Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: December 31, 2007"

If you have been doing SEO for a little while you have most likely heard the phrase "My competitors are doing it, why should we do the same thing?!" or my personal favorite "Why is this guy that is nobody in our industry ranking above me with that spammy link exchange directory thingy, shouldn't install one too!?!".

Those questions never allow for a single dull moment when with working with new or existing clients. The question either becomes incredibly annoying or comical if you heard it enough. Sometimes I imagine saying, "Sure lets install that spammy link exchange directory thingy and see what happens!!!". However you know you would never do such a thing as the secret to your ranking success is hardly ever going to lie in what "other" people are doing. Pageoneresults on WMW, thought so too and started on a thread on WebmasterWorld talking about the My Competitors Are Doing It Syndrome.

He says:

Over the years I've heard the expression "My competitor's are doing it" more times than I care to remember. If your competitors jumped off a bridge, would you follow them? ;) Okay, so your competitor attached a link exchange directory to their site. Time to run out and do the same.
Okay, so your competitor purchased links from that particular site. Time to run out and do the same.

Why not look at this from another angle. How about doing something that your competitors are not doing?

Some of the forum members voice thoughts on their own experience with this type of thinking. Europeforvisitors brings up an excellent suggestion, that instead of studying the tactics that you competitors are doing, you need to study what their weaknesses are. He mentions "my biggest competitors have less flexibility than I do, because they're stuck with corporate overhead and existing business models, (e.g., the need to recycle content from print publishing or to rely on user-generated content of questionable quality). In niche markets, there can be advantages to being a mom-and/or-pop business. "

He is exactly right. You could use time as your weapon as a smaller website you are more nimble to quickly adapt and change your content. This won't always work, but its one angle you could approach with.

Finally, Mikedee points out that if you like what your competitor is doing, you could always buy the website/company or steal the idea and do it better.

Continued discussion on WebmasterWorld - The "My Competitor's Are Doing It! Syndrome"

Jordan Kasteler has written a very nice post to acknowledge three individuals over at Sphinn that are the unsung heroes. In his post, he recognizes Sebastian X, Bill Slawski, and Marios Alexandrou.

Why?

Bill Slawski "has an uncanny ability of decrypting insanely ambiguous search engine related patents and translating them into plain English in terms the average person can comprehend."

Sebastian "has carved quite a niche for himself being the ultimate guru in the programming spectrum of SEO. He has a wide array of experience with Apache, PHP, MySQL which he utilizes to always think outside the box with."

Marios has an SEO experiments category in his blog where he reports his findings in a straightforward fashion.

Congratulations to the three of you; the acknowledgment is well-deserved.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Just about everyone should know about Digital Inspiration, a blog by Amit Agarwal who apparently monetizes his site on Google AdSense. The Inside AdSense blog acknowledged him in a recent blog post which included this video of Amit's story:

Amit also illustrates how he displays his Google ads.

I have tried a couple of other advertising programs on my website, but none of them have been so successful as AdSense. That's because AdSense contextual ads are always so relevant to the content.

He also advocates using Google Custom Search because you can also monetize from the ads within as well.

Very cool. Congratulations Amit!

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

Michael Gray spotted an interesting quote from a recent interview with Matt Cutts and Ted Murphy of Izea (formerly PayPerPost).

I explained to Matt that in SocialSpark all links required by an advertiser would carry the no-follow tag. I thought this would be a great thing. Matt commended the decision, but then added ALL links inside of any sponsored post should carry the no-follow tag period, regardless of whether they are required, not required or even link to the advertiser paying for the post. That means if Nikon pays me to review a camera and I link off to a site about photography that link needs to be no-follow, along with the link to the blog of my buddy the photographer. His reasoning was that the sponsored post wouldn’t exist without the sponsor paying for it, therefore all the content is commercial and should be no-follow.

Naturally, there's a lot of shaky ground with this statement, because Michael believes that Google should start employing nofollow on all the links you see on Google pages -- such as press releases, partnerships, and the like.

Ted Murphy, by the way, clarifies his stance in the Izea community blog, and Matt responds:

"I support No-Follow for any links required by an advertiser, but why should a blogger be forced to no-follow any other link?"

A blogger isn't forced to do anything; they can do whatever they want on their site. I'm trying to communicate Google's views, so that if a blogger wants to do well in Google, they know our stance. I think all major search engines have taken similar positions on paid posts that pass PageRank as well. I think Google has been pretty clear about our opinion on paid posts that pass PageRank.

So in the end, if you want to do well on Google, you should probably use nofollow on all paid posts regardless of the sponsor from what we're all reading.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

A Cre8asite Forums thread asks if Google orders the link reports at either a link:www.seroundtable.com command or via Google Webmaster Tools in level of importance.

Google's JohnMu confirms the link: command as just being a random sample of your backlinks. He therefore says, since it is a random sample, ordering these results in level of importance does not really apply. But what about the results in Google Webmaster Tools?

JohnMu, a Googler, said:

I wouldn't count on any list being in order of importance -- after all, how do you measure importance? How can any tool know what you personally feel is important?

Scanning some of those link reports shows me that Google clearly is not ordering them by level of importance.

But is Yahoo? Take a look and you might think they do.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

A lot of people seem to experience negative web experiences from those abroad. I can personally think of my own experiences and have thought to myself that it would be ideal to block an entire country from accessing a website to prevent fraud and the like. A WebmasterWorld member thinks similarly but wants to know if there are any consequences to blocking countries in this way.

But is this dangerous in the eyes of Google? If Google ranks the site but the visitor from, say, China, visits his site and gets a dead page, is this a bad user experience?

Well, it is, but from the eyes of two other webmasters who have done the same thing, there have been no negative affects by blocking "entire countries" from accessing certain websites. It looks like this webmaster can rest easy.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread has confirmed reports that Google has slipped up majority with payment to their Australian and New Zealand publishers. Google AdSense has inverted the exchange rate, to pay publishers more than 20% less than what they should have been paid this past pay period.

For example, if an Australian AdSense publisher earned $1,000 US dollars, they should have received a check for about $1,139 AUD (Australian Dollars). Instead, the currency exchange rate was flipped the other way and they received $878. So they received 88% a rate, as opposed to a 114% rate.

AdSenseAdvisor confirmed the billing issue and said:

Our payments team asked me to let you know that they're aware of this conversion issue with AU currency payments, and will be contacting affected publishers shortly.

Thanks for your patience, and we apologize for the confusion.

Google might just make the adjustment during the next pay period or they may send out payment before.

Like noted in the forum thread, if this was for a different currency, the results could have been much more extreme.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread is reporting several webmasters noticing that Ask.com's crawler has recently been generating tons of 404 (file not found) errors on their sites. The issue appears to stem from Ask.com auto inserting URL-Encoded spaces into the URL. URL-encoded spaces are those %20 signs you may find in URLs.

The specific crawler called out is crawler100.ask.com. Reports say that this has been going on for two weeks now.

Forum moderator, jdMorgan, offered up a mod_rewrite technique to force the Ask.com bot to obtain the correct URL and not a %20 URL. So if you are noticing this issue as well, check out the thread and try implementing jdMorgan's solution.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: December 28, 2007"

It is that time of the year again and Search Engine Journal is holding the Search Blogs Awards of 2007 now. I cannot express how important these awards are to me personally, so please take the time to vote for the Search Engine Roundtable by clicking here.

We are up for nomination is five different categories and I, Barry Schwartz, am personally up for nomination in an extremely important category.

The categories we are up for nomination include:

• Best SEO Blog of 2007
• Best Search Industry News Blog of 2007
• Best Overall Search Marketing Blog of 2007
• Best Contextual Advertising Blog
• Best Search Conference Coverage of 2007

Again, personally, I am up for nomination in the "Most Giving Search Blogger" category. So if you feel I am the most giving of my time, energy, sleep and knowledge in the search blog world, please vote for Barry Schwartz. Also nominated are Search Engine Roundtable's Tamar Weinberg and my colleague at Search Engine Land, Danny Sullivan - all well deserving of the award.

As many of you know, I have spent a lot of time also writing at Search Engine Land, specifically on search news topics. Search Engine Land has some of the best names writing there both on news and columns. Danny Sullivan, Chris Sherman, Greg Sterling, Vanessa Fox and I all are part of the Search Engine Land team. I suspect Search Engine Land will win at least two awards, I am personally voting for Search Engine Land on the Best Search Industry News Blog of 2007 and Best Overall Search Marketing Blog of 2007 - along with the Search Engine Roundtable. Tamar runs Techipedia, where she shares some awesome gems on social media. Techipedia is up for nomination in the social media category, so make sure to vote for Techipedia also!

The Search Engine Roundtable is not just made up of my personal thoughts. It is made up of the thoughts from you guys. We report on search items from the search forums. The Search Engine Roundtable represents the search industry's views. Tamar, Chris, Ben, Kim and I all take our industry's thoughts and changes - be it happy, sad, excited, or disappointing and share it with the rest of the world. Not only that, our conference coverage is made possible by not just our authors but from friendly faces in the industry, such as cshel, Li Evans, Rob Kerry, Marty, DaveR, Justin Davy, Avi Wilensky, Debra, Steve Krull, Lee Odden, and so many more people. This is what makes us so special - having the search industry make up what we write about at the Search Engine Roundtable.

Why should you vote for the Search Engine Roundtable?

Best SEO Blog of 2007: Day in and day out we find new SEO topics to write about. Writing for five years now, every single work day, and we still find new SEO topics to write about. From link building to keyword research to the minuet changes at Google, Yahoo and Live Search - you know we will pick up on it faster and in more detail than any other SEO blog on the Internet.
Best Search Industry News Blog of 2007: Honestly, Search Engine Land takes it for this. Yea, I know, I am biased, being the news editor. But Danny and I weed through thousands of news items each day and hand select the news stories we find to be the most relevant to our industry. The Search Engine Roundtable differs by watching the search forums to find which news stories are most important after it has been discussed by SEOs and SEMs. A cool, but unique angle.
Best Overall Search Marketing Blog of 2007: Search Marketing is what we write about each day. It includes SEO, PPC, Social Media and more. Like I said above, with us it is more about our consistency in finding anything new, interesting and exciting that is out there - every day!
Best Contextual Advertising Blog: Same with SEO, we cover the slightest changes in contextual ads. From Google changing the clickable area of those ads and how it impacting the typical publisher to Google sending out AdSense gifts. We cover contextual almost like no other blog out there.
Best Search Conference Coverage of 2007: We pretty much invented search conference coverage. There is no blog out there that covers more sessions and search conferences each year than us. BruceClay does a great job, but we cover more sessions, in more locations than any other search blog on the Internet. It is the most tiring and exhausting thing we do, but we have been consistently doing it since 2003. We have covered over 30 search conferences, consisting of over 1,000 sessions.

Personally, I have been writing since 2003 on search. I have written over 5,000 articles here, but well over 10,000 articles and posts at blogs and forums across the Internet. For more on that see here and here.

Did we win enough awards? We have won six substantial awards in the past, but does that mean we shouldn't win this year - since we won already? I don't think so. In fact, winning these awards shows us that people find our content to be important in their every day SEO and SEM lives. Personally, I give my heart and soul to this industry every day, for the past five years. The awards mean so much to me, probably too much.

So please vote for the Search Engine Roundtable and Barry Schwartz and don't forget to vote for Search Engine Land and Tamar! With my deepest respect, thank you all in advance!

To vote click here, note that 5 is the highest vote, and 1 is the lowest.

Forum discussion at Sphinn (yes, vote for Sphinn also).

This week has been incredibly slow. It's the last week of the year and everyone is having holiday celebrations whereas us Search Engine Roundtable folk (Barry and I) have been working diligently to keep you informed of the latest in Search. In fact, if you missed it (and I really hope you didn't), I spent the entire weekend compiling the best Internet Marketing blog posts of 2007 which was an incredible undertaking. If you're bored this weekend and have been partied out, this is a gift you cannot miss.

But on another note, while I gave an incredible amount of time and energy into that post, you should be advised that it is really Barry who is a much more giving search blogger, so consider that when you vote for us for the Best Search Marketing blogs for 2007. I'll remind you again before this post wraps up.

The Holidays

Over the past few days, you might have noticed Google's logo building project to build a nice holiday greeting logo just in time for Christmas. Cool. And on that day, there was nothing really to talk about (besides a Gmail quota increase to 6GB and the fact that JohnMu was so bury working too) so Barry took all the holiday threads he could round up and shared them with us. :)

Google Reader Privacy Concerns

Google Reader has been under a close watch ever since you can share your Google Reader stories with your contacts without opting out. It's not a pleasant thing for some people who feel that their privacy is compromised. I'm just glad I'm still using Bloglines.

On a positive note, you can remove your phone number and address from Google Search Results, so hopefully Google will solve the privacy concerns related to the Reader side of things quickly.

Is your site now ranking #6?

Have you noticed a Google position #6 penalty? If so, you're not alone. That's a strange change indeed.

Take the Search Marketing Quiz

Did you take Matt McGee's search marketing quiz yet? Well, don't, because I want to win.

Search Facebook App

It's FREEZING cold outside, baby. And you can be notified of these climate changes by installing the Search Facebook application on your Facebook profile. It pulls feeds from Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Land and provides a "weather" update of how hot or cold the news is in search. You know you want it. And if you don't, well, at least you can join our Facebook services page and become a fan of Search Engine Roundtable -- for real.

Remember, Vote!

We're in the running for the best Search Marketing Blogs for 2007. I personally am up for three awards (Best Social Media Optimization Blog, Best Conference Coverage in pictures, and Most Giving Blogger). Search Engine Roundtable is up for 5 other categories (Best SEO Blog, Best Search Engine Industry News, Best Overall Search Marketing Blog, Best Contextual Advertising Blog, and Best Search Conference Coverage). I say vote for Search Engine Roundtable for all of those, but Barry says that Search Engine Land deserves one of those votes. I'm not going to argue with the boss man. :) But in any event, vote for us and for me and for Barry and for anyone else you really love right over here. kthx!

A WebmasterWorld member noticed a strange Yahoo address in his logs and was wondering if anyone had ever noticed it:

alchemy.corp.sp1.yahoo.com

According to Yahoo, this is a URL that they use to test the relevance of landing pages. There are no charges for this activity.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A number of people are trying to set up Google AdSense video units via YouTube and are running into a really strange error:

AdSense error: The publisher must be associated with the developer account before the developer can invoke operations on the publisher's account.

Now I'm not sure what that means, and neither should you, but it looks like a lot of people are being impacted by this error.

AdSensePro Jordan has updated the thread at Google Groups informing the community that the error is acknowledged and being addressed:

Our engineers are currently looking into this issue, and I'll update this thread when it has been resolved.

Thanks for your patience until we're able to give you more information.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

Update: This was now fixed on January 11th.

Karl Ribas spotted a great find the other day: Wal-Mart is now offering Search Engine Marketing services at this sign-up link. The offering seems to be a $100 per month PPC service led by a Redmond Washington SEM agency.

Forum members are having a field days with this finding, even though Barry points out over at Search Engine Land that the service has actually been available since the summer of 2004. Here are some reactions:

WOW, I never thought they would go that low. Now Wal-Mart/Sam's Club wants poor people to pay them for NOTHING when search engines pick your sites up for free? Freaking amazing...

Tim Dineen says:

I love their SEO service: "Establish a local search profile and have your website submitted to the major search engines..."

(Sound familiar?)

Some folks (like Matt McGee) think it's an April Fools joke. It must be given that the company offering has been around for 3.5 years now and nobody has really heard about it.... is it for real?

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn and WebmasterWorld.

Matt McGee made a really cute 2007 search marketing quiz that you can take until later tonight. So far, I probably am the winner, but I challenge you to a duel.

Here's a sample question:

What color monkey is Rob Kerry?

You can choose from the following answers:

Red, black, green, brown, orange

Okay, I'm kidding. But the quiz is fun and the winner gets $25 from Matt's pocket. As of last night, only 6 people got all the questions right!

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: December 27, 2007"

When you do your keyword research, my bet is that you may have tens or hundreds of keywords to choose from. How do you keep track of it and monitor your rankings? A High Rankings Forum thread asks this question.

One member still uses the old-fashioned pen and paper tool. I've seen most people use an Excel spreadsheet, and one member at the forum suggests that.

Do you know of any current programs that monitor your rankings for keywords? I know there are some that used to take the Google Search API key, but unfortunately it's been over a year since that has been discontinued by Google. (Can you bring it back, please, Google?) :)

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forums.

Marios Alexandrou wrote a pretty cool post about the 55 questions you'd ask a would-be SEO which is probably the most recent post in my best Internet marketing posts thread and also hit the Sphinn homepage yesterday.

Most of the questions initially talk about your SEO experience, if you understand META tags, if you have any opinions on link buying, if you understand the difference between SEO and SEM, if you understand why Wikipedia ranks #1 for so many topics, and if you enjoy SEO. It's actually a very comprehensive list.

Interestingly, one member on Sphinn didn't think so.

Absurd. The list was created as if SEO is a technical profession. It prepares you for interviews with employers, SEO workers or otherwise, who share this misconception and then, because the question is on the list, they'll ask: If you've done 6 months of SEO for a site and yet there haven't been any improvements, how would you go about diagnosing the problem?

But unfortunately for the writer, his comment was buried (yay for social networks) and many others took offense to his statement. One, TheMadHat in particular, says that SEO is definitely a technical field and these questions are totally appropriate.

You don't think there is anything technical about SEO? The questions were leaning more heavily in that direction but it's a combination of technical knowledge and marketing knowledge. Without both you may as well roll over and find a new profession.

As many people feel, SEO is a balance of technical know-how and creative skill. What would you say about that?

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

WebmasterWorld administrator, tedster, has compiled the feedback of the December 2007 Google SERP Changes thread, which we covered earlier in a new WebmasterWorld thread. In this thread, he says there is a pattern of reports he has been noticing where webmasters are reporting that their rankings have dropped for some searches from a position two to a position six.

Tedster summarizes his findings:

1. Well established site with a long history.
2. Long time good rankings for a big search term - usually #1
3. Other searches that returned the same url at #1 may also be sent to #6, but not all of them
4. Some reports of a #2 result going to #6.

He explains that most the reports say it is not site wide but rather search term specific. Plus, he adds that is seems to be off-page related and not on-page related. That means, he believes the cause for such a "position 6 penalty" is caused by linkage reasons and not your on-page SEO.

Is there something to this new "Position 6 Google Penalty?" Is this just an excuse for some holiday forum chatter? Let the forum discussion continue...

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

As early as on December 14th, AdSense publisher began noticing new report options available to them. The new report type, found in the "advanced reports" section directly under the Aggregate data" and "Channel Data" options was named ""AdSense unit data."

This report is suppose to help those who are using the new announced back in October but not launched until mid-November. Many AdSense publishers, like myself, still do not have the manage ads feature, so they won't see this option.

A WebmasterWorld thread and DigitalPoint Forums thread has discussion on people seeing the reports and then it being removed from their reporting area. It appears to me that those reports were a bit off, but I am not sure if all the recent AdSense reporting bugs stem from this manage ads feature feature or not. It seems oddly ironic that all the reporting issues came along with this new manage ads feature, and that Google has been very reluctant to expand the manage ads feature to more publishers.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: December 26, 2007"

A DigitalPoint member shows the Google doodle for the Christmas holiday as a 5-step logo building project as seen below:

Quite a cool and creative idea as always. I love 'em Google Doodles. :)

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

What happens if Google has assumed your page is a different language than what it's written in? Well, I don't think mod_rewrite will work. But a few things will:

<html lang="en">

This declaration should be placed on the top of all your pages in the HEAD tag.

Furthermore, you should utilize Google Webmaster Tools to ensure that Google is acknowledging the proper language of your site.

What else would you suggest for this user whose site was inadvertently assumed as German even though it's written in English?

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A Google Groups thread asks if Google indexes and ranks Apple .Mac pages. Basically, .Mac is just a hosting service for Mac users, who pay for a "Dot Mac" subscription.

Googler, JohnMu, said Google does index and rank .Mac files. He linked to a site command for site:web.mac.com that clearly shows Google is indexing those files. But it appears Yahoo is indexing a lot more than Google, while Live Search is about the same as Google.

So in short, search engines have no reason not to index .mac hosted content. Just make sure those pages are search engine friendly and allowed via the robots.txt file and you should be set.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

On December 14th, Google Reader announced a feature that automatically shares your feed items with your friends. Google Reader Gets Social With Friends Shared Items from Danny Sullivan has an excellent write up. Honestly, I think we were both surprised that there was not much of a big deal made about Google automatically sharing your feeds with all your Gmail contacts without asking you if that would be OK.

Danny said, "but after now experiencing it first-hand, it's kind of scary that it isn't more opt-in rather than opt-out." Very true. I am just glad I don't use Gmail and I don't have too many Gmail contacts. Why would my wife care what feeds I am reading, specifically all the search feeds. Plus, why should all my competing bloggers have easy access to all my feeds? Got it? Of course, if you are subscribed to feeds that you might not want to share with others, health blogs, etc, then it may become a sensitive issue for some.

That is exactly what has erupted over Christmas with the aid of a Slashdot post:

"One week ago Google Reader's team decided to begin showing your private data to all your GMail contacts. No need to opt-in, no way to opt-out. Complaints haven't been answered. Some users share their problems, including one family who says they won't be able to enjoy this Christmas because of this 'feature.' Will Google start doing this with all their products? You can check a summary of complaints in my journal here or browse the whole thread in Google Groups."

Felipe Hoffa has a detailed summary of the announcement thread at Google Groups. Now with over 200 messages in the thread, with complaints starting as early as the day they launched the feature, Google has said one thing:

All of us on the Reader team are paying attention and are aware of the feedback from this group. However, we do need to balance all these concerns with keeping the feature useful for those who like it and use it. (There aren't many of those on this thread, granted, but this is only a small subset of the people using this feature.) The incremental changes we've been making this week have been aimed at finding the most reasonable compromise.

Let me reiterate: If you're uncomfortable sharing items, you can unshare everything in a single click. With just a few more clicks, you can move all those items to a new tag, to preserve your organization. After unsharing, any privacy concerns you had about sharing your shared items should be taken care of.

We are aware that friends management is still very basic at this stage. Your Google Talk contact list is taken as an approximation of the set of people you're interested in communicating with, but you can remove people from that list as necessary if you don't wish to see their items. The update I mentioned today was intended to help in that, since various folks have expressed confusion about who's who in their lists.

We do intend to keep iterating and improving this feature, though we'll necessarily slow down a bit over the holidays. Thanks for your patience, and we do hope you'll end up enjoying the sharing functionality of Reader.

Happy Holidays to All,

Graham

The all or nothing feature.

There is more recent discussion on this over at Techmeme and forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

As Vanessa Fox writes at Search Engine Land yesterday, Google has kept up their tradition of providing support on Christmas day via Google Groups forums.

Last year, it was Googler's Adam Lasnik and Vanessa Fox found working on Christmas and this year it was John Mueller from Google Webmaster Central AdSensePro Jordan providing support for both webmaster related questions and publisher questions.

Now, keep in mind that John Mueller is based in Switzerland. Here are his posts throughout Christmas eve and day at Google Groups:

1. Please help: sitemap error: Paths don't match -- but the should?!
2. 301 several pages to one - will this harm rank?
3. Hit with a penalty, but not de-indexed?
4. A Google search inserted into html
5. disney
6. dot .mac indexing
7. example sites with no follow links?
8. Sitemap by Atom 1.0 feed?
9. Happy Holidays!

Not only was John active in the Google Groups forums, he was also active at Cre8asite Forums. As you can see by his Cre8asite Profile John was last active yesterday at Yesterday, 06:25 PM.

John was not the only Googler active in forums. AdSensePro Jordan, a newish AdSense rep posted in a forum thread.

2008: The Year of the Friendlier AdSense Help Forum

So there you have it, Google continues the tradition of support on Christmas!

I spent some of the morning reviewing the search forums, practically unable to find any content and news to write about. So instead, I thought I compile a collection of threads from the forums that make up our search marketing industry. The compilation of threads are Merry Christmas and Happy Holiday threads from the search forums.

• Search Engine Roundtable Forums
• Cre8asite Forums
• WebmasterWorld
• High Rankings Forums
• Digital Point Forums
• I Help You Forums
• V7N Forums
• Search Engine Forums (JimWorld)
• Site Point Forums
• Web Work Shop Forums
• WebProWorld Forums
• SEO Refugee Forums
• Google Groups
• Sphinn

Happy Holidays everyone! Wishing you all the best in the new year, health, happiness, and success!

If you login to your Gmail account and scroll to the bottom of the page, you may notice that your Gmail capacity is now above 6GB. Mine looks like this:

In fact, it is exactly 6.020702 GB at the time I am writing this. Just a couple months ago, Gmail reached over 4GB of Gmail storage and now we are at 6.

A nice little present for some Gmail users on this holiday day.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: December 24, 2007"

Aaron Wall recently posted about why many of the best SEO ideas aren't found on popular blogs. His main points are that many people share incorrect and outdated information and it's dangerous to share the best tips because it could negatively affect you. If you expose a secret, it will be addressed shortly thereafter. The best secrets are those that nobody speaks of.

Over at Sphinn, this sentiment is reiterated:

There are a lot of people republishing stuff from 3 to 8 years ago that is no longer quite true, or is in some cases now totally wrong.

It's true. SEO is constantly evolving and those who test often will be more successful. Those who are newer are generally more interested in sharing their findings as well.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

With the entire ongoing debate about paid links, is there a benefit to buying links with nofollow? Perhaps. What would be your argument to go with nofollow paid links?

For one, you can possibly get traffic from the link even if Google doesn't give it any love. Another thing is that it's good for branding. Furthermore, if you have a paid link, it's an endorsement.

But the bottom line is that many people agree that a paid link can still get traffic. As one person says, she gets a lot of traffic from her nofollow Wikipedia link, so it's proven to be successful.

What are your thoughts on the nofollow debate? Would you still buy nofollow links? Forum discussion continues at

A Cre8asite Forums thread poses the dilemma about web 2.0 sites getting web 1.0 wrong. Bill Slawski quotes the following from Jakob Nielsen's article:

Before throwing spending money at "2.0" features, make sure that you have all the "1.0" requirements working to perfection. Of the 149,784,002 sites on the Web, maybe a handful can make this claim. Most sites don't even use the customers' terminology in headlines and page titles — if you want one quick action item to improve site profitability through better SEO ranking, more clickthroughs, and better understanding of your services, rewriting the first two words of your microcontent will beat any technology any day.

As an avid user of web 2.0 sites, I find this so very true.

Some users just think that web 2.0 is a whole lot of bunk:

Web 2.0 is a rather stupid little term, and a prime example of hte complete "marketing and sales" spin on most things today. It's not new, it's not phenominal, and it won't make your busienss a success by simply using it ...It's all merely smoke to me... slapping a fresh coat of paint and selling the vehicle on does not make it worth a whole lot more.

EGOL brings the discussion back to the web 1.0 roots:

You might be much farther ahead to write an EXCELLENT user's guide, detailed FAQ, a few articles and put them out for consumption.

The extremely detailed and interesting discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

Bill Slawski discovered a patent application by Microsoft that seeks to "restrict the results for queries to be from blog pages."

Does that mean that blogging has had its day? Well, if the key word is restrict and Microsoft is seeking relevancy (since when are blog posts irrelevant?), then maybe they can't limit the number of blog posts that hit the results page.

Some people want this to happen. Tim Dineen, for example, has this to say:

Blogs get a disproportionate boost (relative to their actual usefulness) because they tend to be well-optimized and are more likely to gain links than a typical (albeit just as useful) website developed by a small business or unique content provider who has a web design shop build a site for their content.

Then again, bear in mind that not all blogs use Wordpress. They're using Wordpress and the platform because it's already well optimized, so restricting the results will affect those who decided to develop upon that platform.

And finally, perhaps Microsoft should take a clue from Google's success:

Because blogs are so dynamic and oft-updated, they can often be the best source of results for new events.

I'd imagine why most blogs are still #1 for many searches I perform: because they're relevant!

Here's some additional Search Engine Roundtable coverage on the success of blogs (or why Google likes them):

• Setting Up a Blog - Some Things You Should Know From an SEO Perspective


• SEO Through Blogs and Feeds


• Blog & Feed Search SEO - Blog Optimization Strategies You Need to Know


• Blog and Feed Search SEO

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn

More and more often, users are finding their home phone number and address listed in Google. For example, a search on john doe, ny, ny returns the follow Google Phone Book records at the top of the page:

Google has been displaying phone book records for a long time now, it is nothing new. Also, people tend to blame Google for displaying this information. People, this information is publicly available at many many sites, including Yahoo, MSN, Ask and tons of people search engines and yellow books. I have seen frantic emails blaming Google for invading their privacy but this is not a Google issue.

If you want your information removed from Google, you can easily do that at the Google Phonebook Name Removal Form. To remove a home or residential address, simply fill out a form. But to remove a business, it requires a bit more authentication and effort.

To remove your residential listing information from the Google phonebook, please fill out the form below, entering all information exactly as it appears in your phonebook entry. Doing so will mean your residential listing does not appear in Google for any phonebook search, even searches conducted on your name instead of your phone number. Please note that this removal is permanent and that it's not possible to add your phone number again in the future.

To remove your business listing information from the Google phonebook, please send a signed request on your company letterhead to the address below. Include a phone number and email address at which you can be reached so that we may verify your phonebook removal request. Please note that this removal is permanent and that it's not possible to add your phone number again in the future.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

A HighRankings Forums thread has one member reporting the "diary" of a 302 redirect. Here is the timeline so far:

• 12/19/07: 302 Re-direct implemented from www.oldsite.com to www.newsite.com
• 12/20/07: New site name (not url - so BRAND NAME rather than www.brandname.com) shows in the SERPs old site URL for the brand name.
• 12/24/07:A number of keywords are now showing up results in the SERPs for the new domain.

I also want to commend HighRankings on their great new look! Here is a snap shot of their new forum logo:

Nice job! Forum discussion on the new design at HighRankings Forums.

Last Wednesday we reported many people noticing that Google was showing them more Sitelinks in Webmaster Tools. Now, it appears that people are reporting via a DigitalPoint Forums thread that those Sitelinks are appearing in the search results.

I decided to take a look at my rustybrick search example, and I also am noticing more Sitelinks visible at Google.com.

December 19, 2007 Sitelinks in Google:

December 24, 2007 Sitelinks in Google:

The Sitelinks shown today, do not match the Sitelinks shown in Google Webmaster Tools from December 19th. I checked what Google webmaster tools shows today and they do match what I am currently seeing in Google.com.

So does it take four days to have Sitelinks from Google Webmaster Tools flow to Google.com search results? That assumption would be invalid. Hard to say what we saw last week was a bug or something else.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: December 21, 2007"

While most of you are pumped for the holidays next week, bear in mind that those of us at Search Engine Roundtable will be caffeinated and toiling away at ensuring that you're not kept out of the loop for anything. That's why Barry should be voted as the "most giving search blogger" in the 2007 Search Blogs awards. Forget about me. This is all about Barry, guys. Remember, he blogs on Search Engine Land in addition to this blog that he founded. That has serious rockin' potential.

Search Engine Roundtable News

First and foremost, are you a Facebook user? Then become a fan of the Search Engine Roundtable on Facebook. We rock. You love us. The chemistry is hot.

Also, Danny and Barry just came out with a very cool Search News Facebook application, so if you love search and want to install the application on your page, do it!

Getting Excited for the Holidays?

If not, start looking at the various search holiday themes that surround you. Search Engine Roundtable is sporting a new theme by our new graphics designer, Mabe. What do you all think?

Google Wants to Know About You

In an Internet where people get more and more social, the search engines want in, too. Google has launched a profile initiative where users can share as much or as little information as they want about themselves with their peers. Think this will help for reputation management?

Google + DoubleClick + FTC = <3

So, there you have it. The FTC has approved of the Google-DoubleClick acquisition. I have heard many people say "oh no" to the news, but that's about it. The forums have been pretty silent.

Google AdSense Gets Innovative

...but what's new? There have been sightings of a new 2x2 Google AdSense format. Last week, we saw experiments with Google AdSense scrolling ads. Both of these indicate that Google is getting a ton of AdWords inventory since they need to feature more ads.

Speaking of which, in the UK, you can see Google Gadget Ads which are more interactive AdSense ad units. What kind of ads do you expect not to see from Google in the future?

Got Video? Submit a Google Sitemap

Want your video to be searchable on Google? The Google Video Sitemaps protocol has been announced, and you now can! Sweet!

Microsoft Featured Google AdWords Ads, but Not Any Longer

Earlier this week, we reported that Microsoft was showing Google AdWords ads in their natural search results. Oops. Well, after we wrote about it, Microsoft fixed the problem. That's one fast turnaround and good followup on Microsoft's part.

Google Releases Flight Stats

Earlier this week, Google announced that they are going to show flight information in the search results, and they have. I compared this to Ask, MSN, and Yahoo, and MSN comes up emptyhanded. Google has the most interesting information of all of them because the flight times are right on the results pages without having to navigate elsewhere. Good stuff. Oh, and Nathan, thanks for picking up this story but you need to blog way more often ;)

Yahoo Stops Numbering Search Results

A small change has been noted: search results are not numbered anymore on Yahoo. What are your thoughts on this? Bad for keeping track of your rankings? That'd be my concern.

Is there a Google PageRank Update?

According to reports, there was a Google PageRank update this month. Now I don't understand this because my PageRank is still at a solid 4 (even though I whined to Google about bringing me down from a 5. HELLO MATT!) I know numbers aren't important but the glass is more than half empty on my little toolbar. :(

Get Your Emails Translated

Got a foreign word in your email that you just don't understand? Gmail Google Translator will help. Just add a bunch of usernames and start a chat with them to get instant results. Cool beans.

Google Needs to Clarify its Supplemental Stance

All I can say from reading forum discussion about Google's Supplemental Index confusion is that my head hurts. Google, can you please calm the people? What does this supplemental index thing really mean?

Want Google Sitelinks? You may have them now

It looks like more sites are getting Google Sitelinks. It is going to take time, but for those who want it (and I know you do), it's pretty awesome.

Live Search Link Command is Offline

Okay, there's no hope. Microsoft's link: command is offline again. Why? Exploits, probably. Stop abusing the system and let us use it the way it's intended.

Yahoo Schwag Arrives

We reported earlier this week that Yahoo has sent laptop cases to customers. Shimon Sandler writes about his Google Flip Video. Kevin Heisler writes about the flip video as well. Guys, I started a site dedicated to freebies like this and I got nothing!. My website is called Schwag Addict. Now if you need my address (my HOME address, that is), email me at tamarATrustybrickDOTcom. Okay? Thanks.

Have a great holiday week next week!

The holiday season is here, you can tell if you just browse the web and see all the sites sporting fun logos and themes. As you can tell, we have our holiday theme live now.

Google has holiday logo number one live and will likely update the logos daily:

Yahoo went animated again, got to love it:

Here is the Yahoo static image:

Ask.com has a completely animated background, the snow flakes fall from the sky.

Dogpile has their cute logo as well!

Happy holidays everyone - thank you so much for reading and supporting us!

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

A story that emerges at the SEO Refugee Forums speaks volumes about the power of Google Maps in the natural/universal search results. A florist company in Denver is currently ranking #1 for their key terms in the natural organic listings. They have also invested over $100,000 in Google AdWords over three years.

The problem is that now that Google Universal search includes maps in the results, they're not showing up on the listings for whatever reason. Instead, the competition is. They claim that it has "shut down their business overnight." The owner is desperate and is trying every possible angle:

We are now less than 1 week from Christmas, our busiest time of year, and critical weakness in the "algorithm" for maps has bankrupted my company.

....

PLEASE HELP us. I realize we are nothing to you, but my family is losing everything.

It's scary how important Google Maps are now that people are going to desperate measures to keep their businesses and families alive. But it truly shows the power of Google and their technology.

For the sake of this business owner, I hope that someone at Google lists this company in Google Maps. I don't think they deserve to be shafted.

Forum discussion continues at SEO Refugee Forums.

At Pubcon, Matt Cutts was asked about reciprocal linking. We already explored the reciprocal linking question with Adam Lasnik who said that reciprocal linking with relevant sites is better than reciprocal linking with every possible site on the Internet.

A WebmasterWorld thread quotes my coverage of the Matt Cutts keynote (shout out to cnvi for reading!) where I pretty much cover the question about reciprocal linking:

Q: People are all about links but then there's a concern about linking to bad neighborhoods. How do you identify bad neighborhoods? Should you nofollow them or stay away totally?

Matt: Use your gut. Trading links is natural and it's natural to have reciprocal links. At some level, natural reciprocal links happen, but if you do it way too often, it looks artificial. My advice is to go with your gut and if you're worried, you can use nofollow.

Yup, that's what I said. Then I talked about birds. (Actually, Matt did. See coverage here.) In any event, martinibuster expounds upon the statement by Matt to say what we pretty much already know. Matt isn't saying anything different with regards to reciprocal links. He's just saying that you need to be careful with your reciprocal linking approach:

1. Heavy reciprocal linking won't pass a hand check.

2. Light reciprocal linking, both as naturally occurs between similar sites, and apparently the unnatural kind may pass a hand check if it's light.

3. The limits of reciprocal linking are purposely left ambiguous which means either there is no clear number by policy or algo to how many recips you can have, it is hard to put a number to it because it occurs naturally, and/or the limits are left to the judgement of individual hand checkers, i.e. Google reserves editorial discretion when performing a hand check.

That makes complete sense. Be careful in your strategy if you really are inclined to do reciprocal linking.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

In April, Google announced its plans to acquire DoubleClick for $3.1 billion. A month later, that acquisition was contested and reviewed by the FTC. At that point, Google was confident that the deal would withstand scrutiny.

Fast-forward to December, and Google speaks the truth. The Federal Trade Commission writes:

...after carefully reviewing the evidence, we have concluded that Google’s proposed acquisition of DoubleClick is unlikely to substantially lessen competition.

Some forum members are shocked. Others aren't so surprised.

It'll be approved. Heck, if Microsoft wanted to buy Christmas, that would be approved as well.

Microsoft just announced an ad deal with Viacom, so it's not like they're not looking for strategic ways to compete with Google for this deal. And I guess that's what the FTC has determined.

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

Every day, Danny and I always make a note to each other about how busy the search marketing industry will be today from a news and forum posts perspective. We finally bit the bullet and designed a Facebook application that shares our thoughts on that with you. The facebook application can be reached at Search News for Facebook and added to your profile.

Right now, it is fairly cold. The news is slow, the forums are fairly slow, so I set it at cold. It can get as hot as Sizzling or as cold as Freezing! Danny and I hope to update the temperature at least every work-day morning, to let you know how crazy we feel the day will be. If things change throughout the day that warrant a change to the temperature, we will update the temperature on the application.

In addition to having the temperature, it also shares the latest news from the Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Land by default, but you can also add your own to the mix!

So add the Search News for Facebook to your profile, to see it on my profile, go here. You can also become a fan of our new Search Engine Roundtable Facebook Fan page.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums and Sphinn.

Israeli? Speak Hebrew? Also an Google Adsense publisher? Google has recently (December 17th) opened an AdSense forum in Hebrew for you at this URL.

AdSensePro Jordan informed us of the 15th supported language for AdSense forums at Google Groups. The Hebrew speaking AdSense rep is named מנהל פורום AdSense, which means manager of the AdSense forum and it looks like this in the forums:

Here is a break down the other 14 other languages AdSense has Google Groups for:

Arabic: AdSense منتدى المساعدة الخاصة ب
http://groups.google.com/group/adsense-help-ar?hl=ar
Chinese (Simplified): AdSense 支持论坛
http://groups.google.com/group/adsense-help-zhs
Chinese (Traditional): AdSense 支援論壇
http://groups.google.com/group/adsense-help-zht
Dutch: AdSense Help Forum
http://groups.google.com/group/adsense-help-nl
French: Forum d'Aide AdSense
http://groups.google.com/group/adsense-help-fr
German: AdSense Forum
http://groups.google.com/group/adsense-help-de
Italian: Gruppo di assistenza di AdSense
http://groups.google.com/group/adsense-help-it
Japanese: AdSense ヘルプ フォーラム
http://groups.google.com/group/adsense-help-ja
Korean: 애드센스 도움말 포럼
http://groups.google.com/group/adsense-help-ko
Polish: Forum Pomocy AdSense
http://groups.google.com/group/adsense-help-pl
Portuguese: Fórum do AdSense
http://groups.google.com/group/adsense-help-pt
Russian: Форум программы AdSense
http://groups.google.com/group/adsense-help-ru
Spanish: Foro de ayuda de AdSense
http://groups.google.com/group/adsense-help-es
Turkish: AdSense Yardım Forumu
http://groups.google.com/group/adsense-help-tr

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Search Engine Watch Forums Moderator abbottsys started on a venture to make a tool to help AdWords advertisers automate the process of writing their AdWords ads. You can track the idea to the inception of the tool at the Search Engine Watch Forums thread.

As you might think, most people were skeptical, including the tool creator, abbottsys. But that didn't stop the idea.

The tool is now done and is named AdWords Analyzer. Instead of writing a whole ad, it offers keyword ideas for your text and gives you just the headline for your ad. Does it work well? Far from it.

Let's plug in my Custom Web Applications page from RustyBrick and see what it gives us:

It suggests: "Rustybrick Custom"

I would have been happier if the tool just picked my title tag, "Custom Web Applications" and then maybe add "Done Right" to the end. :)

Trust me, I know how hard it can be to automate the process. Google and Yahoo, I believe, both have tools to aid the advertiser in coming up with titles as well. The only way to do this, is to test by hand. Humans read titles, humans click on titles, humans should write the titles. Of course, using dynamic keyword insertion is the exception to all of this.

Forum discussion Search Engine Watch Forums.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: December 20, 2007"

So, it seems that only Googlers like their cats. WebmasterWorld members who are not Googlers do not.

Matt Cutts loves his cat:

AdWordsAdvisor plays devil's advocate in the "I hate cats" thread by stating that he/she (can someone please confirm?!) likes them:

I don't hate cats. In fact, I like them a lot.

Cats are cute in videos where they play with their tails (that video rocks, btw).

But why do people hate cats? Some are innocent victims of cat attacks. Cats will lick themselves all day and all night. Cats are... just interesting.

Forum discussion (yes, really) continues at WebmasterWorld.

The Smackdown blog by Michael Vandemar mentions that Matt Cutts had made some statements regarding the operations at Google with regards to how it approaches SEO and these suggested changes are finally a reality.

First, you no longer need to admit guilt in order to submit a reinclusion request. And secondly, the SEO business needs not to require a money-back guarantee.

The wording in the Google Help document has changed from:

For your own safety, you should insist on a full and unconditional money-back guarantee. Don’t be afraid to request a refund if you’re unsatisfied for any reason, or if your SEO’s actions cause your domain to be removed from a search engine’s index.

to:

Don't be afraid to request a refund if you're unsatisfied with your SEO's performance.

The discussion moves to Sphinn where Danny Sullivan says that it may have something to do with Google's acquisition of Performics, the SEO firm that is owned by DoubleClick. But he says:

To reiterate, Google does NOT own Performics yet. But they've given no indication that they will split off the company. And they really should.

Michael Vandemar also points out that Performics uses Text Link Ads to boost their rankings. Problem? Well, don't you know of the paid links PageRank massacre?

As Danny responds:

And yep, it underscores what an issue this is going to be for both Google and Performics, if they indeed merge. Google's going to have to worry about everything Performics does; Performics will have to be hypersensitive that they don't somehow violate a Google guideline.

I think this could be very iffy territory. But it's good that at least there's a little more support to SEO firms as Matt promised.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Yesterday, we reported findings that MSN was returning Google AdWords links in their natural search results. Well, Microsoft has responded to this issue on the Live Search Webmaster Central Blog, explaining that it was a complete accident and that it will be fixed in the upcoming days:

The issue stems from the way Live Search handles content disallowed by the Robots.txt file. We regularly check the robots.txt file of a site to ensure that we don't index and cache pages excluded by the webmaster. However, if we do find a link elsewhere on the web pointing to a page excluded by the robots.txt file, we may include the link and the anchor text in our index if we think it might be valuable to our users. Yesterday we accidently began including the links from the ads of Google AdSense customers. The issue has been fixed, and you should see the results disappear from our search results over the next couple days.

Vanessa Fox at Search Engine Land explains a little more about this and explains it's primarily due to a new way the Google renders AdSense units, a claim that is neither detailed on Google or Microsoft's side. However, much thanks to Microsoft for responding!

In fact, the problem does seem to be resolved. Try searching for confirmation: http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=site:www.google.com/pagead. Thanks for the fast turnaround, Microsoft!

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Barry Welford at Cre8asite Forums stumbled upon a post by Rich Tehrani where Gmail has a feature that translates words on the fly for you, which is especially helpful if you're reading an email within Gmail and need to look up the words quickly.

He explains:

What you are doing is chatting to the bot that does Google translations. So for example if you want to translate from English to French, you add en2fr@bot.talk.google.com as one of your contacts. Then whenever you go chat with en2fr, what ever you say will be translated in the reply from the bot. If you're a frequent user of Gmail, as I am, you may find this a very useful feature. The translation isn't perfect but it often will provide what you're looking for.

As eKstreme echoes, however, the translation really isn't perfect. It will do a basic translation and you'll get the idea of what is being said, but you won't get the best translation. Still, it's a cool tool to use if you're in need of a quick definition.

Over at Search Engine Land, Barry talks more about the features available and encloses screenshots. Additionally, the Google Talkabout Blog has more.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

The Ultimate Fate of Supplemental Results from the Google Webmaster Central blog announces, what Google calls, the "next major milestone" for Google's supplemental results. What is happening exactly? Google is implying that when you conduct a search in Google.com, Google will not just search their main index, but also search the "supplemental index" to return results from both indexes, dare I say it, equally. Or at least, that is how I understand it.

Did webmasters notice anything? Yes! We covered what Webmasters were noticing yesterday with Is Google's Supplemental Index Increasing? This was before Google announced anything, so something was up and yes, it was noticeable. How noticeable? Hard to say since a drop in rankings can come from a ton of different areas and since Google hides which results are supplemental, it is almost impossible for us to determine if a supplemental results is outranking a non-supplemental result.

Reading through to large forum threads, one from WebmasterWorld and the other from Google Groups, it is painful. There is so much confusion over the supplemental results, probably even more than what we had over a year ago, which, in my opinion, is very sad.

Hiding the supplemental index was a solution? I guess not. Does telling webmasters Google now searches both the supplemental index and the main index clarify anything? Nah. How is that working exactly? Is one index better than the other? I would assume so? I assume it only impacts very long tail queries. Google does offer some hints with this:

From a user perspective, this means that you'll be seeing more relevant documents and a much deeper slice of the web, especially for non-English queries. For webmasters, this means that good-quality pages that were less visible in our index are more likely to come up for queries.

Non-english queries, hmm... From the webmaster comment, you would think your less visible but quality pages that are non-English are more likely to come up? Why would a "good-quality page" be in the supplemental index in the first place? A linkage issue? Freshness?

I'll call Google out on this one, and I rarely do.

Google, we need you to stop hiding this index from us. We really need an explanation of what this index does, why a page would be placed in the supplemental index. When Google actually searches it? In what examples would a page in the supplemental index rank better than a page in the main index?

The confusion over the supplemental index has gone on too long.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Google Groups.

There are two scientific papers or patent that were written about by Bill Slawski and Gary Price, who else. Bill wrote about How does Google Pick Snippets for Your Pages to Show in Search Results? and Gary wrote about How Google Identifies, Detects & Understands Music Files. Both are very interesting concepts and reads. Let's start with Bill's snippets:

Bill points to a new awarded Google patent named Methods and systems for generating textual information and then breaks down that document into english. Here is Bill's "takeaway":

A takeaway from this patent may be that you should pay attention carefully to the text that surrounds and supports phrases on your pages that you think might be terms that people will search for to find those pages, and that may rank well and show up in search results that people will see.

Forum discussion on Snippets at Sphinn.

Gary points to a paper written by Google's NYC office, named Robust Music Identification, Detection, and Analysis (PDF). The paper goes through the various ways Google can identify, detect and understand music files. What is also cool, is that Google also has a method of apparently detecting "duplicate content" when it comes to music files by looking at pitches and tones and comparing them to what else matches those pitches, frequencies, tones, etc that is in the Google Music or Video index. Google calls that piece "Factor Uniqueness Analysis".

Forum discussion on Music detection at Sphinn.

A WebmasterWorld thread named Bet on Google Paying Early in December says it all. Yes, as expected, Google has already started the "PIP" or payment in progress notifications to their AdSense publishers this month. Why was it so expected? Well, if Google's fiscal year goes by the calendar year and ends on December 31st, which I believe it does, then Google wants to spend spend spend, as much as they can before the 31st to get all the deductions they can possibly get before the new year starts.

WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums are all commenting about how early their payments were made in progress this month. Mine was set into progress as of yesterday:

You can check yours on your payment reports screen.

An early Christmas gift or Google's tax accountants working those IRS rules?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Many people are now spotted new Google AdSense ads. These ads are named Google Gadget Ads, yes, they are interactive ads, part of the AdSense program, which was launched on 9/19/2007 at http://www.google.com/adwords/gadgetads/.

As Darren Rowse explains, yes they are interactive ads, hence, "Gadget Ads." The first demonstrations of them were more video format like. Here is an example of one ad that has been popping up on UK sites:

The first discovery of this type of ad comes from a DigitalPoint Forums on December 16th, as far as I know. The ads seem to have also been spotted on Technical Itch in the UK.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Continue reading "Search Forum Recap: December 19, 2007"

Interested on getting some cash? Well, you may be able to with the new MSN adCenter Affiliate Program. For every advertiser you refer to adCenter, you'll get a percentage of their signups.

Cool. It may help others too, as some forum members point out.

The only concern is the domain name and marketing behind the product. It really hasn't gained momentum and there's not much of a marketing push behind the initiative.

Interesting, I stumbled upon the adCenter affiliate program a few weeks ago and thought it was a dummy test site. There was no marketing push behind it and this affiliate program didn't seem to have much resources behind it. I did talk with Jessica Lee who was very kind, but couldn't tell me what the payout was. One reason is the domain name www.microsoftaffiliates.net. Come on Microsoft, you cant get microsoftaffiliates.com?

By the way, Google also has an affiliate program which is nearly three years old. It's good that Microsoft is also taking on the challenge.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

You've gotta love being too dependent on a good thing. But when it goes down, boom -- the unfortunate occurs and you notice. Earlier, a bunch of folks looking at the Google Cache couldn't find what they were looking for and received the following result:

Your search - cache:http://www.##############.html - did not match any documents.

It looks like there was an early morning hiccup online as many forum folks noticed. But it's back now!

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums and High Rankings Forum.

Wow, talk about strange issues with MSN Live. I just performed a search on Live.com and the 3rd and 4th results were Google AdWords ads as pictured below:

Actually, I'm not the one to have discovered this. Michael Dorausch spotted it at the Raven SEO blog. Interestingly, this was picked up yesterday and was posted to Sphinn but the problem remains. At least Google removed its raccoon problem in a timely manner. ;)

But as Barry points out at Search Engine Land, Google is blocking this kind of spidering in their robots.txt file and MSN is still crawling the information. In fact, Barry notes that they crawled over 4 million ads.

It makes you wonder what their CTR is and how Google AdWords can possibly track the CTR accurately...

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Google has announced that they now provide flight stats right on the search pages.

For the latest information on a flight's status, simply search for an airline and flight number, and the first result will tell you whether your flight is on time or delayed as well as the estimated departure and arrival times.

This is pretty cool, actually. Let's compare this to other flight status tracking on the other big three search engines.

First, the Google stats:

The results are right on the page.

On the other hand, Yahoo has stats but you have to go to another site to get them.

And Ask.com is the same way:

MSN doesn't even have flight tracking:

(Please don't email those people.)

So, what do you think? Who has the best flight stats?

Oh, and of course, if you wanted some real time flight tracking, there are alternatives as presented by Gary Price, but they are not available within the search engines themselves... for now.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

In yesterday's post, I wrote about how you can create profitable campaigns with high CPCs. David Wallace wrote a pertinent post over at Search Engine Guide about the difficulty faced by small businesses to keep their Google AdWords costs down.

Ultimately, after much trial and error, he lowered the costs and focused more on long tail keywords. The end result was that the traffic doubled and the average CPC was cut in half. He ends his article with the following very important note:

If you are finding it to expensive to compete for that highly competitive keyword phrase or phrases, try cutting back on the maximum you are willing to spend for click-thrus and concentrate your efforts on "longer tail" or less competitive keywords. The results may astonish you.

I've seen this as well, and it's very cool to play around and be patient as you experiment to achieve desired results.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

We asked the question a while back, Should Google Display RSS Feeds in Web Search Results and we determined, no. Then GoogleGuy confirmed Google does not want to display most RSS feeds in the Google index.

The Google Webmaster Central blog announced Google has taken the RSS feeds out of their index. But first credits for finding this news goes to Sebastian, who spotted via a German Google Webmaster Central blog post.

To address these concerns, we prevent feeds from being returned in Google's search results, with the exception of podcasts (feeds with multimedia enclosures). We continue to allow podcasts, because we noticed a significant number of them are standalone documents (i.e. no HTML page has the same content) or they have more complete item descriptions than the associated HTML page. However, if, as a webmaster, you'd like your podcasts to be excluded from Google's search results (e.g. if you have a vlog, its feed is probably a podcast), you can use Yahoo's spec for noindex feeds. If you use FeedBurner, making your podcast noindex is as simple as checking a box ("Noindex" under the "Publicize" tab).

See, we are clear of feeds.feedburner.com in Google, for now, at least.

Good news, in my opinion.

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld & Sphinn.

In early November I reported that Microsoft's link command came back to life. But it now seems to be up and down, currently down.

The new link command that should work, is the the syntax of +linkdomain:www.seroundtable.com. But as expected, the more people who find out about this plus sign work around, the more likely Microsoft sees those queries and pulls the command offline.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yahoo has begun shipping out their Christmas gifts. One Yahoo Search Marketing advertiser received his gift. CPA Affiliates posted a picture of the gift he received, a nice looking laptop case.

You can see a picture of the inside at CPA Affiliates.

Google gave out 2GB Memory Cards and some advertisers also got a $100 DonorsChoose card to give to their favorite school. But some special advertisers received a Flip Ultra Video Camera.

Love schwag, so does Tamar, she devoted a blog just to schwag at SchwagAddict.com.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Reports are coming from WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums that more sites are obtaining those much sought after Google Sitelinks. Now that you can get up to 8 Sitelinks for your listing, people simply want them.

My web development company now has them, a search for rustybrick returns 4 Sitelinks beneath the main listing. A couple weeks ago, I did not see Sitelinks for my listing (I believe). The search engine roundtable Google search returned Sitelinks almost since the beginning. Notice how the rustybrick example only shows 4 Sitelinks:

But if I login to Google Webmaster Tools and view the Sitelinks section for that site, I see 6 available links:

In any event, there are some rumors it takes a few weeks for the Sitelinks displayed in Webmaster Tools to update to the main Google search results. Sitelinks is a bit too early to have hard evidence like that and I would suspect, Google would want to make that transition as soon as possible. So we will see.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread has a nice amount of Webmasters noticing an increase in the number of supplemental pages being returned by Google. How does one measure the number of supplemental pages in the Google index for their site when Google hid that information from us?

site:www.domain.com gives 711 pages
site:www.domain.com/* gives 104 pages
as I know the 104 are indexed and the rest up to 711 are in supplemental index

There has always been terrible confusion over the supplemental index and Google is partially to blame for that confusion. Is this something? Are you seeing the same thing? Is it impossible to measure supplemental results?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: Google made a major announcement about the supplemental index just an hour ago at the Google Webmaster Central blog that is probably related to these findings.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: December 18, 2007"

Do you want your videos to be more searchable in Google Video Search? Then check out Google's newest announcement relating to Google Video Sitemaps. Google says:

By submitting this video-specific Sitemap in addition to your standard Sitemap, you can specify all the video files on your site, along with relevant metadata.

The video sitemap looks like a typical XML sitemap with a few tweaks. Google shows you how to create one on their help page.

As a Search Engine Watch member says, the new protocol has given him the nudge to start getting some videos integrated into his site.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A WebmasterWorld forum member is advertising his $19 product on Google AdWords. When the CPC for his ads was $0.05, he was doing phenomenally well. Now, the CPC has gotten much higher due to competition and the ROI is just not there anymore. How do you resolve this discrepancy and still make your campaigns profitable?

As one person says, you need to really get an idea of how your competition is doing. Competitive research is a must.

One person puts it all out, and this is true for any campaign, really:

You need patience. You need a history. You need to stick with adwords. You need to try different ads and different. landing pages. You need to tweak landing pages. You need to work with 'exact match' You need to get lucky. Geo target, The 'world' is expensive.

You may need to tweak your campaign often to get the desired results, but patience and determination typically pays off.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

If you're reading Search Engine Roundtable, chances are that the answer is yes. A recent Pew Internet and American Life Project study announced that up to 47% of Americans are looking for information from themselves through search engines. Similarly, 53% have used search to look into information about other individuals (co-workers, romantic interests, etc.) with women tending to look into the online histories of people they are dating.

Surprised? Not really. The question for many of us should be "how often do you Google yourself?" :)

And most of us need to be proactive generally anyway:

Ya know, Googling yourself is crucial for your OWN online brand reputation management. Yes, we're each a brand and there may be a time we may have to combat negative dialect in the SERPs.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

A topic most SEOs already know, but it is nice to have confirmation from Google. A Google Groups thread has Googlers responding to a Webmaster who's site dropped from a PageRank 4 to a PageRank of 0. It appears this site saw a drop in PageRank, but not a drop in rankings, because it has done Paid Review posts without a disclaimer, said Google.

Anyhow, I would just move all the paid posts to a category "paid reviews", add a disclaimer to each saying, this is a paid review, then nofollow the link to the company to not share any pagerank.

Then when one member suggested complying with Google's recommendation and then submitting a reinclusion request, Google said not to bother.

Excuse me, but what reason do you see to file for reconsideration? I already see nofollows in there and the site appears to be doing fine. Not seeing PR does not mean a penalty.

So all the PageRank reductions, most without any traffic drops means those sites were not penalized. If you read the thread carefully, you will notice how the Googler keeps sharing how well the site ranks and that PageRank, in this case, is not an important factor.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Clarification: Admin Aaron is not a Google admin. Google did recommend sending a reinclusion request in this case. Google did not say it was a penalty, but they did not say it was a penalty. In either case, the site ranks incredibly well with a PR0. Sorry for the mis-information, I am still under the weather.

Getting the Most out Of Your Anchor Text: It’s not as Simple as you Think from Slightly Shady SEO goes through how one should vary their anchor text used in their link building campaigns.

As described in the blog post, search engines like Google use to be tolerant of having your anchor text read all the same thing. So if you wanted to rank well for "blue widgets" you would get people to link to you with the anchor text, "blue widgets." That is no longer the case. It is not natural for 99.5% of your links to say the exact same thing about you. The blog post shares an algorithm to help you mix up your anchor text to make it more "natural." Don't you just love when algorithms try to make things more natural?

There is a Sphinn thread where Danny Sullivan equates this to how he and others vary the title tag text to "take advantage of overlap."

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Permanent redirects, also known as 301 redirects, are the life blood for webmasters when they make changes to their URL structures. It is common practice and knowledge, that when you change a URL from one location to a new location, you want to 301 redirect that URL to the new location. This tells Google and other search engines that the URL is no longer at location X but has permanently been moved to a new location.

Sometimes, Webmasters have to set up a double redirect (or sometimes even more) for one reason or an other. For example, abc.com/page1.html has moved to abc.com/page2.html and the webmaster set up a 301 redirect from page1.html to page2.html. Then, abc.com/page2.html had to be moved again, this time to abc.com/page3.html. So the webmaster set up a redirect from page2.html to page 3.html. If a search engine or user went to page1.html, they would be redirected to page2.html and then redirected to page3.html.

A Google Groups thread asks if Google can support this "double redirect." Googler, Berghausen answered that Google can. He added that the "process might take just a little longer for double-redirected URLs than it would for single-redirected URLs." How much longer exactly? That is unknown and depends on many factors. If it was a single double redirect, I assume it would get picked up quicker than if it was hundreds of double redirects.

Overall, it would be best to bypass the original redirect to make a single redirect. So in our example above, redirecting page1.html directly to page3.html would be the mode of action, and making sure to set up the page2.html redirect to page3.html would be necessary as well.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: December 17, 2007"

Loren Baker has opened up nominations for the annual 2007 search blog awards. I think we deserve a few nominations at the minimum. Wouldn't you agree? :)

There are 24 categories and I bet you can fit Search Engine Roundtable into a few of those. For example, who rocks the house with conference coverage? Don't you think Barry is a very giving search blogger?

So nominate us (and perhaps other some personal blogs too... cough) and we'll be sure to thank you for adding to our trophy shelf. It is because of you, the readers, that we write, so thank you to our loyal reader base. :)

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

According to Jeremy Schoemaker's blog, he has recently been terminated from the Yahoo Search Marketing program because 65% of his referrals to the YSM program are signing up with fraudulent credit cards. According to the lengthy email discourse, Yahoo has no way of tracking where these signups are occurring and naturally he's a bit upset.

How can this problem be fixed? As many forum members say, it is really not Jeremy's responsibility. It's Yahoo's.

I think the main point is YSM's lack of reliable tracking and fraud detection.

And if that's not possible, then Commission Junction should be able to verify this.

My thought (and the perception of many others) is that Yahoo should have assigned Jeremy a different ID so that he could change it on his website to confirm that the 65% number is being accurately reported from his website and from nowhere else.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn and DigitalPoint Forums.

Who are you? Google wants to know. This past weekend, we learned of Google Profiles, a way for Google to learn about who you are, what you do, and provide any information about yourself.

Google goes into further detail, explaining that a profile page is a way to "represent yourself on Google products — it lets you tell others a bit more about who you are and what you're all about."

Google Profiles are accessible to everyone but you can show as little or as much information as you like.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

In the old days, if you conducted a search at Yahoo Search, Yahoo would automatically number the results for you. So of the 10 listing, Yahoo would display the rank number on the left of the result.

Here is an example of that in action for a search on google at Yahoo:

Now, the same search, does not display the numbers:

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

There is discussion at a DigitalPoint Forums thread that Google is updating the visible toolbar PageRank scores.

I personally did not look deep into this. Because (1) Toolbar PageRank is not all that significant and (2) I am very under the weather.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Reports are coming from WebmasterWorld, Search Engine Roundtable Forum and DigitalPoint Forum that Google AdSense reports are not sorting properly.

It was first reported December 13th at about 8pm (EST). In short, the numbers are simply not sorting correctly.

On my "Overview" screen, when I click on "Top Channels" it is not sorting by "Earnings" as usual. I can't detect a sort field by the data presented, it seems either to be unsorted or sorted by channel-id or some other hidden field.

Ashley, a Google AdSense rep said:

Thanks for reporting this issue.

I have forwarded the information you provided to our engineering team for further investigation. They are working to resolve this issue as
soon as possible. Thanks for your patience,

Ashley

We currently don't have an ETA on when it will be fixed.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, Search Engine Roundtable Forum and DigitalPoint Forum.

Update: Google informed us that a fix will be coming in the "upcoming weeks." Seems pretty far ahead.

Mugshot sent me a picture of this new Google AdSense ad unit over the weekend. Here it is:

Honestly, at first, I wasn't sure if it was a brand new format. But after scanning the forum, it seems to be new.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: December 14, 2007"

The week has been interesting. It snowed and the trees are finally bare. Google Analytics came out with new features. SphinnCon Israel is planned and you should all sign up. Google wants your story about Gmail. Ask.com launches AskEraser. Yeah, let's walk through this week in search in case you haven't been caught up. I know Stoney hasn't a clue.

Holidays

Chanukah came and went, but the festivities are still ongoing. The search landscape changed to celebrate the holiday, with Ask.com sporting a dreidel, Search Engine Roundtable sporting a Chanukah theme, and Dogpile featuring three different carefully-dressed dogs for Christmas, Chanukah, and Kwanzaa. If you missed the themes, check out our holiday screenshots to see what we saved for you.

Google Analytics Compares

Google Analytics has launched new features, including the ability to compare two metrics. Jon West spotted the changes too (but a little too late, my friend!) and so did Andy Beal. I know, I know. You all noticed it. Now how do you keep track of everything Google Analytics has implemented in the past few months?!

Ask Eraser is Here!

Concerned about privacy? Well, Ask has launched AskEraser which will protect users from having their searches saved to Ask.com's servers, adding an extra layer of security to your search conscience.

Banned from Gmail

Google accidentally banned a ton of users from Gmail. Oops. In any event, if the account is disabled, Google informs the community that the information within still stays intact, so in the event of an accidental disabling, it can be reenabled without information loss. Good to know ... in case it happens to you.

Yahoo's X-Robots Tag Updated

Guess what? Yahoo now recognizes your updated robots.txt file and supports NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW, NOARCHIVE, and NOSNIPPET. Good stuff for search engine consistency's sake.

IE Users? Get Google's New Toolbar

If you use IE, you might want to know that Google's new toolbar has been released. It supports gadgets, saving clips and settings, and the AutoFill feature has been improved.

Googlepedia Coming Soon

Google has announced a Google Knol initiative, where users can create their own Wikipedia of sorts. It's all about user generated content in this web 2.0 world. Will it kill Wikipedia? Will it be more worthwhile? Will Google nofollow links like Wikipedia does? (If it doesn't, maybe Knol will get somewhere.)

Google AdWords Search Results

Barry reports two new AdWords findings. First, Google is ranking relevant searches higher where they are putting keyword-centric results higher than others. The other is that Google is adding the address to AdWords ads, which I'm able to note myself.

Cool Link Analysis Tool

Joost de Valk makes pretty awesome tools. His recent link analysis tool supports information from Google, Yahoo, and MSN. You should definitely check this baby out.

AdWords Tools Update

The Google AdWords Keyword Tool has been updated with a new look and AdWords Editor 5.0 has been released with features to support local business ads, the ability to export to different file formats, saved searches, default campaign targeting, the ability to locate errors quickly, and a larger workspace.

Wedding Bells

Guess what? Larry Page has gotten married and now the two Google founders are unavailable... for real. In any event, we wish you a happy and long marriage, guys!

Google Wants To Show You More Ads

So with that, Google is now testing scrolling AdSense ads. What do you think? Distracting? Useful?

Link Value Factors Sheet Released

Wiep Knol asked a ton of people to provide information about links. The result is a pretty awesome link value factor form that he has published on his blog. If you're interested in experts' opinions, be sure to check this out.

Google AdSense: Ad Review Center is Coming

Are you a Google AdSense user? If so, you might want to know that Google will be releasing an ad review center in the coming months where publishers can approve ads for their site using placement targeting. Today, we got confirmation that ad review center is coming.

Google to Give SEO Advice

A new feature in the Google Webmaster Central gives SEO advice. Called Content Analysis, the tool shows you which pages have problems and how to fix them. Barry walks through the tool with screenshots in case you want to see it for yourself before you log in.

Google Wants to Know How You Use Gmail

Use Gmail? Google wants your story in a video format that they can then publish on their website. There are a few guidelines that you should check out, but if you can participate, let me know and I'll be sure to look for you in the final video!

Near or in Israel? Save the date: February 5th

Barry is leaving me in February and will be organizing SphinnCon Israel then. It's going to be a laid back but fun event for search marketers to mingle and network. It's also really cheap ($50) compared to other conferences. If you can make it, Barry would love to meet you.

The Google Blog announced the newest Google Toolbar. Some of the new features include the ability to add gadgets to the toolbar, an improved AutoFill, saving settings online, and clipping content using Google Notebook.

These features are highlighted in this video:

Unfortunately, unless you are using Internet Explorer, Google does not have a new version of the toolbar for you.

So, does anyone using IE have any positive experiences to share with the new Google Toolbar? Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Similar to a Wikipedia of sorts, Google has planned on launching Project "Knol," which looks very similar to the infamous Wikipedia. Danny Sullivan has an incredible writeup on Google Knol with screenshots and a brief history of competing websites (Wikipedia, Mahalo, Squidoo, and Yahoo Answers). The Google Blog has more, and it explains that the goal is to highlight the authors (unlike other user-generated content websites that don't necessarily give much thought into the sites' biggest contributors).

But do you think it will make it? AussieWebmaster over at Search Engine Watch thinks that beta will last for about a year (and that will be it, I suppose. Does anyone remember the enormous success of Google Answers? I didn't think so.)

Well, some others are just hoping that Wikipedia stops ranking #1 for every term. Maybe there's hope. And maybe Project Knol won't nofollow pertinent links within the articles.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums and Search Engine Watch Forums.

Matt Cutts found an interesting news article on The Guardian. According to the article, the Florida update occurred in Christmas of 2004. Not so, and we have enough proof here too.

First of all, one of Search Engine Roundtable's first posts ever quotes Google's VP of Engineering on the Florida update. That was in December of 2003. Additionally, we have a plethora of linked threads later in December of 2003 about the Google Florida update, citing a date of November 15. The name "Florida" came from the WebmasterWorld thread which started on November 14, 2003.

So did the Guardian do their research? I don't think so. :)

And maybe the Guardian isn't a trustworthy news source, as Ian over at Sphinn adds:

If that's the UK "Guardian" newspaper then be aware they are known to the masses as "Teh Grauniad", due to their long history of spelling, grammar, and factual errors over the years.

Too funny.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

In my previous post I showed an example of a search for my company name. I then noticed something I have never seen before. Conduct a search on rustybrick at Google and look (but don't click) at the AdWords listing on the right hand side of the search results. Do you see an exact address that reads "Suite 305, 2 Executive Blvd, 10901"?

Here is a screen capture of the ad:

Google is known to show local information, such as the state, under the AdWords listings. They have been showing the state under ads that are geo-targeted locally since at least 2004. However, I have never seen a full address listed.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread is speculating that Google has recently shown more interest in ranking domain names that have keywords that match the searcher's query.

One member explained:

This could just be a regional thing, but G.ie seems to be giving a lot of weight to having the keyword in the domain.

Another member is supporting the original post by adding:

I've just started seeing two-keyword parked domains showing up on the first and second pages of the Google search results for competitive two-word keywords. These pages have nothing but ads and "related searches" on them.

The thread is still new, so it is hard to validate without seeing specific examples.

A HighRankings Forums thread discusses a similar topic, asking if keywords in the URL or domain help. Most people in that thread say it does not help directly, and they don't hurt. Of course, like I always say, it is great to have your keyword phrase in your domain name, so that when people link to you, they give you a keyword rich link. For example, if my company was named ABCWebDevelopment.com, I would get links to me that had "ABC Web Development" as the anchor text. But since my company name is RustyBrick, I get to rank number one for rustybrick.

Related discussion:
- Keywords in URLs the New Google Search Optimization Winner?
- Comprehensive Study on Importance of Keywords in URLs
- Keywords in File Names & URLs Do Help

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and HighRankings Forums.

Last night Google released a new feature for Google Webmaster Tools named Content Analysis. Vanessa Fox's Search Engine Land post named Google's Webmaster Tools Adds More Diagnostic Features and Video Sitemaps is outstanding.

Basically, the Content Analysis feature shows you problem areas with your sites from an on-page search engine optimization standpoint. It shows very basic issues like title tag issues, meta tags and non-indexable content issues. Here is a look at some of the issues from the Search Engine Roundtable.

Here is the overview page, summarizing my many issues:

I have two pages with missing title tags:

I have over 500 pages with duplicate meta descriptions, which I will probably never get around to fixing on these specific pages:

I have a bunch of "short meta tags" issues:

And then a couple images that could not be indexed. Overall, the site is fairly good. It would be nice to see a score given to webmasters for how well they are doing from a search engine visibility perspective in the content analysis - would just make things fun.

The forum discussion is currently very lacking. Honestly, this is an outstanding feature and I would have expected to see a lot more discussion out in the forums on this already. I bet next week, we will see more.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

We now have a confirmation from Google one news we reported Monday, Google AdSense to Launch "Ad Review Center".

In short, the ad review center, will give publishers a method of reviewing all placement targeted ads on their site and decide if they want to block those ads or not. AdWords advertisers can specify if they want to place an ad on a site that runs AdSense. Some AdSense publishers want control on which advertisers can display ads on their site in this manner. So AdSense is rolling out the "Ad Review Center" to address this concern.

First, you need to opt into the Ad Review Center. Once you opt in, then Google will show you all the placement-targeted ads currently targeted to your site. Then you can make an informed decision if you want those ads to continue to run or stop them by blocking them in the Ad Review Center.

When you block ads, Google asks you to provide a reason, which is then shared with the advertiser, so the advertiser can use this information to improve their ads. Google also uses this information internally to help improve their products.

Most AdSense publishers won't be able to see the Ad Review Center, Google plans on rolling it out over the course of a few months. You will know you have it when you see a "green notification box at the top of your 'Competitive Ad Filter' page." The competitive ad filter page is under the ad set up section.

Part of this is the option to auto-allow versus allow manually. As described in the AdSense help section:

When you first opt in to the Ad Review Center, your setting will be defaulted to auto-allow, which means that all new ads that are placement-targeted to your site will be allowed to run automatically. Even when ads are already appearing on your pages, you can review them and take action by visiting the Approved tab in the Ad Review Center later. You'll still be able to block individual ad groups or advertisers on this page if you choose.

The alternative to auto-allow is manual review. When you choose manual review, you'll have 24 hours to take action on new ads before they are automatically allowed to run on your sites.

Before you choose to manually review ads, keep in mind that doing so may have a negative revenue impact. Ads that are awaiting review won't compete in the auction on your site, and therefore won't drive up potential earnings on your site. Please consider the potential revenue impact before choosing manual review instead of auto-allow.

As you can imagine, AdSense publishers are delighted that this feature is coming their way.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Google has changed the "Products" link in the main Google navigation bar from "Products" to "Shopping" last night. Here is a picture:

You can see, just a couple days ago, the link said "Products." Around Thanksgiving time, Google replaced the Video links with Products, we guess in anticipation of the holidays. Maybe the word "Products" didn't give them the click through they were looking for. So now they are giving "Shopping" a try.

Clicking on the shopping link, still takes you to Google Product Search. Originally, Google Product Search was named Froogle but that was changed back on September 25 of last year. All these name changes: Froogle ---> Google Base ---> Google Product Search ---> Google Shopping, what is next?

It still seems Google has not changed the name of the search vertical. It just seems they changed the link in the navigation from Products to Shopping.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: December 13, 2007"

Forum members are reporting numerous new features that have been released within Google Analytics. Right now, you can compare data points like this:

You can use this to compare date ranges, though the wording doesn't quite fit (you're not comparing to site and cannot do so as far as I can tell).

Additionally, you can compare two metrics:

I'm trying to keep track of everything that is happening within Google Analytics and they're moving faster than I am. But that's a great thing and the new features make the analytics package a lot more rich which is terrific for a free system.

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum and DigitalPoint Forums.

Update: Google has confirmed these Analytics graphing tools and also informs us that Google Analytics now supports six new languages: Thai, Filipino, Indonesian, Czech, Hungarian, and Portuguese.

A Google Groups member points us to some shady practices that a business is applying on Google Local. Apparently, a website registered nearly 100 "businesses" at local nightclubs even though they don't own the nightclubs. Their intentions are to take business away from the nightclubs themselves and to convince buyers that they should buy tickets from this business which apparently has some club associations as far as ticket sales are concerned. Naturally, these tactics are not ethical nor do they have any business (no pun intended) in Google Local.

Google is looking into it, they say, and they have been vigilant about spam fighting for quite some time. They will evaluate whether this site should be listed as representing these businesses and will probably remove them if it is deemed that they do not. (I'd recommend exclusion from the index for their shadiness, but that's just me.)

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

Last week, at Pubcon Vegas, the SEOmoz crew threw a Werewolf game night and Matt Cutts turned out to be a black hat.

Not familiar with what a "Black Hat" is? Well, in the search engine optimization industry, a black hat would be considered a person who uses SEO techniques that are not in accordance with the search engine's terms of service. Matt Cutts, being the head of Google's Search Quality team, would make for a funny "black hat."

But Matt himself says so on Sphinn:

For my job duties, it's important to be able to step into the black hat mindset. That game was interesting because I got to test my black hat abilities without it causing any harm. :)

Wish I was there!

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

If you're extremely dependent on Google Groups, be advised that Google is currently doing some database maintenance.

Google Groups Guide 2 says:

I wanted to let you all know that our team is doing some database maintenance, which is causing subscriptions and certain group settings to not update.

They're on it!

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups

Joost de Valk has released a Firefox extension that provides data from Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo Site Explorer, and Microsoft Webmaster Central. By combining all three great resources, Joost has created a pretty awesome link analysis Firefox extension.

Here's a screen grab:

It looks awesome and everyone else thinks so too.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

I would like to formally announce the first SphinnCon event, a "Low-Impact Networking Event" under the SMX brand and Sphinn brand named SphinnCon Israel.

It is my hope that the small half day event will turn out to be a huge success that we will have a full fledge two-day SMX Israel event the following year. Here are some details for SphinnCon Israel.

Date: February 5, 2008
Time: Noon to 6pm
Venue: Jerusalem College of Technology
Location: 21 HaVaad Haleumi St, Givat Mordechai, Jerusalem -- (see map)
Cost: $50
Max Attendance: 150 people

I, Barry Schwartz, will be chairing the event. I have an awesome crew of organizers helping me, including Tens Technology, Rank Above and Gilad Sasson.

The agenda is fairly flexible, we hope to have a ton of time to network as well as hear from local SEO/PPC and Social Media experts. We hope to have an after hours party as well.

You can register for the event by clicking here, again, it is only $50!

The Facebook group can be found here and more details on the event can be found at SphinnCon Israel.

Please help me make this first SphinnCon event a success. I would really love to have annual SMX Israel events!

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

As expected Google released AdWords Editor 5.0 yesterday.

The new features include:

• Local business ads: View, add, and update your local business ads on the new Local Business Ads tab.
• Export picker: Select specific campaigns and ad groups to export to CSV.
• Save your searches: Use the 'Name this search' feature in Advanced search to save the settings for up to eight searches.
• Draft account: Like a draft campaign, a draft account may be shared with other AdWords Editor users. To post, export the account for archiving, then import it into a non-draft account.
• Default campaign targeting: In the Tools menu > Settings, specify a language and location for your new campaigns to target by default.
• Find errors quickly: If your campaigns contain items with errors or warnings, you'll see splats at the top of the affected tabs.
• Maximize work space: View more rows in the data view by minimizing the other panels, such as error descriptions or 'Review Proposed Changes.'

Check out the updated release notes for more changes and updates to the AdWords Editor.

The folks at WebmasterWorld are praising Google for providing such a useful editor but not everyone is sharing in the praise. Both Search Engine Watch Forums and DigitalPoint Forums are not all that happy. The DigitalPoint Forums thread has a list of complaints, including:

• It still doesn't work with PPA,
• it still doesn't have a keyword tool,
• it still doesn't create/view reports
• it still doesn't allow you to change a lot of campaign settings
• it still doesn't have a traffic estimator
• it still doesn't support advanced budget features

In any event, when it comes to looking at what the competitors offer (i.e. adCenter and Panama), this blows them away.

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

Google seems to have updated the look of the AdWords Keyword Tool.

Here is a before shot:

And here are after shots:

Notice the new tab for "Website Content":

I believe the UK keyword tool has this design for a bit longer - not sure exactly how much longer.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

If you try to conduct a title search in Yahoo news, you will fail. Both Yahoo and Google give you a method of searching for keywords that match in just the headline of the article. To do so, you can go to the Yahoo News Advanced Search page and select "in the headline of the article" as shown here:

An alternative method, if you are a speed searcher, is to use the intitle: operator. For example, to find all matching headlines for the keyword "google" in Yahoo News, search for intitle:google and it will return the same results.

The problem is, Yahoo News has a intitle operator bug that seems to be returning zero results for the command.

The operator works nicely at Google News.

Forum discussion at Digital Point Forums.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: December 12, 2007"

As you may know, today is the 8th and final day of Chanukah. But we haven't yet discussed our pretty theme that went up last week nor have we highlighted other themes on search engines around the web.

Here's the Search Engine Roundtable Chanukah theme. It will probably go away soon, so take a look at it now.

Ask.com celebrated Chanukah with a dreidel.

Dogpile is ready to celebrate all three holidays with different themes (you'll need to refresh to see them all). First, the Chanukah theme:

Then, the Dogpile Kwanzaa theme:

And finally, the Dogpile Christmas theme:

Additionally, Google is adding little touches to differentiate sponsored listings from organic listings with holiday colored highlight bars for all three holidays:

A search for Chanukah yields the following:

A search for Christmas yields the following bar:

And finally, search for Kwanzaa and get some color:

Festive enough? Discussion continues at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Sorry, women. The two Google founders are no longer single. Officially. In May, Sergey Brin got married. This past weekend, Larry Page tied the knot too with his longtime girlfriend.

Most forum members are offering their congratulations. Others are hoping that his prenup was as "ironclad as possible."

But others are taking the high road and wishing that Larry Page gets much privacy, since not many people are giving it to him. Still, as AdWordsAdvisor says in the thread, "As someone who admires Larry Page and wishes him the best, I sincerely thank you for that."

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Many of you in the US may already be so used to the navigational bar on Google that you wouldn't notice a difference elsewhere. But here it is in case you're "banner blind."

The Google Operating System blog announces that other Google websites, such as Google.co.uk, Google.fr, and Google.de are now using this same navigational bar. This is confirmed by Search Engine Land who says it's now available worldwide.

It's interesting to see that this new feature is making it easy to understand and navigate to the various Google properties. And if you were wondering what's different on the Google homepage, now your questions have been answered.

Do you use this navigational bar? I'm curious to know how often you use it instead of going directly to the sites. Feel free to share your input in the comments.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

The I'm Not a Doctor blog has an interesting poll: how often do you dream about SEO? The poll has some interesting results so far (one guy dreams about SEO every night, but most go with once a month). The discussion led to Sphinn where many people admit that they do dream about their work -- a lot.

Haha. Yup, I am sad to say that I do. I was just thinking about how dorky I am when I wake up and run to my computer in response to a dream I had only to be disappointed (or relieved) that the dream was not true.

Yeah, those are the kinds of vivid dreams I typically don't have. But it's funny that so many people have these funny dreams.

DigitalPoint Forums members don't dream about SEO. Instead, they dream about Google AdSense.

Replying to a post just now has just reminded me that last night I had a dream where I checked my Adsense account and found I had a huge amount of clicks but only half the impressions.

Yeah, and someone recommends that he goes outside more. I guess that most of the community there doesn't relate. :)

Anyway, what do you dream about? Barry has interesting dreams. He dreams about blogging. He also dreams about Matt Cutts leaving Google and working for RustyBrick. Maybe ... in his dreams. :)

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums and Sphinn.

If you're a user of the Sphinn social news network, you might be inundated by the folks who participate on a regular basis. So who should you know? A SEOmoz post (or rather, a YOUmoz post - it's in their user generated content section) posted by member bookworm-seo has a real in-depth article of the top 20 Sphinners and why you should befriend them.

So why? Well, they're seeking out some great content that you should read. And they're pretty interesting, as bookworm-seo says.

It's actually a nice read. I won't mention who is on the list since you'll have to look at it yourself.

So who are the top 20? And what do you think about such lists? The discussion continues on Sphinn.

Yesterday, both Google AdWords and Microsoft adCenter had reported issues with logging into their respective advertising consoles.

The first Google AdWords issues were reported at WebmasterWorld last night at 7:40pm (EST). Similar issues were reported with the AdSense console at DigitalPoint Forums at 7:35pm (EST) last night.

AdWordsAdvisor confirmed the issue at 8pm (EST) last night saying:

OK, yes, this is known to engineering - it's impacting a small percentage of advertisers, and folks here are hard at it to resolve, as you might well imagine.

The Google issue was then confirmed to be resolved at about 8:20pm (EST).

Microsoft adCenter had similar issues, and the first reports came yesterday morning via WebmasterWorld at about 5am (EST).

adCenterEU confirmed the issue was resolved at about 11am (EST) yesterday:

Excellent. Engineering let me know that this is now considered to be resolved - as of just a few minutes before the time you wrote, briggidere.

Again, my apology to those who were impacted. I'm glad it was brief. ;)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld (AdWords), DigitalPoint Forums (AdSense) and WebmasterWorld (adCenter).

A WebmasterWorld thread reports one Google AdWords advertiser has been upgraded to the new AdWords Editor, version 5.

I reviewed the release notes and there is no mention of version five. I downloaded the latest version and that version is still version four. I checked Google for mentions of a version five and found this post from yesterday. The post says, he met with Alex from the Google New York office and Anva from the Mountain View at a Singapore training event. In that event, they told him "AdWords Editor 5 is to be released soon this week" and version 6 is in development.

I would expect the release of version 5 to the public within the next 7 days.

The one change in version five mentioned in the thread is how the tabs are laid out. The member in the thread said, the "new tabs in the main screen allow the editing of placements and local business ads."

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: Confirmed: Google Releases AdWords Editor 5.0...

A WebmasterWorld thread has Labnol asking, "Can rankings vanish because a site is not updated?" If you do not update a site's content, can it set off a red flag at Google or another search engine and have the site lose its current search rankings?

The consensus in the thread is that having stale content should not penalize the site. There are many sites that are rarely updated but continue to rank well for both competitive and long-tail keyword phrases.

It is always good to update and add fresh content to your site. Fresh content is useful for your end user, it encourages the spiders to visit you more frequently, which helps search engines pick up new pages quicker. It also gives you the opportunity to rank well for new keyword phrases, on those new pages you create. But if you decide your content is super and there is no need to update it because you rank well already, then not updating it should not impact your current rankings.

Everyone seems to be in agreement that there is something else at fault in this situation. Not updating content or having a stale site is not a reason for a downgrade in search rankings.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Reports from DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld show proof that Google is testing out a scrolling ad feature with AdSense. Here are select images taken from forum uploads of how Google has implemented the feature, take notice of the small arrows on the corners of the ad.

As you can see in these four sample images, Google has added arrows up and down (or left and right). When you click those arrows, the ads scroll to different ads.

Google is constantly experimenting with different methods of enabling users to interact with the ads.

The overall reaction to this new ad format is positive, so far.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: December 11, 2007"

If you have been logged onto Gmail in the last day or so, you might have seen a link where you can share your Gmail story. That's right. Google is looking for you to share your stories on how you use Gmail in a 30 second or less video.

Details are posted in Google Groups but here are the criteria:

1. 30 seconds maximum
2. Make sure your audio is set up correctly (so that you're heard)
3. Get creative
4. Tell a story about how Gmail has impacted you.
5. Play nice - don't trash other email providers that you used before Gmail.
6. Make sure your video doesn't violate any copyright laws and complies with Gmail and YouTube's terms.

Pretty cool. Will you participate?

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

A Cre8asite Forums member asks how a site is differentiated by Google as a mobile site or as a regular website that may not be included in Google's mobile web search. What are the criteria for being categorized as a "mobile" site?

The Google Webmaster Help Center has a guide of questions and answers on this very topic. Additionally, other feedback is given from a webmaster who has been designing for the mobile web for a year.

He says that you need to avoid tables in your design, have concise titles, have a small page size, and include good content.

As far as understanding whether your site is going to be accessed, he says that Google crawls your site as a Nokia 6820 which accepts XHTML.

And finally, it helps to create a mobile sitemap.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

Jordan McCollum wrote at Marketing Pilgrim that Google is looking to partner with H3tec on their detection technology within mobile phones. She goes on to explain that there are several different applications, including tainted food and explosives.

Here's a mock-up of the device:

And forum members think it's a good idea:

Use an existing network that exists practically everywhere (mobiles) to give authorities pinpoint location of explosives. Perhaps a bit big brother ish though.

This could be interesting.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

On his own blog, Wiep collected data over the past few months from many esteemed link builders and presented his own link value factors. How important is the anchor text? How important are the number of links? What about the age of the page or the contextual relevance?

The result of Wiep's research from many folks, including our very own Barry, has resulted in a very awesome piece of information where no one can really agree. As Jill Whalen says:

Interesting that once again, there are no definitive answers and most people are simply using their best "guesses" when it comes to determining the weight of any particular SEO factor.

Either way, it's incredible to see how diverse we are in our guesses about link value. And it should help with decision-making either way.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

I wrote a long post on the launch of AskEraser at Search Engine Land, titled, Ask.com Launches AskEraser Giving Searches Ability To Search Anonymously. But honestly, if you think about it, AskEraser does not erase data, it is a bad name.

AskEraser just prevents data from being written to Ask.com's servers. It is not like data is being written and then Ask is erasing the data. It is simply not being written in the first place. So maybe Ask.com should rename the tool to something else?

Anyway, if you go to Ask.com, you should see a link to AskEraser. When activated, it won't store data such as IP address, User ID, Session ID, and the complete query text in their databases, cookies or log files for that search. If you turn it off, it will store that data. If you turn it on, you won't get Ask personalized results.

Here is what it looks like:

The FAQ is at this page and again, I have a large walk through at Search Engine Land.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Back on November 7th, we reported on a Google AdWords Diagnostic Tool Bug. The issue was that when you moused over a keyword in your AdWords account, the diagnostic tool would display a message that read, "this keyword is not permitted to show your ads in the targeted location."

The thing is, the keyword was permitted to show in the targeted location and it was indeed being displayed, even thought the diagnostic tool said it wasn't.

Google first told us it was fixed on November 29th but it was not fixed. Google now updated us last night, December 10th, over one month after the bug first started, that is has been resolved.

I asked this several hours ago, as I was expecting to hear from engineering late this afternoon that this issue is considered to be resolved. And, I have now received that confirmation.

If anyone is seeing a case of the AdWords Diagnostic Tool saying that your ad is not running, when a search tells you that it is, please let me know.

Once again, please accept my apology for just how long this has taken to resolve for everyone.

The consensus of the forum seems to show that the issue has been resolved, for now.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks how long might it take for a search engine to discover new links and then have those new links impact your search results.

For example, let's say you write an awesome article and you get 50 new links from authority sites to the article. How long will it take for those new links to impact the search results landscape in a particular search engine.

Without a doubt this topic is most likely extremely controversial. Here are some quotes from the thread, but none should be seen as fact:

I have noticed completely different. Links to my site affect SERPs as early as 4 days after I get them. All depends on the volume.

If the domain is trusted it is pretty much immediate I think. On a new domain, I have no idea how long it would take.

Plus each engine picks up new links at their own speed.

It is interesting that Wiep's Link Value Factors doesn't have this question.

Forum discussion WebmasterWorld.

There is a tip full Search Engine Watch Forums thread with things you can do to fine tune and optimize your new Yahoo Search Marketing campaign, after you preform the migration to Panama from a legacy Yahoo Overture account or a Google AdWords account.

Here is a summary of those tips:

• Ensure the migration tool actually worked right, you will often find things that don't match up and can hurt your campaign's performance
• Take advantage of Yahoo's improved geotargeting features, they work well now
• Utilize Yahoo's analytics tags to the fullest
• Yahoo has a domain blocking feature, make sure to use it when applicable

Mona Elesseily wrote the book on Yahoo Search Marketing named Mastering Panama, so if you prefer books, I know she did a ton of research and exploration before publishing this book.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: December 10, 2007"

A publisher using Google AdSense noticed that he is not making all the money he apparently earned in AdSense. For example, if he's making 12.01 for his AdSense earnings in the content network and 0.05 in the search network, he's only making $12.05 and not $12.06. Is Google taking pennies from him?

Not quite, as someone points out. It's possible that he was making 12.0055 and 0.049 which is rounded up and would then translate to $12.05 and not $12.06.

That makes sense.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Yahoo recently announced that they are supporting four new types of exclusion tags in the robots.txt file: NOINDEX, NOARCHIVE, NOSNIPPET, and NOFOLLOW. The benefits of being able to declare these directives in the robots.txt file enables folks who store PDFs, Word Documents, and other files on the web and cannot easily place these directives in the header.

Google actually expanded its robots.txt protocol in July with the unavailable_after tag, and Sebastian discovered the Noindex: / directive to block Googlebot from crawling your entire site.

The downside to these changes is that you'll have to check the robots.txt file to see if link juice is passed.

Yahoo also announced that this is related to its most recent search update:

Along with this change, we'll be rolling out additional changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days. We expect the update will be completed early next week, but you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages in the index during this process.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Ever since December 1st, AdSense publishers who needed to verify their accounts via phone were unable to, due to a bug.

Google announced on Friday that they have resolved the issue and if you have yet to verify, you can now do so. Once you verify, you may need to remove any holds on your payments. To do so go to your "Payment History" page and look for a 'Required Actions' box at the top of the page.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Google Groups.

A Google Groups thread is tracking a major problem for hundreds of Gmail users. Many users were noticing that their Gmail accounts were all of a sudden disabled.

Google has documentation on why an account would be disabled and what you would see if it happened to your account.

But this time it happened to way too many Gmail users for it to look normal.

The problem began late on December 5th. The following day, Gmail Guide replied saying that this was an error on Google's side and they are fixing it:

I understand that some of you have had a frustrating experience with your accounts being inappropriately disabled. Our team is aware of the problem, and our engineers are continuing to investigate. Thanks for bringing this to our attention.

Later that day, Gmail Guide posted that the issue has now been resolved. Any emails sent to a disabled Gmail account would have "received a bounce message informing the sender."

What was the issue, Gmail Guide said they misclassifed an abuse term which caused many Gmail accounts to be banned.

Our efforts to prevent breaches of our Terms of Use caused a number of users to be incorrectly identified. I know this had to have been frustrating for those of you that were affected.

Then a bit later, Gmail Guide offered more explanation:

I just wanted to address some concerns that were brought up in this thread. When an account is disabled it is no longer possible to access the account. However, this doesn't mean that the information within the account is lost. All users that were incorrectly identified as violating our Terms of Use will be able to access all the data that was in their account (this should have been possible for everyone as of 8:40am PST). No account data will have been lost, as we have a number of safeguards in place to prevent this from occurring.

Our engineers work diligently to combat spammers who are attempting to abuse our system, and their work allows Gmail to function as an effective email solution to users everywhere. With this in mind, our engineers have built a monitoring system to minimize the impact that some of you ended up feeling.

The number of Gmail accounts this impacted was not released, but it seems it was more than just a few.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

WebmasterWorld members are reporting receiving an email from Google that they will be launching an "Ad Review Center."

The Ad Review Center will be launched within the next few months and enable AdSense publishers the ability to approve ads that are submitted for their site via the placement-targeted method.

Google launched placement targeting in September 2005 and then started displaying Advertise on this Site on those ads that support that feature. Google told me they will be dropping the "advertise on this site" from the AdSense ads.

So this new feature will give publishers even more control on the ads that are displayed on their site. Of course, an advertiser can block any ad using the competitive ad filter. But this feature seems like it will allow publishers the ability to approve the ad before it even goes up.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports that Google's AdSense Preview Tool does not show all the live ads in the system.

For example, this user said he saw an ad on his site. He then went to the AdSense preview tool and the ad was not there.

Here is how the AdSense publisher described the problem:

I've noticed this for months now, but, recently especially when I try to track down the URL of MFA spam sites (in order to comp-filter them) which put different URLs in the ad than they actually redirect to, that they don't even show up in the Adsense preview! When you input the showing URL the domain is non-existant. They show up on my page, but when I click on the preview tool they are nowhere to be found, thus it is harder to filter them as you have to risk accidently clicking them to get the google-code and parse it.

I did confirm this, but there seems to be a couple, "me too" posts in the thread.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Friday we reported that Google to Begin Treating Subdomains as Folders: Max 2 Results Per Search based on a post from Tedster at WebmasterWorld.

Soon after, Matt Cutts of Google commented saying:

This isn't a correct characterization of what Google is looking at doing. What I was trying to say is that in some circumstances, Google may move closer to treating subdomains as we do with subdirectories. I'll talk about this more at some point after I get back from PubCon.

But Matt didn't offer us more hints as to what was meant by this in our comments area. So I swung back to the WebmasterWorld thread and saw that Matt spoke more with Tedster on the topic, where Tedster explained:

This change will NOT mean that it's 100% impossible to rank subdomain urls in addition to urls from the main domain. The current plans are to make it harder to rank a third url, then even harder to rank a fourth, and so on with an increasing "damping factor".

So this change will NOT mean that it's 100% impossible to rank subdomain urls in addition to urls from the main domain. The current plans are to make it harder to rank a third url, then even harder to rank a fourth, and so on with an increasing "damping factor".

Matt also did a video interview with Michael McDonald of WebProNews this afternoon, where he planned to bring more clarity to this issue. When that video goes live, we'll have even more direct information.

But just now, Matt posted subdomains and subdirectories at his personal blog explaining it all.

Matt explained they use something called "host crowding," a method Google used to show up to "two results from each hostname/subdomain of a domain name." Matt said Google has already changed the likelihood that Google would show more than two results from the same hostname for the same search, this was done already in the "last few weeks." For the most part, this change went unnoticed, until Matt said something to Tedster - which is why Matt needed to clarify. Matt explained:

This change doesn't apply across the board; if a particular domain is really relevant, we may still return several results from that domain. For example, with a search query like [ibm] the user probably likes/wants to see several results from ibm.com. Note that this is a pretty subtle change, and it doesn't affect a majority of our queries. In fact, this change has been live for a couple weeks or so now and no one noticed.

So, all in all, this change is extremely small and was not as big as I originally thought.

Has anyone seen a change in how Google ranks their sub-domains for "ego queries"?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: December 7, 2007"

Wow, it's been an incredibly crazy week and I am still blogging even though I landed back in New York before the sun rose this morning (and didn't sleep on the plane. Yay!) And now I'm catching up as I have no idea what really happened outside of Vegas.

We Turned 4

Search Engine Roundtable is now four years old and we've celebrated with a temporary theme. (And if you haven't noticed, it's Chanukah, and our blog has another redesign for the rest of the holiday. Click on this link if you're reading this through a feed to see!)

Yahoo Search Updates

Apparently, there's been a Yahoo algorithm update this month. People are noticing similar things on Google.

On Paid Links

This is going to be a sore subject for awhile. Barry summarizes the Google war on paid links and I summarized statements from Matt Cutts on paid links and PageRank. In case you felt like you've missed out, there's a tremendous amount of valuable information on both posts and massive community feedback.

Google Spreads Holiday Love

Google has given AdSense publishers and AdWords advertisers a cute little gift: a 2GB USB memory card. They should've given something else, though, according to someone I know. Like a mini fridge. Now that is a good gift. ;)

Add Your Phone Number to Google AdWords Ads

Guess what? You're now able to add your phone number to AdWords ads. That's totally awesome, but I hope you have a system in place to determine whether there's some ROI with your AdWords campaign. Perhaps you should get a new phone number for AdWords referrals. Either way, finally!

Microsoft's Spam Site Referrals: Cloaking Tests

After we've been spotting Microsoft's spam site referrals, they made a statement to clarify what exactly was occurring. We were testing for cloaking, they said. Thanks for the statement, guys!

Microsoft Launches adCenter Excel 2007 Plugin

Earlier this week, I spoke with Natala Menezes who told me that Microsoft came out with a new adCenter product: an Excel 2007 plugin. Now, if anyone here has Excel 2007, it's a whole new Microsoft product and is ways beyond previous versions. This is quite cool. But the plugin is also very awesome, according to advertisers. Awesome.

Subdomains as Results in Google

Google is now testing subdomains as results in Google, but you won't get more than 2 folders per search (so don't go all out and create two billion subdomains since that will do little for you). However, it's an interesting change. I wonder how well it will be received over time. I'm sure some people will love it and others will hate it. :)

Conference Coverage

Okay, so I liveblogged a lot of sessions and my fingers and feet hurt (yes, I walked too). But so did a bunch of great bloggers and we're truly thankful for the coverage. In case you missed it, our Pubcon 2007 and SES Chicago coverage has been posted. Really, you should have been there, but if you couldn't make it, we did our best to provide you with near live coverage of everything. And thanks to all who said hello to me in Vegas. It was really nice to meet you!

Our coverage of the December search marketing conferences is now complete. We have extensive coverage, in raw-live format from SES Chicago and PubCon Vegas. Both conferences were a huge hit and lots of fun and learning took place.

Again, a huge thank you to our contributors and writers including Carolyn Shelby, Dave Rohrer, Chris Boggs, Justin Davy, Marty Weintraub, Avi Wilensky and Tamar Weinberg. Your hard work does not go unappreciated by the SEM community and industry - we all thank you.

We covered 28 sessions from PubCon and 24 sessions from SES. Here is a recap of the sessions we covered by conference:

PubCon Vegas 2007 Search Conference Coverage Recap:

1. Keynote Conversation with Craig Newmark
2. SEO 101 - The Timeless and Classic Hits
3. PPC 101 – Beginner to Intermediate Level
4. Monetizing Social Media Traffic
5. Reputation Monitoring and Management
6. Social Marketing 101
7. Link Building Campaigns and Strategies
8. Link Baiting - 96 Different Strategies
9. Optimizing Your Site for Contextual Ads
10. Content Creation - Cranking it Out
11. Link Buying
12. Domain Names and Trademarks - Legal Issues
13. Effective Domaining Strategies
14. Web Hosting Industry Overview
15. SEO Design and Organic Site Structure
16. SEO and the Big Search
17. Alternative Discovery and SEO - Feeds, PDF's, and Blog SEO
18. Brand Management
19. Keynote with Matt Cutts
20. Responsible Web Design
21. Effective Action Based Copywriting
22. CSS and HTML Coding Today
23. Ecommerce and Shopping Cart Optimization
24. Search and Blogging Reporters Forum
25. Competitive Intelligence
26. International and European Site Optimization
27. Organic Keyword Research and Selection
28. Tools of the Trade

SES Chicago 2007 Search Conference Coverage Recap:

1. Search Around the World - Part One: Asia/Pacific & Australia
2. Mobile Search Battle Royal
3. Redefining the Customer
4. Meet the Web Analytics Players
5. The Human Equation: Giving Back Internet Style
6. Orion Panel – Search, Privacy, and the Community in the Digital Age
7. Igniting Viral Campaigns
8. There’s Still Money on the Table!
9. Orion Panel - Universal, Blended, and Vertical Search
10. The Transformation of Local in a Search Driven World
11. Retailer Track: Shopping Search Tactics
12. Are Paid Links Evil?
13. Maximum Conversion in Retail: Raising the Bar
14. Actionable Social Media
15. Online Maps: Plotting the Direction of Local Search
16. Case Study: Moving from Paper to Online
17. Managing Automated PPC Bid Management
18. Your Marketing Program in Context
19. Calling All Clicks: PayPerCall and You
20. PPC Advertising on Influential Blogs and Social Media
21. Last Minute Holiday Search Tactics
22. Just for Fun Track: So You Want to Be a Search Marketer?
23. Fun With Dynamic Websites
24. Dealing with Difficult Clients

Our top five stories across both conferences by pageviews are:

• Monetizing Social Media Traffic from PubCon Vegas written by Tamar Weinberg
• Link Buying from PubCon Vegas written by Tamar Weinberg
• SEO 101 - The Timeless and Classic Hits from PubCon Vegas written by Avi Wilensky
• Shopping Search Tactics from SES Chicago written by Marty Weintraub
• Link Baiting - 96 Different Strategies from PubCon Vegas written by Dave Rohrer

That wraps up our coverage. See you all in February, for our next major conference coverage event!

A WebmasterWorld thread reports Google is being more lax about validating AdWords advertiser's display URLs.

Google AdWords affiliate policy says:

We will only display one ad per search query for advertisers sharing the same top-level domain in the display URL. This means that if you're an affiliate advertiser, your ad may not show for a query because another affiliate or the website that runs the affiliate program also has ads using the same (or a similar) domain in the display URL.

This member said, "lately I've noticed as many as 5 invalid Display URLs for one search term - all of which lead to the same page on the merchant's site."

Google has taken notice, where AdWordsAdvisor said "what I have been doing, though, is passing these threads along to the right teams - and I see quite a lot of attention being paid to them."

Do you think Google has been getting lazy validating their advertisers and their policies?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

WebmasterWorld administrator tedster has informed us that Google will be treating subdomains like they treat folders on a site. In short, he said, Matt Cutts said Google will roll out in a few weeks a new filter to make sure only two results of a domain (no matter subdomain or folder) will show up for a search. Here is tedster's exact quote from a WebmasterWorld thread:

News flash from Las Vegas PubCon. Matt Cutts informed us that Google will very soon begin treating subdomains and subdirectories the same in this fashion: there will be only 2 total urls from a domain in any set of search results, so no more getting 3, 4 or however many spots via subdomains. We didn't get any more information than just that basic heads-up.

Of course you can expect exceptions to this rule. For example, blogspot.com sub-domains one would think would fall under this exception to the rule. But overall, if this change happens, it can be a pain in the neck for some SEOs. It will make it a bit harder for one site to "own the search results." Plus it may make some search engine reputation management companies change their strategies.

In an other WebmasterWorld thread tedster gives us a bit more detail on how this may work, bolding for emphasis:

Here's what happens now. The first step of results retrieval for any single search still has no limit on how many urls can be returned from a domain. In the early days of Google, a domain could even have all 10 first page spots and still keep on going. It could even be embarrassing!

Today, the preliminary, raw retrieval of roughly 1,000 results still puts no limit on how many urls can be returned from a given domain. But there's a further processing step - a filter kicks in. That filter is supposed to ensure that only 2 urls maximum from any domain will actually be shown.

If those two urls happen to be on the same page, then they will cluster together on that page rather than show at their "true" algorithmically determined position. But through all the total pages of any search result, any single domain is supposed to show up a maximum of 2 times.

Now here's where we've been able to game the current situation. Subdomains are treated like a separate domain, and so you can get two results for www.example.com, two more for sub1.example.com, two more for sub2.example.com, and so on.

Matt Cutts mentioned that Google is working on code to eliminate that possibility for most domains. That is, Google plans to treat most subdomains essentially like any other url on the main domain, and they will limit that domain, INCLUDING all its subdomains, to two positions total on any given search.

At that point, the whole subdomain vs. subdirectory decision will lose most of its importance - and your wwww urls will not show up, even though they may still be causing you trouble behind the scenes.

For a practical example, here is a search on search engine roundtable, our site, that shows the top three listings from this domain:

The top two listings are from the www.seroundtable.com and the third listing is from the subdomain, forums.seroundtable.com. If Google makes this change, I will loose the second www result or loose the forum result. For relevancy, does this matter much?

Honestly, with the introduction of Sitelinks on this particular site and for this particular search, no it won't impact relevancy, because the searcher can use those Sitelinks. But for sites that do not have Sitelinks, it may make a big difference to the searcher.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: See update to this post over here.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports Microsoft's Live Search automatically regionalizing the search results of Live.com when searches are conducted in Australia.

Woz, WebmasterWorld moderator, said Live is "automatically serving results focused towards," plus they have added "an "Australia Only" tick box." Woz says there is no way for him to turn off the local preferences. Here he expresses his frustration:

If I go to live.com I expect to see global results. If I want local MSN results, then I will go to nineman.com.au and search there.

But moderator, bill said he doesn't see the same happening in Japan. So it may be Microsoft testing things out in select countries, like Australia?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Last month, we provided you with November 2007 Google SERP changes, and this month, the trend continues.

WebmasterWorld members report that their rankings have been fluctuating heavily. One reports that his site was not ranked in the top #1000 on Google but then he hit #19. It then increased and the rankings got better, but it soon disappeared out of the top 1000 again.

Similarly, another person is reporting that his biggest site is jumping back and forth from the #1 result to #16-#20. This sentiment is echoed by at least two other members.

A member reports that gaming and entertainment results are popping into SERPs that have no relationship to gaming and entertainment, which is certainly an issue of relevancy for these webmasters.

Finally, the other thing noted is that .ca and .co.uk results are appearing in .com results even though the market isn't tailored to US demographics.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

The Register reports about some corruption that was discovered within Wikipedia: the existence of a secret mailing list that cracks down on users why may be threats to Wikipedia administrators' power. The article goes into depth about what ensued, what happened, the reaction, and the community is pretty shocked.

Can Wikipedia still be considered a trusted source by search engines with this information known? Well, most people say that there are always flaws in these sources, but the data is still more relevant than other search terms.

The real story here seems to be the paranoia and the heavy handed treatment of dissent by the Admin group. It comes down to control. I don't think Jimbo wants to lose that.

Users will still be in control to keep the results relevant.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread has been complaining about how Google's site exclusion feature works.

Discover, Search Engine Watch Forums moderator, shared a screen capture to explain the extra step you need to take to ensure you actually exclude your ads from showing up on sites (AdSense publishers or parked domains) that you do not want them to show up on.

As you can see, first you type in the domain you want to block, then you click "Exclude Sites" and then one more step, you need to click, "Save All Exclusions."

Discovery explains:

Anyhow, I don’t know if this new process has resulted in many advertisers thinking they added new sites to their list but didn’t. If you have a list as large as ours its not very easy to see what has and has not been successfully added.

I guess this is why SEMs get paid the big bucks.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: December 6, 2007"

Tools of The Trade
Location: Salon A

Successful Search Engine Marketers should be armed with the tools of the trade to make their lives easier. This panel will review some of the well-known tools and not so well known SEM tools. It will cover basics from research tools to advanced paid tools. Knowing how to interpret the data of the tools is just as important as knowing which tools to use.

Moderator: Joe Laratro
Speakers:
Todd Malicoat, Independent Marketing Consultant, Meta4creations, LLC
Joe Laratro, President, Tandem Interactive
Derek Vaughan, CMO, Techpad Agency
Jessie Stricchiola, Founder & CEO , Alchemist Media, Inc.

First up is Derek Vaughan from HostMySite.com and he shows statistics for an eye tracking study. Researchers call the upper left the "golden triangle" and being below the fold is bad for you.

As far as Rankings, he uses a tool called WebCEO - www.webceo.com. It's easy to set up and use, supports multiple websites, it's easy for inputting keyword information, is automated and runs in the background. The warning is that long keywords can take hours and it's addictive. Its interface is beautiful, he says.

Analytics is extremely important and he uses IndexTools (www.indextools.com) It has the best view of your last 100 visitors in almost real time. This is extremely valuable especially if you produce timely content because it alerts you immediately when things get popular. He acknowledges that some people swear by Google Analytics but he doesn't.

What do I know what I don't know what I currently rank for? Use Spyfu (spyfu.com). It has a simple interface that gives you information in adwords, competitor sites, keywords, etc. It really is a deep source of information and is great for metrics superfreaks.

Understanding Traffic to Search Terms: Google Trends (google.com/trends). You