November 5, 2007 Archives

A Cre8asite Forums thread is buzzing about social media, where a forum member asks if bounce rates are higher than from other traffic sources.

It really depends on the audience and the content. Someone might go to a site and want to know more. Others might just keep clicking the "Stumble" button repeatedly until their phone call ends. Others are intrigued by a headline on Digg, might then access the page, but will then return to Digg. A number of factors come into play here.

Some people are actually seeing lower bounce rates from social media sites (22% as opposed to 50%), which is substantial. If you have the good content, then take advantage of it. :)

But what else could be involved in that metric? It is possible that the searcher didn't find what he wanted for the particular search phrase since many terms have multiple meanings. When you're in a mode for performing a social search, you're likely to meander. Again, there are a lot of factors including the mindset.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

To make things simple for the folks in China, Google has purchased g.cn, the shortest domain name I've ever seen... in 2003. But they just activated it now and it already seems all set up for the Chinese populous.

Since China is a threat to Google, with most of the searchers using Baidu, this is a good move for Google -- and it probably should have been done earlier. Will it work? We shall see.

Other forum members are curious to know how much Google paid for that one-letter domain name, even though it occurred 4 years ago. I know how coveted those are!

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

What would you do if you were targeting UK traffic and a US resident came along? You might, like a WebmasterWorld member, run into a pickle. The user targets UK traffic with AdWords but is also opted into a program that detects where traffic comes from; if the traffic is from outside the UK, the content that is supposed to be seen is essentially "cloaked."

Of course, this raises concern because the user is also a Google AdSense publisher. What would happen if his site were to be reviewed by a Google representative out in Mountain View? The content wouldn't appear, and then what? Would he be penalized?

There's no clear answer so far because he does not want to remove any content that may lose him money. What do you suggest? Do you think Google would ban him from AdSense if they review his site?

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

It appears that what was once an advertising deal between AOL and Quigo is now turning into a $300 investment, as Brett Tabke shares a report about this acquisition.

The purchase is designed to help the Time Warner unit better compete against the stepped up online ad initiatives from Google and Yahoo. Quigo's two main ad serving products include AdSonar, which is similar to AdSense in terms of providing targeted placements on websites and through searches, and FeedPoint, a search engine marketing tool.

This is a great direction for AOL and Quigo, as forum members report.

Congrats to the hard working folks at Quigo. AOL is living up to its stated goal of becoming one of the major players in online advertising going forward.

Hopefully this will also make Quigo a bigger player in the advertising sphere.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Last week, Newsweek reported that the Google "algorithm" paired up two African American leaders with monkeys, as the screenshot suggests:

Is Google racist?

They fault this on their algorithms. Other bad image-text links are inevitable. Newsweek cites a few more examples:

Recently Google News mismatched stories on Argentina's newly elected president Cristina Fernández with a photo of the California wildfires. A photo of the late Australia crocodile hunter Steve Irwin accompanied a report on the stock market. And thanks to the fast-breaking developments at Merrill Lynch, O'Neal managed to evolve. After he was forced to retire Tuesday in the wake of massive subprime losses, Google News illustrated the story with a 1939 photo of Katharine Hepburn taken during the filming of "The Philadelphia Story."

That's right. There's really no way for computers at this point to discern what is in the contents of an image. It is still reliant upon human intervention. If you want to help rectify things (and please have good intentions!), you can play the Image Labeler game.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

Google enabled a way for webmasters to set a geographic target for their site. So if you want to tell Google, most of my visitors are from a specific area, you can do that. This way, if someone searches in a specific area and Google knows it, Google can serve up your site higher in the results for that user.

But what if a good portion of your target users are from a specific location but a large minority is not from within that area? Should you set your geographic area?

Personally, I would not. But a Google Groups thread has some more details from a Googler, Jonathan Simon. Jonathan said:

Setting your site's location information to Austria will help ensure that it will be returned in results for "pages from Österreich" searches. If your site is currently being returned for "the web" searches on google.de, it will continue to do so even after you've set your site's location information to Austria.

This does help but it doesn't give me the full picture.

There are more questions in the thread and hopefully we can learn more from Google's responses in that thread.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Google is constantly updating the search results pages. But there seems to be a lot of discussion about an update made to the Google search results yesterday.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread and more conversation at a WebmasterWorld thread report such changes. Here are some quotes from some Webmasters:

Once again there has been an update and as usual I lost another 30% of my traffic from Google. Soon it'll be down to nothing and that is without me doing anything except adding more pages, fixing some typo's and a few layout fixes.

Yes, there definitely has been an update or algo movement yesterday. My first guess is that there has been some movement on dup content filtering measures.

Personally, I have yet to see any changes myself. But I admit, I do not look as carefully as most these people.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

On Friday we reported that Google is expanding Western Union payments to AdSense publishers based in Egypt and Morocco.

But since then, there has been confirmed reports that the feature simply does not work for those countries. In fact, just recently, there has been reports that the option has been completely removed from a Moroccan publisher.

Here is a screen capture of a publisher received an "invalid selection" error when choose that payment type:

Yesterday morning, one publisher said the Western Union option was removed:

3 days ago saw this option in my account i thought that ll be available for my country morocco but today i checked my account and i found that W.U option removed.

Others seem to be getting reports that the feature will be activated on the 15th of the month. One forum member said, "i found the answer it will start after 15 of the month , I'm so happy." Honestly, I would not consider this to be factual, this member can be wrong.

In any event, will the Western Union option be enabled for Moroccan publishers?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Update & Confirmed: A WebmasterWorld thread has confirmation from AdSenseAdvisor that Google will be rolling out the Western Union payment option to other countries really soon. AdSenseAdvisor said:

Sorry for the glitch - this feature isn't available yet. But stay tuned because it's coming soon, and we'll be sure to let you know when it's really available for you.

There is an excellent Cre8asite Forums thread brewing on the topic of Google's Supplemental Index.

The thread basically asks if the percent of pages on a specific domain can be used to determine the overall site's importance in the eyes of Google.

Barry Welford said:

All we're trying to find out for a website is whether in Google's eyes the content is valued as well as it should be.

It would be nice to have something a little more informative than the Toolbar PageRank measure.

JohnMu, a new member to the Google team, but an old face to the SEO forums, is in that thread trying to give us insight into that question.

It is clear that pages in the supplemental index are not as important as pages in the main index. The big question is, how reliable is that index now that Google hide it from us and now that PageRank is all over the place?

I suspect a thread like this will continue to evolve and maybe we can learn a thing or two from it.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.