some nostalgia, check out Barry's post from 2004 where he muses about Microsoft's relevancy. Microsoft has gained the market share only in the past few weeks, but I'm not hearing anything about relevancy getting worse. Search is alive and well.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld (Google) and WebmasterWorld (Microsoft).

On social media sites, do comments enhance or detract from the user experience? That's the question that has been brought up in a Cre8asite Forums thread. There's "utter garbage" that is being served to the community, so how does that make social media sites engaging and enjoyable?

Joe Dolson has some interesting insights:

I think you're absolutely right - but I think it's a criticism of the community which creates those comments, rather than a problem with accepting comments.

This is echoed by Kulpreet Singh, who says that it's different (and higher quality) on sites where you have a true personal profile attached. That's when you're most likely accountable.

Comments only work for sites that already have a community, and the members have a track record and some accountability.

An interesting discussion has also been brought up on the SEO Igloo blog, where Barry, Kim Krause Berg, Bill Slawski, Sophie Wegat, and Matt McGee were interviewed. The distaste for foul comments was unanimous. Many don't participate in these communities as a result.

In the Cre8asite Forums thread, Kim Krause Berg goes further to say that there's an age and gender gap in comments.

There's a definite difference in the content of comments depending on the age and gender of the commenter.

I couldn't agree more. I also think there's an acceptance gap, but if you are involved enough in these communities, you somewhat see where these commenters are coming from, especially on a site like Digg. Not all sites have quality commentary (YouTube is notoriously bad at it), but when you're deeply involved in the community, these comments make more sense to you, even if they are laden with immaturity.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

In April, Google added the My Maps feature which gave users the ability to personalize their maps with lines, shapes, text, photos, and video. Now, they've gone a step further with personalization. From a WebmasterWorld thread, the new features allow users to "plot the locations of everything from local fuel supplies, to the newest earthquakes, worldwide." To do so, My Maps has added both internal and third-party Mapplets functionality, which allows you to install mini-applications on Google Maps.

Reuters goes into the features in more depth:

One map application allows users to watch YouTube videos based on the locations where they are uploaded. One could switch from the video confessions of a teenager in Ohio to tourist videos shot in the Andes mountains of South America.

That's pretty cool stuff.

Here's a look at the real estate Mapplets:

And here's integration with one of Google's most recent acquisitions, Panoramio:

The Google LatLong blog calls this Google Maps Mashup 2.0, explaining that "you can now layer information from multiple sources on the same map as well as save content that's relevant to you into a personal map."

They also shared this video on how it's done:

Gary Price adds on ResourceShelf that Ask.com offers similar features, including a near real time earthquake map and the features within Ask City.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread is having a debate over the topic of link exchanges.

There are those that believe link exchanges help improve your rankings in the search results, then there are those that believe they do not help.

Tedster quotes Google's Matt Cutts as saying:

"Reciprocal links by themselves aren’t automatically bad, but we’ve communicated before that there is such a thing as excessive reciprocal linking."

That is the key, "excessive." Everything in moderation, is the line my dad tells me. Same applies here. You can see a positive return from exchanging some links with relevant sites. But don't go overboard and create dozens of links pages. Make it natural.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

One of Google's most preferred tools for PPC managers is the AdWords Editor program.

It allows search marketers easily manage their paid search campaigns running in Google via their desktop. Then they click a button to upload or download their changes.

Recent reports via DigitalPoint Forums suggests that the upload and download of data is getting slower.

Anyone experience a significant/measurable slow down in their AdWords Editor as their campaigns and ad groups have grown?

Tends to be a little slower uploading/downloading with larger accounts but that's to be expected. I haven't noticed any performance issues with large accounts outside of that.

On a side note, the upload today seems exceptionally slow.

Is is a computer related item or is it simply just on the upload/download side of things?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread has a member stating that although his site was banned from Yahoo! Search and was denied reinclusion into Yahoo's index, he was still able to guarantee inclusion through Yahoo's paid inclusion program.

Yahoo's paid inclusion is now named Search Submit and it is a program that allows you to send Yahoo your pages, and if approved, Yahoo will guarantee to crawl those pages often, plus give you the ability to send them more meta data.

The major issue with being accepted into paid inclusion but being denied to the normal Yahoo crawl is that they both should follow the same quality content guidelines. Yes, the paid inclusion program has a set of content guidelines. But whatever is displayed within the search results have to meet Yahoo's overall quality guidelines.

The member explained the process:

1. Banned by Yahoo!
2. Made some changes
3. Given the opportunity to participate in Paid Inclusion, which you have to be good enough for regular inclusion to participate in.
4. Attempted regular inclusion...we were told NO.
5. Looking at Paid Inclusion again because we can advertise in the organic rankings with this product.

About a few weeks later, Yahoo actually included them back into the search index for free. The member said:

We have been miraculously reincluded and we are performing very well in the organic listings without paid inclusion!

As many people know, there is a gray line as to what quality truly is. Even within organizations, one person at Yahoo can review a site and consider it "good enough" to be included, whereas someone else can say it "just doesn't meet the requirements." Is this a case of that?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Today is July 11, otherwise known as 7-11, and they're giving out free slurpees in the states, so grab them while you can.

What's been up in Digg? First, I posted a nice and hopefully really informative article on 29 Tools Built on the Digg API . It took me about a month to collect that data and do the research, but it was worth it. If you like leveraging your social media efforts, these are definitely helpful.

Google has done a great job acquiring a ton of companies between 2001 and 2007. By the end of the year, it's guesstimated that they'll have acquired another 11 companies up to 22 for the year. Do you agree?

Nofollow sucks . Why? As the WebProNews Blog article says, it implies that despite the effort someone has put into commenting on a blog, they still might be a spammer. Right.

‘You left a comment. I would love to acknowledge your existence, but you might be a spammer. Since you might be a spammer, I better not link to you. Google doesn’t like spammers and… you know, you’re either with Google or you’re against them. So, I can’t really, you know, risk it.’

I hear that. It's true. But typical blogs don't always use Akismet or any other sort of spam defense, so I see why it's needed.

Who is the Animal House of search? And can you find Jeeves?

Social search? Sure, Google and Yahoo are doing it. The goal is to "rethink and reinvent online social networking." With Facebook's emerging popularity and crazy growth this past few months, that's a tough act to follow, but by all means, go for it.

Got an eBay store? Want to optimize it and get more traffic and sales? Here are some eBay Store Search Optimization Tips that should get you on your way. It really is good stuff.

On another note, Danny Sullivan's son doesn't know what Internet Explorer is . He says his kids also associate Google with "finding things on the web." Is this a sign of the future? I remember someone saying that Ask.com implies the same thing, so maybe not.

Bill Slawski references the Blogscope search engine in a Cre8asite Forums post.

BlogScope is an analysis and visualization tool for blogosphere which is being developed as a research prototype at the University of Toronto. It is currently tracking over 10.16 million blogs with 79.48 million posts. BlogScope can assist the user in discovering interesting information from these millions of blogs via a set of numerous unique features including popularity curves, identification of information bursts, related terms, and geographical search.

So far, it's limited to blogspot.com domains, but the information it gathers is pretty useful. As Bill says, "it has features that I wish that more well known blog search engines were using."

Agreed.

The interface is pretty cool too:

Could it lead to an acquisition?

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Yesterday, 2 burglars tried to raid an amusement center, but after an hour, couldn't open the safe, according to the Colorado Springs Gazette.

The burglars tried to disable a security camera by repeatedly spraying it with WD-40 — it only cleaned the lens — and spent an hour and 15 minutes trying to open three safes, apparently unaware that some types require the dial to be turned two or three times.

So what did they do? The turned to Google for help and got away with $12,000.

Barry at Search Engine Land says that after search terms, "how to open a safe" and "how to crack a safe" gave them the boost they needed.

The duo have not yet been caught.

They should've done their research beforehand, really. As DigitalPoint Forums members suggest:

this isnt really news, we all know we can find anything on Google :P

(Now why didn't they search Google before they got to the safe?!)

With their use of WD-40 and their brains, it all makes sense.

As police detective Chuck Ackerman says:

“They’re not professional safe people,” said Colorado Springs police detective Chuck Ackerman.

Definitely not. But why haven't you caught them yet?!

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A very interesting Google Groups thread has many bloggers, including SEO Buzz Box, DaveN, and Search Engine Journal voicing their reactions.

The background is that the webmaster of AlkenMRS.com realized that his 10+ year old site had been delisted from Google. With help from his friends, he addressed what he thought were technical issues related to his site. But even so, his site was not reindexed and the Google crawler had never come.

Adam Lasnik of Google explains that his site might have been the problem after all:

Imagine this scenario. You walk into a store and some guy -- surprisingly the owner -- grabs you by the shoulder.

"How'd you like some beer? Oh, hey, we also sell coffee. Hmm... you don't want something to drink? We specialize in air purifiers, too! And you know what... after you drink some beer next to your new air purifier, I bet you could use a date, right? No, no, not the eating kind... I'm talking a really nice lady! And if she ends up stealing your identity, well, no problem! I sell Identity Theft protection services... and... wait! Wait...come back!!!"

How much would you trust that guy? Or his store? Sure, he may have small leaflets on a zillion topics, but he's not an expert in any.

He then mentioned that site owners need to put that into perspective online -- because it's no different.

If you, as an independent observer, came across such a store online, would you trust it anymore? If not, why should Google see this as an important and relevant site?

Oops. So his site has, as Loren Baker put it, a "lack of quality, focus and trust." Most importantly, as Dave Naylor points out, the site was Made for AdSense. Essentially, Google is looking for relevancy and nothing but. Otherwise, the site has no value to visitors and won't be crawled.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

In June, Microsoft adCenter postponed maintenance, but it appears that it's about to happen. adCenterEU posted on WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums, and Search Engine Watch Forums about upcoming maintenance to be held on Saturday, July 14.

adCenterEU writes:

Microsoft adCenter will be unavailable during an upgrade this Saturday, July 14, beginning at 10:00 A.M. Pacific Time (18:00 P.M. GMT), and continuing for up to 14 hours. During this time, your current keywords and ads will continue to run normally; however, you will not be able to access adCenter.

Please make any needed changes to your account beforehand if possible.

After the scheduled maintenance, reporting may be delayed for up to 24 hours. On the adCenter Reporting tab please check the timestamp at the bottom of the page to see when the data was last updated.

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

Google Webmaster Central is an excellent resource for site owners and developers. A Google Groups thread asked if there is a way to give someone else access to your Google Webmaster Tools reports.

Why would someone want to do this? Let's say you are the site owner, and you want to show the reports to your SEO. There can be dozens of reasons.

Unlike with some of Google's other products, where you can invite people to see your data. Examples of products that allowed invite access include, Google AdWords, Google Analytics, Google Docs and others.

Currently Google said this feature is not available, but they know about the request and they are "considering it." But there is a work around. You can easily upload several verification Meta tags or HTML files. This allows you to give that user access to your reports. You just have that user try to authenticate your site in his Webmaster Tools section and him give you either the verification Meta tag or HTML file and add that to your site. Presto, multiple access to the same reports. I do this with a few sites.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks if it is allowed to place AdSense ads on pages that require you to skip the ad to see the content.

There are many sites that have what are called interstitial ads. These ads act as a gateway to the content you want to see. Typically, you click from a site to see an article of interest. But before the content is shown to you, you are taken to an intermediate page, with an ad, that says this article is provided by Company X. After about ten or fifteen seconds, the page will automatically redirect to the article, or you can manually skip the ad.

To place Google AdSense ads on those pages is not allowed. I received confirmation from Google on this.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A DigitalPoint Forums advertiser was wondering how to display relevant ads to his non-English sites. Because he's embedding a lot of YouTube videos with English descriptions, AdSense seems to be feeding him with ads that are English even though they are not pertinent to his reader base.

I did some research and discovered this Google AdSense Help Page that shows you how change your display language. The steps required are as follows:

• Log in to your account at https://www.google.com/adsense
• Click the My Account tab
• Click the Login Information [edit] link
• Select a language from the Display Language drop-down list
• Click Save Settings

Discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

Many people have opted to sell their products on eBay but are wondering the best way to give their eBay store some visibility. Such is the case as illustrated in a Cre8asite Forums post where a person is looking to optimize their eBay store.

Many great suggestions have been tossed out, and I thought it would be useful to share this with anyone else who may also run into this issue.

1. A good starter guide is the eBay Store SEO Guide
2. Get an database of your inventory and upload it to Google Product Search
3. Set up an informational website with more reviews and the ability to purchase through the eBay shop
4. Study the eBay Search Engine and do some keyword research to determine what works.
5. Write eBay guides because they occasionally rank well in the SERPs.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

In the Seattle Conference on Scalability, Google's Marissa Mayer was asked a question where she revealed that Google has 10,000 human evaluators that manually go through the search results and rate them.

You can find coverage of this keynote at Dare Obasanjo's blog.

Q: How do they tell if they have bad results?

A: They have a bunch of watchdog services that track uptime for various servers to make sure a bad one isn't causing problems. In addition, they have 10,000 human evaluators who are always manually checking the relevance of various results.

We have reported about Google's Human Touch and people finding trails of these humans reviewing their sites in the past. But to have 10,000 human evaluators! That seems a bit large.

Most people agree that the 10,000 number sounds large. The question is, does this include internal Google staff that have this rater hub evaluation software installed on their machines?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread reports seeing the first ever Search Marketing commercial on CNBC. I am not sure if this is the first ever commercial on TV offering search marketing solutions, but I have personally never seen any by third-party SEM shops.

Here is the commercial, via YouTube:

The date on the YouTube upload is from a month ago. I am not sure if it was first aired on TV yesterday or before.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

In Google's Webmaster Guidelines they write:

If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.

The 100 link per page concern has been a concern in the SEO world for years. What is behind this concern?

(1) Search engine spiders want to be efficient. If they find a page with thousands of links on it, it may take a really long time for the spider to get to all of them.

(2) Users looking at a page with hundreds of links on the page possibly can overwhelm the user.

But to think that Google or other search spiders are not built to crawl hundreds of links on a page kind of seems a bit ridiculous. They may be programmed to stop a certain point but I doubt that number is 100. In addition, to think that a good usability designer cannot design a page that is easy to use with over a hundred links, is also a bit wrong.

Like Ben wrote in What Is Google's Indexing Limit?

The first mythbuster, is that you can have more than 100 links in a navigation menu and get by just fine. The prevailing thought for a long time was that Google would only spider the first 100 links, and any more was risk for penalty. Not true anymore, times have changed. However, there is still inherent problems with more than 100 links, such as page size which can cap the amount of spiderable links and so on.

So if you have a 120 links on a page and that page is designed and easy to use, I would not worry. But if you feel that you can make that page even easier to use by breaking it out into additional pages, then that is probably the way to go.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums and Search Engine Watch Forums.

Yesterday, Jon West rang in with a tip about a specific search on Google for variations of the word ecommerce both with personalized web search enabled and disabled. As you may notice, the sponsored results are showing the letter "e" bolded throughout.

I created a screenshot of the result, but you can probably reproduce it. Click for full-size. Basically, all the letter e's, even in the URLs, are bold, but the rest of the letters are not.

Has anyone noticed this?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums

Update from Barry: Here is a clearer image, of the sponsored results from the right side of the page. It is easier to see here that the letter "e" is bolded throughout the URL area of the ad. Just look at the green font, and how it gets bold with the letter "e".

To improve on the Google Apps suite, Google has just acquired Postini, as we learn in a press release today.

Postini's services -- which include message security, archiving, encryption, and policy enforcement -- can be used to protect a company's email, instant messaging, and other web-based communications. Under the terms of the agreement, Google will acquire Postini for $625 million in cash, subject to working capital and other adjustments, and Postini will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Google. The agreement is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close by the end of the third quarter 2007.

I happened to have worked for a bit with Postini in my days as a system administrator and this is a pretty cool thing for them. Congratulations. :)

More coverage from Barry at Search Engine Land.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A Google AdWords advertiser says that he would rather prepay for his Google AdWords rather than have it set up as it is now, with him paying for the ads after the fact. He asks in a Google Groups thread whether it's possible to change the account from post-pay to pre-pay.

AdWordsPro says that it is not possible to do so without closing your account first.

AdWords accounts can't be changed from post-pay to pre-pay billing. If you'd like to switch to the pre-pay option, you will need to close your current AdWords account. Then, you can set-up a new account with the pre-pay billing option that you prefer.

The link below from the Help Center has more details about changing payment options.
http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=34103

I have to say that this option is a bit inconvenient for people who maintain huge AdWords campaigns. Would it be possible for the Google AdWords team to make it easy to do without having to close an account and recreate it from scratch?

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Bill Slawski, resident patent guru, has discovered yet another patent application about Google AdWords. The discussion has been brought to the attention of the folks at WebmasterWorld. According to Bill, there are 44 factors in total that might be used in a Google AdWords quality score. Some of these include:

• How many times a user selects a given ad in a given session.
• A duration of time, from an ad result selection, until the user issues another search query.
• A ratio of the time, from a given ad result selection until the user issues another search query, as compared to all other times from ad result selections until the user issued another search query.
• Time spent, given an ad result selection, on viewing other results for the search query, but not on the given ad result.
• How many searches (i.e., a unique issued search query) that occur in a given session prior to a given search result or ad selection.
• How many searches that occur in a given session after a given search result or ad selection.

This information seems to apply only to Google AdWords, but the descriptions are pretty clear and many are happy to have stumbled upon Bill's post because they now have a greater understanding of the Google AdWords quality scores.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread has two claims from respected members, giving us a little more insight into Google's search engine.

The first thing we learn is that Google has several cache databases.

When doing site search "site:exmple.com" when I see the snippet description of the page xyz.html and compared it with "site:example.com/xyz.html" they were different in fact the later consists many months previous page. To verify this I compared the Google's cached pages those were also different.

Tedster, WebmasterWorld administrator, confirmed this to be true. Is it simply a data center thing?

Respected member, g1smd, added that often the snippet Google chooses is not pulled from the cache. He said that Google has a snippet database that is typically much older than what is found in the cache.

The snippet database often contains content that hasn't been on the site for many weeks or months, content that is no longer in the Google cache copy either. It has all that, as well as content that is current.

Note, none of this has been confirmed by Google.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread discusses the implementation of 301 redirects on a newly constructed site.

WebmasterWorld administrator, Tedster, adds to the discussion that he has seen that a chain of 301 redirects does not always pass the link popularity along.

For example, you have URL1 that is redirected to URL2 and then have URL2 redirected to URL3. In this case, Tedster seems to imply that URL1 will not pass link popularity over to URL3. It will not carry over from URL1 to URL2 to URL3.

Instead it seems that if you need to set up a third redirect, you should change the original redirect from URL1 to URL2 to URL1 to URL3 directly. This way there is a direct redirect from one URL to an other, without having to go through multiple chains of redirects.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There has been a lot of buzz recently about how Google has been indexing blog content or fresh content very quickly. Not only is Google indexing and crawling the fresh content, but also showing the content in the search results within a few hours of that content being posted.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread has some people noticing Google picking up and ranking new content within three hours.

The forum thread there kind of went off topic, but I have seen many examples of blog content getting picked up and ranked fairly quickly at Google.

Is it a Universal Search thing or just Google being fast? We know, Google wants to consolidate spiders to be more efficient in their crawls. Using blog crawlers helps.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Hey ya'll. How is your week going? TGIF, right? I hope that those of you who celebrated all had a nice July 4th. I got rained on, but it was still nice to be with old friends.

We Celebrated. Did You?

As you know, America celebrated its 231st birthday on Wednesday. Our festive Search Engine Roundtable theme joins other themes in search. I especially like Ask.com's really cool flag background. This could be a good background too, Matt.

Sicko!

Over the weekend, a Google employee posted her opinion about Michael Moore's movie, Sicko, in a Google Health Blog post. As Barry said, this buzz overshadowed the iPhone press, especially because the blog post gave an opinion about how the health care industry should buy ads to improve its image. It turned out that it was the employee's personal opinion, and she wrote a follow-up saying that she was speaking for herself and not for the company. Matt Cutts, a seasoned Google blogger, made a great follow-up post himself about company blogging policies. He says that mistakes happen, and it's better that they happen when you're new. Blogging isn't a behavior or habit you can pick up immediately; it's a learned skill.

Google Acquires GrandCentral: It's Official

Google has acquired GrandCentral, a service that consolidates multiple phone numbers into one phone number. It's actually a very cool service that I've recommended to users from the howto written up on TechCrunch. So, how will they use it? Many people are asking that question. That's for us to find out, I guess.

Gmail: Gone in Germany

You win some, and you lose some. Google has lost the Gmail trademark in Germany to an individual who had registered it much earlier than Google had been using it. Apparently, they wanted to buy it from him for a low price. Maybe he'd have caved if they offered more? I don't know if the legal trouble would have been worth it.

Flickrized

We covered reputation management earlier this week. Barry wrote earlier this week on how you can achieve high rankings with Flickr. All you need to do is put two and two together on this one, folks. It works pretty well. :)

FREEdburner

Feedburner is now free, which I'm really excited about. I really can't wait to try out MyBrand, which Danny explained how to use so well. That is just hot.

Search Engine Strategies

I can't wait until next month which will be my first time in California. What will SES bring us beyond SES San Jose? Well, we'll see. Kevin Ryan has opened the podium for search marketers to discuss what they are looking for when they attend the SES conferences in the future.

Given Up

I had this scheduled for 12AM GMT as many people noticed: the Give it Up liveblogged notes have been published. I was not home when it was published, so I got buzzed by my BFF who was shocked that I got it up so early. Hey, Danny said we were on Greenwich time! It's fair game! :) Other coverage came from the Lisa, Stephan Spencer at Search Engine Land, and Jordan McCollum at Marketing Pilgrim. (Did I miss anyone?)

A WebmasterWorld thread asks how to prevent publishers from being banned from Google AdSense.

AdSenseAdvisor writes in and offers two links to the Google AdSense Help Center to assist with these issues.

In the Google AdSense Help Center page on how to keep your account in good standing, some tips are provided that include:

• Don't click on your own ads
• Don't ask others to click on your ads
• Don't use popups
• Respect Google trademarks

Also, AdSenseAdvisor offers a link to a very comprehensive Disabled Account FAQ that addresses the most commonly-asked questions related to disabled accounts, including if the publisher will get paid and if s/he can get the account reenabled.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

According to the MSN adCenter Blog and werty on WebmasterWorld, Microsoft adCenter has released click quality reports to provide advertisers with more information about received clicks.

adCenter has now classified low-quality clicks that will not be billed, which include invalid clicks, clicks that appear to be unusual activity, clicks that have low/unclear commercial intent, clicks that originate from spiders, and clicks that should be filtered out for other reasons.

The adCenter blog walks you through how to access these new reports:

1. After signing in to your Microsoft adCenter account, click the Reports tab.

2. In the Report drop-down list, select either Campaign Performance or Account Performance.

3. In the Report View drop-down list, select Summary.

4. In the Date Range drop-down list, select the date range you want to work with.

5. Under Customize this report, in the Columns and values row, select Customize report layout.

In the Available values section, you will now see several new column headings:

* Low-quality clicks
* Low-quality impressions
* Low-quality click filtration rate
* Low-quality impression filtration rate
* Low-quality click conversions
* Low-quality click conversion rate

Yahoo and Google have also taken steps to take action on PPC quality with quality based pricing and smart pricing for AdSense. Google is rolling out new tools for advertisers, including IP exclusion and performance reporting, so this is a good step for adCenter.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Earlier this week, Google lost a lawsuit against a German trademark holder, Daniel Giersch, which bars the search engine giant from using its trademark in that country. As Barry reports, similar restrictions are in effect in the United Kingdom and Switzerland.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint discuss the ramifications of this loss for Google.

Some believe that the loss is deserved and the Giersch win the suit fair and square, despite the costs.

The guy has the rights to the name, the case is cristal clear. And if someone owns the name you can either buy him out or look for another name if he doesn't want too.

The only reason Google hast taken this to court is to generate as many costs as possible until he gives up the name. If someone with less money than Giersch had owned the name he would already be bankrupt.

On DigitalPoint, the angle shifted to Google's offering price of $250,000 for the Gmail name. Many feel that it was a low offer and that Giersch was correct to have turned them down.

Discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint.

June 1st, it was reported that Google was to shut down AdSense arbitrageurs and target MFA (made for AdSense) sites. It has now been over a month and a WebmasterWorld thread is looking back to see what patterns of changes have people noticed.

Here are some quotes:

CTR increases by few percent, but eCPM decreases significantly.

CTR down as compared to previous 3 months, but CPM up a bit. As a side... I decided to listen to Google and empty my competitive folder late on June 15. The first 1/2 of June with the filter list had a higher CTR but when I emptied the filter list the CPM went up. And to top it off I haven't seen a great abundance of MFAs since. They're still there but I'm not sure how bad the problem is now as compared to before because I had the filter list before to block the most popular ones...

June 2007 compared to May 2007
CTR unchanged, all other values (traffic, revenue, EPC, eCPM) slightly down, but close within last month (i.e. within +/-5% range).
June 2007 compared to June 2006
All values (traffic, CTR, revenue, EPC, eCPM) down, with only traffic being close to last years (i.e. within the +/-5% range). All other values significant down, with revenue (-35%) and eCPM (-30%) being the worst values.

In general, I am far away from being able to clear the filter list. I see more parked domains popping up daily, and at a higher speed. And I see more thin-content sites. As .info and .biz TLDs seem to have a bad credibility already, these type of sites seem to now also target .tv TLD.

As I see it, based on the averages of responses, most are noticing a drop in MFAs they have to block from displaying on their site. So that is good overall. But publishers still want to see more from Google.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

And hat tip to Ogletree SEO for sending me this thread to cover.