December 10, 2007 Archives

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.