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.