October 31, 2007 Archives

Those of you have been anxiously awaiting the launch of Microsoft Gatineau can now sign up. The sign up form is here and is available only for US subscribers for the time being.

What is the benefits of Gatineau, you ask? adCenterEU says the following:

Project Gatineau is closely related to adCenter – for example, adCenter customers will be able to use their existing account to access Project Gatineau if they choose to use the web analytics service.

But it also a full-fledged web analytics offering with a lot of great reports and tools for measuring your site traffic and understanding your visitors:

- Click and visitor tracking

- Marketing campaign reporting

- Conversion tracking

- Demographic and geographic segmentation

- Paid and natural search analysis

- Visitor information including browsers, languages, operating systems and resolutions

You will need to create an adCenter account but you won’t need to buy any advertising – the account can be used for Gatineau only.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

It really sucks to live in Southern California, and my heart goes out to all those affected by the wildfires. In case you were not aware of what happened, thousands among thousands of residents were forced to evacuate because of some of the worst wildfires in California's history. As such, a WebmasterWorld member believes that the wildfires -- particularly the evacuations that prompted half a million residents to flee their homes -- may have caused a decrease in AdSense earnings. This isn't the first time either. When wired cities are affected by natural disasters, the consequences are inevitable.

What else has contributed to decreased AdSense earnings? In July, Harry Potter may have done it. The World Series and World Cup tends to keep users away from the computer and glued to the TV. School holidays, when families take vacations, can contribute as well.

What do you think may be responsible for a decrease in AdSense revenue?

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Want some cash? Got a Facebook application developed? Numerous reports to Facebook developers suggest that Facebook is looking for some cash, and they're willing to share. An application developer has received the following email:

Dear Facebook Application Developer,

Would you like to drive more users to your app? We've expanded our pay-per-action (PPA) beta test and would like to invite you to participate by creating ads for your Facebook application. [snip]

A WebmasterWorld member has pointed out that Facebook is intending to launch SocialAds next week so that advertisers can target Facebook users anywhere. Will SocialAds end up competing with Google AdSense if these ads can be viewed everywhere?

That's certainly a thought. Danny Sullivan suggests that Google is launching a competitive campaign of its own: OpenSocial.

Who do you think will win this battle? Facebook clearly has the lead in the social sphere. AdSense clearly has the lead in the advertising sphere. Will the tides change with the times?

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

As many of you know, I'm a heavy social media user. I love finding interesting content that is typically determined by an audience of my peers who vote on articles on many different web 2.0 sites. A WebmasterWorld member, whose website is typically one of those frequently-voted-upon sites, is having trouble getting regular traffic because all of these links on social sites are nofollowed. He asks, "[I]sn't Google missing on a lot of that action by not taking this new web 2.0 dynamic into consideration?"

A few users suspect that these sites are actually the driving force behind some of the drops in PageRank from the October update.

Google might be missing out, but forum members suggest that other factors may end up causing the algorithm to shift in due time:

With all the "no follow" tags being used these days you'd think it would be nearly impossible for sites to get rankings. My guess is that google will be looking more at the volume of traffic a site gets. Especially if they use analytics.

That's certainly an incentive to use Google Analytics. ;)

Here's a thought: the users acknowledge that these social media sites can be spammed, but what about very popular pages? Should nofollow be removed when the stories reach a certain threshold of votes (assuming there are no negative votes as well--to keep out gamers)?

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Today is Halloween and the search industry, from Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, Dogpile, us at the Search Engine Roundtable and others, have decided to dress up for the day. Here are some of the logos and designs the companies have released for the day.

Yahoo is incredibly creative with their flash logo:

Here is Yahoo's static image, if you do not have flash enabled on your browser:

Ask.com US is sporting a sweet theme at their site:

Ask UK and France is sporting these theme:

Google goes with this special logo, see history of Google and Halloween at Danny's post:

Dogpile, got to love them:

And, us, the Search Engine Roundtable, has a sweet animated theme for the day:

Gary posted Fast Facts: Resources for Halloween Week 2007 at ResourceShelf. And here is some history of our coverage:

• Halloween Logo From the Search Engine Roundtable, in 2006
• Google, Yahoo, Ask.com & Dogpile's Halloween 2006 Logos, in 2006
• Search Engines Dress Up for Halloween, in 2005
• AdSense Offers Halloween Themes, in 2005

We have forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Let Google Know The Geographic Location of Your Site from Vanessa Fox at Search Engine Land has nice coverage of Google's new Set geographic target feature in Google Webmaster Tools.

In short, if your site is tailored to a certain geographic location, you may want to use this feature. Google says, "If your site is targeting users within a particular geographic area, please provide us with the relevant information below, using only the fields that apply to your target audience."

Clarify, it is not to tell Google. Hey, Google, my site is hosted in Canada. It is to say that I am trying to target users who are based in this specific location. So your site can be hosted anywhere, Google won't care, Google will learn that you are trying to target a specific location by you setting this feature. If you are a travel site, be careful when using this, because I am sure people in New York, looking to vacation in Spain, won't be searching for "Spain Vacations" while sitting in an Internet cafe in Spain.

To get to this feature, login to Google Webmaster Tools, click on "tools" and then click on "Set geographic target." You should see:

Specify your preference, and if that means, you want to specify a geographic target, you will see this:

Yes, you can get as granular as the street address you want to target.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

It appears that some folks are buzzing about a new update taking place at Yahoo Search.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread has one person documenting a major change in traffic from Yahoo:

Just like every morning I am checking my SERP's through the Keyword Ranking tool here at DP and to my astonishment I found that 90% of my sites lost rankings in Yahoo...

Most rankings have declined from top3 into lower top 10 or even top50 and my previous top10 rankings are now nearing the 100. ALL my hotel related sites lost rankings, while some of my other sites have gained some, but that is from outside top200 into top100.

This leads me to believe that they did on algo update today, but I would like to have some input from you all.

I personally reviewed a couple of my sites and noticed a decline in traffic from Yahoo on some sites and an increase in traffic from Yahoo on other sites. It may just be too early to tell. The last update was just about a month ago, so it does make sense that this can be an update.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Update: Now there is chatter about an update at WebmasterWorld.

Update 2: Yahoo Search Blog has confirmed the update saying:

Over the last few days, we've been rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms. While we expect the update will be completed soon, as you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index.

There appears to be more reports of issues with Google's Webmaster Tools. The issues are not exactly the same as we reported earlier, but the issue appears to impact the same tool, the Link Reporting tool at Google Webmaster Tools. But is it an error in reporting or part of a new Google update?

Many are reporting that Google is showing zero external links for their site.

We have threads at Google Groups, DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld about this topic, plus some random guy gave me a call about this yesterday.

Is it a penalty? Most have seen that zero links are coming up for their site and their PageRank dropped a point or two. The person I spoke with yesterday showed me his site and it appeared plain. It was in a competitive landscape and was not extraordinary, by any benchmark, but it didn't appear penalized to me. Yes, this person's rankings dropped and traffic dropped, and the site's PageRank and link count dropped.

I personally do not see any of this on my sites but there are plenty of reports about this going on, as of a few days ago.

Forum discussion at Google Groups, DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.