September 2007 Archives

This topic comes up pretty regularly as it affects quite a few websites in the space. People are wondering how with more regionalization of search results these multi-language or geospecific websites are faring in today's result set. The thread on WMW highlights some of the experience and thoughts from posters concerned about these trends. I think people are looking to understand how the search engines are responding to geolocation sites. What is the process for which they consider these websites?

A member asks:

I remember reading either GG/MC suggesting CCTLDs was the preferred option when targeting specific countries, so are the days of the multi-language single site numbered?

Rainborick responded to how the search engine are treating CC TLD's these days "The search engines behavior in this area has remained unchanged in at least 2 years. They check for a CC TLD first, and failing that refer to the IP address of the server. It is easy to see why they chose these methods. Its dirt simple to implement because it doesn't require a lot of ongoing processing, and reasonably reliable in terms of the Web overall. Routine updates of the generic TLDs' IP addresses is all that's required."

It seems everyone is quite interested more in how multi-language websites are treated. There is no consensus how these websites are treated, but some do offer plausible examples on how they are approached.

So what are they doing differently these days? Here are some thoughts.

"What's new in all this is that for generic terms G is boosting "local" pages in the "web search" results and it now depends mostly on the strength of the local competition how well "foreign" pages will feature."

"Its not just Google. Yahoo! and MSN both give geo-location a great deal of weight in their rankings for all web searches."

Some good information and discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

One of Google's first audio advertisers has written up a great in-depth review of the service on DigitalPoint Forums. A few takeaways:

• There is no way to delete or remove campaigns, only stop or pause them. This creates a tad bit of confusion when looking at the collective budget because it includes ALL campaigns, even ones you stopped.
• It still appears to be a beta product. Some of the navigation is still ambiguous.
• Creating an ad is simple. You can upload an MP3 or have one done professionally.
• Custom jingles, multiple voices, and sound effects can add to the cost.
• Currently, there's no easy way to request quotes from companies that display offerings on multiple pages. This appears to be a bug.
• Price range for most ads $300-400
• You can choose demographics to tailor your ad to.
• Caution: The cheapest audio ads will almost certainly play on AM stations.
• The approval process for audio ads takes a few days.
• So far: no conversions for this advertiser, but he may try again.

This is definitely a lot to digest, so if you want to read the whole review, navigate to DigitalPoint Forums.

This post was composed on September 25 and was scheduled for publication on September 28.

If you live in the Dallas/Fort Worth area of Texas and want to know of 51 essential tools for SEM, Jeff Martin has announced that there will be a meetup at the Renaissance Hotel in Richardson, TX on October 15, 2007 between 6:30PM and 8PM. The meetup is intended to cover "51 essential tools for managing paid and natural search engine marketing campaigns." The presenters include Christine Churchill, Rob Garner, and other members of the DFW SEM association.

If you're interested in attending, the event is free for members and $20 for non-members. Additional information can be found on the DFW SEM website.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Watch Forums.

This post was composed on September 24 and has been scheduled for publication on September 28.

So lets say you change all of your urls on your website to a completely new url structure. You 301 redirect all the old urls to the new ones. So how does it take for this to update in Google and other search engines? A thread on WMW has some good thoughts from members who have experienced this situation. The thread starter remarked on his situation:

We dropped from 120k pages in the index to 87k pages. We also are not coming up for certain keywords that we were always there for, and are seeing 50% less traffic from Google.

Some of the other posters said that it take quite some time up to a year for all the urls to be fully spidered and ranked again by Google. It is important to mention that result will vary based on a number of factors. If you have a site that has 120K pages and you change all the urls, then it not unreasonable to expect a large delay. It often comes down to "Is it worth it to change that many urls?" Does the outcome of such a change benefit you in the long run? For traffic from search engines? Or for visitors?

Tedster said:

"My experience was that, long term, it was always a positive step. Short term, a site with anything lower than a PR7 Home Page may experience a few bumps on the way to improvement. It's essential to get the technology right in your rewrite scheme, and there are several pitfalls.

1. Poorly configured, you may open the door to duplicate urls for the same content.
2. Remember that there are two steps to address: a. get the new urls to resolve and b. 301 redirect the old urls.
3. I found it more effective to do a ranking, traffic and backlink study and then only redirect the key urls, letting the rest go 404. That approach seemed to give the quickest "recovery" time in Google I ever achieved. In fact, that site never saw a dip in Google traffic, and then rankings improved quickly."

Some great advice from him. Continued discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Who knew something as simple as a link in a footer giving credit to the web site designer could set off such a controversy, but that's exactly what happened in Adding Links To Sites You Designed Right or Wrong?.

In this Cre8asiteforums thread, the majority of web site designers see nothing wrong with wanting a link to their web site placed on the web site they designed and/or built. Some view this as a courtesy. Some put it into their contract. In general, it's been a practice we've seen for years.

However, someone in this thread steadfastly looks at this link as an SEO trick to get link juice and recommends that if credit is given, that it not be in the form of a link or if so, add the "no follow" tag so it passes no PR.

Battle lines were drawn. Interesting points were raised. This issue must have been one of those "I always wondered about that" questions. What happens if everybody wants credit?

Garrick writes,

"Footer:

Copyright © Company XYZ. All rights reserved.
Website Design by Joe
Graphics by Ken
HTML by Betty
CSS by Larry
Logo by Fred
Database design by Harvey
Programming by Anne
Javascript by Karen
Rollovers by Uncle Fred
Dropdown Menus by Maurice
Color Scheme by Wendy
Copyrighting by Irma
Server administration by Chuck
Photos by Janine
Graphic optimization by Julia
Shopping cart by Shopping Carts r US
Gateway services by Versign
Credit card processing by Harry and Sons

Where does it stop? There are lots of people one could hire to help build a site, who have worked equally hard to help make the site what it is."

For the record, I only come here and play when Barry and Tamar are away on holiday and can't yell at me for my silly posts. The site design and all the credit for this place is totally theirs.

SEO's from the early days eventually learned that no matter how often they submitted URL's to search engines, the rewards were questionable, if any existed at all. There are still some search engine marketing company rip-offs selling site submission services to "hundreds of search engines", promising rank (in them all?) and doing it for dirt cheap.

When someone asked about such a scam, he also wondered that if a search engine like Google follows links to find new web sites, why is there a URL submit form?

It's kinda like a Dentist insisting that you get fluoride treatments, even though you buy toothpaste that has it in there and many towns put it in the water and some research says it's bad for you.

Do you submit to search engines on a "just in case" basis or is there some worth to this practice that remains?

If you're curious, read How Many SE's Do You Submit To? at Cre8asiteforums.

A forums member wants to know who the boss is. In your work as an SEO, are you optimizing pages for the site owner, search engines or web site visitors?

The writer asks,

"Now wouldn't we all be out of a job if we did whatever is best for the people viewing the site? We do what is best for our customers. The people paying us to make their websites....Of course, we need to provide something for the viewers out there to 'view'. But really, isn't this secondary to delivering a product to them?"

Ammon Johns responds:

"All the searching on major search engines happened in the early phases - the pure research phases. By the time they were holding their credit card, they were using another means to find the best price, such as a price comparison site.

The SEM uses this knowledge to change the way he markets to this small but growing portion of the market. He makes sure he provides material for those early 'scouting' type searches. He provides impressive information to make a good experience for the user. He builds a brand.

Because later, when that person is shopping for prices, if his site is any one of the options, he's got that sale on the trust he built, and the positive experiences given.

That is why it is all about giving an excellent, remarkable, memorable user-experience to every visitor."

Cre8asiteforums discussion: Why Is The Answer In Seo Always "Think About Your Audience"

A HighRankings thread discusses how conversion rates are calculated. Alan says that industry experts typically calculate conversion rates between 0.005% and 0.2% but would like to know how this number is found.

It really varies, says other members. The only use of knowing this statistic is that it may be necessary in the future to explain to your PPC customer that a big percentage of their visitors will not be converting visitors. nethy explains that it's really not a useful metric at all.

Conversion rate outside of context is not a very useful metric. That's why it is not agood idea (it think) to benchmark too seriously. Except maybe to calm a client that just realised that 98.6% of visitors to his site left without paying.

Conversion rates in general are difficult to apply over different markets or different situations. Randy adds that funnels may show higher conversions.

As a general rule though, I'd say your 00.5 - 0.2 numbers are probably talking about overall site conversions. I would personally expect CR for individual pages or even a series of pages (funnel) that lead to a sale to be considerably higher.

Forum discussion continues at HighRankings Forums.

This post was composed on September 25 and was scheduled for publication on September 27th.

A DigitalPoint Forums member is concerned about the heavy crawling performed by the Googlebot. He claims that Google is crawling 3GB of data from his site a month and wants to reduce this as it's a bit excessive in his opinion.

This is possible and can be done through the Google Webmaster Central Tools.
. Click on the Tools button on the left hand navigation and then choose "Crawl Rate." You'll get a screen like this:

If you want to reduce the crawl delay, you can do so here. Google advises you that if you want to use a slower rate, it will be valid for 90 days. If, after that time, Google determines that it is crawling your site too slowly, it will present the webmaster with a recommendation about crawling the site at a faster rate (or the webmaster can continue having the site crawled at the slower rate).

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

This post was written on September 25th and was scheduled for publication on September 27.

How does one rank in the Google Image Search Engine? A Cre8asite Forums member asks this question and a bunch of good advice is dispensed.

For one, filename, alt text, and surrounding text is important.

EGOL says that while on-page elements are important, rankings are also driven by searcher interest in the image. The more times it's accessed for a particular search phrase, the more likely it is relevant for the search.

The Google Webmaster Central blog shares some useful tips: don't put the bulk of your text in images, take advantage of ALT tags (but don't overload it), and look at the image-to-text ratio on your page.

Other resources: Search Engine Placement using Google Image Search and Optimizing Images for Search Engines.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

This post was composed on September 24 and has been scheduled for publication on September 27.

Tonight is the holiday of Sukkot, so Tamar and I will be offline starting tonight through the weekend.

We have scheduled several posts to go live during our time offline. But we will also have live coverage from Ben, Chris, Kim while Tamar and I are off. I have previewed some of the topics and they are really exciting. So stay tuned.

Next week is the same story. It is the last day we are off during the week for months. So after next week, we are back to a regular schedule. At least I hope so.

For those celebrating Sukkot, have a happy holiday. Everyone else, thank you for reading and commenting!

There seems to be a major update taking place at Yahoo! Search today. A WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums thread has chatter on it from SEOs.

One member said that his rankings "jumped from 168 to 29."

But is this update causing technical problems with searching over at Yahoo? An other WebmasterWorld thread reports Yahoo is telling searches they can't process their query:

We had temporary problems searching for web pages. Search again for MY SEARCH or type a new query above.

Aaron Wall at SEO Book seems to be the first to spot and call out this Yahoo update. He said he has seen a shift in rankings and problems with how they handle 301s, and a change in how they weight on domain names. Loren Baker also covered Aaron's post.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Update: It is now official, the Yahoo Search blog just posted a weather report.

The 37th edition of the Search Pulse is now available for download.In the 37th edition of the Search Pulse, Chris, Ben and I discussed several exciting topics. We talked about how some search engines celebrated Talk Like a Pirate Day. We also discussed some of the reaction towards Google stopping the commission payouts to AdWords agencies in Europe. We discussed the Chinese-like spam in Google, as well as how Google Book search results invaded some of the listings. We touched on many more topics including AdWords Quality Scores, link building, web directories, Microsoft's Live 2.0 search engine and then went into "lightening round." The topics we covered are listed below, in order of priority (based on search community buzz).

Update: They recovered the file, here is the MP3 file.

NOTE: The show MP3 file was corrupt, WebmasterRadio was unable to publish an archive of the show. I apologize, but I guess more of an incentive to listen live. But here is a summary of what we talked about.

Topics We Covered:

1. Talk Like A Pirate Day: Dogpile, Flickr, Roundtable & Others
   
2. Google to Discontinue Commission Payouts to European Agencies
   
3. Google Update Underway? Chinese Spam Impacting Google.com
   
4. Google Book Search Results in Google.com Organic Results?
   
5. Advertisers React to Google's Quality Score Penalty Definitions
   
6. Link Building is Getting More Difficult, but Why?
   
7. What Makes a Bad Web Directory?
   
8. More Signs of Live Search 2.0
   
9. Live.com Search Update & Design Update?
   

Continue reading "Search Pulse 37: Pirate Day, AdWords Payouts, Google Spam, Google Books, Ad Penalties & More"

WebmasterWorld members announced that the ODP has created a blog which is run by AOL staff.

That's great, some say. They always believed there was an intelligent force behind DMOZ and hope it persists. They hope that a new era is about to arrive with better quality.

I'd love to see AOL make a sincere effort to diagnose and fix the weaknesses of DMOZ (no need to repeat that debate/list). There's a huge opportunity for changes that are win-win-win solutions for DMOZ volunteers, AOL shareholders, and quality-oriented webmasters. The only losers would be the fakers and spammers.

My only gripe with this is that I wish it happened earlier. Right now, in light of all recent events relating to DMOZ (in a negative light), it appears that they formed this blog because they're in damage control mode.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

About a week ago, Barry posted at Search Engine Land that a man is suing Google for $5 billion because he says that the word "Google" turned upside down looks so much like his social security number. Interestingly enough, Google has 6 letters whereas a social security number has 9 digits. I wonder if he meant "Gooooogle."

In any event, DigitalPoint Forums members think that the guy is absolutely ridiculous (a claim echoed by me).

If this guy actually wins this, then I will commit suicide.

(They say that he should sue Google after he commits suicide.)

If he wins this case, I will pay some politician to get me that SSN.

Most people think that the guy suing Google is just brainless. Others think that it's just the nature of the American judicial system since it's so easy to start a frivolous lawsuit in this country in comparison to others.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

My friend Sam, who I met at SES New York, ran into an interesting dilemma at the Cre8asite Forums. She's managing several Google Analytics accounts under one master account.

According to the Google Analytics Help, Google Analytics will track an unlimited amount of websites.

However, she's stuck at 50 and is getting the following message:

Add Website Profile » You have reached the maximum number of website profiles allowed.

Interesting. Is this a bug?

However, while there's a lot of convenience to monitor multiple accounts under one single account so as not to require hundreds of logins, it may be simpler in the future to use separate accounts in case you need to give clients access if they no longer do business with you:

I think its a good practice to have separate accounts for different clients, and you should have it with clients login, because if client for some reason want to leave you, then you want have difficulty giving him access

This is a good point, but I'd be inclined to request two things: if Google Analytics is unlimited, please let us know, and can we make it easier to separate Google Analytics accounts in the future without going through the Google team if the time comes?

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

Take a look at a site:familyonetransportation.com query. Notice everything looks fine and dandy.

Now, lets look at the cache:familyonetransportation.com result for that page.

Why is it displaying the cache of a different site? Currently, I see ShuttlesInOrlando.com for a cache lookup for FamilyOneTransportation.com. But why? Here is the cache information:

This is G o o g l e's cache of http://www.shuttlesinorlando.com/ as retrieved on 22 Sep 2007 00:58:26 GMT.

In a Google Groups thread, the owner of the site said he or she had a 302 redirect from FamilyOneTransportation.com to ShuttlesInOrlando.com in the past, but over two months ago, she stopped the 302 redirect, but Google still displays the wrong site in the cache.

What makes this a bit weirder is that I can get the cache page of the home page if I go this route.

In any event, Googler Susan Moskwa said:

I've seen a couple other users report the same phenomenon recently in our Help Groups. I'm not sure if/how it's related to your 302 redirects, but I've passed your case along to the team to look into further.

So this might be a larger problem with Google's cache operator. It appears Google knows about the 302 change, it also appears they have cached the correct home page. But the operator for a cache: lookup does not appear to work 100% correctly right now.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

If you take a look at the AdWords Robots.txt file, you will notice that they disallow "Disallow: /*?"

Technically, that disallows all Google AdWords Qualified Professional pages. Here is an example of one Google AdWords Professional page. Notice the URL is https://adwords.google.com/select/ProfessionalStatus?id=. Since Google disallows /*?, Google won't index them fully.

Ah, but what about the 1,300 pages Google seemed to have indexed at adwords.google.com/select/ProfessionalStatus? Well, those are not fully indexed, as you can see. It seems like that is just linkage data, and that is why those are listed in the index.

The big question is why does Google not index them? Is it a duplicate content reason? Do you feel that this information is redundant to the company's web site? Is there no added value to having these pages found in a Google search? I find that hard to believe. Even more so, Google has approved these AdWords advertisers, so there is an element of trust, a stamp of approval, so why block these pages from being indexed? Clearly, the link to the company's home page does not have a nofollow attribute applied to the link, but it doesn't really need one if the page isn't indexed.

What do you think? Should Google index these pages or not? Should Google nofollow those links if they are indexed?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Danny Sullivan has turned 42 years old today. I wanted to wish Danny a happy birthday on behalf of the search marketing community.

As many of you know, Danny is instrumental in bridging the search engines and the search marketing industry together. He has helped the communication between the two sides. He has encouraged, successfully, the implementation of open dialogs, tools, access to data, and more importantly, the friendly attitude between the two sides.

Outside of that, Danny has provided free content and information for over a decade on search related topics. From SEO, to PPC, to paid inclusion, to searching and even social media. He has given us a playground with the new Sphinn, he has organized the hottest news in search at Search Engine Land and has organized a new array of exciting conferences with Search Marketing Expo.

Proof of Danny's impact can be seen in this article: Reaction from the Search Community on Danny Sullivan's Departure.

FYI, we have covered Danny's 41st, 40th and 39th birthdays.

Happy Birthday Danny!

If you want to wish Danny a happy birthday, you can! Go to Sphinn thread and leave a comment for Danny.

Many publishers have a hard time getting approved into the Google AdSense program. In fact, Google recently posted a blog entry named Before you apply to AdSense. In that blog post, Google explains the ways to apply and some of the criteria that must be met to get approval into the program.

If that blog post doesn't help you get into the Google AdSense program then maybe a DigitalPoint Forums thread would.

In that thread, one member claimed that if you register at HubPages and then click on "account settings" and then "affiliates." You can sign up for Google AdSense within HubPages. HubPages says:

When you create a user account with HubPages, we’ll automatically create the Google Adsense program for you. Just answer a few simple questions and you’ll be ready to go.

This implies that creating a HubPage account will guarantee acceptance into Google AdSense.

Some of the forums members are giving this theory a try. It would make sense that the same applies to Google's Blogger accounts or Google Pages.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

The Inside AdWords blog announced a new CPA bidding product yesterday called Conversion Optimizer. The tool is intended to "help you meet your ROI objectives by automatically managing your bids according to a maximum CPA goal. By automating the bidding process, this feature helps you minimize your conversion costs while saving you time."

Forum reaction is mixed. Since Conversion Optimizer is requires a minimum of 300 conversions in 30 days, many advertisers cannot try it out.

One who, did, however, is dissatisfied with the tool. Apparently, it's not easy for him to restore his bids as they were before:

I have changed my keyword bids using conversion optimizer tool but iam not satisfied with that tool ,so i would like to know how to insert previous bids for the keywords as they were before.

Yet are just looking forward to seeing how this feature will work on the content network versus the search network.

I agree that PPA sounds much easier on the content network, I'd be interested to see how this could improve the performance on the Google/search network though.

It will take some time before that is known.

If you're interested in giving it a try, Barry has more information at Search Engine Land.

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

WebmasterWorld members are a bit frustrated with broad match keywords since advertisers are complaining that the wrong ads are being delivered by desired keyword phrases.

Some comments regarding broad match come from a member who is particularly peeved:

Broad match does not work as well as described. Actually, I think it works terribly.

The ABSOLUTE WORST thing i've seen broad match do is show ads for searches that I AM NOT BIDDING ON.

AdWordsAdvisor chimes in at that point and asks, with sincerity, why advertisers who know about the risks of broad match are still using it.

Broad match is configured (and documented) to work in a particular way, which includes 'expansions'. Given that this is so, why do advertisers who genuinely hate broad match because of the 'expansions' continue to use it - when 'exact match' is an option which would give them complete control, and when 'phrase match' is less 'exclusive' than exact, but is not expanded?

Some reasons presented by advertisers include:

1. Broad match is good, but some expansions are "way off the mark"
2. If you are not educated properly about the varying match types (broad, phrase, exact), you're led to assume that broad match might equal exact match - nobody is informed that they need to enclose keywords in quotes, for example.
3. Broad match destroys the optimization of keyword relevancy and bidding.

These are some very valid points.

If you have anything to add (AdWordsAdvisor is taking these suggestions to a meeting next week), join the discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Numerous reports indicate that Microsoft is looking to purchase a stake in Facebook and values the social networking site at roughly $10 billion. That's 5 times as much as Zuckerberg was originally rumored to have wanted to sell Facebook for in early 2006.

Forum members, particularly those at WebmasterWorld, are shocked that Microsoft has put such a high value on the social networking site.

So we're saying Facebook is worth $8billion... what a load of &*"!£$%^. That's more than some serious worthwhile businesses!

Actually, with many people using Facebook during work, the valuation might not be too far off. I happen to know a lot of Facebook addicts. Don't you?

Others aren't as enthusiastic that Microsoft will have access to all the user data.

Somewhere in this mess is a great truth that your personal data has value and that value will be squeezed out of it, lucky us.

Very true -- and very frightening.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Just a heads up to new Google AdSense publishers, if you are trying to enter your PIN (personal identification number) and it is not working, you are not alone.

A Google Groups thread reports dozens of publishers receiving the same errors:

We apologize for the inconvenience, but we are unable to process your request at this time. Our engineers have been notified of this problem and will work to resolve it.

AdSensePro confirms the issue and says they are working on fixing it as soon as possible:

Our engineers are aware that some people have been having trouble entering their PINs, and are working to investigate and resolve this issue. There's no need to write into AdSense support, as they won't be able to give you any updates yet, but I'll be sure to post updates here as more information becomes available.

Thanks, and sorry for the inconvenience,
-AdSensePro

An AdSense PIN is required to get paid. After you verify your address by entering in the PIN that was mailed to you, you will likely not need to enter a new PIN in every again. But you cannot get paid without it anymore.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Update: This is now fixed.

The other day we reported on a Live.com Search Update & Design Update. The other week, in conjunction with our post, the LiveSide blog captured dozens of screen captures of "Live Search 2.0" in action.

Ever since then, I see people popping up in the forums spotting a new algorithm and design for Microsoft's Live.com search engine.

Microsoft actually "spilled the beans" on the launch, posting a blog post too early that read something like:

In a blog posting on Thursday, Windows Live program manager Akram Hussein demonstrated how the revamped Live Search handles searches for digital cameras, showing not just product details, but also reviews. The new search scrapes details from other sites that have user reviews and other information and presents it from within the search engine.

In any event, this new design and "algorithm" is on it's way. Will it be better? Time will tell. It is hard to get worse (ouch!).

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google released Google Referrals 2.0 to all advertisers a couple months back. We now have a detailed WebmasterWorld thread with feedback on if it actually earns publishers money.

Most say, no, it does not earn them any or enough money to keep them live on their site.

In the twenty plus replies about how much people are earning from Referrals ads, there was not one single positive reply.

Many have dropped those ads completely from displaying on their site:

It just didn't work for me. After trying referrals for a couple of months with virtually no conversions, I took it off of my site.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Gabs from SEO Home reported at a Search Engine Roundtable Forums thread that the Google Directory PageRank bars have updated.

There is a difference, sometimes, between the PageRank shown in the Google Directory when compared to the PageRank shown in the Google Toolbar. Also, the PageRank values Google has internally are normally different from both the Directory and Toolbar PageRank values.

Gabs showed an example of a change. If you look at the cached version of this page, it shows a PageRank value of 3 for Abbey Theatre but the current version shows a PageRank value of 2 (I may be off on those numbers, but you can clearly see the current version of the PageRank bar is less than the cached or older version. Here is a side by said:

Current:

Past:

Side by side, just looking at the PageRank bars:

Note, we had a Google Directory Data Update last month, but the last time I reported a PageRank score update at the Google Directory was back in 2004, that is not saying it hasn't happened since.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

DigitalPoint Forums members report that Google (GOOG) stock has reached new heights: at $564, it's higher than it's ever been and is $45 more than our June reporting of $519.

Well, last week it was at $560. It already went up since then.

Forum members attribute this to Google's popularity (as "top dog") and mobile ads. But as one forum member reports, "it keeps growing in a market it basically created a need for. "

What next?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Fear not, my friends. It appears that our report last Monday about Yahoo! Overture being dead was a bit premature. According to WebmasterWorld members, the Yahoo! Overture Keyword Tool is back. The optimistic hopefuls have revived the useful tool from the dead.

Here's a search I performed just a few minutes ago.

Contrast that with the screenshot I created last week:

It definitely looks like it's working, and it's using data from January 2007. Other forum members report that it's showing May data. I suppose it may vary per search term but I'm unable to get May data.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Do you think that Gmail is lacking in functionality? With millions of users, many people might seem to disagree (but they'd like folder functionality!) However, since Google hasn't innovated with Gmail anytime recently, there's likely to be a brand new Google on the horizon, according to reports by ZDNet.

DigitalPoint Forums members are enthusiastic, but they'd love unlimited storage (for free). I, too, think that would be sweet.

What new features would you like in Gmail? Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread refers to last week's Hitwise Press Release that states that Google has received 64% of US searches for the month of August. Danny Sullivan also reported with these findings at Search Engine Land and followed with another article reporting the Neilsen NetRatings for August 2007. Clearly, Google is on the top of the popularity statistics for the US.

Forum members believe that the smallest players in the Top 4 should close up shop. Given that there are hundreds of other search engines outside the top 4, I'm not so sure I'd agree. Plus, as other members add, competition should exist.

Other search engines are innovative in their own space. For example, a forum member believes Ask is making an impact with its advertising strategy:

ASK.com has been making a big push at google using Radio and Tv ads recently in the USA specifically detailing about the search results with video, ipod and other major sectors that bring it "above" googles.

In general, though, Google might be big in some countries, but in Asia, for example, they're not necessarily leading in search popularity.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

Sphinn users report that the DMOZ homepage is missing from the Google results. While you can still do a site:dmoz.org search and find a few million results, searching for "dmoz" alone won't bring up the homepage.

A screenshot, taken by Barry on Search Engine Land, is below:

Does this have anything to do with Search Engine Land's report of the Google Directory Ban of September 2007? Danny Sullivan wonders if that's the case.

Truthfully, I wonder if it has anything to do with DMOZ's apparent corruption.

Discussion continues on Sphinn.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports on a Guardian Unlimited article that says Google will be discontinuing their "Best Practice Funding," which basically pays back some European agencies 3% to 8% of their ad spend each quarter.

This program actually earned some agencies up to £50,000 each year. The program is to be discontinued at the end of 2008. Damian Burns, head of agency relations for Google EMEA said:

Agencies are now at a level where they don't need a subsidy.

Everyone should be equal in an auction system, there shouldn't be buying clout, the value for clients is in how well agency campaigns perform.

This will now level the playing field for many advertisers. As you can imagine, this has been a hot debate over the years. Many agencies kept this program under the radar, to try to not 'ruffle any feathers' over this sweet deal they had with Google. We covered it back in January 2006 with AdWords Discounts for Big Agencies?

A WebmasterWorld thread has some reaction from these European advertisers. Although many knew this day would come, they didn't want to believe it. Some say that some agencies have not charged a PPC management fee, and solely relied on Google's commissions to run their business. This "free model" of PPC management has to be changed and there may be some client's lost over this in the European market.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Go to Google Suggest type in "Israel is a ", again, just type in the words israel space, is space, a space and see it suggests "Israel is a Terrorist State." Then it follows that by "Israel is Evil." Here is a screen capture:

Why would Google suggest these search phrases? According to Google's FAQ this works purely based on algorithms:

Our algorithms use a wide range of information to predict the queries users are most likely to want to see. For example, Google Suggest uses data about the overall popularity of various searches to help rank the refinements it offers. An example of this type of popularity information can be found in the Google Zeitgeist. Google Suggest does not base its suggestions on your personal search history.

Can Google Suggest be manipulated by the outside? I suspect so. Just like they had with the search on "jew" back on April 2004. In fact, a search for jew still returns a Google ad that leads to http://www.google.com/explanation.html.

If you recently used Google to search for the word "Jew," you may have seen results that were very disturbing. We assure you that the views expressed by the sites in your results are not in any way endorsed by Google. We'd like to explain why you're seeing these results when you conduct this search.

A site's ranking in Google's search results relies heavily on computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page's relevance to a given query. Sometimes subtleties of language cause anomalies to appear that cannot be predicted. A search for "Jew" brings up one such unexpected result.

So should one thing Google suggests that Israel is a terrorist state? Personally, I think not. It is a shame those types of suggestions come up, but I don't think we can blame Google for it.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread shows an ad for Digital Point Coop Network. The network is now a controversial ad network, because it can be used to try to influence the search results.

In any event, a DigitalPoint Forums thread has a picture of someone advertising the network. The thing is, most people feel it is Shawn Hogan, the owner of Digital Point, advertising the network. I highly doubt that. In fact, it is probably an advertiser in the network, who wants to earn what is called "referral weight" to gain more "weight" in the network.

The more "weight" you have, the more your ads will be displayed in the network. So by this person having ads, he/she is hoping to increase his/her weight in the network and boos the visibility of his or her ads.

More coverage of the Digital Point coop network at over here.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Over the past week I was tracking a thread at WebmasterWorld that suggested Google was ranking their own book results in the top results.

I have seen many examples early on, and they included searches for building wealth and neckties, as well as some others. Yes, book.google.com results were coming up on page one for those searches.

But today they do not. In fact, they have grown to be less of a 'problem' as soon as the first report came out.

Although, books in general due rank well, it is not Google's Book search results that rank well. For example, this Google book search results is now on page four, which is fine by me.

Same with a search on neckties, the results that were on the first page, are now on the fourth page:

I agree with WebmasterWorld administrator, Tedster:

The books.google.com phenomnon that started this thread seems to have calmed down - as far as I'm concerned, Google is welcome to play with page 4 on down all they need to.

This is not to be confused with the top image on the right. Those are special universal results, where Google dynamically brings in their books database into the main web search results. The results above are about Google indexing and displaying Google book landing pages in the main Google.com web search results.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and now Search Engine Watch Forums.

Yeah, I know. It's not "weekly" because I didn't post last week due to the holiday. Next week and the following week, two more holidays will keep Barry and me offline on Fridays so we'll see a big recap (from me) in three weeks from today.

Now for the big news for the last two weeks...

Google, Yahoo September '07 Update

Forum members reported that a September 2007 Yahoo Update may be underway since rankings are fluctuating. Has anything changed for you or have things returned to the norm?

And by the way, what's with Google's update and the spam from China within the search results?

Google is Testing Grouped Results, Search Suggestions

Some people have seen a brand new Google SERP: one that includes Google grouping results that fit in a category together while pushing the more diverse results to the second page. They are also testing out a variation on Search Suggestions for URLs. I haven't seen either of these but they sound interesting. Will it work?

Google Webmaster Tools Gets Landing Page, Internal Page Facelift

Google Webmaster Tools has been busy lately. They changed the landing page and then they changed the interface. Things are getting... different.

By the way, if you leave the Google Webmaster Tools team, you could be worth $30 million. My next stop: Google. Then I will sell my soul to a venture capitalist. But I up my ante to $50 million. New York is more expensive than Seattle, you know. (Sergey and Larry, can I get a handout?!)

We're cooler than Philipp

Nathan Weinberg didn't think so, even though we broke the story, so I am just making that clear. :) Google has an AdWords Chat with a Specialist feature, and it's fast. Better than email if you're looking for a quick solution.

Microsoft in Hebrew means "Microsoft"

Microsoft has launched a translation tool for foreign languages. I don't really run into the need to translate words very often but would love feedback on how this is doing.

Google Time is Back!

Once, there was time. Then, time was dropped. It's back, my friends, as Barry reports that Google has the time again. Whew!

Google Mobile Ads Return, Gadget Ads Surface

With iPhones and more widespread mobile web surfing, it's no surprise that Google is launching mobile ads yet again. A beautiful AdSense for Mobile screenshot tour has been compiled by Barry, and if you're looking to advertise on the mobile market, hop on.

Google also announced gadget ads that are more interactive. Some advertisers are ecstatic, but users aren't as enthusiastic. I would find Flash games fun though, especially if they show up on sites that I visit for work related purposes so that it actually looks like I'm working.

A Cleaner Google

Google is trying to remove RSS links from the search results. I found that highly annoying so all I have to say is "Huzzah!" (Actually, I was thinking about saying "score," but then I thought about my BFF Lisa and realized that she'd like it if I honor her in my recap.)

A Dirtier Google

Okay, no, this isn't a dirtier Google, but Google is concerned that traffic exchange programs are bad. Therefore, yes, BlogRush may be bad for the health as indicated by the Google AdSense team. It's also incredibly overrated. Get rid of it!

PageRank Update? Stop Asking!

There is no forthcoming PageRank update, according to Matt Cutts. This begs the question: will my SearchStatus Firefox extension be rendered obsolete? Time will only tell (but hurry it up, dammit!) And yes, if you're still wondering, the lack of Google PageRank in Google Webmaster Tools may really mean something. Who knows. I want to find out though (again, hurry up!)

Yahoo! Overture RIP

The Yahoo! Overture tool is dead, according to reports and yours truly. Thanks to Jon West for spotting this before we did. We were offline, after all. ;)

Yahoo Mash Born

With every end comes another new beginning. So Overture died. But in its place we see the emergence of Yahoo! Mash, a social network for keyword research people. Okay, so they're not at all related. But still, Yahoo! Mash looks kind of neat. However, it's really like another Facebook. The best part is when I get to kill people's mash pets.

Yahoo Widget Badges

Yahoo has also come out with widget badges that give you more functionality for your website. Some will show real time traffic, others will show weather, and others are just purely for fun.

Save the Date: September 26 for MSN 2.0

It's only 5 days away, my friends: MSN 2.0 will debut with personalized results, social networking, and more. We're already seeing the beginning. Can't wait.

Rob Kerry is My Boss

I quit RustyBrick and now Rob is my new boss.

Okay, I'm kidding.

As a mod at Sphinn, however, Rob Kerry is somewhat my boss... he has left Search Engine Watch Forums and gone to Sphinn to take over. I'm not sure how good I feel about having an evil green monkey as a superior.

Holidays and Themes

We celebrated Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, last week, which is why there was no Roundup last week. Then, we talked like pirates (well, I didn't, but maybe you did) for International Talk Like a Pirate Day. A few other holidays are forthcoming: Yom Kippur (tonight!), Succot, Shmini Atzeret, and Simchat Torah. That's why you won't see a lot of me in the upcoming days. I hope you're enjoying the fun look to Search Engine Roundtable.

By the way, here's a heads up on the theme for Yom Kippur:

Cool stuff. :)

What began as a thread at WebmasterWorld on Google AdSense turned out to be applicable to all different areas of content creation.

The question posed is as follows:

The best AdSense sites, and those that usually make best money, are those that rely on user created content. But still there are many successful AdSense web sites whose content is written entirely by their creators.

For those who are creating content rich web sites, how many words per day in average can you produce?

This is a great question. I start to think about Jennifer Laycock, since I asked her in San Jose about how she's writing so much in so little time. People do exceed expectations, after all.

Food for thought: write a bit a day. The more you write, the better you get.

Great writers both highbrow (Graham Greene) and lowbrow (Stephen King) recommend a constant production rate of at least 1000 words a day. Writing is a bit like sport, in that (a) it requires fitness obtained through daily practice, and (b) the more you do, the better you get.

It seems that most content providers will write between 500-2000 words a day from the discussion.

But then there are others who take a creative spin:

I make pictures

picture = 1,000 words

3,000

(That made me smile too.)

Some people who don't write on a daily basis will still try to pump out new content ever few days which comes out much less than 500 words per day. Nothing wrong with that!

I wonder how many words I write per day. Oh, and Barry too. :)

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday, Rand Fishkin came out with a SEOmoz article on what makes a good web directory versus a bad one. Some of his points were that manipulative directories may have the following characteristics: are too broad, allows everyone access, uses manipulative link building, stuffs content to look natural, interlinks with other directories, and allows link bidding.

Cre8asite Forums members dissected this post and gave their $0.02 on Rand's take.

For example, Rand says that premium sponsorships on directories is shady practice. But some forum members do that.

it's no different to paying to advertise on the front page of a print paper, rather than page 23.

Other members agree with this sentiment.

I believe that's pretty much the only criticism they have on Rand's points. There also is a slight reaction in the blogosphere. Overall, Rand's article has a good direction, however, and I suggest you give it a read.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

The Google Webmasters Blog has published a checklist for webmasters to get a better idea of their site security. A quick rundown of the steps to be performed:

• Check your server configuration
• Keep on top of the latest updates and patches.
• Watch your log files.
• Ensure that common site vulnerabilities are patched.
• Be cautious of third-party content providers.
• Use the Google site: search to see what pages are indexed.
• Use Google's Webmaster Tools
• Use secure protocols (SSH, SFTP)
• Read the Google Online Security Blog
• Get support from your hosting company if necessary.

Overall, good list. Google adds that this list is a good starting point but if you're overly concerned about the security of your site, you should conduct research elsewhere as well. Alslo, good advice.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

The Forbes 400 has been published for 2007, and Sergey and Larry are tied at #5 with $18.5 billion each to their names.

Can they hit #1? DigitalPoint Forums members think that they can -- or at least that Google is still on the rise.

i think google will be the biggest company on the world in future

They certainly don't seem to be stopping anytime soon.

Other Googlers are also on the Forbes 400, and Search Engine Land has a rundown.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

There is early discussion at a WebmasterWorld thread with some frustrated Yahoo advertisers. Their frustration mostly stems from some of their imports into Yahoo Search Marketing. They say, the import feature doesn't always work.

Here is how one advertiser described it:

To be honest, I gave up on the upload feature in Yahoo. It has always been buggy for me, regardless if I down load my campaign directly from YSM, make changes and try upload the same, edited file. And forget about trying to upload my AdWords campaign into YSM! :)

Now, let me take Yahoo's side on this. As some of you know, I run a Web development company named RustyBrick. Part of that is to build out methods for clients to easily import and export data from their back office applications. Just like you would with importing and exporting into Yahoo.

Now, when you have users import files, if the structure of the document is changes or if there are invalid characters in the export, an error will be presented to the user on import. These changes to structure and characters can occur for dozens of reasons, even without the user knowing. That is where the error checking comes in. If an error is found, it is best to represent the error to the user as clear as possible. But there can literally be hundreds of different types of errors and causes for why the error might occur. As you find those outliers, they are programmed in. In addition, file sizes can impact the import as well.

There are many reasons why an import might fail on one day and work the next.

Over time, these imports will become more streamlined. Just keep reporting the exact error, submit your files to Yahoo and be descriptive. It will not only help you out in the future, it will help out other advertisers as well.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday we reported that Google's link report tool was not working fully. To be specific, the link reports were not downloading to your desktop, when that feature was requested. After about two-plus days, the feature is now back.

Webmasters can now login to Google Webmaster Tools, click on their link reports, and download them for deeper analysis.

First reports came in that it is now working at about 7pm (EST) last night.

There are currently two Google Groups threads discussing this topic.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

TexTex reports at a WebmasterWorld thread about an algorithm and design update at Live.com.

No one else saw what Tex saw. Tex described it as:

It was a totally different index...with a different look aesthetically..it has since disappeared.

Although no one really saw it, Tex is not imagining things. Danny covered the new look, as did Gary.

Danny posted a screen shot of the green home page, which has since been pulled:

Danny explains this is part of Microsofts Searchification event to be held later this month.

Microsoft has invited a number of bloggers and journalists for the event next week, on September 26. But Microsoft apparently can't wait to release some things, since Live.com is now sporting a new home page.

So if you saw it, it was real and don't think you are going crazy.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The 36th edition of the Search Pulse is now available for download. I was not on this show, but Ben and Chris covered many of the exciting topics for the past two weeks. From Google Webmaster Tool's new design and PageRank issues to how Google spiders large sites. Heck, even a Google Bomber went to prison. We discussed many other topics. The topics we covered are listed below, in order of priority (based on search community buzz). You can download the MP3 file and listen at your convenience.

Oh, did you know that the show is one year old now? We had our first show on September 5, 2006, congrats guys!

Topics We Covered:

1. Google Webmaster Tools Not Showing PageRank Pages for Some Sites?
   
2. Can Google Ever Spider 29.5 Million Pages on One Site?
   
3. Is Imprisonment Too Harsh a Punishment on a Googlebomber?
   
4. Is PageRank Juice the Only Value of a Link?
   
5. Google Webmaster Tools Updates Interface
   
6. Don't Expect Any PageRank Updates, Says Matt Cutts
   

Continue reading "Search Pulse 36: Google Tools, Spider Craze, Jailed Google Bomber, PageRank Chatter & More"

According to a Search Engine Watch Forums thread, SMA-NA has been dissolved. SMA-NA was originally formed out of "frustration" with SEMPO, Kevin Ryan says.

Ben Pfeiffer, who was initially part of SMA-NA in the founding days and was on the Board of Directors, says, "SMA-NA dissolved mainly from a lack of leadership. It was real difficult in general to get an organization established and maintain a membership."

But forum members add that SEMPO is doing a great job lately. Even former president of SMA-NA, Ian McAnerian, says that SEMPO is "doing a pretty good job of providing representation and research so far."

The goodwill and man hours given to create the SEMPO Institute was more than we could ever have expected. The early days of SEMPO as a fledgling start up were criticized without mercy and I think the seeds they sowed and their vision is now clear today as SEMPO takes its place as a trade body that is respected and worth being a part of.

In January of 2005, SMA-NA was founded. In September of 2007, SMA-NA was laid to rest. Goodbye, SMA-NA.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Watch Forums.

The Inside AdWords blog has provided more information about how landing pages will negatively impact your Quality Score. They have now provided a FAQ that answers many of the landing page questions as they relate to the Quality Score.

A few landing page types that are frowned upon: data collection sites that offer freebies in order to collect private information, arbitrage sites, and sites that install malware on visitors' computers.

Forum reaction is pretty much summed up by this: "Thanks, Google." Even though it should have been obvious before, it's nice that Google is finally making it a policy.

A few people, however, are worried that they'll be negatively impacted. For example, one user requires personal information for freebies which is one of the new restrictions.

What about honest newsletters? One of my sites is a weekly newsletter about a certain craft. I advertise it as a newsletter and the only thing on the landing page is the description of the newsletter and the signup box.

The question, then, is how much information does the landing page need to ask for in order for it to break Google's guidelines?

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

WebmasterWorld members wonder why link building has become more difficult. Years ago, it would be easy to ask a webmaster to create a link on his/her site to point to your site. But now, everyone is requiring reciprocity or they don't respond at all. Why is this happening?

Link building has become a lot more mainstream as people understood that value that search engines place on links. Matt Probert makes a good argument:

Its the same old story that accompanies all SEO. We link to sites because the link may benefit our readers. That is the only reason. With so many sites linking to so many other unrelated sites the benefit to the user is minimal, its just a game of SEO forgetting that readers are the target, and while SEO tricks and manipulation may encourage larger quantities of initial visits, they wont attract back quality users.

That's what other people echo. Link building is so mainstream that it's being abused nowadays. Link building may not be relevant to the sites that you request links from. And people are not providing the correct information regarding link exchanges.

There's a lot of great information in this post as to why link exchanging just doesn't go as it used to anymore. We'll miss the good ole days.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday I reported on issues with Yahoo Site Explorer. It now appears that Yahoo Site Explorer is operating just fine.

With yesterday's issues, we reported that people were having problems accessing the tool. A DigitalPoint Forums thread has reports of people noticing a huge drop in the link counts for their domains around three or four days ago. Just in the past 24-hours, webmasters started noticing the link counts coming back to their normal numbers.

Looks like the backlinks are back to what they were before for my sites, as well.

Good to hear.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Yahoo appears to be releasing a new search marketing feature that enables advertisers to block specific sites from displaying on both Sponsored Search and Content Match networks.

Discovery at the Search Engine Watch Forums thread writes that the "Site Blocking" feature should be available anything between now and the first quarter of next year.

Yahoo Site Blocking will enable you to prevent your ads from displaying on a specific domain or sub-section of domain at the account level. Yahoo will allow up to 250 blocked domains, while Google only allows 100.

You are able to configure blocking a entire domain, sub-domain and up to two directories.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

The Google Link Tool at Google Webmaster Tools is now allowing you to download all external links.

I have been trying it myself from several locations for the past two days and no luck. You can the "Download all external links" on the "Pages that link to yours" page under "Links" and nothing happens. The download just spins and nothing gets downloaded.

This is not just happening to me. Several other people are reporting this via Google Groups. So there appears to be a real issue with this download feature at the moment.

I am sure it will be resolved quickly.

Hat tip to The Hodge from bringing this issue to my attention.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Andy Beal did an incredible writeup on Google's newest ad venture, gadget ads. As Andy has written, these are interactive ads that can be built in numerous ways and support CPC and CPM pricing.

Google Gadget Ads are designed to be interactive, can be built using HTML or Flash, and support both cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-impression (CPM) pricing models.

Here's an example ad of one of the coolest bands of our time sponsored by Honda:

Reuters calls this a "technology breakthrough" that will help Google break into the corporate brand market. WebmasterWorld members hope that the corporate brand market will embrace these ad features.

One member notes that this is a beta that is open to the entire advertising community (as it was previously in beta). Nice.

Cre8asite Forums members, however, are not enthusiastic because Google is apparently using the "widget" terminology - more specifically, they say that they're "distributing ads within widgets." With all the buzz lately about widgets that didn't fare so well, the ubiquitous term is wearing people out. I can't say I blame them. Widgets were cool before they became popular.

More coverage is at Techmeme.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and Cre8asite Forums.

The Yahoo Widgets Blog announced yesterday that they are launching Widget Badges for the web.

You may have already noticed some improvements in the Yahoo! Widget Gallery with the release of Yahoo! Widgets 4. Instead of those plain old download links, each Widget now has what we call an in-page installer. There’s a button for each Widget that just works, no matter what components a given user require.

Here are some sample badges:

Kind of cool. DigitalPoint Forums members think so too.

Yesterday, Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz announced that there were big changes ahead, and he's right. SEOmoz, a search marketing firm in Seattle, has decided to take in venture capital funding. This means that SEOmoz will begin to focus on a lot of exciting projects among other things.

Rand is active in the forums world, and Cre8asite Forums members wish him well. They're really excited for SEOmoz. I am too. This should be good.

Congratulations, Rand, Gillian, Rebecca, Jane, Jeff, Brandon, Scott, (Matt: I'll miss you), and the rest of the new team.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks if there's any purpose to the 'noarchive' metatag in Google. Why use it?

A few reasons are mentioned:

• Pages that are constantly updated should not be showing the wrong information in the cache so as not ti mislead users.
• News sites don't want to cache information because they don't want the world to access the data well after publication. In their minds, it should only be available to subscribers at that time.
• Some people just don't feel that Google should republish their content without permission.
• You're cloaking your pages and don't want to be reported. This is something that Barry has expounded upon, saying that in the past, cloakers would utilize this tag to prevent Google from showing the cloaked content. However, Google would flag sites that used that tag. He suspects it's no longer done.
• You want to prohibit scraper sites from lifting content off your cached pages.

Good points. I wonder if anyone has any others to add. If so, join the discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Today is Talk Like a Pirate Day and some of the search players out there are posting special logos for the day.

Of course, you can see our theme for this site is live now, here is a snap shot:

Dogpile totally rocked it with:

Flickr is even sporting a nice flag for the day:

I am surprised not to see anything from Ask.com at this point. They did something cool in 2005 with this dressing up Jeeves...

Happy Talk Like a Pirates Day! Mine started off great, because I went to a Jimmy Buffett concert last night, I live blogged it actually.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks what does the "google_ui_features = "rc:0";" line represent in one's Google AdSense script code?

It actually stumped me, but the response made me go "doh!"

It represents the relatively new AdSense rounded corners feature.

So now your ads can have round corners, and they will be defined by the rc:#.

Here is an example of an ad with an rc:10 value, rounded corners:

Here is an rc:6 example, i.e. slightly rounded corners:

And here is a rc:0 example, i.e. square corners:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The other day we reported of a Possible GoogleBot DNS Issues Causing Indexing Issues at Google.com. It has now been confirmed as an issue, and is now reportedly fixed.

Susan Moskwa of Google said in a Google Groups post:

It was an issue on our end, and should be cleared up now. Thanks for all your reports!

If anyone is still seeing DNS-related errors in their Webmaster Tools account, check the "last found" date. If it's dated before today, wait for us to recrawl the URL and the error should go away; otherwise, feel free to post the details here and we can look into it further.

So it should all be cleared up now, shouldn't it?

Some users are still reporting issues, are they related to this DNS caching issue or is it something else?

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

There are reports at two different WebmasterWorld threads of reporting issues at both AdWords and AdSense. Let's first tackle the AdSense reporting issue.

If you login and go to your reports manager link, you are taken to a 403 Forbidden error page. It looks like this:

I assume this AdSense bug will be resolved shortly. Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The AdWords side is a bit more complicated. There are confirmed reports that when running a report at AdWords, it doesn't ever complete the report.

Yesterday I attempted to run a keyword performance report and was told it would take 15 minutes (!) to complete--however the report (as well as any I attempted to run subsequently) never completed. They just stayed hung up on 'Pending' status until I deleted them.

In addition, some people are noticing weird Japanese characters for previously run reporting dates.

Today I logged into my reporting center and for whatever reason the dates of all my previously run reports appear to be in JAPANESE. Literally.

AdWordsRep has confirmed the issue and said the engineers are "working towards a resolution."

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Google Groups.

It appears that the Yahoo LinkDomain command search is not functioning properly. When I personally try to conduct a linkdomain:seroundtable.com search, it simply times out.

I am also hearing reports that Yahoo Site Explorer is not responding. It isn't responding for me either.

In any case, I am sure it is a temporary issue that will be resolved soon. At least I hope so.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There are several reports across multiple forums about a large update at Google. It appears people are noticing large search results shifts at Google Web Search. Some are obviously happy with the changes, such as one user at Search Engine Watch Forums and an other user at DigitalPoint Forums and some are not.

A WebmasterWorld thread has been tracking this update in more detail. The WebmasterWorld thread picks up speed as of last night, as did the other threads.

It appears many people are complaining about Chinese Spam sites coming into the Google web search results. One member described what he saw:

This isn't even news but I noticed something I didn't see before. A good majority of these domains were listed as follows:

fake title whatever blahblah
... description with some of our keyphrases plus a lot of
other scraped stuff all mixed up yet showing for this query...
xr.aghdweo. cn/whatever.html

In addition, George posted a question at Matt Cutts's blog, a Google engineer, asking:

Why are the chinese spam sites still in the index? I thought you were wroking on it and was testing, but the only thing I have seen, and other have reported in WMW, is that sites have disappeared from your listings but the chinese spam sites are still there. How is this possible after over a week?

Matt Cutts replied to that explaining that he is aware of the chinese spam site issue, and they are working on addressing it with an infrastructure change. He said:

On your second point, there’s at least one infrastructure change we wanted to make in order to handle these better. Infrastructure changes take more time than just killing specific spam sites.

So there does seem to be some type of update going on and it appears that there is a Chinese spam issue in Google. It doesn't appear to be specifically Chinese sites, some people are reporting. Unfortunately, I have no examples to share with you at this time. If you know of keyword searches that bring up samples of this problem, feel free to share via comments.

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

Update: Donna at SEO Scoop sent me an example query that returned these Chinese spam results. Now, I am not sharing the keyword search for this, because Donna warns that if you click on the results, "you'll get infected with a virus." So I decided to show you what they look like via a safe screen capture:

Notice the space between the domain and the .cn extension? The first example is c7b.2kisa．cn/. The period is not really a period, it is a weird character. Compare a normal dot, to this dot cn result:

• ．
• .com

Not sure if you can see the slight difference. Here it a picture of the two blown up:

It seems as if this is a generated unicode hex character of EFBC8E but it doesn't make much sense to me. The link in Google drops the space code off but the display code keeps it there.

Very weird.

The Google Blog announced yesterday that Google Presentations have now been integrated fully into Google Docs. And it's true! I played around with it. Some screenshots below:

Look at the highlighted menu item. That's new, my friends. Huzzah!

Here are slide layout options:

You can also upload images, change fonts, change text colors, use background themes, and more.

Search Engine Land reports that Google Docs & Spreadsheets has now been renamed to Google Docs. And forum members are obviously pleased.

So what else is offered? I created a presentation using the new Google Docs and it's available for the entire world to see. Comments welcome. :)

By the way, Nathan Weinberg notes that you can also embed PowerPoint presentations on your website. One thing to note, however, is that there could be security concerns with this in the future. That's why I'm not embedding my slideshow, but I encourage you to watch it. I promise that it's worth it. ;)

Forum discussion continued at Search Engine Roundtable Forums and DigitalPoint Forums.

Yesterday, word spread that Yahoo has brokered a deal with email service Zimbra and will be purchasing it for $350 million.

WebmasterWorld members wonder if Yahoo is really pressured to buy all companies. They're wondering if Yahoo is trying to do better. My guess is that yes, they are.

Bill Slawski sings a different tune on Cre8asite Forums. He's actually liking the combination of multiple Yahoo properties.

You know, between that and yesterday's Beta launch of Yahoo Mash, I think Yahoo is moving in the right direction. Now if Mash can replace 360, and incorporate Groups into it (and maybe some of those Zimbra) features, things could get interesting.

But Joe Dolson would love Yahoo to collapse the services and mesh every acquisition into one solid product.

And of course, some people are afraid of the Zimbra acqusition because they're not interested in sharing their email addresses with other companies. Then again, everyone has a Gmail or Yahoo Mail email address nowadays, so I'm not sure that's a tremendous concern.

Overall, the acquisition seems to have mixed reactions, not so much regarding Zimbra but because they're afraid that the Yahoo ship will sink. Like Bill, I'm going to hold my chin up and hope for the best.

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

Yesterday, I reported that DigitalPoint Forums members were concerned that a new widget, BlogRush, might be in violation of Google AdSense. Today, a new DigitalPoint Forums thread has emerged from a member who asked AdSense support if it was safe to participate.

Google's answer is that they don't condone it.

Thanks for checking in with us. We don't encourage or endorse the use of a program like this Thus, we're unable to give specific advice regarding BlogRush.

It's kind of a non-answer, as forum members say.

While I can see the concern, I don't think that BlogRush would conflict at all with Google AdSense since there's no confusion with ads and nobody is asking anyone to participate in clicking on ads. A forums member puts it this way:

Isn't this just like some sort of blogroll when two owners of blogs link each other ?

Exactly!

However, in another DigitalPoint Forums thread, a more understandable response is given by Google:

Thanks for your email. I understand that you'd like to have more traffic visiting your site. However, while we're unable to comment on any particular program or service, we do not recommend the use of any program that artificially drives traffic to your site. Use of these programs may lead to activity on your site that artificially inflates an advertiser's cost or a publisher's earnings, which would violate the AdSense program policies (https://www.google.com/adsense/policies) and Terms and Conditions (https://www.google.com/adsense/terms).

However, as I said yesterday both here and on my personal blog, I think the entire BlogRush program is overrated; there's way too much hype about it, and the traffic generation, if anything, will be minimal. Despite this, it's better to be safe than sorry.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums (thread 1) and DigitalPoint Forums (thread 2).

Tomorrow, the Google AdSense team will hold a webinar to inform the community of new developments within Google AdSense. The webinar is to be held tomorrow at 11AM PDT (2PM EDT, 7PM GMT).

AdSensePro has updated a Google Groups thread with the following information related to the webinar:

The "What's New with AdSense" webinar will cover the top support issues every publisher should know as well as an overview of the latest AdSense features.

I hope that notes taken during the webinar become publicly available.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

It's been 8 months since I initially reported on Microsoft Gatineau, and now the forums have gotten hold of the news. DigitalPoint Forums members are happy to see that other alternatives are available, and Search Engine Roundtable Forums members are excited to see the new features.

For more information about Gatineau, you can check David Naylor's website or the video presentation.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Yahoo has released Yahoo! Mash in what appears to be the closest thing to a Facebook-MySpace clone that I've seen coming from Yahoo. Initial impressions seem to indicate that it's not much different than Facebook at all and many individuals are happier using the older social network.

On WebmasterWorld, moderator martinibuster points out from a NY Times blog that the differentiating feature of Yahoo! Mash is that profiles can be edited by multiple users.

The site, which began an invitation only preview Friday, is quite an homage to Facebook, but it adds one significant new wrinkle: users can edit each other’s profiles, redecorating, changing information, and adding features. Think the Wikipedia version of a social network.

Of course, not all users are enthusiastic about this feature. Would you want to find your profile altered in a bad way by friends (or enemies?) I wouldn't think so. I do have a Mash Pet on my profile though, and I see that my friends are taking good care of him. (Please continue to do so.)

But others think that this is a plus, because you'll only be adding true friends, not people who would blatantly edit your profile. Also, some elements of other users' profiles cannot be altered (I tried. No luck).

For those who don't have access yet, here's a preview of my profile.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums, and Cre8asite forums.

When you login to Google Webmasters Tools and click on your "Crawl stats" under the statistics section, you are suppose to see a screen like this:

Notice it shows two tables, the first is for "The PageRank of your pages in Google" and the second is for "Your page with the highest PageRank." But some people are missing the "Your page with the highest PageRank" table. I see it on some of my reports but not all. For example, my web development company's site is not coming up with that table, as seen below in this screen shot:

There are others noticing this problem also at DigitalPoint Forums. So it is not just me.

Is this a sign of changes to come to PageRank? I doubt it, but who knows.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Google has announced they are now publicly launches AdSense for Mobile. We have been asking for it for a while now, and they began testing AdSense for Mobile in July and now it is here for everyone.

Here is a step by step, on how to set up AdSense for Mobile.

(1) Login to your AdSense account at google.com/adsense/.

(2) Click on AdSense Setup and you will see the AdSense for Mobile option at the bottom:

(3) Click on "Get Started" on the next page:

(4) Define your ads format, markup and colors on this page:

(5) Define a channel to track your mobile ads:

(6) Select your server side scripting language and copy and paste the code into your mobile pages:

Some more details at AdSense Help and at Search Engine Land.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Forbes has published an article about the concerns regarding click fraud. Shuman Ghosemajumder, Google's click fraud czar, says that Google is throwing out less than 10% clicks to accommodate any invalid clicks so that advertisers are not billed for these fraudulent clicks:

The auditing firm, Fair Isaac, for example, estimated in May that on Google's content network, 10 to 15% of clicks are fraudulent. On ads placed next to search results, they said that there was a negligible rate of click fraud, less than 1%. That implies an overall click-fraud rate of around five to 7%. The number of clicks that we proactively throw out is less than 10%. So then the question is really: How much are advertisers getting for free thanks to our detection methods?

Not all forum members are convinced by Ghosemajumder's statements. In fact, they're concerned that Google is withholding information. They'd like a lot more data.

But one user sums it up, saying that advertisers should track their conversions to ensure that they are making a profit and that Google should continue containing these concerns. Still, there are fraudsters who will exploit the system.

The way I see it is just as it says. Advertisers bids will ultimately adjust up or down according the percentage of click fraud they are dealing with. If google is comfortable with the current fraud levels and they are taking measures to contain it, and advertisers are using conversion tracking and turning a profit, everyone is happy...unfortunately so are the fraudsters that are making off with the 10% to 25% margin allotted for click fraud.

This doesn't really change how things have been seen with regards to click fraud.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A DigitalPoint Forums member reports that the Yahoo! Overture Keyword Tool is no longer providing results.

I reproduced this as illustrated below.

It looks like the Overture tool is finally gone unless this is a bug. YahooSarah said in January that Overture would be offline until an updated product was released. Does this mean the product is ready? After all, in May, Yahoo stopped updating the Overture tool. It has been four months so hopefully a new tool will be announced shortly.

Since so many tools use the Overture API, I certainly hope that this is the case. DigitalPoint Forums members agree.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

On WebmasterWorld, a number of webmasters have seen an abnormal number of clicks from Microsoft's IPs since August 1st. Interestingly enough, the clicks are going to PPC links and not organic links, so it's not simply a spider.

A number of suspicions arose: perhaps AdCenter reps are clicking on these links (since they get a percentage of what their customers spend on PPC campaigns) or perhaps there is some sort of intrusion and a third party is using Microsoft's IP addresses to generate artificial traffic.

adCenter411 then updated the thread and has asked the affected webmasters for information regarding these clicks. adCenter411 adds that some clicks are used to calculate the relevancy of ads.

However, I do want you to know that that there ARE some clicks coming from adCenter that we don’t bill for, such as clicks on ads that originate from our editorial verification system. The editorial verification system routinely checks ads for page relevance and the validity of links and landing pages for ads submitted to the system.

In addition, you can see how we analyze the clicks that come through the system for click quality. Because all clicks might not carry the same value for advertisers, adCenter categorizes the clicks as either standard-quality clicks or low-quality clicks.

-- Low quality clicks are clicks which adCenter classifies as non-billable. Low quality clicks originate from a variety of sources including: clicks suggesting low commercial intent, clicks that have been identified as likely coming from automated bots, or clicks showing unusual and suspicious patterns of behavior.

-- Standard quality clicks on the other hand are of value to advertisers and are the clicks advertisers are billed for.

You can add low-quality clicks to your reports through the adCenter reporting tab in the user interface.

Anyone affected by these abnormal clicks is encouraged to submit a request for an investigation using one of the links below:

U.S.: http://support.adcenter.msn.com/contactus.aspx?productkey=Adcenterss&locale=en-us
U.K.: http://support.adcenter.msn.com/contactus.aspx?productkey=Adcenterss&locale=en-uk
Canada (English): http://support.adcenter.msn.com/contactus.aspx?productkey=Adcenterss&locale=en-ca
Canada (French): http://support.adcenter.msn.com/contactus.aspx?productkey=Adcenterss&locale=fr-ca
France: http://support.adcenter.msn.com/contactus.aspx?productkey=Adcenterss&locale=fr-fr
Singapore: http://support.adcenter.msn.com/contactus.aspx?productkey=Adcenterss&locale=en-sg

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Over the past few days, numerous bloggers have been buzzing about BlogRush, a new widget that allows you to get "free traffic" to your blog. It works like this: users (based on referral codes and traffic) get titles of their blogs listed on similar blogs.

By adding the BlogRush Widget to a blog, a blogger can get instant distribution for their latest blog post titles across a network of related blogs.

DigitalPoint Forums members think that this can be a violation of AdSense TOS. But it's really doing nothing but displaying titles, so others disagree with that notion.

I've seen similar traffic widgets which I've also used but haven't seen much traffic increase, so I'm skeptical about this tool bringing traffic to my blog. As it is, most people I know are using full feeds and rarely take advantage of widgets on the sidebar. So, to answer Li at Cre8asite Forums, I'd be interested in seeing if there's anything more than just initial buzz. Right now, the tool does have the right kind of spokespeople behind it and this has prompted a plethora of new signups, but is there anything else?

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums and Cre8asite Forums.

The other day we asked Should Google Display RSS Feeds in Web Search Results?

Saturday, GoogleGuy, replied to the WebmasterWorld thread saying:

I think that we've been getting better recently about not showing RSS/Atom feeds in the search results.

So it appears that Google feels, in many cases, RSS/Atom feeds should not be shown in the search results.

I see that Search Engine Land's feed URL has dropped in the rankings for a search on search engine land but the feed can still be found on the first page.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread is reporting that some members are noticing that Google is asking searchers to suggest other URLs they would like to see come up for specific searches.

Google says on the search results page, "Help improve search for everyone." Then asks you to click a link to submit a link. The link is something like this and takes you to a form that looks like this, after you login.

Google claims:

If you click yes, we'll save this suggestion with your Google Account so we can use it to improve your search results. This is an experimental feature and, based on this experiment, we may come up with other improvements in the future. Like all data in your Account, your suggestions are subject to our Privacy Policy. If you want to delete one of the suggestions from your account, just repeat your search and click "withdraw" next to the saved result.

After you submit the new URL, it takes you to a 404 page that is at http://www.google.com/reviews/w/nominate.

If you do a search for /reviews/ results, you get plenty of results.

Is this a new personalized search feature?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Ammon Johns (Cre8asite Profile) has announced he is stepping down as an administrator at Cre8asite Forums.

His nick on the forums is Black_Knight and he has been well known for his posts through the SEO community at all the major forums, but especially Cre8asite Forums. He first started contributing under Black_Knight in 1998. His Cre8asite profile was created pretty much the same day the forums went live. He has been with Cre8asite since before its inception. Ammon has posted almost 10,000 times, averaging almost 5 posts per day and making up almost 4% of all the posts in the forum, to-date.

I personally have covered many of his posts here.

The Cre8ative Flow blog has a bit more information.

Ammon's farewell post:

Being an Administrator of this community has been a wonderful experience over the years. I've (virtually) met so many interesting people. I've been able to be a part of something truly immense and spectacular. I've been able to be a small part in many people's lives here. I don't regret a second of it.

However, I do feel a need to take an indefinite break.

It is not an easy thing to walk away from such a great team. But it is not my way to allow the team to carry me either. So I am stepping down as an Admin rather than take this break leaving the team and community hanging.

I want to take this opportunity to say a big "thank you" to all the folks who make this community. To all those over the years who have been a part of this amazing place and its creative energy. It has been an amazing journey.

We will miss you dearly Ammon! Best of luck with your future endeavors!

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

If you visit Google Images in the UK, you get a little promotion for Google Image Labeler that reads:

Want to help improve Google Image Search? Try Google Image Labeler.

The link to Google Image Labeler links to http://images.google.co.uk/imagelabeler/. But if you try going to that page, up comes a page not found error.

Not Found

The requested URL /imagelabeler/ was not found on this server

The US version of the URL does work at http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/.

Funny that a Google promotion link is linking to a page not found error.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

A great tool for webmasters just got better. Google released early this morning an updated look for Google Webmaster Central. They have added some new features and better organized some previous sections. Members on WMW are discussing the new changes and how they feel about the redesign. Mostly the feedback is all positive and find the interface much easier to use.

New for WMT seems to have added Subscriber Stats, adding the ability for webmasters to track the number of people who visit their feeds via Google Reader, iGoogle, or Orkut. One member on WMW noticed the PR distribution link has been removed. Overall this seems to just be an interface update with a better design, nav improvements, and sleek spiffy new buttons.

One member jokes: "A great tool to see what has been happening on your site two to four weeks ago."

Regardless this is an excellent free tool that I think everyone will agree is very useful to SEO's and webmasters alike.

Check out Webmaster Tools. Continued forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

After my post about how people really want to find Matt Cutts, Matt kindly poked in on things at DigitalPoint Forums. In the thread, he is quoted as saying that you should not expect any PageRank updates:

As far as the toolbar PageRank, I definitely wouldn't expect to see it in the next few days. Probably not even in the next couple weeks, if I had to guess.

This thread was picked up by the MarketFederation blog and has become a topic of discussion on Sphinn.

The response is overwhelmingly unanimous to remove PageRank altogether. Some members are just totally overwhelmed by the amount of PageRank updates; they want it to cease existing so that they don't have to hear about it anymore.

This isn't surprising. Maybe Google is listening to the PageRank removal feedback and is secretly seeking out PageRank alternatives. That doesn't sound like a bad idea.

Forum discussion continues on Sphinn. Additional coverage on related topics (Google banning directories) has also been discussed.

This post was written on September 10th and was scheduled for publication on September 14th. Yes, September 14th is Friday. Unfortunately, we won't have a Search Buzz Roundup this week. Tune in next week and read about what has happened in the last two weeks of search!

In the search engine marketing industry, when it comes to social networking and social media marketing, there are a few things that really fire folks up. The first is being banned for being branded an "SEO".

The second source of lighter fluid is a social site that promises something like privacy and ethical practices when it launches. When it becomes a mainstream darling, it bites you in the butt with an "Oh, and by the way. We have all your personal information and we gave it to all our third party buddies."

It boils a search marketer's blood but hey, they have 346 friends in Facebook now, are addicted to changing their "status" every few hours and for them, "The Wall" is absolutely NOT a Pink Floyd song.

Which leads me to the next, and not final, reason for the recent grumblings about social media sites. And that's employers. They hate email, the Internet and now, social media. Since talking to friends and sending them pictures of Kamikazi drinks is far more fun than working, companies around the world are blocking sites like Facebook from being accessed by their employees.

Fortunately, most marketers have convinced themselves, their clients and if in-house SEO's, their employer, they can't live without social networking sites. Since they "need" them to perform their jobs properly, this last hurdle isn't such a scandal. However, it does make one wonder.

Are we addicted to Facebook?

A little fun for Friday (but don't tell your boss) discussion at Cre8asiteforums: Facebook - Is It Really As Addictive As The Media Makes Out?

In July, I wrote asking for ideas on how to prevent "View as HTML" links from appearing on PDF files. In other words, authors of PDF files don't want them to be cached.

A DigitalPoint Forums member seems to have found the way to do this without implementing robots.txt. After all, he wants his page to be crawled but he doesn't want the HTML to be available.

He shares the following tidbit:

A special case is PDF files that should be indexed, but not cached. There is no way to directly include meta information in a PDF file, but if security is enabled for a PDF file it will be treated as if the noarchive tag was specified. Security settings can be controlled using Adobe Acrobat (not the free Reader).

Apparently, therefore, it's possible. More information can be found in this article that allows you to control caching of your pages.

Has anyone had success with this method?

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

This post was written on September 11th and scheduled for publication on September 14th.

A High Rankings Forums member asks if the order of keywords matters in site copy. Of course, the answer to this is yes. After all, if you create content that doesn't read well for your visitors, they won't stay on the site long enough to purchase, or let alone understand, what you're trying to sell.

At the end of the day, when it comes down to copy, if you're unsure, do some keyword research to validate what people are searching for.

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forums.

This post was written on September 10th and scheduled for publication on September 14th.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks if Google penalizes or blacklists domains that are parked domains. A parked domain is a domain that has little to no content on it, that is basically a in limbo and is just sitting idle with possibly ads on them and not much more.

The majority of folks in the thread say that Google does not penalize a domain that is a parked domain. It may not rank well for reasons such as not having many links to the page or not having much content on the page, but for being a parked domain - that alone most likely will not penalize or blacklist the site.

In fact, Tedster said Google helps monetize parked domains with Domain Park. It is a Google AdSense product for parked domains. Domain park is a very controversial Google product, but that is for another debate.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This post was written on September 11th and scheduled to be posted on September 14th.

A Cre8asiteforums discussion called The Divide Between Search Engines And Seo's - "No Follow" Fiasco points to two somewhat emotional discussions elsewhere on the possible ramifications or practices of using the "rel=nofollow" tag in links.

In one case, the US Federal Trade Commission enters the arena to stir up the pot for paid links.

In another case, a blog directory has been accused of not passing "link juice" to the blogs who have submitted to it and using JavaScript "onclick" code in their URLS.

The thread at Cre8asiteforums points to both discussions and members returned to voice their opinions. Both the Sphinn and SEOFastStart discussions provide a chance to learn more, regardless of who is right or wrong. I was voted completely out into the universe in Sphinn for remarking that PR can't possibly be the "only" reason people submit to blog directories.

Apparently, I'm terribly wrong about that.

Picture this. You're a search engine marketer from the dawn age of web site promotion. You go to a cave and meditate on what the heck Google is up to next for a few years. Return to this reality and do a bit of research to catch up on your old industry. Your heart races with joy when you discover this new-fangled thing called "social media". (As one might, having been stuck in a cave, ok?)

It looks strikingly similar to web sites from the early days, with the same type of ads mentality, placement and channels for lead development. You wonder. Just exactly who was it that was living inside the cave all those years?

Two lively forum pro's, "Glyn" and "iamlost", tackle the lack of marketing creativity and progress online in a Cre8asiteforums thread called Quite Frankly I'm Staggered...Advertising on the web hasn't moved on at all. They bounce around some ideas and play around with the topic.

From Glyn:

"Here's another thing at the end of the day I question whether or not a person will get spooked if advertising is so targeted that the user is clicking on every add. Thought police of 1984?

When does targeted advertising become spooky?"

This one could be juicy.
(Note: Please forgive the dancing bananas.)

In what began as an innocent question turned into a lively usability and web design debate for ecommerce site home page (or landing page) presentation. If you've ever struggled with how much information and/or how many product images a home page can handle before online customers become annoyed, this topic is for you.

Continued forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums - Number Of Products Per Page

If Wikipedia content wasn't so full of holes and easy to steal then less might people might be doing this. One member on Webmasterworld explains how he steals Wikipedia content and uses it on his page. You'd think such behavior would eventually get you stuck in duplicate content netherland. However, the users doing this say they have never been penalized for using wikipedia in mass on their websites. They recommend recombining the content in random ways or banning the directory with robots.txt.

The thread starter was asked whether he was bothered by taking this content for his own use. He says:

Nah, it doesn't bother me at all. It's legal to use the content if I choose. I do make sure content on my site is accurate, and the bit of Wikipedia I've used in the past has been terrible I usually ignore it or rewrite it.

Wikipedia Steals Too
Okay, so you can get away with stealing wikipedia content apparently. What about Wikipedia stealing YOUR content? The Wiki apparently is prone to it own spree of petty content thief from time to time according to this WMW thread.
As one guy quoted to set the record straight:

wikipedia does not "steal" content.

The people that edit articles for wikipedia might.

So watch your content. For more strategies on stealing wikipedia content for your website and telling people not too. Continued discussion at Webmasterworld - Using Wikipedia Content

A WebmasterWorld member asks how long Google will take to spider all 29.5 million pages on his website. He just launched the site 2 weeks ago and is hoping that *all* pages get spidered.

That's a generous request of Google. After all, too much content being released at once can be risky, as one forum member says:

Matt Cutts discusses the possibility of triggering a penalty if too many pages are released at once.

That being said, I'd go for it because if you've created a quality site you're going to attract the links you need to start climbing the SERPs.

However, so far, 2,000 pages have been crawled. If the Googlebot goes on a path of spidering all these pages, it will take awhile.

Based on the current indexing routines of your site (143 pages per day), I'd say you have about 56.52 years in the queue. ;)

Maybe it will. After all, large sites like Amazon.com only has 18.7 million pages indexed. It will be hard to compete with authoritative sites even if they're not in the same space.

But the site, which appears to be a city directory of some sort, will have its challenges. It's rare to get that many pages crawled. And moderator pageoneresults adds that a site like Amazon is " is seeing upwards of 5+ million Googlebot visits daily." On the contrary, the webmaster says that Googlebot has only visited him 22 times since launch.

It's possible for Google to crawl more pages, but I'd also find it hard to expect all 29.5 million pages in the index. As tedster says, it will really depend on the backlinks to the sites. The more quality backlinks and the more quality deep links you have, the better you'll fare.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

This post was composed on September 11th and scheduled for publication on September 13th.

ZDNet has announced that Microsoft will be holding a 3-hour seminar on September 26 that will act as a launch pad for the newest release of Microsoft Live Search. Here are some proposed additions:

* New personalization capabilities integrated into Live Search * An integrated location/calendar/presence service that may also tie in with Live Search 2.0 * A new capability integrating social networks, annotation (ratings and reviews) and search * Future integration between Outlook and Live Search

The WebmasterWorld community hopes there's more to it than just these user customizations. They're hoping that the results are more relevant and that the pages are crawled in a timely manner.

On the positive side...let's hope indexing of new pages is done in a timely manner, relevancy is MUCH improved and when pages meet MSN guidelines they STAY PUT in the serps...not here today and gone tommorow.

Sounds like a fair request.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

This article was composed on September 12th and was scheduled for publication on September 13th.

An AdWords advertiser on the HighRankings Forums asks an interesting question regarding how to maintain her Google AdWords account. She is utilizing broad match, phrase match, and exact match. Is that too much?

It's a good question. Other alternatives, therefore, are presented.

Dan Thies says that you can still use embedded match on those broad match key terms.

I usually have separate ad groups for broad, phrase, and exact matches (or combine phrase+exact into one). When you structure it this way, you can then use an embedded match in your broad match ad group, to prevent the phrase & exact from triggering the broad match ad.

Jonathan Hochman says that you might just want to stick with broad match for the longer tail keywords:

Using different match types can help if you have substantial traffic on the keywords. For long tail terms I generally use broad match only, unless there is some sort of ambiguity. The reason is more practical: with "thicker" slices we get actionable data sooner. If you slice the keywords too thinly, you won't get a statistically valid sample size for a long time.

But then SharewarePro gives the golden rule:

As in all things related to Google AdWords, just keep monitoring and tracking everything.

Keep an eye on your campaign to see if it's worth it.

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forums.

This post was written on September 10th and was scheduled for publication on September 13th.

How many of you in the audience have taken the Google AdWords Professional exam? If not (or even if you want to offer some tips), a High Rankings Forums thread discusses the pros of getting certified.

Study Tips: It's no different than a regular exam. Study it as you would any test.

Achieving Pro Status can mean two things. You can be either a Google AdWords Qualified Individual or a Google AdWords Qualified Company. As Alan Perkins puts it, "Google works with my agency ... not specifically with me as an individual Google Advertising Professional. Our individual qualifications allow us to qualify as a company."

Benefits: The Google AdWords Learning Center has a lot of good information. Additionally, once you achieve your certification, you can use it in promotional materials for your company.

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forums.

This post was written on September 10th and was scheduled for publication on September 13th.

Starting tonight is Rosh Hashanah, that means Tamar and I won't be doing live coverage of the search news and topics found within the search forums. It does not mean that there won't be any news published here.

Ben, Chris, Kim and company will be helping while we are gone. In addition, we have several exciting articles that are scheduled to be published over the next couple days.

We decided to create a special theme for the Jewish New Year. Here is the preview:

I expect Google.co.il to have a special logo, like they did last year.

On a personal note. I want to thank everyone for making this site such a success over the past four years. Thanks to all the authors and contributors, big thank you to our sponsors, thanks for the search forums for the great topics, thanks to all the search engines, thanks to all the press and a special thanks to all the readers and those that comment. Without your continued support and loyalty, we would never have been able to keep up the comprehensive coverage of our industry.

Happy, healthy and successful new year to all!

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks if cleaning up code will improve Google Rankings. Can removing bad code get better rankings in the SERPs?

Not so much for Google, as one webmaster points out. He has had better success with MSN when he cleaned up his code.

Other benefits of clean code include increased repeat visitors (faster load times) and the increased ability to get links from authority sites.

Meanwhile, some people are expecting that this may be a problem in the future.

I spent a lot of time over the past 6 mos cleaning up my code so that each page validates. While I don't think there's any benefit to Google if you skip an Alt tag here and there, there is the idea that this could matter in the future. As Google marches along it increases the characteristics that are important to the algo. By doing this housekeeping, you are ready if this happens.

Tedster echoes this sentiment:

The most problematic kinds of true errors in your HTML mark-up can be very difficult to spot by eye - they really need a tool, such as the W3C HTML Validator, to be ruled out with certainty.

What are these problems? Things like an unclosed quotation mark or a missing angle bracket on a tag. You can stare for hours at your source code and miss that kind of thing. But until you fix that kind of error, there is a section you intended as content that just looks like an invalid attribute, or something like that. Browsers have different error recovery routines, and just because the content displays on screen is no guarantee that Google's index will "see" it as content.

Eventually Google's error recovery routines may pick up a clue farther along in the code - and after that point, the rest of the page can be indexed. But there can easily be a gap, sometimes with important content, that just gets skipped. I speak here from painful experience.

It's something to keep in mind for the future, but it's not a big deal now unless your code is bad enough that the Googlebot is choking on it.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Don't drink your coffee when you read this.

Matt McGee, jokester or teddy bear of SEO (so they say), has written a hilarious list of the top 21 signs that you need a break from SEO.

A sampling:

6.) You’re filling out a registration form for your child, and when it asks for Emergency Contact, you put Matt Cutts. For Relationship, you put “I commented on his blog once.”

8.) As you arrive at your vacation destination — a gorgeous, beachside hotel in Honolulu — a pretty, young lady greets you. This is heaven, you think to yourself. She puts a lai around your neck and says “Mahalo!” You punch her.

16.) The nurse tells you and your spouse that you’re going to have twins. You secretly hope they’re not identical. You know … duplicate content issues.

Funny stuff. Matt made me laugh; can you relate? (I hope you can. If not, subscribe to the blogs he's linked to!)

Apparently all the Sphinners like it, and discussion continues there.

A 23-year-old man was arrested in Poland for the latest Googlebomb which was employed to insult the Polish president.

Search Engine Land reports:

Marek W. from Cieszyn is accused of somehow causing the Polish president Lech Kaczyński's web site to rank tops for "kutas," which translates to penis.

He has been sentenced to three years in prison.

DigitalPoint Forums members are impressed. They want to know how he even succeeded (and they really would love to know how to get that software that he used). But many think that he shouldn't have been penalized as harshly as he has been. After all, the guys behind President Bush's miserable failure didn't get arrested (or caught, for that matter).

Different countries, different laws, I suppose.

However, others disagree completely:

He targeted the wrong word. Failure is an acceptable word in daily use.

Verbally abusing is a crime everywhere.

Think the punishment is too harsh? Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

WebmasterWorld moderator pageoneresults reports that Google AdWords now has a mobile ads help page.

In the first question, information relating to the program is shared:

Why are my text ads running on mobile phones? If your text ads are eligible to appear on Google Mobile Search pages, they will run for free through November 18, 2007. You can opt out at any time, but you will start getting charged for them on November 19th. We'll email you a reminder and post a message on your account's Campaign Summary and Account Snapshot page as the end date draws near.

Thus, it looks like the program, which Barry blogged about over a year ago at Search Engine Watch, has been relaunched. Would the prevalence of the iPhone (with over 1 million sold as of Monday, September 10th) have anything to do with it? Perhaps.

Advertisers can also see the four-month-old mobile ad preview tool in case they want to see the display of their ads.

A poll on DigitalPoint asks whether people will actually take advantage of Google's mobile ads. Right now, 2 people have voted "No," one is "Undecided," and one has answered "Yes."

Why not? Well, to one advertiser, it would be too hard to market his product to mobile phone users:

It's impossible to market any products that I advertiser by using the mobile web (none of the advertisers I work with have mobile storefronts), so I won't be using mobile ads at all.

Understandable. Personally, I avoid the mobile web unless absolutely necessary. I'd be interested to see how many impressions of ads accrue over time with this new implementation.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and poll and related discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

An interesting WebmasterWorld thread touches on an expert topic of "account wide" quality score. What this AdWords professional is scared of is to start a new campaign within the same account, in fear that the new campaign will hurt his account wide quality score.

So this advertiser is holding back spending more money with Google, because of the fear that in doing so, his older ads will cost more and rank lower. He said:

I really want to spend more with Google, but I daren't!

This sprung AdWordsAdvisor's interest:

This is an important topic, dmorison, and I thank you for starting the thread.

Was it the "account wide" quality score that made it an important topic or the fact that he and possibly other advertisers are fearful of spending more money with Google due to the quality score?

Of course, the advertiser can set up a totally new account under a new credit card and email, if they want to keep them completely separate. Or they can create clients and manage them under your My Client Center.

Are you afraid of setting up new campaigns because of it having the potential of hurting your quality score?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I have been tracking a WebmasterWorld thread about an issue with Google Webmaster Tools.

Apparently, the link reporting tool, within Google Webmaster Tools, has issues with pagination. By this I mean, when someone clicks on the "next" page link, it does not take them to the next page.

I personally have been trying to replicate the issue, but I have been unsuccessful. It simply works just fine for my reports.

But the dozen of "me too" confirmations in that thread, seem to imply and suggest otherwise. It appears there are issues with pagination on these reports for many users.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

If you need a question answered from Google AdWords in a quick fashion, you can take advantage of the "Chat with a Specialist" feature. It's super fast.

<
Elric99 of WebmasterWorld tried it and got a rapid response. Then I did the same with the same results.

Nice. This is definitely an avenue to pursue if you're in need of immediate assistance.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday, Search Engine Land announced that Microsoft has launched Windows Live Translator. Essentially, this is Babelfish for Microsoft.

The interface looks pretty impressive, and I'm sure that if I knew any other language besides a little bit of Hebrew, it would work for me. But DigitalPoint Forums members don't think so. In fact, it seems that Google Translate has succeeded.

Then again, the DigitalPoint Forums member was trying to translate a vulgar word, after all. Perhaps there are some filters in play.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

A detailed Google Groups thread is reporting various reports of webmasters claiming GoogleBot is timing out before reaching their pages.

First, these webmasters are noticing a drop in GoogleBot activity on their server. So they login to Google Webmaster Tools and see the error "We can't currently access your home page because of a timeout." Then they drill deeper to see "URL timeout: DNS lookup timeout."

This is happening for several webmasters, all on different hosts and servers.

The question is, is this a Google issue or a host issue outside of Google. Does Google need to clear their DNS cache in order to be able to recrawl these sites?

Here is one concerned Webmaster's story:

This is exactly the same problem I have!

Long time indexed, no problems, then 9/5 suddenly we start getting the 'hompage timeout' errors. Same with the site map-- DNS timeout. But Yahoo! gets the sitemap just fine, and we didn't change anything on our end-- neither in DNS zone files, nor in server setup, nor the sitemap files themselves.

Googlebot is still pulling down other files from our server, just not the sitemap and index (and robots). Indexing is down *significantly*-- so this is not just a funny coincidence.

The last download of robots.txt was: September 5, 2007 3:49:14 PM PDT. Does this match yours?

Google representative, Susan Moskwa, said she is now looking into it:

Just wanted to let you know that we're looking around to see if this is being caused by something on our end. Also, as webado noted, it helps if you post the URL in question.

We will track this thread and report back on the outcome.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

On August 29th Google dropped the time feature temporarily. In fact, I believe it was a mistake, because Google's Matt Cutts commented saying:

I asked about this; sounds like it's a temporary thing that you just happened to notice. My guess is that it will be back on within a week or so.

Matt was right, it is now back a week or so later.

In fact, it is now improved. It now sports an alarm clock icon as well as supports showing multiple times for overlapping names such as current time in london:

I know a lot of people were upset when Google dropped this feature, so I am glad it is back.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums thread discusses how some publishers are now applying the nofollow attribute to ads they had already sold without the nofollow attribute on them.

One publisher actually was accused of "breach of contract" over applying the nofollow attribute to an advertisers link.

So I JUST got an email from the once a quarter person that I contact about payment saying that these nofollow tags need to be removed!

"This needs to be removed as per our initial agreement"

In fact, some publishers admit to cloaking the advertiser links to be nofollowed to GoogleBot and not to humans.

I've been nofollow'ing paid links for some time, although in my case I cloak to only serve nofollow to GoogleBot. Unless someone has purchased a link explicitly for SEO benefit then they cannot expect to get it.

I wonder if Google would consider this form of cloaking to be acceptable?

In any event, here is really the first discussion I have seen about these two concerns:

(1) Advertisers cloaking their paid links to be nofollowed in the eyes of the search engine spiders.
(2) Publishers claiming breach of contract for nofollowing links they paid for.

Forum discussion WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Rob Kerry, aka evilgreenmonkey has announced he will be leaving Search Engine Watch Forums, as their forums editor, for Sphinn.

Rob will be the Sphinn editor. As Danny explains:

Rob’s role will be to work with all the Sphinn moderators, provide a steady hand on a day-to-day basis to watch over the site and oversee the further development of the site.

Rob took over the Search Engine Watch Forums Editor position when Elisabeth Osmeloski left on May 25th. Frank Watson (AussieWebmaster) will be taking over his role as Forums Editor at Search Engine Watch Forums from next week. He has been a moderator here since 2004 and also writes for the SEW Blog. Rob will continue to moderate at Search Engine Watch Forums, but not play an active role in SEW's future growth.

You can wish Rob good luck in his new position as Sphinn Editor at either Search Engine Watch Forums or at Sphinn.

Justin Goldberg, a Search Engine Watch regular, has announced on the Search Engine Watch Forums that he has created a feed that combines four Search Engine Watch forums feeds. Using Yahoo! Pipes, he has created a single feed that integrates the Search Engine Watch homepage feed, the blog feed, the forums feed, and the experts feed.

If you're interested in subscribing to that for more forum goodness, you can do so by clicking here.

If you'd like to preview the data, you can do so here.

That's pretty cool stuff.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Watch Forums.

According to an Australian newspaper, a watchdog group feels Google is selling the top result in its search engine to commercial partners rather than sorting the results organically. In other words, consumers are clicking on the top result assuming it is organically relevant when the reality is that the top result is really a sponsored listing.

GOOGLE has been selling off the top rankings on its search engine results to commercial partners, rather than sorting them by relevance as it claims to, a Sydney court has heard.

The consumer watchdog alleges Google does not do enough to differentiate "organic" search results - those ranked by relevance - from sponsored links which appear at the top of the results page.

I personally don't think these concerns have any validity to them. After all, the top sponsored listing is paid, after all. If you click on it, the advertiser is responsible for paying Google for that click. If you don't like the top listings, click on them all you want scroll down to see the other results.

DigitalPoint Forums members feel the same way. In fact, one has been kind enough to share the Google Terms of Service with us, where it specifically says that Google is entitled to display advertisements.

17. Advertisements

17.1 Some of the Services are supported by advertising revenue and may display advertisements and promotions. These advertisements may be targeted to the content of information stored on the Services, queries made through the Services or other information.

17.2 The manner, mode and extent of advertising by Google on the Services are subject to change without specific notice to you.

17.3 In consideration for Google granting you access to and use of the Services, you agree that Google may place such advertising on the Services.

Others are just peeved that Google is being held accountable for people's inability to differentiate between sponsored listings and organic ones. And why should they? Google is not owned by the residents of Australia but exists rather to serve them to find information.

Google hasn't done anything wrong. They're basically being sued because [people] can't read the writing that says "Sponsored Links".

I totally understand that frustration. There are many folks around here who don't find any fault with the display of listings.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

Last moth, we reported that Yahoo! Search Marketing will be adding new features. Today, one of those features, payment by PayPal, is a reality. This feature was made live last week.

Now advertisers can pay via PayPal and publishers can get paid via PayPal. This all makes complete sense since Yahoo forged its partnership with eBay and Paypal. Expect things to get easier for the millions of users who have PayPal accounts.

For more information and forum discussion, see YahooPete's announcement at DigitalPoint Forums, Search Engine Watch Forums, and WebmasterWorld .

A WebmasterWorld thread was broken out by WebmasterWorld administrator, Tedster, where he summarizes one isolated change he may have noticed from the latest Google update.

The change, he said, has to do with Google grouping more of the same category results together in the search results, thus pushing more diverse results to the second page. Tedster explains:

I think Google has been classifying types of sites for a while, and now it's getting more granular and sophisticated. This kind of sorting and classifying showed up a while back for some of the highly competitive searches. One day we woke up and WHAM!, the whole first page looked profoundly different, with very different types of sites (often informational rather than commercial) being featured. And the previously dominant domains were pushed down or off page one.

Robert Charlton also sums it up a bit more clearly with this one line:

I'm seeing page one dominated by results from one market, with the right column dominated by ads from another market.

This not only reminds me of Google Universal Results, but reminds me more of when we visible signs of Google grouping results by category. Here is a screen shot of that in action:

Is this now being tested in some areas but without labeling them as categories? Is it possible Google is testing this for some search phrases, on some users, without labeling them? Sure, it is possible. I am not sure if this is the exact case, but it does remind me of it.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

An interesting Cre8asite Forums thread sprung up over the weekend. Miriam (aka SEOigloo), a respected Cre8asite member, has a client where he has been provided web development work over the past several years. Miriam never provided any SEO services for her client, just standard web development services.

Miriam learned that her client was using, whom she felt, was a shady SEO company. The SEO company provided services that are typically found of SEO companies that fall under the "shady" practices. Let's assume this SEO company is a shady SEO company and doesn't offer their clients any SEO value - I am not saying that, let's just assume that for the case of this article.

Miriam presented her concerns to her client, explaining that this SEO company is not providing them any value in increasing their search rankings. Miriam's client was shocked by what she learned and now understands the issues with her SEO company but she is not ready to drop her SEO company. Miriam's client is concerned that if she stops paying her SEO company, her rankings may drop.

So Miriam decided to post a thread at Cre8asite Forums to get advice on what her client should do in this situation. Should the client drop this SEO company or should the client continue with the SEO company?

So far, the responses are saying Miriam's client should drop the SEO company. But put yourself in this client's seat - it is a tough decision indeed.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

There are early reports via WebmasterWorld of fluctuations in the rankings at Yahoo Search.

The reports came over the weekend where some have seen large jumps or declines in rankings within Yahoo.

Yes, I had a drop from #7 to #18 for a 1 word search that had been stable for a while. No other changes seen on that, or any other sites though.

This may be a small update, since the last update was just a few weeks ago.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld .

A DigitalPoint Forums thread reports that FeedBurner RSS statistics for many users have been reset to 0 for a 12 hour period.

First reports came in about 10am last night that their stats for their RSS subscribers have been set to zero.

Ok, it looks like Google finally did what Google does well, and broke their new Feedburner toy.

Did anyone else lose all stats and subscribers today in the Feedburner control panel?

Thanks.

This morning at about midnight, the stats began to show up again.

Stats are back now. Thank god.

So the down time was about 15 hours.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Ah, September has come around. School is back in session. We had work on Labor Day, and Nathan Weinberg picked up our logo in case you didn't. And we posted about the only other logo from Dogpile which indicates that summer is over. :( Sad.

Microsoft Goodies

Microsoft is accepting users into its live search portal. And after changes are done to adCenter tonight, advertisers can rejoice. Importing data from other campaigns? Sch-weeet!

Google Easter Eggs Make You Fly

In case you haven't heard, the newest version of Google Earth has an easter egg: a flight simulator. Now it's more than just informative; it's fun!

Give Matt Cutts a Break

Matt wants you to use Google Groups. And some people just don't want to accept that. But come on; let's be fair to the guy. He's one person. We're millions of webmasters.

Yahoo to Behaviorally Ad Target

Yahoo has acquired BlueLithium, a behavior ad agency. This is exciting news to most people. I think it will be interesting to see how it plays out.

These Results Aren't Relevant

Okay, seriously, I don't know why nobody brought this up earlier, but I agree wholeheartedly with the concern that Google should remove RSS listings from the SERPs. Do I really need to explain myself? I don't want to click a link and get a Feedburner subscription page or a Bloglines page. I want to see the content of the information I'm searching for. Google, please take note.

The Google Webmaster Link Tool September 2007 Update is Here

And now we have September 2007's top stories by number of links. Barry does a great job making a nice table. Ironically, though, my post about getting access to Gmail accounts of those who have died still has a lot of link juice. But anyway, Barry does this every month. Give him a pat on the back.

Making Millions off Google AdSense

It doesn't typically happen. On your first day, you probably won't make much off AdSense earnings. Most people still have their day jobs. Don't hold your breath or assume you can get rich fast off Google AdSense.

Google News Takes Over the Wires

Google News is now showing AP content on its own pages and reducing duplicate news stories from the same source. I'm not sure what to think about this one. If I find a story by AP on multiple sources, I might be compelled to click on another news story there that piques my interest. With the duplicate story filter preventing me from accessing these pages, I may never see some news stories of interest to me.

Google Webmaster Central News

Today, Google Webmaster Central changed its landing page. It looks pretty. And earlier this week, a webmaster successfully included URLs that were once removed from the URL removal tool. Cool.

Microsoft Performs Official Tests that Smell Spammy

Remember those weird referrals from Microsoft's Live Search? Well, it's a real test as confirmed by a Microsoft rep. Don't block them because you could be delisted. Ironic.

Google Advanced Search Gets Better

The Google Advanced Search page has added more features. Now, you can search for results that were added to the SERPs within a particular timeframe. Another sch-weet from me.

Has Yahoo! Stopped Supporting the NOYDIR Tag?

Well, we don't know. But webmasters report that Yahoo is ignoring that tag. Hopefully, it is a bug. No word on whether it is or not yet.

Uh, When is Google's 9th Birthday?

When will Google celebrate its 9th birthday? They haven't done so yet this month, but it's about time that they do it. Come on, someone is looking for a pretty logo. And I want cake.

Now I'm going to get lunch. But no cake. :(

The Google Webmaster Central team has announced a number of changes to the webmaster central landing page.

Here's a screenshot:

Recall the old version:

New features include quick links to Google Analytics, custom search, Google's Developer Tools, and Google Gadgets.

It seems like Search Engine Watch Forums members are excited. Forum discussion continues there. :)

Search Engine Watch Forums member Discovery shares an email he received from Microsoft. In the email, there are a number of features that will enhance adCenter:

Save time with fast and thorough editorial reviews for new ad groups.

Create campaigns with ease by quickly importing campaigns directly from other paid search programs or by copying existing ad groups within adCenter to a new campaign.

Instantly navigate to specific accounts, campaigns, or ad groups with the new adCenter home page dashboard, a one-stop-shop for all of your daily campaign management tasks.

Update keyword bids in bulk and view keyword performance on the same page.

Visualize your campaigns' targeting settings with Microsoft Virtual EarthTM map integration for geographical targeting.

For details on how to use these adCenter improvements view the Feature Release Guide. In addition, the adCenter Blog will highlight detailed feature reviews after the upgrade occurs.

As adCenter411 writes in WebmasterWorld, Search Engine Watch Forums, and DigitalPoint Forums, the downtime is expected to begin this evening (6PM Pacific/9PM Eastern/2AM GMT) and may last up to 8 hours.

But the Search Engine Watch Forums thread discusses these features in more detail.

Forum members are extremely excited about the ability to import campaign data from other paid programs. They're happy that Microsoft is listening to their desired changes.

The only thing left for some is an offline editor. I guess that could be in the works too, right?

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

Over the past week or so, there has been a ton of discussion over Google banning directories.

You can find discussion at these threads:

• DigitalPoint Forums
• Sphinn
• DigitalPoint Forums

I think it is the same type of algorithm twist put into place recently where people are noticing their pages drop a bit in the rankings.

There is a larger discussion on that over at WebmasterWorld.

In short, I do not think this is a directory specific issue. I think it is some tweaking to a possible trust factor in Google's algorithm. Like any of these threads, there is no clear cut answer to what is going on. But the speculation is what keeps the discussion fun.

Matt Cutts did come in to do a rare post at a DigitalPoint Forums thread on this topic, he said:

I'll try to give a few rules of thumb to think about when looking at a directory. When considering submitting to a directory, I'd ask questions like:

• Does the directory reject urls? If every url passes a review, the directory gets closer to just a list of links or a free-for-all link site.
• What is the quality of urls in the directory? Suppose a site rejects 25% of submissions, but the urls that are accepted/listed are still quite low-quality or spammy. That doesn't speak well to the quality of the directory.
• If there is a fee, what's the purpose of the fee? For a high-quality directory, the fee is primarily for the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url or site.

Those are a few factors I'd consider. If you put on your user hat and ask "Does this seem like a high-quality directory to me?" you can usually get a pretty good sense as well, or ask a few friends for their take on a particular directory."

As far as the toolbar PageRank, I definitely wouldn't expect to see it in the next few days. Probably not even in the next couple weeks, if I had to guess.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums, Sphinn and WebmasterWorld.

There is a DigitalPoint Forums thread that is taking note that Yahoo Answers questions and answers have a tendency to rank well in Google and other search engines.

Yahoo Answers has been ranking well in the search results for a while now. So the concept of using this network as a platform to try to help your traffic, is nothing new (although the title implies that).

But let's step back and look at this thread.

(1) Hey, it looks like Yahoo Answers ranks well, said one member.
(2) "Interesting. Do people still use Yahoo Answers to drive traffic to their relevant website(s)?" Said another member.
(3) "So go in and start answering some Yahoo Questions. you wouldnt believe the traffic i get with it!" said another member.

You see how it begins or ends for that matter. The spam controls at Yahoo Answers are nice, so let's see how bad it gets at Yahoo Answers in terms of spam.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A user at WebmasterWorld knows that MFA and arbitrage sites have no benefit to anyone (except for the creator of the site). So what can be done about eliminating them once and for all? The member presents a strategy that may solve this problem and get quality traffic.

The automated solution to this problem imo would be to have following feature made available for adsense publishers:

"Don't show ads paying less than $x.xx per click".

With that option/control a publisher could simply raise the level of earnings per click above those of MfA ads, but keep it below those of legit ads so MfA ads wouldn't show anymore and MfA sites would soon vanish. The process of determing the level of earnings per click would be a market finding one for the publisher and the level would depend on the topic of his website.

Some users like this idea but think Google won't implement it. Google probably doesn't want publishers to overestimate the value of their clicks, for example.

Others don't think it's a good idea at all because the value of clicks on various parts of the website fluctuate. Some clicks receive more money than other clicks. The proposed solution is flawed. Also, the fear of putting PSAs instead of real ads abounds.

The discussion is heated and very lengthy (110 responses as of this publishing) but it is a useful read in case you have been considering this issue.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

An advertiser at Cre8asite Forums has a dilemma.

• The user has two different sites for the same business: a .co.uk and a .com. There is a PPC campaign currently focusing on the .com site.
• The .co.uk site is performing better than the .com in the organic listings.
• The user is looking to optimize the .co.uk site better than it currently is and also focus his PPC efforts on the .co.uk.
• From material the user has gathered on the web and from other tests performed by other advertisers, it appears that the .com will have a higher CTR than the .co.uk.

The user was hoping to display a .com in the PPC results but have the destination URL be the .co.uk in order to not lose the CTR. However, this is not allowed by Google.

Forum members advise this user to run a split test. That is the best way to determine whether the CTR will change by displaying the .co.uk.

Have you ever run into this problem? How did you get around it?

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

A WebmasterWorld member asks what value Google AdWords has for the potential advertiser. Do you actually use AdSense and buy products, do you click on the ad and do nothing, or do you ignore the ad altogether?

It's a really difficult question to ask to the webmaster community because our behavior differs from that of the average computer user. It's also something you'd have to answer on a case-by-case basis; you can't possibly get an accurate sample of data from such a small community who are seasoned Google advertisers/publishers/users.

The person who asked this question is filled with a lot of doubt; he is afraid to accept answers provided by others even though they are probably genuine. Yes, many people have purchased products in the past from AdSense ads.

But some people have certain criteria before they even click on ads.

Yes, but it has to be a REALY well written ad. I don't click poop copywriting.

On the AdSense side of things, the same publisher asks if it is a risk to put ads on a website. Will it destroy its reputation? When considering news sites and other sites that have an abundance of ads, I think not. Surely, there will be some people who are displeased with ads, but not everyone will. If you have a good site, you can still monetize.

There's no harm in advertising, and there's no harm in publishing. Behavior is different in every way. The best advice is to run a test -- either as a publisher or an advertiser -- to see if Google AdWords or Google AdSense works for you.

Forum thread at WebmasterWorld.

Mid-August I reported about Weird Referrals From Microsoft's Live Search. These referrals typically came from Microsoft's IP blocks but also contained weird referral strings that included adult keywords, pharmaceutical keywords, and other spam like keyword phrases.

Last night, the official Microsoft Live Search representative, msndude, responded that these are official Microsoft tests. But the zinger is that if you block these tests, which people are doing because it is skewing their log files, you may be delisted from Microsoft's Live Search and MSN search.

Here is a quote from the thread:

First, we appreciate the concerns and issues that have been raised and apologize for any inconvenience this might have caused.

Second, we want to explain what this is all about. The traffic you are seeing is part of a quality check we run on selected pages. While we work on addressing your concerns, we would request that you do not actively block the IP addresses used by this quality check; blocking these IP addresses could prevent your site from being included in the Live Search index.

Please keep the feedback and thoughts coming as we will use this to help improve this process and make sure that it impacts your sites as little as possible.

thanks
- msndude (msd)

Long time WebmasterWorld member, incrediBILL, laughs that response off saying:

I understand your need for quality checking but trying to bypass site security just to check for cloaking is a bit much. Besides, it came from Microsoft IPs and was easily detectable (we all caught it) means it can also be easily cloaked so if you think you're really doing quality control you're just fooling yourself.

FWIW, my bot blocker quarantined that IP range as a roque bot a long time ago because your server kept asking for pages and couldn't answer the captcha.

I am a bit puzzled by this test. I so would love a comment from Matt Cutts on this, I know that this is over stepping your area - but as a webmaster, I would love a response from Matt Cutts the webmaster.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks why is Google showing RSS feeds in the Google.com web search results.

You know you see them. You do a search and an .xml or .rss or atom result comes up in the results. Why does Google bother including them in their web search index when it is, by definition, a duplicate copy of the content from the main site?

Does it offer any extra value to the searcher? Here are some responses from WebmasterWorld:

I'm with you, it is frustrating and it seems to me to be a waste of real estate on the SERP.

Yeah, RSS in the SERPs is among my biggest peeves. A complete waste of time for the user.

I'd be happy to seem them go too.

I'm sure it just confuses anyone who has no clue what an RSS feed is. (Most people I'd imagine!)

But one member does make a valid point. Most new browsers do have good support for RSS feeds. So a user will typically not be taken to a page of raw code, instead the RSS feed will be represented in the browser like HTML.

Most real browsers do a good job of rendering an RSS feed, and an RSS feed when well rendered is no different to the front page of a newspaper - apart from the fact that it has fewer adverts and clutter.

However, like I said above, what value add is this giving to the searcher? Yes, they can quickly add the RSS feed to their Google Reader subscriptions but what are the chances of a user wanting to do that. Most sites with RSS feeds give users that option on the home page anyway.

Need an example of Google displaying an RSS feed in the search results? Check out a search for search engine land and the third listing down is the feed URL for Search Engine Land.

Speaking of RSS feeds, the Search Engine Roundtable not only has a summary feed, we do also offer a full feed. So subscribe to which ever you prefer.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google's 9th birthday can be as early as tomorrow or we can wait until September 27th to celebrate it. Why can it be on the 7th or the 27th?

Well, although we have documented their birthday to be on both those days:

• Happy 8th Birthday Google on September 27, 2006
• Happy Birthday Google - Lucky Seven on September 7, 2005
• Google's 6th Birthday on September 7, 2005

Last year Google changed their FAQ on When is Google's birthday? to read:

Google opened its doors in September 1998. The exact date when we celebrate our birthday has moved around over the years, depending on when people feel like having cake. For more on Google's history: http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html

So the big question is when will Google feel like having a cake?

We have more on this from out 2005 article named Google Celebrates Floating Birthdays.

Any ideas on logos? I bet it has a nine in it. I know, that is a huge bet.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Yesterday, Yahoo announced that it had purchased BlueLithium, a behavioral-targeting ad network, for $300 million.

What is BlueLithium, you ask?

BlueLithium is a three-year-old company whose technology tracks consumer behavior as users move from site to site, allowing businesses to deliver more relevant ads. A consumer shopping for environmentally friendly products might see ads for hybrid cars a week later.

At WebmasterWorld, forum members discuss the acquisition and see that Yahoo is moving ahead of Google in the area of behavioral ad-targeting. In fact, Google is not enthusiastic about the idea at all.

Some thoughts as presented by forum members say that YPN will improve with this acquisition:

This is something that could help Yahoo in many ways. Not only will it help them better target their existing ads, but will help bring the ads worldwide and give them another dimension to both YPN and its advertising program.

Others feel that Yahoo! will come out with a much better analytics package:

It also sounds like Yahoo is interested in providing advertisers with the analytics side of the equation above and beyond simple conversion tracking (maybe kind of like Google Analytics on steroids?)

All in all, forum members agree that this is a great move for Yahoo and are excited to see how it will benefit the company. Congratulations, Yahoo, on the acquisition.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Can you call Google a "sponsor" of your website if you opt in for Google AdSense? A DigitalPoint Forums member presents that question.

Google itself is not a site sponsor. But the links can be termed Sponsored Links since the advertisers are paying for the clicks. You should be careful when using terminology that can get your Google AdSense account banned and contact Google when in doubt with the policies.

The best explanation is that Google is a mediator and gives advertisers (the sponsors) the ability to display their ads on your site.

Similarly, you're not employed by Google if you use AdSense.

The bottom line: it sounds cool to say that Google is your employer or your site sponsor, but Google is not either.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

I don't know about you, but a lot of webmasters think that Matt Cutts has unlimited time and can answer everyone's individual requests about their websites. Matt Cutts apparently gives off the impression of omnipresence. And now, a DigitalPoint Forums member actually wants to speak with him. As if this territory has never been visited before.

(Oh my, is that a picture of me and Matt? Why yes, it is!)

The thing is, Matt is just one guy. Matt has a ton of obligations. Matt is not the sole voice of Google. Matt writes in his blog that he can't answer every webmaster individually and that you should visit Google Groups.

Matt can't give everyone personal attention as much as he'd like to. (He'll give me personal attention, but that's because I'm special.) So if you need to speak with Matt or someone from Google, visit the Google Groups.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

The Google Advanced Search page has added new date parameters to the date option drop down. Prior, I believe they only had the option to choose by the past 3, 6 or 12 months. Now you can also search by past 24 hours, week, month or 2 months.

Even more so, as I reported at Search Engine Land a week ago, based on a Ionut finding you can also define your own time frames. So if you want to search for the past three days, you simply add the =d3 parameter on the URL. If you want to search for the past 3 weeks you add the =w3 parameter and if you want to search for the past 3 years you add the =y3 parameter to the URL.

Here is the quick cheat sheet:
d[number] - past number of days (e.g.: d10)
w[number] - past number of weeks
y[number] - past number of years

This can be very useful for SEOs and Webmasters who want to see all new pages added to Google within a certain time frame. So if you want to see just pages Google discovered in the past 24 hours, go with this type of search. It would be cool if there was an RSS feed for these types of searches.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Google has updated Google Webmaster Tools with a link update yesterday. Google typically does these updates monthly, around this time. There are additional reports of and ranking changes.

There is currently discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

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

This link update just doesn't seem a 100% correct to me. It just seems like a different pattern from the previous updates.

For the past updates see:

• August 2007 Google Linkage Data
• July 2007 Google Linkage Data
• 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.

I am seeing reports from both WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums that Yahoo is not supporting their own NOYDIR tag.

The NOYDIR is a tag you can use to tell Yahoo not to display your Yahoo Directory title in the Yahoo Search results. We have a few reports saying that Yahoo, all of a sudden, started showing the Yahoo Directory title for sites that have the NOYDIR tag on them.

Just this last few days Yahoo is ignoring this tag on my site:

<meta name="robots" content="noydir" />

And has reverted back to showing my Yahoo Directory title and description.

It is probably just a temporary bug.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

A Cre8asite Forums thread has a story of an SEO who got himself in a mess. The mess is that he has to get his client 20 PR6 links all for the price of $475.

Yea, read that again. The thread discusses two things: (1) That this task is nearly impossible and (2) possible methods to achieve this goal. Let's focus on how one can possibly achieve this goal.

• Buy 20 PR6 links for just one week
• Try to create a Wikipedia page
• Call in favors is probably your best bet. Ammon explains "another darned good reason to be a generous soul in this industry," I agree.
• ProjectPHP recommends going extreme: "Sell your virginity, sell a house for a $1, out a celebrity with photos"
• Hide somewhere so the client can't find you

This is a tough situation. Linkbait might be the best way to go in this case. Get some nice juicy Digg bait and you are set. But it is risky because your social media campaign might not work out the way you planned.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Say you were doing some keyword research on a term you felt was widely used and that pertained to a densely populated demographic. You may be surprised to find that all your search terms are coming up empty. A Cre8asite Forums member has run into this problem and is baffled by why it's occurring.

There are a few reasons this happens. One of the possibilities is that the search phrase isn't used. But the other reason is due to the nature of these keyword tools; these tools don't gather every single search query entered by Internet users. Instead, these tools are gathering information from ISPs from a certain time period and that the data the tools contain is only a subset of the entire searcher base.

A.N.Onym goes further to elaborate on the tools:

- WordTrack only has data of latest 90 days and only tracks metacrawlers (Dogpile and some other metacrawler)
- KeywordDiscovery hasn't disclosed its sources, though it shouldn't be everything
- Google External Tool does have Google data, but without exact figures (unless you use Google Traffic Estimator)

Therefore, your keyword research strategy should encompass more than one keyword research tool and you should vary your search terms.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

Google Groups member JLH spotted a line on Matt Cutts's blog where he suggests that forum members take advantage of Google Groups to get their questions answered:

Got a webmaster-related question or suggestion that is not directly related to the topic of this entry? Instead of posting it here, your best bet is our official Google forum linked from http://www.google.com/webmasters/

I've only found mention of that comment in one blog post, but I'm surprised Matt didn't do it earlier. After all, I can imagine he's in demand and Google Groups is not really a widely known avenue for assistance from those I've spoken to.

The bottom line is that if you need assistance on your website, the blog of Matt Cutts is not the place to ask for it; there's a really useful Google Groups for that.

Forum discussion is at Google Groups.

Last week, Danny Sullivan wrote at Search Engine Land that Google has brokered a deal with several major news wire services and will be hosting these news articles on Google's own web pages rather than on individual news aggregator websites. With this announcement, Google is also promising better duplicate story detection so that readers don't come across the same exact story more than once.

WebmasterWorld members are so far unimpressed with the changes; perhaps it will be an acquired taste.

I can see this in the UK at the moment. The actual Google-hosted pages (at ap.google.com/article/) are kinda strange - they feel like a bit of a dead-end. True, there are links to other AP sites (and to the Google News results) but it certainly provides a different experience from a 'real' news website.

As an example, I pulled up this AP news article. I can definitely see where he's coming from. It needs to be dressed up a little more to feel more "newsy" to me.

Other news providers are worried about this change because they feel that Google News stories will take priority and they will not get as much traffic.

I would imagine if Google are now becoming a publisher of news that it will mean less traffic to other sites, especially those using the same agencies, which most do for breaking news.

This is especially true if duplicate stories are now going to be removed from Google News.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks if sitewide or "run of the site links" help or hurt a site do well in Google and other search engines.

We have covered the topic in January 2006, where we quoted Ammon Johns as saying:

Site-wide links seem far more likely to be ignored or down-valued. I'm basing that on what I have seen generally, rather than on a specific empirical test.

Have things changed? Can sitewides hurt you? Let's see what folks from WebmasterWorld think.

Senior member, steveb, said:

Stop listening to whoever you are "hearing" this stuff from. So much nonsense FUD is spread on this topic. Of course Google pays attention to run of the site links. Is the 10,000th link from a domain as valuable as the first? Probably not, but who cares?

WebmasterWorld administrator, tedster, agreed:

And for the other side of the question, there is no certainty that every link Google returns in the link: query is being given a "full vote" either. I've seen links their that do not pass PR at all.

We can just recognize that seeing backlinks in the link: query is not a guarantee of anything.

Even if there was an easy way to see that a url wasn't passing on any juice, there's still nothing you can do about it, anyway, right?

Can they hurt? Most people feel they cannot hurt you but some would argue. I guess it all comes back to that word, "intent" of the link. :) What was the intent of the person who placed the sitewide link on their site to your site? Was it to help the user or to help the site rank better? Does it even matter?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

If you have ever run into a problem with your Google AdWords account getting too big for Google, we have suggested that you call your Google representative.

A new Google Groups thread has some more insight into how Google determines an account's keyword limit.

Google AdWords representative, AdWordsPro, explained it can vary based on both "tenure of the account" and the success of the advertiser to utilize the keywords in his or her account over time.

Most new accounts get a limit of about "15,000 keywords for the entire account, inclusive of all campaigns," said AdWordsPro. But that can be increased based on the criteria mentioned above.

In short, keyword limits are set by "account level" and can vary greatly based on that information.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

In April Google released a way to remove URLs in Google from within Google Webmaster Tools.

There has been very little chatter about reincluding content that you have removed in the past.

With Google it is very easy to reinclude content that you have manually removed. As described:

1. Sign into Google webmaster tools with your Google Account.
2. On the Diagnostic tab, select URL removal request from the list of tools.
3. Select the Removed Content tab, and then select the Reinclude button next to the content you want to reinclude in the Google index.

Then wait about three to five days and your content should be back in the index.

Does it work? A WebmasterWorld thread seems to suggest so. One person said it did:

I did this with dozens of pages, and am now reinstating them.

So far, everything has worked fine. No problems.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread takes us into the life of a Google AdSense publisher. What is the first stop? Typically, they wake up and check their earnings. But then they live their lives like each and every one of us, perhaps by visiting the Internet to catch up on reading material, or perhaps by tweaking their website to improve earnings. And they're all going to work or attending school too. In any event, it doesn't seem like any of these advertisers is making a living off of Google AdSense; instead, it's supplemental income. That's not too bad.

Are any of you living the life solely off Google AdSense earnings?

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Forums member insidedesign unearthed (no pun intended) a pretty cool Easter Egg on Google Earth.

Check out his dictated screencast for more information:

He also writes more about it on his blog. Additional coverage can be seen on Steve Lacey's blog and TechCrunch.

That's a pretty sweet tool.

Forum members think so too. On Cre8asite Forums, Bill Slawski says that Google Earth is getting closer to Second Life.

DigitalPoint Forums members are loving the new features.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums and