July 27, 2007 Archives

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.