April 2008 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: April 30, 2008"

If you were interviewing an SEO firm to see if they're for real, what questions would you ask them? A High Rankings Forum thread touches upon some of the must-know questions, and they're outlined below:

1. How long they have been doing SEO?
2. Can you give me three clients that you have had first-page results for?
3. What are some campaigns you have succeeded with?
4. Can you illustrate any significant traffic boosts or conversion boosts?
5. What is your general SEO process?
6. What is your criteria for choosing keyword phrases?
7. How is success measured?
8. What should you expect from us as a client?

And the list goes on and on. What would you add to this for desired results?

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.

Kevin Ryan of Search Engine Strategies spoke with Daron Babin and discussed the current state of the conference circuit with regards to individuals believing that they have been banned from either SMX or SES events.

Danny Sullivan kindly transcribed the event on Sphinn (which I'm very grateful for!) Here are some key points:

According to a series of events, Rand Fishkin believes that he was banned from SES events. To respond to that allegation, Kevin says:

. There are folks we’ve asked not to come to the event primarily because they were on the competing side of the business from the commercial side of the business and defaming SES. So naturally what kind of a business manager would I be if we didn’t meet with our senior management and ask these people not to come. You don’t go to a Coca Cola convention and the Pepsi people don’t show up at the Coca Cola convention and defame Coca Cola. It’s just not done. It’s childish and foolish and I’m disappointed that Rand is perpetuating a rumor. That’s just not accurate.

Kevin also adds that he believes that there was some sort of exclusion due to his focus on paid search versus organic search:

I was an ad guy doing search, so the red-headed stepchild in the ad community, and I come into the search community and I’m not welcome because I not a search insider.

In his response, Danny says that there was never such a thing and that Kevin has always spoken on panels in conferences that Danny himself arranged.

Finally, one of the last key points is that Kevin believes that the attendees were looking for "fresh" content at the events. Danny responds that the content issue was addressed, but the primary selling point in his experience was the better food (which SMX boasts over SES).

What about banned attendees? Danny says:

At SMX, we banned the staff of one particular show from attending finally in February, in reciprocation for a ban placed on our staff stretching back to December 2006, for a myriad of reasons that would change. If that ban is ever lifted, I'll happily lift ours.

However, Danny is quick to mention that he's always looking for good talent to speak at these events and there should be no perception of exclusion at all.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion on what type of advertiser would you automatically add to your AdSense competitive filter list. I.e. which type ads do you not want showing up on your site?

Here are some of the responses:

• Adult Related Sites
• Ringtone Sites
• Win Free Stuff Sites
• Irrelevant Sites
• MFAs
• Deceptive Sites
• Parked Domains
• Work From Home
• Etc.

I would create a poll here, but the answers can be so open ended. Which type of ads would you block immediately?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Now that Google admitted to crawling JavaScript and forms SEOs and Webmasters need to be aware of how to manage even more duplicate content issues.

In the past, a good strategy was to build out filter pages (filter by color, size, price, etc.) using JavaScript pull down menus. Google would typically stay away from such forms and you would not necessarily have to worry about Google seeing the same content filtered or sorted by color, price, size and so on.

But now with Google crawling JavaScript and forms, Webmasters need to take an extra step towards preventing Google from crawling and indexing such content. Why? Duplicate content.

A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion on this topic and offers tips on what to do, to help you with this problem. Some of the advice includes:

• Include the duplicate content in an external Js, assign it to variables, and do innerHTML to some divs.
• Use XmlHTTPRequest (GET) to retrieve the data in XML format and then put it into the page.
• Use an Ajax POST and retrieve the XML content with this.
• Use robots.txt to block specific files and/or page naming conventions.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google is making a major promotional push for iGoogle (Google's personalized home page), with the new artist themes section. If you go to the Google home page, you will notice a special logo that looks like the logo on the right of this post, and a line that reads:

What happens when great art mixes with your homepage? iGoogle Artist Themes

Clicking on the logo or the link will take you to that special iGoogle Artist Themes page, for you to select from about 70 iGoogle personalized themes made specifically by artists. Here are a few sample themes:

This promotion is not just based in the US, Gabs notes Google is pushing it in the UK as well.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums 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: April 29, 2008"

According to a Yahoo News report, Yahoo will be outsourcing the Internet telephone functions of its instant messaging program to the startup Jajah.

Of course, this is great news for the startup -- but forum members wonder why Yahoo seems to be outsourcing a lot of its internal affairs. However, that may not necessarily be a bad thing, as another forum member says. The less important things are fine if outsourced; the more important things are when one needs to worry. As long as they focus on what they're good at and keep it internal (web, email, search), that's the way to go and avoids the distractions that can cause the company to go into turmoil.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

The New York Times reports that "Google researchers say they have a software technology intended to do for digital images on the Web what the company’s original PageRank software did for searches of Web pages." The algorithm, dubbed VisualRank, weighs and ranks images that look most similar.

WebmasterWorld members fear that this could be a problem for spammers -- just like folks aim to build links for PageRank, so too this may happen in the image arena.

However, it may build traffic to images too, which some individuals are hoping for.

Perhaps this is the beginning of greater software technologies that will "index audio spoken in videos" and podcasts. Those transcription services would be super cool.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion around one advertiser noticing Google displaying three scores directly under a Google Netherlands ad. Here is a picture of the ad with the scores underneath the ad:

So I began to do some research and it seems someone else saw the score for a different search today as well, on Google.de. Here is a screen capture, but even though the webmaster highlighted the score with the middle ad, I have a feeling the score is associated with the top ad:

Here is another:

So what does the scores mean?
- Pscore: 0.00101
- mCPC: 10.0000
- thresh: 0.0001

mCPC, seems logical, the minimum cost-per-click for the ad is $10? The Pscore and thresh, I am not sure about.

It seems like many folks are spotting this in Google's international search engines.

We have forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and at Abakus German Forum.

A newish term, named SEOicide, caught my attention via a WebmasterWorld thread. The thread discusses how an SEO has the opportunity to buy 70,000 links from a PR7 site for a great price. He asks if it he should do it.

Most everyone says, don't - you are setting yourself up for a penalty. In fact, words like SEOicide are being used to describe what you would do to yourself. But others are not convinced, they say, if the site will drive traffic to your site, then do it.

I would buy, if the direct traffic from those links brings you a profit. Otherwise it sounds very questionable a I would not sign any long term agreement/contract.

Anyway, back to the term SEOicide. I did some searching and it appears the Jane Copland of SEOmoz used the term on February 21st of this year in a comment on a blog post. So WebmasterWorld was not the first place it was used in writing.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A recent WebmasterWorld thread is complaining that Google seems to have changed the yellow background color of the Google sponsored ads to a color just a bit different then the white background.

Tedster explains that the color he sees now for the top ads are #FFF9DD, which he said, "is very close to a pure #FFFFFF." On my screen they look different, but on a typical PC monitor, it may look very similar to white. Here are the two colors, side by side - so you make the call.

Google first changed the background color for the top ads to yellow back about a year ago. Based on my screen capture then, the color was #FFF9DD, so I am not sure why we are hearing complaints now? Maybe what I am seeing and what others are seeing are something else? Maybe Google is testing something even closer to white?

Tedster is strong about this, saying:

#FFF9DD is just a cop-out. If Google is going to blur the line between paid ads and organic results, they should just go all the way and use #FFFFFF for the whole page. Somehow, this near-match sends an even worse message, to my sensibilities.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I am seeing reports from across the SEO forums that Google has updated or begun the update of the PageRank score found within the Google Toolbar.

We have threads at DigitalPoint Forums, Search Engine Roundtable Forums, WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums - all discussing the recent PageRank update that began yesterday some time.

The last time Google updated toolbar PageRank was in late February. Google did recently update the Directory PageRank scores earlier this month. You can see some history on these recent PageRank updates over here.

What this all means for your Google rankings? Not much. Typically, a Google Toolbar PageRank update will have zero direct impact on one's ranking in Google. As Google has said, time and time again, the toolbar PageRank scores are older exports and do not resemble the PageRank score Google uses internally, at the time of ranking your pages in Google.

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

Remember the Google Maps stickers spotted throughout the UK? They looked like the image on the right of this post.

Well, a while back, probably a year or so ago, I convinced Google to send me one. It never actually made it to my office. I didn't really think about it until now, when I spotted a Google Groups thread that has word from Google that the stickers are forever gone!

Google Maps representative, Jen, said:

I've been trying to track down these stickers for months for some other people in this group but sadly it looks like they've disappeared into the abyss of aged promotional materials. If we ever make more, I'll be sure to follow-up with you. I don't know if we're planning to do that though ever, so... :o(

Say it ain't so! Can those stickers become collector items? Did I miss out on my opportunity on receiving one of these collectables?

Maybe a neat tip for Google would be to start a map game, to find the missing Google Maps stickers. Or maybe not.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

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: April 28, 2008"

At Search Engine Land, Barry writes about how a US court has decided that META keywords don't matter -- they are "immaterial." The tip came from Eric Goldman's blog where he writes about a recent case that held a company responsible for including trademarked terms in their meta tags.

In this case, because search engines don't use the actual META tags, there is no case. Jill Whalen says on Sphinn that you can test this easily by including a page with an arbitrary word and seeing if that word will come up in your search results once Google spiders the page.

META keywords are not discussed in this Google Help document which should support the law's findings.

However, as another member points out, Yahoo may be using these keywords to rank. In other words, the US Court is overly focused on Google, but perhaps they should weigh in on other search engines.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

WebmasterWorld members are talking about receiving Google Sitelinks, and overall, most forum members who are impacted this way are obviously happy about the expanded link opportunities. Some are a bit afraid that their sitelinks may drop off (as a few members have observed).

Others are noticing that the "algo broke." There's no specific information into how the algorithm broke but some note changes.

I had them a while now but they changed radically about a week ago. Previously, they were showing country specific subdirectories on my static content... now they only show links to country sub forums on my forum. I guess that means the algo thinks my forum has grown and is more important than the static content. Fine by me, I guess.

Moderator jdMorgan notes that Google Webmaster Tools lets you now exclude Sitelinks that you don't want. Simply go to Google Webmaster Tools, click to Links > SiteLinks, select the sitelink that you don't like, and click the "Block" link to the right of it.

Tedster notes the following changes when sitelinks were implemented:

One of my clients had a sitelink that pointed to a very obscurre page - they requested a deletion and it happened with no trouble. But that particular issue highlighted a problem with their entire "mouseover" menu system - the same menu label appeared in three different places! That one little strange sitelink has now generated a major project to re-structure their entire information architecture.

Another client has sitelinks for a single generic keyword. That's a very startling event, since there are 16 million results currently reported, and the keyword triggers many Adwords plus a Google Shopping OneBox at the top of the SERP. In other words, there are serious competitors who must be furious about those sitelinks.

In other words, these are "early bugs," as he notes.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Over at WebmasterWorld, users are discussing the potential value of a link from social bookmarking site StumbleUpon. Is it worth trying to submit to or is it completely not worth the effort?

Well, it depends on the content. Is it "worthy of being stumbled?" That's something that you must seek out. Of course, if you choose to take the plunge, the right person might come along and StumbleUpon your page and then blog about it, which can be an incredibly valuable link building experience.

Just a word of caution though: don't use social networks to be overly self-promotional. As one person mentioned in the thread, he was banned for submitting his own content. As a heavy StumbleUpon user myself, there's absolutely nothing wrong with submitting your own content but you must be sure to avoid being self-promotional. In other words, don't only submit your own stuff; mix it with other content as well.

[Note: StumbleUpon links are nofollowed, so from a search engine perspective, it doesn't help much.]

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

In the first quarter of 2008, Click Forensics announced that click fraud has decreased across Google and Yahoo to 27.8% (from 28.3% in Q4 2007).

Is that a number to be worried about? As Barry says on Search Engine Land, these numbers may not account for discounted questionable clicks. Google has said before that click fraud only accounts for 0.02% of clicks.

Meanwhile, forum members believe that the report by Click Forensics may be misleading. After all, they are a traffic quality management firm and as such "has an interest in reporting exagerrated click fraud rates," according to martinibuster. He says that if the numbers were in actuality this high, "I am certain we'd hear about it in the AdWords forum." After all, that translates to millions of dollars lost.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread asks other Google AdSense publishers which day of the week, do they make the most amount of money with Google. Most say, Monday and Tuesday are their highest yielding days, while some say the weekends are.

I am very curious, which days our readers do best on. Please take the poll below, you can select multiple days.

Which Day(s) Do You Make Most Your AdSense Income:

I promise to report the results of this poll very soon.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A search for flight results in the syntax of flight from A to B, i.e. fly jfk to sjc returns a Google OneBox result, that by default, links to Expedia but offers links to other travel search engines including CheapTickets, Hotwire, Orbitz, Priceline and Travelocity.

This is really nothing new, in fact, we wrote about it back in 2006, but a new WebmasterWorld thread is now wondering if Google has a financial agreement with any of these travel search engines, maybe an affiliate agreement?

Besides for Google not labeling the results as paid, nor stringing them through an AdWords URL, it is pretty hard to assume they are paid. The redirect URLs do go through a few parameters that may imply some type of fee structure, as Receptional Andy implies:

• GoogleAirTest
• googleFlightsLink
• fexp [flights experiment?]
• PLGOOGLECPC [cost per click?]

Should Google clarify if there is any payment going back and forth here. To me, I think it is an unpaid extension of Google's Travel Information OneBox result.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Last week Yahoo added a nifty feature to Yahoo Local Search. For example, let's say you are looking for the nearest ATM machine. You can type in ATM, and then your zip code. But you won't be shown the nearest ATM within an X mile radius always.

Yahoo let's you plot the diameter of the circle and drop the center of that circle anywhere you want. Yahoo will then refine the local results based on the radius you selected and the center of the circle. Here is a quick video demo:

It doesn't seem like this tool is without bugs. A WebmasterWorld thread reports a blackhole issue.

I went looking for pizza places in Manhattan and noticed certain places disappeared even if you move the circle a hundred yards or so. You'd suddenly find black holes in the middle of Manhattan where there were, according to yahoo, no pizza places. Budge the circle over an eighth of an inch and the same pizza-free streets would suddenly fill with pizza joints, so there's still some work for them to do.

In any event, a unique and interactive solution to searching locally.

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: April 25, 2008"

In this week's recap, I discussed my sickness with the flu, announced the winners of the Twing schwag and how to win Yahoo schwag. Also, I discussed Earth Day and Passover. Yahoo, Google & Microsoft announced earnings. Microsoft offers paid organic search support and Google messes with AdWords. Plus a lot more, so watch the video!

To win, watch the video and comment at this post below with the correct answer. Make sure to subscribe to our video feed or subscribe directly on iTunes to be notified of these updates and download the video in the background. Here is the YouTube version of the feed:

For the original iTunes version, click here

Some Of The Topics Discussed:

• Earth Day 2008 Logos: Google, Yahoo, AOL, Ask.com & Others
• Yahoo's Q1 Profits: $542.2 Million, Google announced last week and MSFT announced today Microsoft Quarterly Figures Show $14.45 billion
• Microsoft adCenter Customers Get Premium Organic Listing Support in Live Search?
• Google Tests Higher Placement of AdWords URLs
• Microsoft Launches Revamped News Service and today got RSS
• Google Sitelinks in Position 60?
• Webmasters Report Proxy Hijacking No Longer an Issue at Google
• Google Partners With Domain Tools For Whois Information

Please do subscribe via iTunes or on your favorite RSS reader. Don't forget to comment below with the right answer and good luck!

I may not be able to mail schwag outside of the United States.

I am back from Puerto Rico but the Passover holiday isn't over. It was fun, thanks for asking. ;) It rained for all of 20 minutes and I got some crazy weird sunburns and lots of bug bites. In other words, it was great fun. Seriously.

Earth Day

This week, while taking in a breath of fresh air, we celebrated Earth Day. Google, Yahoo, AOL, and Ask had some nice designs, and Cre8asite Forums as well as Search Engine Roundtable changed their theme. Did you do anything useful for Earth Day? I actually walked around old San Juan!

Q1 Earnings Released

Last week, Google's Q1 earnings saw a surge in stock prices after everyone jumped on the announcement about how well they've done. Yahoo has gone up substantially since Q1 2007, and Microsoft just announced their earnings as well. Life looks good for search giants.

Does Microsoft Favor adCenter Customers?

After a Microsoft adCenter user complained that his organic rankings plummeted after opting in to use adCenter, a Microsoft rep joined the forum discussion and gave the individual personalized attention. Do they get premium organic support if they use Microsoft's adCenter? Food for thought.

Google Sitelinks in Position 60?

A forum member pointed out that he discovered sitelinks in position 60 which looks strangely odd to most of us. This begs the question if it has anything to do with the -60 penalty and if sites ranked #60 are really supposed to be #1.

New: Microsoft Live News

Microsoft Live has launched a revamped news service that is still shadowed by Google but has promise. It'll take time, though.

Google Tests Higher Placement of AdWords URLs

What has a higher CTR, a Google AdWords ad with the URL first followed by the description or an AdWords ad that displays the description followed by a URL? Google is testing out the display of ads in this way, much like A/B testing, I suppose. :)

Google Teams Up with DomainTools for Whois Information

This is very cool news because I always found that DomainTools gives the most relevant whois information without having to worry about CAPTCHAs and the like--and also because I think that Jay Westerdal of DomainTools is a pretty cool guy. Google has partnered with DomainTools to provide Whois information, so if you type "whois seroundtable.com" in Google's search, it will show up on top. That's hot.

Gone Goes Google Proxy Hijacking

Google has been proactive about proxy hijacking and it seems like a thing of the past. Let's hear it for a sigh of relief! ;)

Google is Spidering Weird URLs

More specifically, as our friend Ben discovered, Google has spidered encoded HTML in URLs -- that is, ampersands that are declared with & in the result. If you ask me, it's a bit confusing -- and why? It's probably a bug.

Google CPC Lawsuit

A class action suit is holding Google liable for implying that a blank input box should inherit costs that are input in another box instead of assuming that blank means zero. I totally hear that concern, because if I left a box blank, I'd hope that Google or whatever service I was using wouldn't fill in the box with random gobbleygook or make assumptions for me (remember what ASSuME means, people!). Personally, while some forum members disagree, I think that this lawsuit actually is stronger than a lot of other weird Google lawsuits that I read about.

Yahoo Search Marketing Offers Click Filter Report

If you're a YSM user, you might see the new click filter report that Yahoo has provided to let you wade through statistics that relate to invalid clicks. For example, you'll get CTR, cost, and a bunch of other statistics and graphs as well.

The Large Rectangle is Annoying

While many people think that the largest Google ad yields the most clickthroughs, others think that the most annoying AdSense unit is the large rectangle. Oh well. To each his own.

Do You Want to Work at Google?

Most of you do want to work at Google, according to a recent poll. To be honest, I like the perks that Googlers are offered, but I also like what I do. What about you?

A WebmasterWorld member asks if there's any penalty for adding H2 text (4 words) for the search engines because his logo is displayed in an image.

The answer seems unclear. Tedster responds that he's asked Google twice about this -- one said that it can get a spam penalty and the other said it was perfectly fine if it was not keyword stuffing and was used only for accessibility.

In other words, we'll need someone from Google to let us know what the real answer is. :)

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Have you ever wanted to see what interests Google employees? Now you can. Google has combined research written by Googlers in Papers Written by Googlers. Currently, there are a variety of sections that are broken down into the following:

• Algorithms and Theory
• Artificial Intelligence and Data Mining
• Audio, Video, and Image Processing
• Distributed Systems and Parallel Computing
• Education
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Hypertext and the Web
• Information Retrieval
• Machine Learning
• Natural Language Processing
• Operating Systems
• Science
• Security, Cryptography, and Privacy
• Software Engineering

Pretty heavy duty stuff and very computer-science oriented.

For search enthusiasts, tedster has found two really great papers entitled Finding Near-Duplicate Web Pages: A Large-Scale Evaluation of Algorithms by Monika Henzinger and Structured Models for Fine-to-Coarse Sentiment Analysis by Ryan McDonald et al. Ted believes that these two papers can shape the future of search, especially the latter one which deals with semantic processing.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Earlier this week, Reuters said that Google has announced technology to provide brand images on cell phones. In other words, based on a user's query, they'll be provided with some sort of image advertisement that has been scaled to fit on the screen of a mobile phone.

The ads work on a CPC basis and must link to a mobile-phone optimized website, according to the article. They are also currently available in 13 national markets (Australia, China, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Russia, Spain, the UK, and the United States).

Beyond the initial suspicion, people are worried that mobile ads will penetrate even further beyond web surfing. One forum member says that he is dreading the day when his phone will ring with an ad instead of with his selected ringtone. You never know.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A little over a month ago, I ran a poll asking Would You Want to Work at Google? The results were a bit surprising, 69% of the 143 responses said they would like to work at Google.

98 respondents or 69% of our readers said they would like to work at Google, while only 45 respondents or 31% said they do not want to work at Google. Here is the cute pie chart:

The pie chart, is almost pacman like, sorry Matt.

Continued forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A Sphinn thread has discussion about a new AdWords experiment where Google flipped the URL location in the ad from the bottom of the ad to above the description line of the ad. The Get Elastic Blog has a screen shot, which I used here to show you the difference, side by side:

The ads on the left are typical AdWords ads, that I see now, and have the URL at the bottom of the ad, under the ad description. The ads on the right are the new format, which seems be being tested in some parts of the UK. These ads move the display URL from the bottom, up above the ad description.

Very interesting test, which seems way off to me, since I am used to seeing the URL under the ad description for years now. So I am too accustomed to seeing it the other way, which makes this new test seem wrong. But it can be right, it depends on how this impacts CTR and ROI for advertisers.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

I would consider this Google Groups thread a "gem thread," since you don't always see a thread at this level - it is precious. A Googler, Wysz, discussed in detail four methods of hiding content and how Google may interpret each method.

JavaScript-Only Navigation: Wysz explains that this tactic does not fool or confuse search engines, so it likely won't hurt you in your rankings but from an "accessibility perspective," he says it is "not desirable." Wysz then goes on to answer specific questions posed by a webmaster, which you may gain some clues from.

CSS-Enhanced Navigation: Seems like Google and Wysz both love this method. Wysz said, as long as you do not have "intent to deceive search engines," then you should be fine. On the accessibility front, it is a win-win, "since it degrades gracefully as JavaScript and CSS support are removed," Wysz explains. Wysz adds, "Google should be able to follow these links and rank your pages normally."

Hidden Links via Positioning/Color, for Design/Accessibility: Wysz explains that this method can bring you "dangerously close to a grey area." The example he gives is that if you use the word "SkipToContent," which "isn't likely to be interpreted by anyone as an attempt at deception", said Wysz. He then adds, and this is important, "unless the term "SkipToContent" becomes a highly competitive keyword." Wysz does go on record saying, "If implemented in a non-deceptive manner, these aids should not cause a problem." But that leaves it up to Google to decide and intent is not always easy to judge. So, try not to use this method, if possible.

Hidden Links with No Mention of Accessibility or User Value: I think I will just quote Wysz here, cause he said it best. :)

I'm going to assume that these links are only intended for bots to see as attempt to deceive search engines. That's probably not an assumption you want a Googler to make. When making this judgement on your own, just ask yourself this question: "Is all of this text here for the user?" If you want to make Google (and your users) happy, the answer should always be "Yes."

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

A Google Groups thread confirms that Google Maps is lacking support for a common feature needed both here in the States and overseas, support for multi-language listings.

A Google Groups member asked:

As a multilingual company our website is in more than one language and each language has the same name but different URL. Should I create a listing for each language?

Google's official response is that there is no way to add more than one language URL for a single listing and that you should not add more than one business profile for the same physical address. Google Maps Jen said:

We don't have any way to handle multi-language listings at this point in time, and we strongly encourage businesses to only create one listing per physical address. However, it's a great suggestion to support these types of business listings - maybe we'll be able to support this in the future.

I am pretty sure many local search engines ask for languages spoken at the company when creating a business profile. I am not sure if those are one of the questions asked by Google Local. In any event, if multiple languages are spoken, adding a special URL for each language, should not be too hard.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

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: April 24, 2008"

Maybe so, just a spidering glitch, weird links, or sitemap error? I was searching this morning in Google doing some tests on Google's new Whois feature. When I plugged in a domain what popped up in the first page of the results was a weird URL including encoded ampersand and other characters in front of the shown URL for the website (aboutus.org). Once I clicked on the link I got a 404 error.

Screenshot:

Link to Result.

Thoughts? Comments?

Yahoo News reports on Yahoo's Q1 earnings of $542.2 million, which is substantially higher than 2007's Q1 earnings of $142.4 million.

Forum members are hoping there can be insights into this financial gain. WebmasterWorld moderator martinibuster quotes Jerry Yang's comment: "Not only does Yahoo! have a unique franchise, it increasingly has industry-leading tools, technology and, most importantly, people."

He adds that Yahoo is shutting down their tools that aren't yielding results (e.g. Yahoo 360 and Yahoo Music Jukebox). It's interesting to note that Yang says that Yahoo has great people, though. Does he also mean the employees that were laid off in January?

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld member has been banned from Google AdSense and wants to try again after several years on hiatus. He says that the past banning was d