August 1, 2007 Archives

It's Digg time! And the world is also sphinning, so it's likely that we'll do some Sphinn coverage in the Digest in the future. Who knows?

What's new in the world of search from a tech geek's perspective anyway? A lot of things, actually. First of all, did you know that Google has a quilt shop in Venezuela? I don't think Google knew either. It reminds me of the fake Engadget store in Malaysia. Do these people not think that these brands are almost completely ubiquitous? I guess they don't.

RustyBrick (the company, not Barry) has been featured in TechCrunch because we're providing blog authors with a means of organizing multiple stories with multiple authors. If you maintain a very large website and need to manage your writer's budget, this is a cool tool. On a side point, we've also used it to manage our conference coverage, so it comes in handy for alternate purposes.

Back onto search.

David Wallace proposes an interesting question: should small businesses be afraid of Google Universal Search? . It's one of those challenges that a small company with not as much brand awareness and visibility is posed with. Thus, he proposes that you take advantage of the tools to maximize that visibility, including using Flickr, setting up a blog, using YouTube to submit company videos, and getting listed on Google maps.

Last week, Yahoo started rolling out Yahoo! Search Assist . We covered it and featured Danny's screencast which is quite cool. It's interesting that Jeremiah Owyang then discovered that AOL has been "borrowing" Yahoo's homepage design. But as I commented in that story at Digg, the current design might be replaced by something newer soon.

And finally, a golden nugget of wisdom from Christine Churchill: learn everything you can about your website . For example, renew your domain name before it expires. Make sure your robots.txt file is not excluding pages you want indexed from being crawled. Don't share your IP address with a spam site. Otherwise, you may have major problems to deal with.

What is the difference between on-site and off-site SEO? This is the question asked on a Cre8asite Forums thread.

While this is a somewhat beginner topic, it's a good question and helpful to review.

On-site SEO, as many say, are focusing on the on-page elements. For example:

• Unique title tags
• H1s/headlines
• Copywriting
• Adding descriptions to images
• Crawlable links
• Internal navigation

And off-site SEO, focuses on things beyond your website, such as:

• Press releases
• Link building
• Advertising
• Social media

Ammon Johns has a pretty good summary of how they should be distinguished:

It is important to remember that off-page factors begin while still on the same site, such as the navigational links to the optimised page, the link-text used in the site, and even the URL (which reflects site structure).

Thus, off-site factors and on-site factors are separate but somewhat tied to each other.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread points to a Google Groups announcement where Google has now included support for Bulgarian and Serbian languages for Google AdSense.

This is good news, especially since I know a few people from both places, despite the fact that some DigitalPoint forums folks feel that nobody speaks either language.

I would be interested to know how many people speak either of those languages.

I assure you, there are people who do.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and Google Groups.

A WebmasterWorld user wonders if KeywordSpy is a threat to advertisers. Basically, the premise of the site is simple: you enter a keyword or domain and see your competitors' keywords. The advertiser tried it against his domain and saw that it was pretty accurate. Naturally, that has caused a bit of worry for him.

But many other users tried it for other campaigns and it doesn't seem to be accurate. For example, an advertiser who sells lights was told by KeywordSpy that he was bidding on solar aquariums.

Another member puts it quite simply:

We're not bidding on about half of the keywords it brought up for our domain.

I tried it for a campaign I am working on and I agree that it's bringing up irrelevant keywords.

What are your thoughts of the service?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports seeing weird "property info" within their Google AdSense account settings page.

The information includes:

AdSense for Content: ca-pub-#*$!#*$!#*$!#*$!#*$!XX
AdSense for Content Host: ca-#*$!#*$!#*$!#*$!#*$!XX
AdSense for Search: partner-pub-#*$!#*$!#*$!#*$!#*$!XX
AdSense for Search Host: partner-pub-#*$!#*$!#*$!#*$!#*$!XX
Referrals: ca-ref-pub-#*$!#*$!#*$!#*$!#*$!XX
Referrals Host: ca-ref-pub-#*$!#*$!#*$!#*$!#*$!XX

These results come from the AdSense API and Google's AdSenseAdvisor explained there is a bug in reporting.

Our AdSense API team tells me that the AdSense Host properties that some publishers are seeing in their accounts are being shown in error. These ID numbers are are used for websites that have implemented the AdSense API.

Our engineering teams are working to investigate and resolve the issue. In the meantime, know that there have been no actual changes to the affected accounts, and no action is needed on your part. Sorry for any confusion.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld reports finding that Google is showing the cache date in minutes.

Typically, Google shows a date and not a countdown in minutes as to when Googlebot last retrieved the page. Here is an example of Google showing the date and not in minutes:

The boxed in date is what I am talking about.

Here is an example that I was able to reproduce on http://66.249.89.147 showing the cache date in last minutes.

This appears to be a new way of Google displaying this information.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Last night, Google announced that they have done away with the "supplemental results" label from the search results within Google.com.

What this means is that Google will no longer label results with a "Supplemental Results" tag in the search results. What did that look like?

Here is a screen shot I took from my post named Confusion Over Google's Supplemental Index in November 2006:

That boxed in "Supplemental Results" tag is no longer go to show up.

As Danny explained in his Google Dumps The Supplemental Results Label, Google first introduced the Supplemental Index in September 2003 "to index more pages from the web but not get bogged down actually searching through those billions and billions of them unless necessary." But the thing is, Google got bogged down by SEOs and Webmasters 'bugging out' about their pages being in the supplemental index.

Typically, pages found within the supplemental index were not as important as pages not found in Google's supplemental index. By important I mean, popular in terms of PageRank and links to that page. SEOs used the supplemental index label to learn what corrective action can be taken to improve a page's popularity in Google. If a page was in the supplemental index, that page needed more links and attention.

Currently, the new way to find supplemental results in Google by using a site:www.domain.com/& no longer works for me, on the data center I am hitting. I honestly suspect Google will give us a tool in Webmaster Central to detect which pages are suffering from a low popularity score either by showing webmasters the pages that are in the supplemental index or by just labeling which pages can use a boost from some links. This was one of the items in the webmaster central tools poll Matt Cutts held, so I hope they give SEOs and Webmasters more insight into this at least through GWT.

This change from Google comes to no surprise to me and many other webmasters. In fact, last week I wrote Is Google Gearing Up To Drop The Supplemental Result Label? at Search Engine Land. I was a bit shocked to learn early this week that Google is going to go forward with this change so soon. And they did!

Webmaster & SEO Reaction
We currently have two threads discussing this topic. One at DigitalPoint Forums and the other at WebmasterWorld.

As expected, the reaction is both positive and negative. On one hand, Google promised to show "more Supplemental Results by ensuring that every query is able to search the supplemental index" by this summer. So even if your pages are in the supplemental index, Google promised to give those pages more prominence in the search results.

Does that mean Google will do so? We do not know. That is the other side of the reaction towards this change. Webmasters and SEOs feel Google silenced them by simply hiding information from us. In fact, they feel that pages in the supplemental index will not only continue to always do poorly in the search results, but now they won't have a valuable tool to help fix the issues with these pages.

Honestly, I think the best move for Google is to add a Supplemental Index tool to Google Webmaster Central. This is a great compromise. Webmasters can quickly check what problems they have with their pages and implement changes. Google can also not show the supplemental index in the results and save some of a headache explaining what is it.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld