July 30, 2007 Archives

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.