May 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: May 30, 2008"

Happy Friday! It's almost June -- can you believe it? Next week, we're heading to SMX Advanced! This week, we celebrated Memorial Day and observed a lot of interesting search happenings.

Memorial Day

Monday marked Memorial Day in the states, and most of you had a long weekend. The search industry celebrated Memorial Day with numerous logos -- but Google was noticeably absent. The reason why, as the Google team responds, is that a Memorial Day design would be challenging and Google does not want to offend anyone.

Yahoo Experiences Subtle Update

Readers are reporting that they're getting interesting rankings on Yahoo as a result of a subtle update that occurred earlier this month. Some people are seeing extremely good rankings even though they apparently don't deserve it.

Blogspot and .info Domains Temporarily Penalized by Google

Google temporarily penalized all blogspot and .info domains earlier this week -- all of these sites didn't show up in the index. It was a bug, but it's a bit outrageous to penalize all of these domains. Sure, some are spammy, but not every single one of them is.

How Many of You Would Buy Links with a Nofollow Attribute?

Take our poll about whether you'd buy a link with a nofollow attribute. So far, the results are interesting. In the end, even if search engines do not see the nofollow, that link could bring targeted traffic that can really help you. As some people say, they're not looking for PageRank; this is how paid links work nowadays, and that's the nature of what you're buying.

Your YouTube Video May Help Boost Your Rankings

With Google Universal Search, it's possible that embedding YouTube videos may boost your rankings. A forum member discovered that his pages with YouTube videos embedded within them performed better than pages that didn't have video. Interesting. Maybe I need to start using video. Blech.

Google May or May Not Support Abbreviation and Acronym Tags

There are some HTML markup tags for abbreviations and acronyms, but are they supported by Google? We don't know. We are following a discussion in Google Groups but nobody from Google has commented. Upon first glance, though, Google probably does not support them.

Keyword Insertion in a Google AdWords URL? No

Google does not recommend keyword insertion in a display URL, according to a recent discussion. Why? Because you may have so many keywords that they probably don't work with that format. In other words, be absolutely certain that it fits.

Google Gets New Ugly Favicon

I hate to say it, but Google's new favicon is unappealing. I liked the big G a lot better than the little g. What is the reason behind this change? Google, you have a strong brand. Stop changing it on us. In fact, our 4 commenters this morning all don't like it. Now you have Barry and me -- that's six of us who don't. Change it back please kthx.

Google AdSense Ads Performing Disappearing Act

I just installed Google AdSense ads on a new site, and I think I experienced the same problem that has been reported in forums that Google AdSense ads are sporadically disappearing. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to this; it just is what it is. Oh, and for Michael VanDeMar -- yes, you should be aware that we often display ads on our content to test out theories. Usually we do give a disclaimer. ;) In this case, the ads weren't showing up (initially), so I suppose that may be why there was none.

We're Going to Seattle, Baby!

Finally, after 2 months of silence and lots of busy work, the Search Engine Roundtable team is headed to Seattle for SMX Advanced. We're going to have full SMX Advanced conference coverage with our team of excellent reporters. Stay tuned! And if you're there, say hello!

Search Engine Journal's Loren Baker reminds us that if we're building links, the basic rules of SEO should not be overlooked or forgotten. Even if you have hundreds of thousands of links, SEO basics are critical to achieve better rankings. Some of these include adding keywords to your copy, avoiding duplicate pages, adding unnecessary code, integrating text in images (and not using alt text), and more.

Link building itself is fine. SEO is still important for search engines, and both should be practiced together.

Most Sphinn members are in agreement about the article, but one points out that some sites may rank very well even if they don't incorporate basic SEO. He believes that it's more important to focus on relevant anchor text instead of unoptimized anchor text.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Reuters summarizes a recent comScore report that indicates that Google ad views are increasing. The article states:

Web tracking firm comScore Inc's monthly report on "paid clicks" showed Google's U.S. growth at 19.6 percent in April from a year ago, compared with growth of 2.7 percent in March and 3.1 percent in February, according to analysts.

Forum members believe that this means the recession is over. (Or perhaps people are clicking because they're dreaming to buy products they can't afford during the recession.)

But it could mean that ad views may have been down in the past and this shows an increase.

Still, other forum members are disappointed in the poor ad targeting that has been impacting publishers for a good amount of time. They feel that a lot of these clicks shouldn't happen because they're not as contextual as they should be.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Google Webmaster Tools seems to have a new bug which does not allow you to delete or remove your sitemaps file from your profile.

Several reports came from Google Groups starting on May 27th. All have reported that no matter what they do, the delete function does not actually remove the sitemap from the associate site.

The first report said:

I've tried to delete the RSS feed "sitemap" from webmaster tools, but it doesn't seem to go - te page reloads - but both sitemaps are still showing?

Googler, Susan Moskwa, replied saying they are looking into the issue:

Thanks for reporting this issue. Our team is looking into it.

FYI no need to worry, since those extra Sitemaps shouldn't cause you any problems.

On a similar note, a WebmasterWorld thread reports that Google seemed to have merged two of his sitemaps files into the same domain. I.e. He set up profiles for subfolders, so he can manage each subfolder, which Google recommends. Google seemed to have automatically merged those two sitemaps under a single site. Which begs the question, how do you delete part of your site using Webmaster Tools?

Finally, a DigitalPoint Forums thread is reporting a backlink update in the link tool within Google Webmaster Tools. As an FYI, that tool does update every few weeks.

Forum discussion at Google Groups and WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

There are two WebmasterWorld threads and some Google Groups threads reporting that some AdSense ads sporadically are disappearing.

Several publishers are reporting that a new ad they placed on a particular page received impressions and clicks on day one and then on day two, the ad received no impressions and when the publisher checked out the page, he/she was shocked to see the ad missing. Here is one publisher's story:

Adsense were being displayed on it and I got around 35 clicks. Now today Adsense is not displaying ads on this page

Here is another post from a senior member:

There have been a couple of threads lately where someone mentioned ads were not appearing on their site(s). Just a blank space was there - no PSA's, nothing.

I've noticed it myself a couple of times and on pages that have had good targeted ads for years. One minute the ads aren't there - return to the page a few minutes later and they're back.

Over the course of a few days, a bunch of these types of threads have been popping up. I'm going to place a new ad below this line and you guys let me know if you see it or not:

I guess keep checking back over the course of the next few hours and let me know. It does seem very out of the ordinary for an AdSense ad not to render. Maybe Google is having ad server issues or maybe it is something else?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Google Groups.

Confirmed: The ads are disappearing, even my test ad above. Here is a screen shot, I even tried refreshing 5 times, very rarely does the ad show up:

Update: 1/9/09, Google updated their icon again, take our poll and let us know if you like it. To take the poll, click here.

Such minor things as changing a favorite icon is noticed immediately by people. Google, sometime over night, updated their favorite icon to a new icon. The favorite icon is the little icon that is displayed in the browser URL bar on most modern browsers. Here is the before and after:

Before:

After:

If you do not see it, try shift refreshing on the google.com/favicon.ico page a few times and then go back to Google.com.

Personally, I miss the old one. I wonder if this is a long term change or someone at Google decided to have some fun. Or maybe Google wanted to see if the smallest, most insignificant change can drive up buzz about the company. Heck, Google can hiccup and people will not stop talking about it. Case in point?

What would be neat is if they updated their favorite icon with their seasonal logos.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums & DigitalPoint Forums.

Update: I received a comment from Google on this and posted it at Search Engine Land.

We recognized there was a need for a Google icon that would better work across multiple applications including web, mobile and client applications. We felt the small 'g' had many of the characteristics that best represent our brand: it's simple, playful, and unique. We will be looking to improve and enhance this icon as we move forward.

Update: 1/9/09, Google updated their icon again. Here is the new one:

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: May 29, 2008"

At Search Engine Land, Danny Sullivan discusses how search 4.0 will integrate human elements and that editorial decisions will help keep the freshness and relevancy of results. (In case you were wondering, search 1.0 from '96 used on-the-page criteria, search 2.0 from '98 used off-the-page criteria, and search 3.0 from 2007 included universal search).

But times are changing. Google Personalized Search is already incorporating our preferences in search results. Social networks can be tapped into for some personalized results. Mahalo uses human editors, as does Wikia. It's something that we're likely to see more of in the upcoming months.

Is Search 4.0 today's reality, though? The Sphinn discussion suggests that Danny is a bit early in his assessment. It's coming, but it's not yet here. (Still, Danny's pretty darn good at what he predicts in terms of search, so I think the column is timely.) On that note, I don't think Danny intended to say it's here now (we know it isn't), but that he's all ready to coin the phrase "search 4.0" to mean human powered search.

Gary Price mentions that library and academic tools have been human-powered for years. Gary has a point, but these aren't as mainstream as Google. I believe that the interesting part of this all is that Google is taking that direction to keep its results top notch (and to avoid gaming).

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Those using Google Audio ads are reporting that there are some problems when resuming ads. If a campaign is paused, you apparently cannot resume it. If a campaign is stopped, you also cannot resume it. Another issue that was reported is that some advertisers cannot run their audio ads on more than one station.

AdWordsPro.Steph writes a response on the Google Groups thread and says that you're unable to resume a campaign once it's stopped. You can, however, copy your settings over to a brand new campaign and start again.

The other issue reported are likely to be technical glitches, Steph continues. Her recommendation is to report it as a bug to the attention of the Audio Ads team.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

PC World has an article about how Belgian publishers are looking to sue Google for $77.5 million in damages for "for violating copyright law by publishing their articles on Google News and caching their web pages." This has been going on from at least several posts that have discussed this case. Forum members are still wondering why it's an open case -- they think the $77.5 million request is a bit much, but they must've used Google's site: operator to get that number. Also, while this case has been open since 2006, members suspect that everyone wants a piece of the Google pie.

Another member points out that the problem isn't with caching the site's content, but the content that is supposed to be for subscribing (paying) members only. The question is: who should be held accountable -- Google or the incompetent Belgian publisher's IT department? (Does anyone there know what robots.txt does?)

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Talk about theories! A WebmasterWorld thread has a theory that was posted by senior member, travelin cat, who noticed that his top ranking pages tend to have related YouTube video's embedded on them. The YouTube videos are not his videos, just random videos that seem to be related to his content.

The member who posted this theory seems to not believe his findings himself. He decided to test out his theory by adding YouTube videos to 10 more random pages that previously did not have any good rankings in Google. The results were shocking:

After 15 days, the average Google visit went up just over 200% compared to the previous 15 day period on those 10 pages.

Honestly, I really don't believe it. Can it be some other change that is influencing the results? Could be and of course, I did not test this theory out myself. But it is a very new theory.

So I figured I would slap a video on this post for fun:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Google Groups thread, an advertiser is asking for advice on if Google supports the keyword insertion technique within the display URL.

Keyword inserting is a method of dynamically inserting the searchers query in your search ad. For example, if you sell computer electronics and someone searches on [MP3s], you can tell Google to show MP3s in the title, description or display URL of your ad automatically. No, you do not need to create an individual ad that matches on that keyword with the specific MP3s text in the ad copy. It can be done automatically.

But should you deploy dynamic keyword insertion in your display URL? Google seems not to recommend it for all advertisers.

AdWordsPro Sarah said in that Google Groups thread:

Although this seems like a slick trick, I don't recommend using keyword insertion in the display URL. If you do, be very careful that all of the keywords in the ad group list work with this format.

I did some searching around to find signs of advertisers that may deploy this technique and found this ad:

I hovered my mouse over the ad and noticed that the destination URL was not the exact same as the display URL. Now, although I don't know if this was a manual ad or an ad that used keyword insertion - this ad may have been using keyword insertion. As you can see, it bolds the keyword MP3, because that is what I searched on. Any extra bolding may increase your ad's visibility, thus increasing your CTR and possibly increasing your quality score - which in turn lowers your CPC and increases your ad position. Now, who said PPC isn't rocket science. ;-)

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Can you believe it, it is almost a year since the first ever SMX Advanced show hit the stage. Next week is the second SMX Advanced show, following several successful SMX presentations, hosted by Danny Sullivan.

Like always, we at the Search Engine Roundtable will be providing the most comprehensive coverage of the search conferences. We will be covering virtually all of the sessions being offered by the conference. There are three sessions per time slot and we have coverage of all three. Helping Tamar and I with the coverage includes David Wallace of SearchRank, and Justin Davy, both who have experience providing our style search engine conference coverage.

Here is our schedule of conference coverage, which is subject to change last minute:

Day 1: June 3rd
9:15am - 10:00am
Keynote - Kevin Johnson, President, Platform & Services Division, Microsoft by Tamar Weinberg
10:45am - 12:00pm
Blow Your Mind Link Building Techniques by Barry Schwartz
Winning From The Start: Getting Ad Copy Right by Justin Davy
Money For What? Search Marketing Payment Models by David Wallace
1:30pm - 2:45pm
Bot Herding by Tamar Weinberg
Conversion Optimization: Winning After They Arrive by Justin Davy
Creating Value In Your SEM Businesses by David Wallace
3:15pm - 4:30pm
Buying Sites For SEO by Barry Schwartz
Closing The Loop: Are You Tracking Every Lead? by David Wallace
Funding, Valuing & Selling SEM Businesses by Tamar Weinberg
5:00pm - 5:45pm
You&A With Matt Cutts by David Wallace

Day 2: June 4th
9:00am - 10:00am
Search Marketing & Surviving A Recession by David Wallace
Search Friendly Development by Tamar Weinberg
10:45am - 12:00pm
International SEO by Barry Schwartz
What You Should Be Measuring -- But Aren't! by Justin Davy
Platform Considerations for the Microsoft Stack and LAMP Stack by David Wallace
1:45pm - 3:00pm
Analytics Every SEO Needs To Know by Tamar Weinberg
Bid Management Today by Barry Schwartz
Diagnosing Web Site Architecture Issues by David Wallace
3:15pm - 4:30pm
Give It Up! by Tamar Weinberg
Amazing New PPC Tactics by Barry Schwartz
Expert Technical Review of Your Website by David Wallace

We are all looking forward to SMX Advanced and I am personally looking forward to possibly (but not definitely) hanging out more with those that come.

See you next week!

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: May 28, 2008"

Let's say you hosted a government website with over 1 million visitors monthly. You'd probably want to monetize it. What about considering Google AdSense? It's a possibility; the contextual ads are likely to be well-targeted. Thousands of websites employ Google AdSense to make some money off their content, so it's not unheard of to try this in the government sector. The question, though, is what happens if some sketchy ads from undesirable businesses or bogus sites go through on the website? It may look like an endorsement that the government doesn't want to be affiliated with.

Very few people in the thread suggest that it will work. "Be inconspicuous about it," one forum member recommends. Most say that it's offensive to add AdSense on sites that are already being paid for by our tax dollars.

Others don't want government sites to run AdSense at all.

If governments start running Adsense on their websites, they obstruct fair competition and the free market.

Similar sentiment is echoed throughout the discussion:

The government should be independent and therefore cannot put any ads on their site promoting either 'store A' or 'store B' nor advertise for blue or green widgets.

Do some people want it? Only if it reduces our taxes and funds education. That's very likely not going to happen, so they'll probably never say yes.

There's always the Ad Review Center which integrates a competitive ad filter for ads that you don't want to endorse. There's likely to be a lot of overhead involved for a government site, though.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Matt Cutts blogged about how Google keeps its index clean by deindexing hacked sites. In his post, he explains that hacked sites can be detrimental to the search experience especially if malware is hosted there and is installed on a visitor's computer. Therefore, Google takes preventative measures to remove those sites so that visitor machines are not inadvertently compromised in any way.

Matt explains that Google also sends numerous reports to the webmaster of the particular domain (contact@, support@, webmaster@, and info@) to inform them of the issue. The email is typically entitled "Removal from Google's Index." Of course, if you register your website with Google's Webmaster Tools, you can get the information there when you log in as well.

If your site is removed, you have a few days to act upon it before Google removes your site from the index, but once everything is clean again, you can file a reconsideration request and be readded.

In 2006, we covered when the Jennifer Convertibles site was hacked and delisted from Google. Within 2 days, it was back in the index. In this case, Google acted fast because the webmasters acted fast to remove the malicious code from their content.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

After much frustration with Google's Custom Search Engine, it seems that Google's CSE doesn't actually support the Opera web browser. Apparently, when Opera users try to set up the Google custom search engine, they fill in all forms, hit save, but nothing happens.

AdSensePro eventually weighs in on the desperate forum discussion and says that Opera is not a recommended browser:

Our engineers have investigated, and inform me that this is an issue with Opera. We do not support this browser, and recommend you use IE or Firefox 2.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

I have been tracking a very sensitive thread at High Rankings Forum for the past several days. The original thread creator is fairly cryptic in his details, due to privacy reasons, but I think I have a grasp of what is going on. Again, I might be wrong, but I think I might be right. Here it goes...

It appears that Siemens, the huge technology engineering company based in Europe is teaming up with Microsoft to sell search ads to their client base. The thing is, Siemens knows nothing about SEM, so they are looking for willing SEM consultants to aid them through the process.

What makes this even more interesting is that it seems like Siemens will only allow these third-party SEM companies to sell Microsoft Live Search ads to their clients. They won't allow them to sell Google ads or other search ads, outside of Live Search, to their client base.

What is this an issue? Well, Google holds the majority share of search traffic and by telling Siemens's clients that all they need to do is be on Live Search, might be considered immoral. On the other hand, if Microsoft sold direct, it would be a no brainer, but by masking themselves through Siemens and then a third-party SEM agency, it seems a bit unethical (for lack of a better word).

Again, I am not sure if this company is Siemens, but it makes logical sense based on the details in the thread.

Forum discussion at High Rankings Forum.

Did you know that there are specific HTML markup tags for abbreviations and acronyms? Did you know that people sometimes use them?

A Google Groups thread asks if Google actually uses these tags for indexing purposes? The example given in the thread is if Google would understand the following tag:

<acronym title="Cable News Network">CNN</acronym>

Would Google understand that CNN is an acronym for Cable News Network based on this tag?

Furthermore, would Google understand the abbreviations tag?

<abbr title="et cetera">etc.</abbr>

We all know Google has a huge dictionary and a huge huge database of searchers. I am sure they understand acronyms and abbreviations as part of the search. I am also sure they have tackled the question of automatically determining acronyms and abbreviations as part of their index. But does Google support the official acronyms and abbreviations tags?

We have no confirmation from Google either way, but it appears that Google might not support them. I have a feeling a Google representative is checking out the thread and may reply soon. I will update this post when I have confirmation on if these are supported tags.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

A couple weeks ago, we reported that Video Ad Support Comes To Google AdWords API Sandbox. We now have an update from Jeff Posnick, a Google AdWords API representative in the Google Groups thread.

In short, due to a mistake in pushing out the new API update, they forgot to push the video ad support changes live. It looks like the video ad support feature will have to wait until the next minor release of the AdWords API.

Jeff said:

Unfortunately, I've been told that while the configuration change to support video ad creation in the Sandbox was submitted, due to an oversight in the push process it wasn't properly applied to the Sandbox environment. Apologies for the miscommunication and the delay in getting this implemented.

I'll post again when I hear that the configuration change has been properly pushed out so that you can try again.

I will keep you posted on any enhancements made to the AdWords API.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Yahoo Search typically does a search update once a month. Yahoo has announced last night that they have pushed out a new update that may result in "ranking changes and page shuffling in the index."

Did we, the Search Engine Roundtable, miss early signs of this update? Possibly. I was tracking a thread at WebmasterWorld started by senior member, BillyS, who noticed a major traffic surge via Yahoo for a very short amount of time. On May 23rd, he reported major changes but then on the next day, May 24th, he said things were back to normal. I kept watching the thread but no new updates came about. Those were our early signs, but it seems not much came of it.

In the new WebmasterWorld thread, the only thread in the forums I track to discuss the update, only one member said she noticed changes. WebmasterWorld legend, Marcia said:

Haha! they *accidentally* put a site of mine at #8 out of 83 million (earlier today and late yesterday) and now it's sitting #9 out of 98 million pages returned. This update will be interesting to watch.

Trust me, it's an accident. ;)

That implies to me that Yahoo ranked a site that doesn't deserve to rank well.

The last Yahoo Search update, the Yahoo Tax Day update was much more visible then this one. But the March update was more like this update, where no one noticed anything much.

Is this a good thing? I.e. a good thing that Yahoo is making changes to their algorithms and index and at the same time, SEOs are not noticing those changes?

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: May 27, 2008"

A WebmasterWorld member was desperate for improved rankings, so he bought links. As a result, his rankings tanked and he was wondering if there's a better way to buy build links.

Really, if you're trying to buy links, the recommendation is to avoid using brokers. Go directly to webmasters and ask them if they can place a link on the site where it appears naturally (not in the navigation, for example). Additionally, go for quality over quantity. As pageoneresults says, "[t]en (10) high quality links will typically trump a hundred (100) low quality links."

The best ways to build links is slowly and methodically, he adds. You don't want to add a bunch of inbound links immediately because it can raise red flags.

On a related note, Jim Boykin suggests that you build links by focusing on the right text by having the right content on targeted pages. Don't necessarily link to your homepage; build links to the appropriate internal pages instead.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and Sphinn.

We posted about the requirement to link Google AdSense accounts with a Google Account in February. As indicated in the comments of that blog post, the frustration of doing so is still there and a lot of publishers are not taking the plunge as a result.

Well, Google is reminding you that you have no choice. You'll need to do it, according to a Google Groups thread. AdSensePro Ashley refers to a new post on the Inside AdSense blog which states that if you don't make the change, you'll be locked out of your account -- for good. (Roger, I'm sorry.)

There's no exact date for when this will be rolled out, but Google states that it will be a requirement "in the next few weeks."

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

A Google Groups webmaster is reporting that he is finding .co.nz (New Zealand) sites ranked highly in the Google Ireland (google.ie) search result. Strangely enough, that .co.nz site is not even hosted in New Zealand; it's hosted in the US.

Similarly, the webmaster reports that a few other sites are being ranked highly even though they are US-based servers. He suspects that there is a problem with geotargeting in addition to other issues (like duplicate content filters, which he's also encountering problems with).

This may be a problem, and Google rep JohnMu has reported it as an issue. Hopefully we'll see some resolution soon.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

Search Engine Strategies Toronto 2008 will be held on June 16-18, and the parties are already being planned. AussieWebmaster has opened the floor to anyone who knows of happenings in the area, but Becky Ryan has already posted a few events that she knows will be occurring in a Search Engine Watch Forums thread.

On the first day (June 16th), there will be a networking reception from 5:30 until 6:30 in the expo hall.

On the second day (June 17th), there will be sponsored parties (TBA) and a number of private parties. Aim to get invited and you should have a good time.

As stated, there will be more parties to be posted, so be sure to check the forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A Google Groups thread has a very interesting discussion that is almost complete. The discussion takes you through the life cycle of a 301 redirect. Site owner moved from domain.com to domain.info, on a domain name sale, but wanted to retain his links, so set up a 301 redirect from .com to .info for a certain period of time.

Besides for the thread covering a ton of details that are critical to such a move, I wanted to highlight one point made by Googler, JohnMu. John said that you should not use "the robots.txt to block crawling while you have a 301 redirect enabled for the domain. By blocking crawling, you're effectively blocking the search engines from recognizing the redirect properly."

I wonder how many people do that because I never would have thought people do.

Besides for that, there is some discussion on how long the 301 should be in place before handing over the old domain to someone else. If you 301 the results for 3 weeks and then hand the old domain over to the new owner, if that owner drops the 301, will Google return the old links back to the old domain or keep them at the new domain? Some suggest keeping the 301 live for at least 6 months.

There are many tips in the thread for such a process including collecting as much linkage data you can from the previous domain. You can collect linkage data via Yahoo Site Explorer, Google Webmaster Tools, your web analytics, your own database scripts and more. This way you can go back to those sites and ask them to update your link to the new domain.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread asks members if they would consider buying a link that has a nofollow attribute appended to it. For those who don't know what the nofollow attribute is a snippet of code added to the html of the link, so a search engine can easily detect if they should follow the link (in terms of link popularity and even actually following the link physically). It looks something like this:

<a href="http://www.site.com/page.html" rel="nofollow">Visit My Page</a>

In any event, the thread asks if you would buy such a link. I know people do, cause some of my advertisers buy them from me. But would you buy such a link? I know it depends, depends on if the link is on a high trafficked site, or in a prime location, and so on. But let's pretend the link is on a site like this or a site like Search Engine Land, would you buy a link from those types of sites, if it was nofollowed?

Here is the poll (try not to use the "other" option):

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

One constant thread you see at the forums are threads complaining that their sites become automatically unverified in Google Webmaster Tools. So the webmaster needs to go back in and manually click the verify button in Webmaster Tools, to reverify the site.

One webmaster wrote a Google Groups thread discussing a pattern he has seen. This webmaster wrote a script to notify him whenever his verification file is being accessed by Google. This way he knows when Google has tried to re-access his file and if he needs to go back in a verify the sites again.

Over the course of months, he believes he found a pattern where if he verifies his sites at around 12:22am (not sure what time zone), without failure the verification will fail, even if the verification file is there and accessible. His theory is as follows:

Since the file is obviously there and accessible, the only thing may be a slower response time. Even though it responds fully (I get my email), maybe Googlebot Sitemaps finds it a bit slow and flags it as unverified.

Maybe, at that time, Google's webmaster tools servers hiccup and need a nice kick? Or maybe it is nothing. But I found this thread both unique and interesting.

Googler, JohnMu, promised to show it to an engineer. So I hope to see confirmation of some sort, shortly form Google.

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: May 26, 2008"

comScore released its April 2008 rankings last week, and it appears that Google has increased its search share to 61.6% up from 59.8% the previous month.

Even though this is an overall view of search traffic, forum members wonder if the quality will improve in certain niches (especially Ask, now that it may target women -- of course, women would have to actually realize this and search Ask in order for this new arrangement to work for them). It all depends on the users, according to a forum member. Google performs very well in certain areas.

Looking at this data, another forum member wonders why Google, the "search giant baby," is worried about the Yahoo-Microsoft merger. That's one specific issue that will affect a lot of people for some time.

On a related note, Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land has graphed out the search shares of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. The graph shows that Google search shares have increased, whereas Yahoo and Microsoft search has decreased for the most part.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Over the weekend, I noticed reports from WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums suggesting that Google dropped .info and blogspot results from its index.

First reports came in at around 9:50am (EST) on May 23rd at both forums. Massive panic actually started where we saw dozens of forum posts with members not understanding how Google can completely wipe off many (not all) .info TLDs and all Blogspot results. Here is one person's reaction:

But banning all .info domains without any apparent reason is greatly surprising.

But most felt this was a pretty large Google bug and they were right.

About five hours later, Webmasters began to see the old results come back to life. At 2:49pm (EST), we got reports from WebmasterWorld that the info TLDs were coming back into the Google results. Then at 4:33pm (EST), we received similar reports from DigitalPoint Forums.

Imagine that, Google delisting most of the .info TLDs and blogspot hosted blogs.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Historically, most search engines do not place a special logo up on their home page for Memorial Day. I am not sure why, I know it is just a U.S. holiday - but typically, the lack of a special logo, confuses many Americans.

This year, we had some search engines that historically have not placed a special logo for Memorial Day, place one. But Google, still, has yet to showcase a special logo for today. In any event, here is a run down of the special logos from Yahoo, Ask.com, Dogpile, Cre8asite Forums and yours truly.

Yahoo:

Ask.com:

Dogpile.com:

Cre8asite Forums:

Search Engine Roundtable:

Here is a look past at the previous years coverage of Memorial Day:

• Memorial Day Commemorated: Ask.com & Search Engine Roundtable
• Ask Jeeves Commemorates Memorial Day : 2005
• Memorial Day & Search Engines : 2004

Where is 2006? Well, I got married on Memorial Day weekend of that year.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Update: Where is Google's logo, the Stepforth blog has a comment from Google:

Thank you for your note. We understand your interest in seeing a Memorial Day Google logo. If we were to commemorate this holiday, we'd want to express reverence; however, as Google's special logos tend to be lighthearted in nature, this would be a particularly challenging design.

We wouldn't want to create a graphic that could be interpreted as disrespectful in any way.

We have a long list of holidays that we'd like to celebrate in the future. We have to balance this rotating calendar with the need to maintain the consistency of the Google homepage. We really appreciate your feedback regarding the Google logo, and please be assured that we're actively pursuing ways in which we can acknowledge Memorial Day and other such occasions in the future.

Regards,
The Google Team

In this Memorial Day weekend recap, I discuss the recent Google changes, floating fours, case sensitivity, minus X penalties and the local universal search change. I mock Microsoft Live Search's Cashback program. I looked into Ask.com's search update and then move to Yahoo's search ad change. Google updated the AdWords billing page. Plus SEOs are not rats, go figure. Check it out and don't forget to listen for a chance to win schwag, by commenting below at SERoundtable.com.

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:

• Google Search Index Update: May '08 Update
• More Google Floating Four Theories
• Google Still Showing Different Results Base on Case Sensitivity
• A Deeper Look at the Minus X Google Penalties
• Google Universal Search Local Results Adds "Change Location"
• Microsoft to Offer Cash Back to Users
• Possible Ask.com Search Update?
• Yahoo Reduces Top Ads & Changes Ad Layout Slightly
• Google AdWords Updates Billing Page
• Most SEOs Don't Report Competitors To Google

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.

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: May 23, 2008"

Google Universal Search has been around for a while now. But today, Sam asked me to look at a search for scuba diving, which shows the local results smack in the middle of the page. Now, Sam (via Tamar) did not see that, same saw a box at the top that shows "Looking for local results for scuba diving? Enter location."

Let me first show you what Sam saw, which I can replicate using a different browser, a browser I did not use to search with Google Maps in.

Now, on my primary browser, where I use Google Maps and have a default location, I don't get that box. I get the results immediately, in the middle of the page, which is classic Universal Search. But, there is a slight change, it adds "near 2 executive blvd., 10901 change location," which is my location. Here is a screen capture:

If I click on the "change location," I get this:

Then clicking "back to results" brings back the previous screen.

Going back to Sam's example above. Google will ask you for your location, when it doesn't know it. You do not need to be logged into Google. You just need to have searched with a default location on Google Maps in the past to see the map pop up. If you have not, then Google will ask you for your location. When you enter it into the web search results in Sam's example above, then Google will show you a map at the top and not in the middle of the page. But, if you search again, Google may show you the map in the middle of the page, depending on the query.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Two weeks until SMX Advanced. Four weeks until SES Toronto. Stuff is looking up after a conference-free (and relatively busy/boring/slow news) month. I'm getting excited :)

Webmasters Report Big Google Update

The biggest news of the week, perhaps, is the fact that Google is undergoing a May 2008 update. Many people are reporting a huge shift in their rankings this week and drop in traffic.

On a similar note, the floating four doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon. A theory by Tedster has been proposed that this may have something to do with the number of URLs indexed. Hey, you never know.

Case Sensitivity Matters

While people have debated the previous impact of case sensitivity, Barry performed a test with different case and found results that weren't consistent. In other words, it looks like Google is somewhat testing out theories related to case.

Google's Minus X Penalties

In an interesting analysis of the minus X penalties, an SEO Google is performing a review of his site, but one webmaster is worried that the hundreds of visits from Google may result in a penalty. What say you?

Ask.com Shifts Algo

Ask.com webmasters are reporting an algorithm shift with updated rankings. The last time we reported such a thing was in October of 2007, so this is a breath of fresh air.

Microsoft's Cash Back Program

Want some money? Most people do. If you want to get cash back on your purchases, check out the Microsoft Live's Cash Back program which offers you money based on products purchased through the search engine. I think it may work for those who really want the money, but Barry disagrees. He's probably right.

Google's Crown Jewels Discussed

They say Google has the best search algorithm in town, but people are curious about it. Google VP Udi Manber wrote a blog post on the Google Blog about quality factors, and I have to say it's a pretty interesting read -- one of my favorite posts on the Google blog of all time. If you haven't read it, go. Now.

Yahoo is Playing with Ads

Yahoo is performing their own tests with ads, and while the changes are subtle, this is what A/B testing is all about. Will it improve CTR? I guess Yahoo will find out.

Google AdWords Billing Page Update

If you want detailed information about your Google AdWords billing, hop on over to Google AdWords and take a look at the new changes. Looks good, right?

Controversial Google AdWords "Automatic Matching" Beta Launching

A small amount of Google AdWords advertisers are currently being selected for the automatic matching beta launch within Google AdWords. The ads will go live in June 3rd and those who don't agree with the suggestion can opt out beforehand.

Google Supports Third-Party Ad Serving Technology

Google is now supporting third party ad serving technology, and AdSense publishers can partake in this as long as they opt in for image ads, enable advertisers to target your AdSense channels, and opt into placement targeting.

You Don't Report Your Competitors

...because if you did, you'd look pretty silly, wouldn't you? We ran a poll and asked you if you report your competitors to Google and most of you (70%) said no. That's good to hear.

Google Health Launches

This week, Google Health launched which somewhat is a journal of the kind of medicinal information that you may see for emergencies for babysitters on your refrigerator door. Now, it's all online. Useful? Depends. A privacy concern? For most of us, debateable. For Gen Y'ers, probably not.

That is all for this week. Have a nice long weekend!

Many blogs are abuzz with the news about a recent fake piece of linkbait that ended up capturing the eyes and ears of many big traditional news outlets and bringing the originating story thousands of backlinks. After the community went up in arms about the "snakeoil" tactics of this piece of bait, Nick Wilsdon and Barry at Search Engine Land talk about the ramifications of the action, especially with how Matt Cutts is responding to it from a Google perspective. In a Sphinn thread (that is REALLY long; you have been warned), Matt says:

My quick take is that Google’s webmaster guidelines allow for cases such as this:

“Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). It’s not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn’t included on this page, Google approves of it.”

There’s not much more deceptive or misleading than a fake story without any disclosure that the story is hoax.

Numerous forum members at Sphinn are disappointed in the approach taken here, especially since it was fake and deceptive. Others think it's unfair for Google to assert control over web content. Yet others understand that Google wants to link to the most trusted and relevant website, so they're going to obviously take action. I'd argue that the piece of linkbait in question is the most relevant piece of the pie here and should rank #1 for the query.

The question is: what would happen if nobody admitted that the linkbait was fake and everyone assumed it was true? Even if people contest the motives of this particular piece of linkbait, it was confirmed as fake, but do you really think that every piece of linkbait out there is legitimate?

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn and Sphinn

The question of domain name registration and its impact on SEO is not a new one. However, every so often, the question comes up. Would it be better to register your domain name for 5 years instead of renewing it for just another year?

In our past coverage, we reported that there are some signals sent by extended domain name registrations, including informing the search engines that your website is not spammy (you're here to stay). Google does weigh in on these signals, apparently (albeit not as much as other factors, obviously).

Domain name registration lengths may also show more about your commitment to your work. If you extend your registration for many years, it shows that you're serious about your business. I'd say that this is stronger than renewing it yearly every single year.

Others disagree that domain name registration lengths have any profound impact on SEO. Instead, the older the domain is (rather than the length of registration), the better it is.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Update: It seems Google has gone on the record saying domain registration length does not impact rankings.

What's worse than having pop-up ads on your website? Having ads on your website that aren't actually contextual and aren't properly matching the text of your website to draw in prospects. (Well, maybe it's not worse, but it's surely frustrating a lot of publishers.) At WebmasterWorld, incrediBILL says that "[t]here were ads for all sorts of junk linking to sites that didn't have what it claimed, Amazon affiliates, off topic garbage, even phone company directory listings." He started trying to weed out the bad ads by hand, but says that his filter list is already full, so it wasn't easy to do.

Bill is not alone. It seems that a lot of other publishers are starting to filter out up to 90% of new ads that are using the Google AdSense program. Publishers complain that "[a]pparently the targeted ads aren't quality/relevance checked at all by Google," which doesn't make the viability of AdSense a strong one at this time.

Is there a correlation to a holiday weekend? Some forum members suggest that to be the case. One member says that "[l]ow advertiser inventory lowers the threshold to the bottom feeders." But others contest this claim, saying that bottom feeders should cease to exist if Google is really screening them for quality. This is a valid point.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A couple weeks ago I asked if Do You Report Your Competitors as Spam in Google? Well, the results are in and most SEOs said they do not report their competitors to Google as spamming. Of the 159 responses, 111 respondents or 70% said no, they do not report competitors to Google. 45 respondents or 28% said they do report competitors to Google. While three of those votes were for "other" but was actually left blank.

Here is the break down:
:: No said 111 respondents or 70%
:: Yes said 45 respondents or 28%
:: Other said 3 respondents or 2%

I am actually a bit surprised by the results, I would have thought more SEOs would anonymously say that they do report competitors to Google. These results, to me, shows a fairly strong unity amongst the SEO industry.

Forum discussion continued at Sphinn.

A WebmasterWorld thread has some discussion over one member spotting a Google IP address navigating through his site. The IP address originates from the Mountain View location and resolves to Google, so he is convinced a Googler is manually reviewing his site.

Well, it can be a manual review or it can be a Googler interested in your site. Maybe the Googler is using your site like a normal user? Maybe? If you think not, then maybe your site should be manually reviewed?

Heck, Google's people are all over this site all the time. Here are some stats from Google Analytics where I try to isolate Googler's on my site (I am sure it isn't 100% accurate):

Here is a chart showing "network location" for the past 30 days or so. Notice all these Googlers on my site:

Here is a chart showing my visitors from the Mountain View area, the location of Google's headquarters.

So am I being manually reviewed or are Googler's just reading this site? Maybe both. :)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google Maps has really come a long way since it originally launched, a really long way. The mapping tools offered by Google are not only informative but very fun to use. From street views, directions, plotting your own points, user images, wikipedia data, data overlays and much more - it is really a great tool for users.

But it can be better and Google is looking for suggestions from us.

Google Maps Guide Brian posted a thread at Google Groups asking for our feedback and suggestions. He said:

We're always interested in hearing your feedback and feature suggestions. Use this group to share your thoughts, and I, along with the rest of the Google Maps Guides, will make sure that your comments shared with the rest of the team.

If there is any feature you want, this is your time to let Google know about it. Just go to the thread, join the forum and post your two cents.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Yesterday afternoon at about 4pm (EST), the Google AdWords magnifying glass feature went missing. The magnifying glass is a little icon you can find in the keyword list within your AdWords management interface. When you mouse over the icon, up comes information regarding your quality square factors. Here is a screen capture:

That feature went missing around 4pm (EST) yesterday and finally came back around five hours later.

In a WebmasterWorld thread, AdWordsAdvisor confirmed the issue at 7:48 pm and then about an hour later informed us the issue should have been resolved.

I can confirm that I see the magnifying glass this morning.

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: May 22, 2008"

Yahoo made small, but significant changes, to the layout of the top search ads. It seems like Yahoo is now showing a maximum of three ads at the top of the page, when they use to show four ads. Plus, they have moved the display URL under the ad description.

Here is a sample of the old layout:

Notice the display URL is on the same line as the description. Plus, there are four ads for this particular search result. This picture was taken from James Omdahl and seems to be as recent as January 2008.

The new/current layout:

Notice, the display URL is now under the ad description and there are only three ads.

Spratjac, notified us of this change in Search Engine Roundtable Forums just a couple hours ago. He said, "On some of the keywords that I follow that normally show 4 ads above the organic results, it's now only three - very consistently." "Also, the ads look simultaneously more compact (closer together), and yet bigger (the URLs are now on a line by themselves)," he added.

Is Yahoo taking the Google route of reducing the number of ads to improve search quality and click-through rate?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Some webmasters will kill for a top ranking. Others will get it when they least expect it. A WebmasterWorld member talks about how he's ranking above Amazon for his brand new site which has already been fully indexed. He wonders if this is a mistake, since he's doing so much better than the bigger competition.

That's a good question. There are a few factors that can influence high rankings. The obvious culprits include domain age (it may be a new site under his ownership, but was it a high-authority site under another's ownership?) and inbound links (if the content is good, you'll get good links, right?).

Then there's the other side of the coin. Perhaps the guy isn't ranking so well after all but his personalized results are showing up. Don't forget; you need to turn off personalized web search in order to see what the world is seeing. To do that, append &pws=0 to your search results like this (or log out of your Google account).

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

While everyone talks about Google's market dominance and how it's taken over the world (naturally, because it's good at what it does), most forget that like any business, Google has made erroneous decisions as a company from time to time. PC World explores these flubs, flops, and failures in an article that proves to be a very informative read.

Some examples of Google mishaps include Google X (a homage to Mac OS X which mysteriously disappeared after a single day of being public), Google Video Player, Google Catalog, Google Web Accelerator, Google Answers, Google Coupons, Google Voice Search, Google Viewer, Google Checkout (especially related to a party-crashing incident), and Orkut (at least in the US).

The question is: do you guys really remember most of these? Probably not. With success will ultimately come failure, but you can certainly gain from learning what works and what doesn't.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

A very cool post by Web Professor was published yesterday about the 11 1 most important stories about Sphinn ever. The post goes into detail about who the big community participants are, what the best posts about Sphinn are, and what kind of Sphinn discussions there have been since its launch last year.

This post goes to show the power of "social" media and how we're all united by a community bond of some sort. Plus, it's a great post that illustrates that many people share information about what they're passionate about.

If you're new to Sphinn, it's a great read. If you're old to Sphinn, it's also a great read. The links (111!) will tell you the ins and outs of who and what Sphinn is all about.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

A Google Groups thread has discussion around how this webmaster should handle redirecting its web visitor to a localized version of their site, based on the IP address information.

Since I recently wrote a comprehensive article at Search Engine Land on How Search Engine Redirect Users To Country-Specific Sites, I thought this post was particularly interesting.

Googler, JohnMu, was first to respond to the webmaster's question. He explained that as a user, he wants the option to either see a localized version or a different version. John said, "I live in the German-speaking part of Switzerland but often browse the web in English. If I go to a search engine and search with English queries for English pages, I do not want to be redirected to a translated version which the website thinks I would like to see." For John, he would think that you should "allow the user to switch [to any version] with a simple link."

On the SEO front, John explains that if you offer these localized version via a different URL (unlike how Microsoft's Live Search works, interesting), then the search engine will pick up the content and then aid the different regions to go to your localized version for you. Let me quote John:

This allows our crawlers to find those pages and - should the user accidentally search for and click on the wrong one - lets the user move to a different language version on demand as well. By allowing our crawlers to crawl the various versions, we'll be better suited to suggest those URLs to users from those regions as well.

Of course there are many advantages to using IP geo-location techniques for your web visitor. But you need to judge the pros and cons of your specific site's goals and decide what works best.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

I am a heavy Google Reader user and while I was checking my feeds on my iPhone at the Verizon Wireless store (ironic) last night, I noticed that Google Reader began bugging out. Also, throughout the day, the "unread" count was higher then what was being actually shown as unread, earlier in the day.

Both issues resolved themselves after a few hours. I did survive without clean access to my RSS feeds for an hour or so. But I was not the only one to notice.

We have dozens threads at Google Groups, the largest Google Groups has most of the complaints.

Roger, the Google Reader Guide in the group, said:

As you've noticed, Reader experienced some temporary outages last night. We've been working through the night to fix the issues and all the major problems should now be resolved. There may still be some features not working properly, so please let us know if you notice anything else amiss as we continue to investigate.

Thanks and sorry for the inconvenience.

The bulk of the messages came throughout the day. I believe it was all fixed by 9pm (EST) last night.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

If you login to your Google AdWords account and visit the billing summary page, under "my account," you will notice that the page looks different. Google's FAQ page says they have updated the page for three reasons, "transparency, flexibility, and performance."

The new billing page looks like this:

The old billing page, taken from here, looked like this:

The main changes are:

• Advertising costs are broken out by day
• One invoice is created at the beginning of each month showing all advertising costs and payments from the previous month
• Highlights were added at the top of the rows showing balance or next bill date, your last payment info and your payment methods.
• Costs are broken down by day
• Overdelivery credits are clearly displayed now
• Your running balance is clearer
• Better and more flexible date range options
• Collapsible totals feature for monthly views
• New filter by charges, payments, adjustments, and taxes
• A break out by Offline ad views (like print or tv ads)
• Monthly invoice print option
• Speed was improved
• Faster updates, from six hours to less than an hour.

There were more changes, but this is a major change to the AdWords Billing Summary page.

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: May 21, 2008"

I didn't know that being electrocuted by solar panels was even possible, but apparently it is. Solar Dave made a really cute video about how it all went down:

The idea behind the video, as Dave explains, was to illustrate that Google is starting to see that linkbait isn't all white hat and that there may be more "shades of gray" than assumed possible before (I guess anything can turn into black hat SEO if you think about it).

In the case of this piece of "linkbait," a few forum members were taken aback by hearing that Matt Cutts died :( I can hear that. What would we do without Matt's sunshine in our lives?

Is this viral marketing? It could be within the community who knows who Matt is. But most people don't, so it's mostly just linkbait among those who know Matt.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn

In a three hour video (but thankfully, there's a slides-only version that only features 162 slides), Google takes us through a walk of its search factory and the various components of the big search engine, from Alerts to Book Search to Experimental Products (Google Labs) and more. In the slides, you can see that Google looks to expound upon image search (and reflects upon its growth), especially with regards to image ads which are on the horizon. Google also talks about Google News (specifically how it's geotargeted) and Google Finance (how the data is visualized). Additionally, geographic targeting is important. Specifically, Google aims to use user generated content to annotate the planet. The video also talks about Universal Search and the importance of mixed results, particularly due to the growth of video.

There's a lot more, and the information is comprehensive and informative. With Google's predominance on the Internet, forum members are questioning whether Google will acquire any broadcast companies in the future (especially due to its emphasis on video and visual elements). Forum members are also interested in knowing about Google's interest in geotagging.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Search with Microsoft Live, get cash back. That's the new mantra behind Microsoft's Live Search Cash Back program, which has its own dedicated homepage and works like this: you search for a product using Live, buy the product through the search engine, and then save. The site explains "Every time you make a qualifying purchase, we'll send you an email to confirm your Live Search cashback savings. When your cashback account reaches a balance of at least $5, you can claim your cold, hard cash."

Here's a screenshot of the interface:

It's an interesting system, though it does show the great lengths Microsoft is taking to get a share of the search pie. Will it work? I think it could, as long as people are using the search engine regularly for this purpose and if they're finding what they're searching for.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Watch Forums and additional blogosphere discussion is at Techmeme.

In September 2005, we reported that members were seeing image ads with Google Image Results. It seems that this is on the horizon and will be tested (and possibly rolled out) anytime now. As Bloomberg reports, "Display ads may work better with image searches because they seem more natural to people looking for pictures" (according to Marissa Mayer).

There's no date on when this will be rolled out, but since Google can monetize image search, it may happen pretty soon, I'd imagine.

Would you be receptive to image ads in image search results?

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld

Google's Udi Manber, VP of engineering, writes a very informative piece on the Official Google Blog about search quality at Google and the steps they're taking to make sure that Google's search quality is optimal. He explains that it has taken the engineering teams over 1000 man hours to develop without any stopping, and that's because the goal is to "improve the user experience." In this regard, there are a number of elements to search quality that are discussed.

Ranking is one of the more important elements about search quality, and Manber explains the difficulty of ensuring proper rank, particularly because of language ambiguity. The ranking algorithm utilizes PageRank and other elements (but Manber suggests that he won't give too much information away; this information is Google's "crown jewels" and providing too much would mean that the system could be gamed).

There's also a team that evaluates the effectiveness of Google, especially in different languages. Another team works on features and the user interface. Yet another team fights web spam. In other words, there are a lot of different pieces of the Google pie.

Matt Cutts takes this article to another level and illustrates the team environment. (I guess a cloud is better than pie.)

For someone who has an interest in the variety of teams working together to improve upon the Google experience, the post by Manber is informative. I suggest you read it. :)

Additional discussion is at Techmeme and forum discussion continues at Search Engine Watch.

Remember the floating four story I wrote a week or so ago? Basically how a search result would be in the fourth position and then go so a lower position, then come back to four and then go back again to a lower position?

Well, the forum discussion has continued at WebmasterWorld and Tedster, WebmasterWorld's administrator, has posted a theory. I am a big fan of Tedster, so I wanted to share his thoughts with you guys.

Tedster asks, "is size of site a potentially big ranking factor?" "Then other factors would help Google decide which of the smaller sites deserve a shot at position #4 (or wherever they are currently testing.)," he adds.

He shared some of the data he used to suggest this theory:

Many members are supporting his theory, but again, this discussion is what makes SEO a wonderful place.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Back in February, I wrote a story named Upper Case & Lower Case Searches May Return Different Google Search Results. Since then, the discussion on that topic has died off.

But in the past month or so, more and more people have been talking about how a Google search results will change based on if you use upper case letter or lower case letters. I have received emails, saw blog posts and watched thread after thread pop up about this weird Google behavior.

Google still clearly states that case has no impact on search results. From the horses mouth:

Google searches are NOT case sensitive. All letters, regardless of how you type them, will be understood as lower case. For example, searches for george washington, George Washington, and gEoRgE wAsHiNgToN will all return the same results.

But yet we continue to see reports about Google being case sensitive.

So I decide to go back to my trusted search on big blue pineapple chair and compare it to the same search but in word case, i.e. Big Blue Pineapple Chair. Guess, what, even though both on my searches were on the same data center, i.e. 208.67.217.231, the results differed. Here are screen shots of the first page results, at the bottom.

Lower Case Version:

Upper Case Version:

The difference is the cartoonbarry.com vs. extrasformovies.com results - yes I am not signed in, and I am using a search that turns personalized search off.

So, Google, tell us what is up.

New forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

First spotted by John, a new Googler has been added to the Google Webmaster team, to help webmasters in Google.

The Googler's name is Chark, he goes by Char, and he is part of the Search Quality team. He promises to help put in the Google Webmaster Help Group.

In a post, introducing himself at Google Groups, he shared some of his personal stuff:

My foray into webmastering began with a personal photo gallery site I created years ago, which looks like it is perpetually stuck in the nineties. To redeem myself, I helped my last company bring its website out of the nineties. Currently, I co-author a personal blog and am working on setting up a personal website to host my own music fluff (domain name TBD).

In addition to creating music fluff, I also like listening to all sorts of music, trying different kinds of food, wandering around in general, and learning about people.

Welcome Char, it is great to have you part of the SEM family.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

It looks that Google might be conducting some sort of major update. Yes, I know - Google is constantly updating, constantly adding content and "improving" the algorithm. But some changes make a bigger impression in the forums then others.

I have noticed recent discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums with people either complaining or praising a major shift in their rankings over the past 24 hours.

First post came in via WebmasterWorld at around 4:30am (EST), saying "There seems to be a roll back now... seeing the same old results for a few highly competitive 2 word keywords." Several members support his findings, even senior member, nuevojefe, added:

Very interesting changes I'm seeing. Major swings in a high traffic niche, but not much different in other niches I watch.

Seems new sites of a certain criteria are being allowed to jet up more though. Surprised to see new sites able to be propped up by network linking.

The DigitalPoint Forums thread has members who are commenting about a loss in traffic. Some members have posted charts showing a major drop in traffic, possibly due to a Google update.

So I think we have sort of major Google update going on.

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: May 20, 2008"

Matt Cutts wrote a blog post yesterday about how Google is noticing reciprocal link exchange requests and how the sender of the particular email tried to circumvent Google's "filters" by including a request for a link exchange within in image (so that Google couldn't "read" it). Since people are quick to report such infractions to Google, they know about it.

On that note, how do you compete with those who buy links in bulk? WebmasterWorld members attempt to tackle this question. Some typically avoid taking upon clients who are working in competitive industries unless there is money to be spent. Others look for relevant link exchange options (provided that the webmaster who is asked to give a link actually is receptive to providing the link).

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn and WebmasterWorld.

Mike Grehan wrote an article on the future of SEO and shared his thoughts on Search Engine Watch Forums. Perhaps most importantly, Mike talks about the personalization of search among different verticals and how social search will have a predominant impact on the future of search in the next five years. He notes in the forum discussion that there's an advantage (perhaps an unfair one at that) because of some people having access to the web over others and poses the following question:

Should search engine ranking algorithms continue to be based only on the data they have about people who happen to have web sites and therefore have text pages and can link to others. Or is the voice and opinion of the end user now being heard much more clearly?

It's an interesting dilemma, but I think having a website means that you have a vested interest in the growth of the Internet (whereas if you didn't maintain/own a website, your motives are different). But that's just me. What about you?

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Yesterday's big news was about the launch of Google Health which right now is likened to a "notebook" of your medical records (gender, age, medications, doctors, etc.)

Here's a screenshot of the portal once you're logged in:

Of course, the issue of privacy has come up in several forum discussions. It's enough that Google has other information about so many millions of users, but health is a step too far.

beu at Search Engine Watch Forums points out something interesting, though:

Some residents of New Orleans have no medical records as a result of Katrina! I'd love to know the adoption rate of Google Health in the State of Louisiana as compared to the rest of the US.

It'd be nifty to see if Louisiana adopted this system and made it mainstream.

Additional blog discussion is at Techmeme and forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums, Search Engine Watch Forums, and DigitalPoint Forums.

We rarely ever hear of Ask.com updating their search index or algorithm. We rarely ever hear of Webmasters complaining or praising Ask.com about a recent change in the search results. But we have a solo post at WebmasterWorld from a member who has been there since 2002. The post says he has noticed a major change with Ask.com's search results.

WebmasterWorld paladin said:

Seeing some significant changes in the SERPs here. Most are positive for my sites which makes me a happy camper.

I have not seen any reports from any other forum on an Ask.com update. Also, the last time I reported about an Ask.com update was in October 2007.

I personally have been watching Ask.com over the last week or two for improvements in their index depth and freshness. I have been also testing that index for improvements in their query processor. The tests I have been running have continued to be very disappointing, to say the least. This comes after a year since announcing the Ask.com's new search technology, code named Edison.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google announced that AdSense (the AdWords content network) now supports the use of third-party ad serving techniques and technologies. I am not sure if most publishers understand the significance of this. Many large companies would not even think about placing an ad on a publisher's site without being able to track the results of those ads (impressions and clicks) through a third-party ad serving intermediary. Got that?

What this now brings to AdSense are major agencies and advertisers with large budgets, who are now more willing to dip their ad budgets in Google's content network. More advertisers with bigger budgets means more money for AdSense publishers.

There are a few requirements for these ads to show up on AdSense publishers sites.

(1) You must opt into image ads
(2) Enable advertisers to target your AdSense channels
(3) Opt into placement targeting

If you have all three, then you can now enable advertisers to place these ads on your site.

Will the ads look different? Yes, they shockingly won't contain the 'Ads by Google' text near the ad. Even more of a reason for larger advertisers to use the Google content network.

Will the ads act differently? Yes, they will open in a new window as opposed to staying in the same window.

Which third party tracking vendors are certified?

(A) North America: Ad servers include DoubleClick DFA and Mediaplex/ValueClick
(B) North America: Rich media include DoubleClick Rich Media, Eyeblaster, EyeWonder, Interpolls, Pointroll, and Unicast.
(C) North America: Research include Dynamic Logic/Safecount, Factor TG, IAG, and InsightExpress.

You may need to update your privacy policy to include more details about these third-party tracking techniques. More on that over here.

Can you block these ads? Many you can by using the competitive ad filter, but the third-party Flash ads you cannot block without contacting Google.

Here are three videos from Google on 3rd-party ad serving to help explain it better. It is a three part series by one of our favorite Google personalities, Maile:

Forum discussion at Google Groups, Cre8asite Forums and WebmasterWorld.

A week ago, we reported that Google Analytics had a data processing issue, which caused the reports to have missing data. A very limited amount of data was lost forever.

GAnalyticsAdvisor, Google's official Google Analytics representative updated us in the WebmasterWorld thread that the reports should now have the correct data. GAnalyticsAdvisor said:

Our re-load took a bit longer than previously expected. Please check now, as data has been restored.

However, when I visit the home page of Google Analytics (after you login), I still see the notification that "Analytics Processing Delay from April 30th to May 5th." In addition, no one in the forum thread confirmed Google's response, even though it seems people had about 22 hours to respond and confirm the analytics data issue.

Personally, I really did not see a drop in traffic on my sites in Google Analytics. So maybe it is hard to confirm the issue on both fronts.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update from Google: Google informed me the data loss recovery is complete. The data loss "was confined to roughly 5% of all data and 10% of e-commerce data," a Google rep told me.

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: May 19, 2008"

Yesterday's news was all about Microsoft's new deal with Yahoo, which won't require an acquisition, which was dropped earlier this month, according to CNN, CNET, and other sources. Instead, the goal will be to keep the value of Yahoo high and make the shareholders happy. A number of people, including Loren Baker, assume that Microsoft may end up going for Yahoo's search technology. We'll see how this plays out.

There's mixed reviews for this new partnership (which forum members are hoping for rather than an acquisition). One goal is to take down the "Google monopoly" as one forum member puts it. But others believe that it may end up negatively impacting Microsoft since any investment would be a waste of money. Of course, others disagree with that entirely since Yahoo is one of the most popular sites on the Internet today.

What will we expect to see in 20 years if this goes through? (Heck, 20 years is a really long time. Look what has happened in 15 years!)

I guess it's hard to tell whether this is going to be a good investment or not, as there's a variety of opinions on the subject matter. Still, if it's a bad investment, it may be a risk people are willing to take, and if it's a good one, it may be "the deal of a lifetime" as one forum member suggests. Time will only tell.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Bill Slawski has written up another interesting piece about how search engines substitute other search terms for yours depending on past user behavior. Of course, this is related to a patent he discovered that was filed by Yahoo.

Bill explains how this works:

Let’s say that a large number of people who search for the term intellectual property then go on to search for the term patent attorney with their very next search, or within the same search session.

The search engine log files would uncover that such an association exists, and the search engine might explore how common it is for searchers to search for that second phrase. If it happens frequently enough, the search engine may start suggesting patent attorney as a suggested search to searchers along with a display of search results for the term intellectual property.

Therefore, it's important to take these other substitutions into consideration when optimizing your page, according to a Cre8asite Forums post. It is helpful to look at the various suggestions and optimize accordingly.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

Less than a month ago, a lawsuit ruling determined that META tags are "immaterial" -- at least within Google, so forum members are wondering how important it is to add the meta description to web pages. Is there any benefit to this or should Google pick the best snippet based on users' queries?

Well, considering that Google isn't the only search engine out there, adding a meta description helps other search engines like Live, Yahoo, and Ask. Further, as forum member tedster notes, "Google will still use their own snippet for some query terms, if the snippet team's algo decides that the meta description isn't good enough for that query."

Another forum member makes an interesting case regarding not using meta descriptions at all. The more popular pages will probably come up for a variety of different searches, and as such, it's important to keep an open mind to see what comes up in the results:

Higher level pages are more likely to attract a broader keyword set and therefore by excluding a meta description you are allowing Google to highlight the term that the user searched on, increasing perceived relevancy. This ensures that if Google returns the page in the SERPS, the keyword will appear in the meta description, which may not have been the case if you had not included it in the meta description. Although you would think that if Google could return a snippet with the keyword they would default to that instead of the meta description.

That's an interesting observation.

Other people have said that they're starting to shift their meta descriptions to the title because Google no longer emphasizes the meta description. I'm not sure that's a good thing because if title tags are the next spam target, Google might start shifting its emphasis to something else.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread discusses the inherent benefits of typing URLs with capital letters. A few thoughts come to mind:

1. It's possible that search engines actually put emphasis on capitalized letters, though this is unconfirmed.
2. It stands out for readers

But there is a big con that you must be aware of, and that's the fact that there's a concern about duplicate content on different casing. This is especially true for IIS servers which will return "200 OK" status on all different types of casing. Tedster notes that "One big downside to using mixed case in the filepath is that you can easily get multiple urls indexed that point to the same content, just because of case differences."

A few people have experimented with capitalized letters (also known as Pascal Casing) and have determined that it helps with Google AdWords through A/B testing.

It may help improve your brand, though, but sometimes you want to make it look like a URL and not a brand name.

It's an interesting discussion and one that should be read at WebmasterWorld.

Branko at SEO Scientist wrote Anatomy of a Google Filter/Penalty (or how not to do nofollow PR sculpting). In that post, he goes through a specific client who saw signs of the minus X penalty (i.e. -6, -30, -60, -950 and so on).

Branko summarized the pattern he saw, and actions he took, via a chart:

The full size version is available at the post, but as you can see, he tried to isolate certain factors. His observations led to a few theories, including that the filter is not a complete ban of a site, it is country specific to the US, it appears to be keyword sensitive, and both on and off page factors seem to trigger it. Based on his observations, Branko offers several pieces of advice.

For more details on this, I recommend checking out his post.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion about how one should handle inter-linking a network of sites. You said interlinking a network of sites! In some cases, it make sense to link a property of sites to each other.

For example, IAC, which owns Ask.com, also owns TicketMaster.com. If you scroll to the bottom of the site, you can see many of the other internet properties IAC owns. That includes Expedia, Lending Tree, Hotels.com, Hotwire and many more:

Is this wrong? Often not. It depends on your intent. But as SEOs are more concern about their intent being misconstrued by the search engines. So they often might take steps to keep the links but some how show to search engines, you don't have to count these links when looking at the link popularity component. You can do this easily by slapping on a nofollow attribute. But some SEOs don't want to add nofollows for several reasons.

WebmasterWorld administrator, Tedster, says, he uses iFrames for this situation. Tedster then explains why and what he uses iFrames for:

I use iframed urls for sets of "customer service" utility links, for example. That helps to sculpt PageRank without joining the "Cult of the Nofollow" ;)

I also commonly use iframes for large chunks of boilerplate text, such as legal disclaimers. I prefer having some indexable text, rather than using an image file and iframes have served quite well.

Got to love Tedster's "Cult of the Nofollow". In any event, this is the first thread I have seen a while on using an iFrame for this purpose.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The very controversial Google AdWords Automatic Matching feature has been confirmed to be expanding to other advertisers as early as tomorrow.

In short, automatic matching is a new algorithm used to automatically target new keywords, not included in an advertiser's set keyword list, in order to use up all of the advertisers allocated budget. So if you are advertising for [Adidas shoes] and you have $10 left in your ad budget for the day, Google might decide to show your ads for search terms as far off as [slippers]. Like, I said above, there is a lot of controversy around it.

Google admitted that they will be expanding the very limited beta, as early as tomorrow. In both a WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums thread, an official AdWords representative posted giving more insight into the expanded launch.

The Google representative clarifies that the expansion of this program will be "truly tiny." Explaining that "automatic matching" will not be going live for all advertisers, but will be expanded to a select number of advertisers, as a continued test of the program. Here is a quote from the statement:

What is happening: Automatic Matching has been in beta for some time as regular readers of this forum will know - and starting on May 20th the beta will be expanded somewhat. Even with the expansion of the beta, the number of advertisers who will see this beta option in their account is truly tiny.

Again, to be very clear Automatic Matching goes not go live 5/20.

The Google representative said they will be back today to post more details and address more concerns.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums.

Update: We have more information from Google on this news. An AdWords representation said that those in the very limited beta will be notified on May 20th but the ads wont go live until June 3rd. They have all that time to opt out of automatic matching.

For the purposes of this limited beta, the feature is enabled by default. Please note, however, that automatic matching won't start running in these new beta accounts until June 3rd.

Advertisers being offered the beta option may opt out as early as May 20th (and, of course, at any time thereafter) - and, again, they will not receive any traffic before June 3rd.

Full instructions on how to opt out are provided in the email they will have received. Basically, though, advertisers who wish to opt out will want to uncheck a check box on the 'Edit Campaign Settings' page of each of their campaigns. They will want to do this before June 3rd if they want no automatic traffic at all - or at any point thereafter if they are not pleased with the actual results once they've seen them.

For more details on Automatic Matching, see here.

A WebmasterWorld thread has a discussion around why Google might not allow you to add more then three AdSense ad units per page.

WebmasterWorld's wyweb, a senior member, has a great theory. He explains that, imagine your web site is your house. Would it be fair to your neighbors to paste billboards all over your house and lawn? Not necessarily.

Zoning laws still apply. You can try to have them changed or you can move to a neighborhood with more favorable (to you) laws.

Is Google providing some type of zoning law for ads on the Internet? I am not sure. I think it might have to do more about ad inventory. If you have a page about a big blue pineapple chair (I love going back to that post), then how many relevant ads can Google possibly show? Nine ads seem like a lot already and typically, Google will show 9 or 12 ads, at most, on a web search page, query dependent. So, I would think it is more about inventory control.

Overall, you can do very well with three ad units. Just test your placement and color schemes and see what works best for you.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

In the past week, we covered Mother's Day logos, Yahoo redirecting users to localized versions of their home page and Yahoo showing the location of an ad to searchers. Google is testing a green user interface on the search results and directory. SEOs are in deep fear of link penalties by competitors. Finally, Yahoo dropped the ambassador program. To win, tell me the most important topic from my video by commenting below at SERoundtable.com.

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:

• Mother's Day '08 from Google, Yahoo, Dogpile, Ask.com & Search Industry
• UK Based Yahoo Users Redirected to Yahoo UK
• Yahoo Now Showing Geo-Location Under Search Ads
• Google Testing Green Backgrounds & Turns Directory Ads Green
• Most SEOs Believe Competitors Can Hurt Your Google Rankings
• Of Course Google Indexes Content About Vodka & Hard Liquor
• Yahoo Drops Search Marketing Ambassador Program
• Google Celebrates the Anniversary of the First Laser

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.

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: May 16, 2008"

Another Friday, another rainy day. For what it's worth, though, today is a special day, as we are celebrating the first laser. I don't know if lasers are viewable through cloudy skies, though. Do you?

Mother's Day

First things first. Did you have a happy Mother's Day? (Did you even surf the internet on Mother's Day?) We did. By the way, Chris Boggs, the Search Engine Roundtable design was inspired by our graphic designer, Mabe. Glad you liked it. :)

The First Laser

Today is the 48th anniversary of the first laser. How did I know that? Google told me. Interesting logo choice for sure.

UK Yahoo Users Getting Geo-Targeted Search Page

Want to visit Yahoo.com while you're in the UK? You may be directed to uk.yahoo.com instead. Does this have anything to do with geo-targeted Yahoo ads? It's possible, as Barry suspects.

What Background Do You Like Better?

Are you a fan of green? Blue? Yellow? Well, it looks like Google is testing out green backgrounds on the sponsored results. I'm not sure I like it; it's a little "bolder" than the standard yellow. In my opinion, it sticks out like a sore thumb even though it's still a pastel green.

Get Creamed by Your Competitor?

According to a recent poll we had on Search Engine Roundtable, most SEOs believe that their competition can hurt their rankings. My question: are you saying this from experience or are you paranoid?

Google Will Let You Buy Alcohol

Okay, just kidding. Google has a rule that disallows hard liquor to be sold, and guess what, they sell materials related to vodka and hard liquor, but since their policy prohibits indexing hard liquor content, Google is not indexing the actual alcohol itself. If you want to buy Vodka on the internet, go to another search engine. Better yet, just go to your local liquor store, flash them your ID, and you'll be fine.

Is the Yahoo Search Ambassador Program Gone?

Forum members have spotted notifications that the Yahoo Search Ambassador program is being discontinued. Why now? Does it have something to do with Google?

Tomorrow: Google AdWords System Maintenance

If you use any tools based on the Google AdWords API, bear in mind that the Google AdWords system will be down for a few hours tomorrow, May 17th. That's okay. Go out and have fun. It's the weekend, after all.

Are you a developer? You may be interested in SearchMonkey, Yahoo's new open developer platform, which was released to all developers yesterday.

The concept behind SearchMonkey is to empower developers to build applications that increase relevancy of search results. Developers can build Enhanced Results or Infobars under the Search Monkey API which can pull data from CitySearch, StumbleUpon, eBay, Epicurious, and more. According to the announcement, "Enhanced Results replace the current standard results with a richer display. All the links in the Enhanced Results must point to the site to which the result refers. Infobars are appended below search results and can include metadata about the result, related links or content, or links for user actions (such as adding a movie to a Netflix queue)."

Yahoo is also holding a contest that enables developers to create their own tools using the new API. Winners can receive up to $10,000.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

An interesting phenomenon is occurring within Yahoo Search Marketing that has been expressed pretty intensely by affected advertisers at WebmasterWorld. According to the impacted advertisers, the quality of their campaigns have gone down because of false impressions that have been generated for long tail keywords that were often never searched upon. In the case of one advertiser, his ad campaign served nearly 120,000 new impressions (triple what it was before) because of these obscure keywords in the campaign. After digging into his statistics, he disabled these low-performing keywords, but the damage had already been done, and the overall campaign effectiveness was reduced.

In other words, "a competitor found a low traffic keyword that [was being] advertise[d] on and searched tens of thousands of times to skew your CTR, thus lowering the quality of [the] entire campaign."

Only two Yahoo PPC users have been impacted by this shift thus far. According to one Yahoo rep, it is probably due to "market fluctuations," but typically, those who run the campaigns themselves would be most abreast of any market fluctuations (am I right?) It seems, to both affected individuals that there may be something else going on here, perhaps in the sense of fraud.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

If you've ventured to Google today, you may be wondering what in the world that logo resembles.

Fortunately, all you need to do is click on the logo for the answer. Today, Google is celebrating the anniversary of the first laser, which, according to Wikipedia, was demonstrated on May 16, 1960. Today, then, marks the 48th anniversary of the laser.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

Google updates their search algorithms and indexes fairly often. Results change all the time. The goal for Google is to make this transparent for searchers by providing relevant results. But when a change happens, typically the webmaster will notice and may be impacted strongly by the update. So what are the Google processes and thoughts behind an update?

Google's JohnMu has an interesting post at a Google Groups thread in response to a webmaster being upset with a recent change in which results Google is showing for a particular term. In JohnMu's response, he explains why Google makes changes, for how long the changes may appear and so on. Let me explain that we do not learn much about how the changes work technically, but we do learn the thought process behind Google making these changes.

The premise behind all Google algorithm and index updates are to "improve the users' experience on our [Google's] sites." Google's "engineers are constantly working on" that, day in and day out. So Google is often trying "new things and run experiments" to collect data to help Google come up with new ideas on how to "improve" the search experience.

John explains that these "experiments" and "new things" can "run for a day or for many months." The thing is, these experiments "generally evolve over time," so although the experiment may do one thing, it can evolve to do other things (hence the constant Google flux). These changes to the experiments are "mainly based on that data" Google collects as they run tests.

Google is constantly changing their algorithm because "world around us is changing
rapidly, our users' expectations are changing equally," as John explains. John adds that "sometimes," these experiments can "lead to changes which not everyone likes." "Not every site can be listed in all search results, or even in the top 10," John adds.

I personally don't have much to add to this. It all makes logical sense, but I thought it would be good to document and have for later.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Google's Malware Review form, which was added back in August of last year had some technical issues this week. First reports came via Google Groups at about 1am on May 15th.

Webmasters trying to utilize the form received a "oops, not working" error when they tried to access it. Google partners with StopBadware.org for malware detection and handling. Reportedly, www.stopbadware.org was also having issues at the same time and they were reporting errors that read "500 - Internal Server Error" throughout the day.

Googler, JohnMu, suggested that webmasters can also submit Malware Reviews directly at StopBadware.org at this form, if the Google form does not work.

The Google form is now working, about 24 hours later. I am actually amazed at the number of complaints about the form not working. It seems like the form is used more often then I would have thought. JohnMu said, if you submitted a review, they likely re-submitted it anyway, but double check to be sure. He said:

We went through all the failed requests and submitted them again, but you may want to double-check your sites just to be sure.

Here is a picture of the malware review form:

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

The iCrossing Blog posted screen captures of Google experimenting with green in the Google user interface. In addition, Google has changed from the yellow background color for their ads to green, within the Google Directory. iCrossing actually reported this two weeks ago but I I missed it until I spotted a Search Engine Watch Forums thread on his findings.

Here is a screen capture of a search on ipods at the Google Directory:

I see that green user interface myself, but I don't see the green look at a normal Google web search, like iCrossing showed for a search on car insurance.

Here is what I see:

Here is what iCrossing sees:

It may be that iCrossing has a browser cache issue from moving from the directory to web search? Maybe? I am not sure.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A Google Groups thread reports that the numbers reported from the traffic estimator tool within Google's AdWords API interface is reporting different numbers based on the IP calling the data.

The AdWords advertiser said that depending on which IP is requesting the traffic data, Google will show a different traffic estimation for the same keyword.

For example, if the AdWords advertiser wants to know how much traffic to expect for the keyword [car], if he/she uses the API to request the data, the data might be wrong. If the API is requesting the data from IP address xx.xx.xx.xxx, it might return one number. If the API is requesting the same data from IP address yy.yy.yy.yyy, it might return a different number.

Jeff Posnick from the AdWords API Team said he will investigate the issue:

Thanks for letting us know; our engineering team is currently investigating to see if there is anything that might have changed recently that could lead to varying results from the Traffic Estimator API calls. I'll update this thread with what I hear back.

I'll update you when I hear more information.

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: May 15, 2008"

United States ISP Charter Communications announced that it will start looking at your surfing behavior to find you relevant ads.

While continuing to deliver the same fast and reliable Internet service you’ve always received, innovative new technology in the field of online advertising enables Charter to provide you with an enhanced online experience that is more customized to your interests and activities. As a result of this service, the advertising you typically see online will better reflect the interests you express through your web-surfing activity. You will not see more ads – just ads that are more relevant to you.

While Charter is probably the first ISP to do this, it's already being contested as a heavy invasion of privacy as well as something heavily questionable since any ISP can swap out AdSense IDs for their own and monetize off their members' clicks.

Will anything be done? That's the question. Will Charter get away with it? Perhaps websites will need to block Charter Communications from overriding their own ads (and consequently "defacing a third party website") -- by not letting Charter in at all.

Legally, this can be a problem as well. It may be copyright infringement if they're taking a website served by another company and just replacing ads.

But this may also cause another problem for publishers: if this gains traction, more users will start using ad-blocking solutions that may not necessarily bode well for those who are trying to make a buck off of their hard-earned work. As a statement to Charter, they may install some software to circumvent the ads, but other people will end up suffering as a result.

Overall, the forum members are appalled and think that it won't pass in a court of law. I'm not a Charter Communications user (thankfully), but I'd hope they don't get away with this myself.

Forum discussion continues (and it's long and more informative than this post!) at WebmasterWorld.

Need help with Google AdWords? If you're afraid of picking up the phone and find email to take too long, you have another alternative: live chat.

This URL may be specific to the UK (or may fit both UK and US queries), but if you ever have a quick question related to Google AdWords, you can click here to start your chat with an AdWords representative.

Life just got a lot easier. :)

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

David Eaves reports that UK based users who go to yahoo.com are now being redirected from the .com version to the Yahoo UK domain.

David said this is brand new behavior from Yahoo. 24 hours earlier, if a UK internet user went to Yahoo.com, it would keep them on Yahoo.com. Now, Yahoo is sending UK users off to Yahoo UK.

I honestly have a feeling this has to do with Yahoo Now Showing Geo-Location Under Search Ads from two days ago. Yahoo told me that they rolled out that feature last "week with the roll out of a new “geo labels” feature." I would not be surprised if the same geo-technology was applied to this.

I am going to post screen captures of this at Search Engine Land, with the behavior of how Yahoo, Google and Live handle UK users.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread is reporting a possible bug with the Yahoo Site Explorer tool.

The webmaster reports that when trying to delete the https URLs of his site from the Yahoo index via Yahoo Site Explorer, it tries to delete the http version as well.

As many SEOs and Webmasters know, having both the https and http version of the same content in the search results can hurt you a bit in terms of link equity. SEOs and Webmasters want to ensure that the links they obtain go specifically to one URL and not two, and since https is a different url then http, search engines may consider them as two different pages with exactly the same content.

So when some webmasters see that Yahoo indexed both pages, they may want to force the removal of one of those pages in Site Explorer. But according to this webmaster, if you try removing https, it will remove the http versions as well.

That brings up an interesting logical observation. If removing an https version, will remove the http version, then maybe Yahoo considers https urls to be the same as http. Maybe https://www.mysite.com/abc.html is the same as http://www.mysite.com/abc.html in the eyes of Yahoo. Maybe all links pointing to the https version are automatically moved over to the http version, in terms of the link popularity component used in Yahoo? Maybe... Or Maybe not?

Maybe, it is a bug in Site Explorer as one member suggests.

I've pointed out to Yahoo that http and https are just different protocols. They suggested that this was a bug in SiteExplorer.

I would think it is a bug and Yahoo doesn't treat https URLs as http.

The quick and easy fix, 301 the https version to http, if possible. But that is not always possible.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

An interesting discussion is taking place at WebmasterWorld on the topic of the robots.txt file. One webmaster did not want his robots.txt file to be indexed by Google, but has no way of delisting in in Google.

The only ways of removing content is Google includes:

• Via meta tags
• Via robots.txt command
• Return a 404 server status
• Use the Remove URLs feature in Webmaster Tools
• Password protect the page
• Some more ideas on how to remove content in Google can be found there.

But if you implement any of those, Google will likely remove your robots.txt, and it won't follow the rules you have implemented in that file. Which can be very upsetting for webmasters. So if you block you block your robots.txt file in your robots.txt file, does Google really see the robots.txt file to block it? (Okay, that was a bit of a joke, but it makes the point).

That brings up the question, should Google list robots.txt files in the search results? In most cases, they do not contain any useful content for searchers. Well, with the exception of Brett Tabke's robots.txt blog, which is a hilarious idea. But outside of that, how is it useful?

As Tedster notes, Google has indexed plenty robots.txt files, should they?

Let me ask you, here is a poll. Should Google display robots.txt files in the search results (even for searches like [inurl:robots.txt filetype.txt])?

There is an "other" option, but try not to use it. :)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: Google's JohnMu commented below explaining how to block your robots.txt file from showing up. News to me, this is excellent news:

Hi guys, there are two ways to block your robots.txt from showing up in search results:

- disallow it in your robots.txt (don't worry, we'll still check it); you can then use the Webmaster Tools URL removal tool to have it taken out of the index if it's indexed.

- use the x-robots-tag HTTP header tag with "noindex"

On the other hand, robots.txt URLs generally would not show up in any search results where you have more relevant pages within your site, so this is probably not something you'd want to spend all too much effort on :-).

Frank Watson, AKA AussieWebmaster, has written a blog post at Search Engine Watch complaining that Google basically indexes content on hard liquor, such as vodka. Frank's specific complaint is that vodka results come up in Google Product Search for a search on vodka. His argument is that since Google AdWords has a policy against showing ads for hard liquor, Google should not show it in the "Google Checkout listing."

I have to be frank with Frank (bad joke). Frank, even though I respect you and we are friends, you are dead wrong in my opinion.

(1) These are not "Google Checkout" listings, it is Google Product Search results.
(2) These are not AdWords results and the rule does not apply to Google Product Search.
(3) Google does not get paid to show the Google Product listings.
(4) People searching in vodka, should see results about vodka. Do you want a blank search page?

Ask Danny says in his comment at Sphinn, if Google Checkout merchants are selling Vodka using Google Checkout as a payment mechanism, then that is against Google Checkout's terms of service, as you can see here. But let's take a look at the merchants who are selling real vodka and accept Google Checkout. Of the first five pages of results, no Google Checkout merchant is selling vodka. They are selling vodka books, vodka DVDs, vodka shot glasses and so on. But not real vodka.

Most of the feedback in the thread supports my opinion on this. But some do argue and take Frank's side.

Forum discussion 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: May 14, 2008"

Dosh Dosh has just written an excellent piece on how to get more Twitter followers. He cites a lot of reasons, but drives it down to the power of your brand. Still, even if you're not a powerful brand, you can benefit from Twitter in the same way that many popular web celebrities do. For example, if you create a tool and promote yourself with it, you can gain a lot of followers. You can also use your website real estate to link to your Twitter profile, such as through banner ads, a Twitter link, and more.

Additionally, your friends can vouch for you or you can run contests. Really, the possibilities are endless and Dosh Dosh touches upon the surface. Your creativity doesn't have to run out with this one.

The article is a must-read (and so is the blog), and forum members think so too. :)

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

There are two Google AdWords updates that readers should take note of.

First, AdWords Editor 5.0.1 has been released. The only change is a small one, but it may help users:

The four tabs for ads (text, image, local business, and mobile) are now grouped under a single 'Ads' tab. This release addresses a space issue that only affected some users. If you aren't experiencing any difficulty, it isn't necessary to upgrade.

Forum members recommend that you export all data before you upgrade because you'll lose your comments from doing the simple upgrade.

On a related note, Google AdWords will have systemwide maintenance on May 17th (Saturday) from 10AM until 2PM PST. Ads will run but the API will not.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and Google Groups.

When you're a webmaster, it's important to check your analytics to ensure that everything there is looking good. You can get a good sense of where your traffic is coming from, be it search traffic or uh, porn site traffic, and you can overall get ideas of where you may be able to improve your website for more visitor consumption.

So when one of our forum regulars checked his statistics, he was a little shocked to see that he's getting more than 3000 visits from a porn site. Is this damaging to his site? Can he get penalized?

Well, the one thing is that he's mentioning that he had 3000 visits, not links. Regardless, if they were links, the only "risk" involved here is that there's a possibility that Google will consider that your site has adult content (even if it doesn't). Of course, if only a small percentage of your inbound links are coming from porn sites, you have a lot less to worry about, but the key here is percentage. There's no exact percentage, here, though. Just keep in mind that if the majority of your links are coming from adult-themed sites, you might trigger an "adult" filter even if your content isn't adult.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

Your Google AdWords display URL may impact your AdWords quality score, but to what extent is the question? A Google Groups thread has discussion on the topic, where AdWordsPro.Jordan, an official Google representative, says that it may have an impact.

Jordan writes, "Display URL can have an effect on your Quality Score." Jordan goes on to explain that it depends, the "effect depends on the context in which your Quality Score is being used and in some cases, the Display URL is not even considered at all." Jordan then links us to a AdWords FAQ page that Google does look at the "historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group." But does Google match the keywords used in the display URL to increase the quality of the ad?

I.e. if you are selling cars, does it help to have the word car in your URL? Jordan explains that since Google bolds the search term in the ad, including the display URL, it may increase your CTR, which helps your quality score. Here is a picture of an ad in Google for a search on car, notice how the word "Car" is bolded in the display URL.

So how should you structure your display URLs? Jordan says the "difference between ‘MyDomain.com/Apple-Juice’ and ‘…/Apple_Juice’ is negligible as we should be able to detect the keyword ‘apple juice’ in either case."

Having the keyword in the display URL can increase your CTR, which has a major influence on your ads Quality Score. But does having the keyword in the URL help Google match on relevancy of your ad and thus increase your quality score?

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Cloud computing is becoming more and more popular amongst webmasters and site owners. In short, companies like Amazon, RackSpace, Google and others are offering hosting services where you upload your content (html, images, videos, pdfs, etc.) to a web server, that web server then replicates that content onto other web servers - so if you think about it, your content is not just on one server, with limited resources and bandwidth, but on dozens (or more) of servers with virtually unlimited bandwidth and resources.

Duplicate content issue? Nope. There is only one URL for that content (unless you generate multiple URLs for the same content yourself) but Amazon S3, for example, doesn't create a duplicate content issue.

One webmaster at WebmasterWorld is complaining that Google Image search doesn't seem to be indexing the images he has hosted over at Amazon S3. But honestly, I think it is just a timing issue for him.

If you conduct a site command on site:s3.amazonaws.com, the location of the S3 content, you will find hundreds of thousands of results returned. If you conduct the same site command search at Google Image search, you find many images from S3 included in the Google Image Search index.

So, it does appear Google is indexing content in the cloud. Specifically from Amazon S3. Does something have to happen on the Amazon side for Google to index your content? I personally cannot find any hints to Amazon blocking any content from search engines on the technical docs or the FAQs. So maybe it is just a timing thing?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Before beginning, I know a few of you will be upset I wrote this at all. But I want to show you the history here.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks what is the story with the noarchive META tag and the likelihood that it may hurt your Google rankings or rankings in other search engines. Let me first give you my opinion for the year 2008. I do not think the noarchive tag will hurt you in any way, unless you are spamming the search engines and hiding something from them. If you are not spamming, then you have nothing to worry about and you can use the noarchive tag for good.

So why is there concern over using the tag and having your rankings drop? As the thread shows, historically, we had reports all the way back in 2001, yes seven years ago, that sites that utilized the noarchive tag saw a drop in their Google ranks. WebmasterWorld's founder and owner, Brett Tabke, said back then, and I quote:

We've tested on 12 domains. All 12 domains dropped in rankings the following update after adding noarchive.

But Brett adds that even back then, there was opposition to the theory.

What about in 2008? Like I said above, I think its a non-issue for virtually all webmasters, of course there are exceptions. The new WebmasterWorld thread discusses just that. As you can see by reading the thread, there is still some concern over using the META tag.

WebmasterWorld's administrator, Tedster, first explains that there is nothing wrong with using the tag. Google has never said it will hurt your rankings. But he does add, that if there are "borderline spammy signs" on your pages, "then a noarchive tag can be one more bad sign and possibly contribute to a ranking problem. Matt Cutts [of Google] has mentioned this several times at conferences."

WebmasterWorld moderator, Receptional Andy, adds to Tedster's warning, saying, "Only a small percentage of sites will use noarchive; so, it puts your site in a slightly different group, and one that is more likely to be closely-scrutinised." But I love how moderator, PageOnResults, follows up to that post saying, "What percentage of Internet surfers actually use the Cached link?" Meaning, just like a small percent of sites use the noarchive tag, so to, a small percent of searches use the cache link.

For those curious, that was the basis of the argument behind Does Using a NoFollow Attribute Raise a Red Flag at Google?

Take Aways:
(1) If you are spamming or it may look like you are spamming, be safe and don't use the noarchive META tag.
(2) Otherwise, go for it!

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Folks at WebmasterWorld have been complaining that their Google Analytics data seemed off for weeks now. Well, they were dead on. If you go to Google Analytics, you will now notice that they have admitted to having data processing issues between the dates of April 30th to May 5th. Google promised to recover most of the data but all some of the e-commerce data between those date ranges are gone. (New Info: Google tells me that those with e-commerce reporting are more impacted by the data loss, but not all e-commerce data is loss.)

Here is the exact notification from Google:

Google Analytics experienced a data processing error from April 30th to May 5th. Almost all of the data has been recovered and is currently being reprocessed. The recovered data will be reflected in your reports within a few days. Please note that a small percentage of data, particularly in the area of e-commerce reporting, was not recoverable from those dates.

The Google Analytics team promised to take "every precaution to prevent such disruptions from occurring again in the future." But what do Analytics users get for the loss? Nothing. Should you expect something? I don't think so - it is a free service. In my opinion, if you need someone to take the heat, you need to pay.

There is no exact ETA on when the data that Google was able to recover will be represented in the reports. So keep an eye out on your stats for those date ranges.

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: May 13, 2008"

At the recent Web 2.0 expo (which I totally wish I went to), Matt Cutts presented on "what Google knows about spam." I actually watched the 9+ minute video (yay me!) and found it informative. Basically, he summarizes a few key points: you should build reputation and trust into your system, you can thwart and frustrate spammers (as they're people), and you should try to make your system hard to infiltrate by spammers.

He even added a slide (so that he wouldn't be "burned in effigy," as he put it), to acknowledge that SEO is not spam and that if you work with whitehat SEOs, they'll be pretty open in terms of what they're doing to optimize your site.

Here's the video, or you can go to Matt's site to watch the video, see the slides, and read the tons of comments he received.

Thanks Matt for the useful presentation. You did a good job. :)

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn and WebmasterWorld.

The Google News Blog has announced that it is now incorporating YouTube videos with Google News results. As the blog post explains, "You'll see the prefix "Video" next to story titles, and clicking on these video links will open a video player directly on the page so you can watch the video right there."

While this was announced in August of 2007, it seems that forum members are starting to see this more often, though not enough. As one member writes:

Our site is a contributer for Google News and I've been tracking our articles by doing a search of "site:example.com". While counting the links, I uncovered some unused JavaScript in the Google News code. It seems to indicate the possibility of YouTube results mixed within Google News results.

It seems that YouTube videos within Google News is still not mainstream. Only a few carriers as of the August post (CBS, Reuters, and some Hearst TV properties) were offering video.

Meanwhile, the forum member suggests that it's possible that YouTube and Google accounts will be merged in the future, as he says that when you sign up for a new YouTube account, you're asked to confirm your Google account data, including Webmaster Tools information. It'd be interesting to see if this is incorporated in Google News results.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday, the Internets were abuzz with news that Google has launched Friend Connect, which appears to be "APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites," according to TechCrunch.

Google's own press release mentions that Friend Connect makes websites social.

The move is applauded by many forum members, who feel that it's great that Google is taking the initiative to make the web more social. Others are a bit skeptical for a variety of reasons, including the fact that if Google's code snippet is on every page on the web, they can learn your habits quickly. Further, another concern lies in the numerous personas assumed by some individuals on the web. If you accept the terms, you're no longer separating your different personalities; instead, the web will be a "big bucket of shared data."

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums.

About a week ago I ran a poll that asked Can Someone Hurt A Competitors Google Rankings With Links? I ran the poll because there is a lot of debate around this topic. So I figured, why not ask you guys and you guys said that yes, competitors can hurt your Google rankings. Here are the details of the poll.

In short, 70% of the 135 responses said that yes, a competitor can hurt my Google rankings. 19% said, no, competitors cannot and 11% said they have no idea either way.

Here is the break down:
:: Yes said 94 respondents or 70%
:: No said 26 respondents or 19%
:: I Have No Idea said 15 respondents or 11%

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

Try it, a search on bowling or lawyers and so on all may return a fourth line to the search ads at Yahoo Search. The fourth line might show a geo-location. Here are some pictures:

If the advertiser is geo-targeting the location of where you are searching for, then the fourth line may show the location. As I explained at BrandVerity Blog on this. This seems to be a new behavior from Yahoo, but yes, Google has been doing this for a while.

Google has been doing this at least since July 2004 and has even tried showing your exact address under the ad, on occassion - which is neat.

Here are Google ads for plumbers:

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Update: Yahoo has sent me a statement:

Yahoo! started labeling the location of ads last just week with the roll out of a new “geo labels” feature. The labeling is displayed primarily for localized queries, like restaurants, florists, mechanics, etc. and is based on the advertiser’s geo targeting preferences and the user’s location of interest.

Google has moved the location of the "Saved Locations" feature in Google Maps. Now, you should see an arrow down on the right hand side of the search box, in Google Maps. Clicking on that arrow will show you your saved locations. It is in that area where you can find the "Edit saved locations" feature, as well.

Here are screen shots to illustrate:

(1) Click on the arrow down:

(2) Will trigger a box to open up below with your saved locations and a way to manage them:

Maps Guide Brian explains in a Google Groups thread:

I understand that it's a bit inconvenient for those of you loyal "Saved Locations" users, but assuming the drop-down arrow remains, any suggestions on how we can improve this feature? I'd love to hear everyone's feedback!

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Dozens and dozens of Google AdSense publishers have reported receiving an email from Google with the subject line, "Important Account Information." The email basically was a reminder to those publishers who have not yet accepted the updated terms and conditions from February.

The issue is, the email was sent to many publishers who have already accepted the new terms and conditions. As AdSenseAdvisor said in the WebmasterWorld thread:

Our team sent an email today with the subject line "Important Account Information", which was a reminder to accept the February changes to the Terms and Conditions. However, we have found that we sent the email to a number of publishers who already agreed to the new terms. We apologize for the confusion caused, and in the next few days we will be sending another message to publishers who received today's email in error.

What is a bit humorous to me, is that Google AdSense recently sent out a mass email to publishers who were not suppose to get that email. In November, Google sent out a tax update email that looked to be a bit "phishy," because it asked publishers to login and update their tax information. The email was sent to publishers who have completed their tax information already, and was a mistake - it should have been sent to only a select number of publishers.

Same here, this email should have been sent to only a select number of publishers who have not yet agreed to the new terms and conditions.

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: May 12, 2008"

A High Rankings Forum member talks about how he has a variety of sites that are all networked on the same server with the same owner. They're not related topically, but there are some subpages where adding links may be of value to search engines and visitors. Would it be bad to link to pages in the same link network? Are there any risks?

It depends, actually. If you're trying to hide the relationship between sites, as one says, it's deceptive and could be dangerous. On the other hand, if you're being open about the relationship and linking where appropriate, it should be fine.

Another option is to add "our link network" to the footer of the site to bring other people to your other pages. It's not as topical, but it may drive traffic. However, that may not necessarily be the kind of traffic or links you're aiming for, so that is totally up to you.

The forum discussion that ensues is informative, so take a read at High Rankings Forum.

Numerous new Google AdSense publishers are reporting that they are trying to get their phone numbers verified with Google AdSense in the UK, but Google is not calling their phone numbers to complete the verification process.

AdSensePro Ashley writes that this seems to be a problem and Google is aware and is working on it.

Thanks for your reports. Please be assured that we are aware that some publishers are currently unable to complete the phone verification process. We are working to fix this issue.

I guess the only solution for now is to wait.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

A forum member pointed out that the Yahoo Ambassador Program signup page is no longer accepting new members. I'm not able to find any news on this story at press time, but I do have a screenshot of the page:

The question remains: is Yahoo dropping Search Marketing altogether? Forum members say they can still log in and see their reports, but that makes sense for the time being. Maybe, instead, they are dissolving the program and focusing more on Google ads. One doesn't know until someone at Yahoo tells us what's going on.

With that said, what's up, Yahoo? :)

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.

A featured WebmasterWorld thread has a fun list of "not to do with your AdSense account because Google might ban you for these things." Here is the list complied by a new member, BrandNewDay:

• Click your own ads
• Asking other people to click your ads
• Joining a program that promises you that people will click your ads if you click their ads
• Telling all your friends about your sites
• Exchanging Adsense code with other people or programs
• Buying and/or operating so called "Adsense ready sites"
• Having sites with only ads and/or search results on them
• Taking/stealing other peoples content without their permission

Of course, with any list like this, there are arguments and discussion about the details.

Later on, WebmasterWorld moderator, httpwebwitch, adds some more:

• allow malware to be installed on your server, or on the machine which is used to access the account
• use any of those "adsense click tracking" JavaScripts
• allow multiple people to log in to the account using the same password
• log in through an anonymizing proxy
• hack into the system and start requesting Adsense ads in raw XML
• mess around with the iframe in which they're displayed
• try to sidestep the cross-domain scripting limitations using a server proxy

The list can go on forever. One thing you should not do, a huge AdSense No-No, in my opinion, is obsess over each rule.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The folks at WebmasterWorld really look at every fine detail when it comes to Google's search behavior. Moderator, Receptional Andy said he noticed that when searching in Firefox at Google, Google would append an HS parameter in the URL, when clicking from search result page to search result page.

For example, conduct a search for anything at Google using the Firefox search bar. Then move your mouse over the next link at the bottom of the Google results. If you look, you will notice an HS parameter. It looks like this:

It is not found in the first search URL, but only when you click next and only when the search is initiated when using the Firefox search bar. Here are the parameters I find after the HS=, cWW, hyB, oyB, WJr, and they keep going.

What does it exactly mean? I am not sure. It seems to be assigned on a page by page level, and only with Firefox.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yahoo's contextual product, Yahoo Publisher Network, Yahoo's Google AdSense product, almost three years later is still failing to compete with Google globally. The Yahoo Publisher Network launched on August 3, 2005, back then as a beta, exclusive to US based publishers only. Still, almost three years later, Yahoo refuses to take YPN globally.

Why am I writing about this now? Well, I guess the three threads per day on "When is YPN coming to [location]? finally got to me. I have asked Yahoo in the past when it would be expanding this product. They never really gave me an answer. I assume it has to do with not wanting to deal with certain issues when it comes to handling publisher details outside the US. Of course, there are some exceptions to the rule but on a whole, they have no expanded the product outside of the US.

Will they ever? I would think so - but right now, doesn't seem like something on the schedule. Will forum members ever stop asking? After three years, the threads keep coming - so I doubt it.

We should really get some type of statement from Yahoo on this. Does Yahoo have plans to launch YPN globally? If so, approximately when? Will the roll out be in specific markets, like you did with the new Panama launch?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Yesterday was Mother's Day and the search engines and search industry blogs/forums had special themes and logos up for the day. Here is a compilation of the logos I found:

Google:

Yahoo (Flash):

Dogpile:

Ask.com

Cre8asite Forums

Search Engine Roundtable

Plus today, Google has a special logo on Google.co.uk for Florence Nightingale:

To view last years Mother's Day logos from the search engine industry, click here. Also, Gary Price has his quick Mother's Day facts.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums, Search Engine Roundtable Forums, and DigitalPoint Forums.

In this special Mother's Day video recap, I discussed that landing page load time is coming to the AdWords quality score algorithm. The AdWords display URL policy is now being enforced. We noticed Google changes in terms of the floating four, minus sixty penalty was confirmed and more Google changes. Google's AdSense and AdWords reporting is messed up. Microsoft gave up on Yahoo. Google loves Comic Sans as a font and much more. To win, watch the video, vote at YouTube and comment here with your YouTube username.

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:

• Google's AdWord Quality Score To Add Landing Page Load Time In June
• Google Finally Begins Enforcing The Display URL Policy
• The Floating Four At Google: Google's Position Four Seems Funky?
• Google Basically Admits to Minus 60 Penalty
• Google Says They Fixed AdSense Reporting Bug But Publishers Not Convinced
• Google AdSense & AdWords Reporting Still Showing Incorrect Data After Over 24 Hours
• Microsoft Backs Off Yahoo & Drops Offer
• Screen Shots of New Google AdSense Font, Comic Sans
• Please Take Our Reader Survey: Win Schwag & Dinner With Me

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.

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: May 9, 2008"

Dear all, it is raining and icky outside, so today's a good day for a buzz roundup. Enjoy. ;)

Landing Page Load Time: Check

Your Google AdWords Quality Score now factors in your landing page load time. If you have a fast landing page, you'll get a great score. In other words, get good hosting!

Google Adwords Enforces Display URL

It only took a few months since Google wanted to enforce the URL display policy so that the landing page URL would match the display URL in Google AdWords campaigns, and now the policy seems to be in full force with pretty much accurate reporting.

Strange Google Rankings Still Plaguing the Internets

Barry likes to coin phrases, and in this case, floating four seems pretty accurate. He mentions that some results in position 4 seem to be floating around -- they show up on the first page, 4th ranking, but then later disappear. There are at least two people who noticed this strange behavior and we're not sure what to make of it.

The minus 60 penalty is not an illusion, according to Google. Google has admitted that it's a real penalty, and that this penalty usually involves cleaning up spam.

In our May 2008 Google SERP update, we're seeing some big traffic declines, which may be related (or not) to the aforementioned symptoms.

Google AdWords and AdSense Reports Displaying Incorrect Data

Earlier this week, AdSense and AdWords data was not being properly recorded and Google's engineering team took a looka at it. The next day, Google acknowledged that they fixed the problem but some people are still reporting inaccurate data.

Microhoo is Not in the Future

After all that anticipation, Microsoft has decided not to buy Yahoo. So long, Microhoo.

Setting Your Geographic Location in Google Webmaster Tools May Not Work

It seems that setting your geographic location in Webmaster Tools may not necessarily give you the rankings you're hoping for. For example, if you have a .com and you're in the UK, and you set your site to the UK geographic region, you're probably not as lucky as the person who has the .co.uk domain, it seems. UK people, give the US folks your .coms (I'm talking to you, Tamar!) :)

Please Tell Me that This is a Joke

If Google AdWords are really going Comic Sans, I'm going to puke. Worst. Font. Ever.

Yahoo's Universal Search is Here

It's time for Yahoo Universal Search, at least in India where Glue Pages are in beta. My verdict: very nice.

Monday is the Best Day for Google AdSense Payouts

Want Google AdSense money? Yoru best bet is to focus on monetizing your Mondays. We polled you, our valuable readers, and found that most of you are making the most of your dough on the first day of the week. I guess that's when people get click-happy from work boredom.

SEO Debate is Back

We love SEO. Seriously. Every day, there's another debate about SEO, and a bunch of people always come up to defend it. I am waiting for Danny Sullivan's post on how SEO is here to stay. I know he's working on it.

Win a Date with Barry

We're having a reader survey, and the winner gets some schwag and a free dinner with Barry. Now this guy is a fun date, so I suggest that you all participate right now!

A WebmasterWorld member wants confirmation if getting multiple links would cause a penalty in the SERPs. He notes that very popular sites which rank on the first page of Google have a lot of links, including those from "shady" places. Why, then, can't he do the same thing on his smaller site?

Some forum members believe that the age and authority of site matter in this case. Some sites just always get inbound links. Others don't unless something is up.

A new site that gets like 20 links per day, then all of a sudden gets 2000 in one day, well then there's tom foolery going on there and the penalty gets slapped. Once that penalty is slapped, over time it will go away.

So be careful when you build your links, because you can find a dent in your rankings, but as forum members note, the rankings will generally improve.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A High Rankings Forums member wants to know if header tags (H1, H2, H3, H4...) are weighted on search engines.

The answer is probably not, but some people think that there's minimal weight from search engines. The point is that header tags are for user readability versus focusing on search engines. If you wanted to test the theory, you could remove the header tags and instead use CSS to see how it performs.

Additionally, it's important to note that if this is something spammers start using more heavily, chances are search engines will devalue it even more (if header tags are even a metric in the algorithm). That said, do your own testing and come up with some results, but the skepticism is pretty obvious from the post.

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.

In the middle of the week, my good friend Jeremy Schoemaker, aka Shoemoney, blogged that SEO has no future. He believes that personalized data will be more important, especially from the toolbar, user history, and analytics data. Social voting is becoming more important, and he explains that his sitelinks are the most trafficked pages on his site.

Well, the SEO community did not really want to hear that, so there have been at least three individual posts on Sphinn about it.

Marketing Pilgrim writer Greg Howlett says that search engines are getting too smart and that search engines won't want to reward companies for playing SEO games.

In one rebuttal, Ian Lurie talks about how SEO really does have a future. Smart SEO makes it easier for search engines to crawl your site. It helps create a long term content strategy. It keeps good businesses out of trouble. It ensures the discoverability of content on your site. SEO isn't about looking for loopholes but for keeping search engines happy.

In another response, Michael Gray also says that SEO has a future. SEO will have to clean up the mess of visual elements, especially flash and other technologies that are not search-engine friendly. SEOs have to explain viral marketing, content creation, and more. SEO is here to stay, he says, and there's nothing that anyone can say to stop that.

In a third response, Taylor Pratt says that SEO will exist as long as search engines exist. He says that while search engines are smart, SEOs are smart too and can work alongside search engines.

On one hand, forum members think that this is a great thing to start saying because then there will be less competition as newbie SEOs don't actually participate in SEO. Others say that SEO is not going to die but become more important, especially as big companies start partnering up with SEO firms and consultants for work.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn, Sphinn, Sphinn, and Sphinn. ;)

I reported this later last night at Search Engine Land but this is very important news for Google AdWords advertisers. Google will be introducing into the quality score component of your ad rank, the speed at which your landing pages load. If you have a slow page load time, your AdWords ads will cost your more.

Last night Google AdWords began showing your landing page load time, on each keyword level, in your Google AdWords keyword diagnostic section. Here is a screen capture from one of my test campaigns:

Right now, Google is showing you this data so that if your page load time is poor, you have time to make changes to speed things up and improve your quality score. Because starting sometime in mid-June, the landing page load time score will impact your overall quality score and may cost you a lot of money. So be prepared. How do you look up your landing page load time scores?

(1) Sign in to your account at https://adwords.google.com.
(2) Click a campaign.
(3) Click an ad group.
(4) Click the 'Keywords' tab above the Ad Group Details table.
(5) Click the magnifying glass icon beside any keyword and then the 'Details and recommendations' link to launch the Keyword Analysis page. You can also see an overview of your Quality Score and ad visibility by pointing your cursor over the icon.

Here are our past articles on the Google AdWords landing page load time factor:

• Landing Page Load Time Will Impact Google AdWords Quality Score
• Google Confirms Page Load Time As Future Factor in AdWords Quality Score
• Test Your Page Load Time Before Google Tests it For You

Overall, most Google AdWords advertisers are excited about this change. The true winner are the searchers. But there is some backlash about the change.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums.

An older Google Groups thread was just updated by Jeff Posnick the AdWords API Advisor, an official Google representative in charge of the AdWords API development and support. The Googler explains that the API Sandbox should now support the creation of video ads.

Now, simulating the addition of video ads may be supported in the AdWords Sandbox environment. Jeff Posnick explained:

Could you try your attempt to create a video ad in the Sandbox environment again? The engineering team made a config change that *should* have enabled folks for it.

So it should work, may not, but should. We know Google is at least working on making it work.

Also, Google released the NET Client Library 1.0.0 for the AdWords API v11 and v12.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

A Google Groups thread leaves me to believe that it might not be the case. Susan Moskwa, an official Google representative said:

Using the tool to target example.com to the UK may have some effect on non-country-restricted searches, but it probably won't be the same as having example.co.uk. Most sites will see results somewhere between the two extremes (no effect, and total equivalence with ccTLDs).

Wait, so are you saying setting your geographic target may or may not have an impact on how your rank in a localized version of Google? Let me bold Susan's response, " Most sites will see results somewhere between the two extremes (no effect, and total equivalence with ccTLDs."

Hmm and I not understanding the response? I am not sure. I have seen dozens of posts complaining that the tool doesn't improve their ranking in the localized Google version. In fact, respected SEO, David Naylor just posted a blog post with the title, Google Webmaster Tools smoke n mirrors. In that post, he expresses his dissatisfaction with the tool and describes how it simply doesn't work for him.

Does it work for you? Please do comment with your feedback, if you have any.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

First, congrats on your wedding - I like to personally wish you both a long happy life together.

Now, let's get down to the money... You make a lot of money with Google AdSense. But now that you are married and you are taking on your spouse's name, you want to get the checks made out to your new last name. How do you go about changing your name on Google AdSense, so that you and your new spouse can share in the huge amounts of money you are making with Google AdSense?

That is the question asked at a Google Groups thread. AdSensePro Stephanie offers a link as aid on changing one's payee name. The process is fairly simple, you simply fill out the Change Payee Name AdSense form and wait. But here are some of the rules behind changing the payee name:

• According to our program policies, AdSense accounts cannot be transferred or sold. If this is your reason for requesting the change, we will not be able to update your payee name.
• You won't be able to change your payee name if you already have another AdSense account under that name.
• Once we've updated your information, you'll need to re-enter your tax information and form of payment.
• If you've received a payment to the old payee name that you're unable to deposit, you'll need to request a reissue after the 25th of the month following your payment.
• We start processing payments on the 16th of each month. If you're scheduled to receive a payment this month and the payee name in your account is updated after the 16th, your payment will be issued to your old name.

Again, to change your AdSense payee name to your new spouse's name, use the Google AdSense Change Payee Name Form and congrats!

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Image sourced from Steena on Flickr

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: May 8, 2008"

Barry at Search Engine Land points out that Yahoo India has glue pages, which some people are comparing to Universal Search, because of classic search results on the left hand column, visual information in the center column and bottom right hand corner (in addition to articles), and sponsored results.

Here's a screenshot for a search for trees. Click to enlarge.

The idea is pretty cool and sticky (pun intended) and the results page is definitely more aesthetically pleasing than the standard 10 blue links. It kind of reminds me of the current Ask.com format:

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

WebmasterWorld member Receptional Andy suggests the unconventional way to perform keyword research: offline with two books.

The first book is the useful dictionary. If you do a search for "widget," for example, you may get an origin phrase, and in this case, it's "gadget."

The second book is the related reading guide: the thesaurus. You can get plenty of comparable words by using the thesaurus.

Then, you just need to write down everything on paper. No need for a computer at all.

Now I'm not sure how many people will do this, but the idea is an interesting one. :)

In fact, as one more modern member suggests, the idea of keyword research is to get information of what people are actually searching for. That said, the oldschool traditional killed-trees version just doesn't cut it.

Still, as Andy responds, some keyword research tools aren't helpful, and using a dictionary and thesaurus may add some words that you may otherwise not have thought of.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

After a deathly cyclone ravaged the Myanmar (Burma) region, thousands of people are still hoping for aid while the death toll rises into the six digits. Fortunately, if you go to Google.com today, you'll see that they're looking to help. A screenshot of what my homepage appears as is included:

The link takes you to the Myanmar disaster relief page which allows you to donate through UNICEF or through Direct Relief International.

Forum members believe that the poignancy of this link is a great gesture and are happy that Google is taking a proactive stance to help out the victims and their families.

More disaster relief resources from other search properties are described in Greg Sterling's very useful Search Engine Land post.

Discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

A WebmasterWorld member notes that when he does a link: query for a specific domain, it shows only internal links and not external links -- but it depends on the size of the domain. This behavior is only observed on very large sites versus smaller ones. How come that's the case? Is there an issue of how this data is being gathered and is there extra weight being placed on these links?

Tedster believes that this isn't the case. He says that internal links pass PR around the site but that the internal linking structure is not weighted as heavily as external links:

Internal links do have anchor text influence, and they do pass PR around the site. But I'd say they are not treated "exactly" same as external links. How exactly their treatment differs is a bit of a Google secret, and it also seems to shift around a bit. For example, I'd say many internal links get a lot less individual weight than a single external backlink would, especially if they are in the page template (menus and footer links.)

On that note, some internal links can be more valuable than external links depending on PageRank, popularity, traffic, and more. Your PR5 homepage internal link will probably be a lot more valuable than a PR0 external link from a link farm. Do you agree?

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread has serious discussion on obtaining advice and tips on getting your images out of the Google SafeSearch filter. Basically, sometimes Google might label your images as being sexually explicit or not appropriate for the average searcher. If that is done, you shouldn't come up in Google's web search results or in the standard Google image search (unless someone changes their Google preferences).

What we have been noticing is that Google has been a bit more sensitive on image filtering recently. This has impacted a lot of webmasters, where they have noticed a major decline in image search traffic.

So what can you do to ensure your images don't fall within this filter?

I remember hearing, I believe during the Google Webmaster Live Chat session that if you move any images that might appear to be adult related into a different folder, Google will better be able to apply the filter only to those images. Google basically recommended to move pictures that might trigger the filter into a folder like /adult-images/ and have a different folder for /safe-images/.

Outside of that tip, there are some suggestions in the thread that include:

• Check your on-page text content and image filenames for potentially adult words, said Tedster.
• Check to make sure your outbound links are not pointing to any adult neighborhoods, recommended Tedster.
• See if your hosted on the same server as an adult site, Tedster added.
• Try using PICS labels, but I personally don't think that will work.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

• Reporting Spam: Is It Ethical
• How Can I Report Spam to Google?
• Google Spam Reporting Working
• Does Google Investigate Spam Reports?
• Quick Spam Reporting Tool

In any event, the related Sphinn thread has discussion on if you report your competitors as spamming in Google. So I decided to run a poll here to find out if you have ever reported a competitor as spamming in Google. Simple Yes or No - hoping people don't use the "other" option, but I added it just in case.

Here is the poll:

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Yesterday we reported about a major reporting bug that impacted both AdWords & AdSense users. Yesterday at about 9pm (EST), Google's AdSensePro Stephanie said the reports were now fixed. Yes, that is about 40 hours after received our first reports of the outage. Stephanie said:

This reporting issue has now been fixed, so you should now see all of your missing data from yesterday in your account. (We've also reflected this update on our Known Issues page at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=92365.) I'll leave this thread pinned to the top of this category for another day, to make sure more forum members see this update.

Thank you all again for your continued patience, and our team sincerely apologizes for the delay.

Even though Google said the issue is now fixed, many AdSense publishers are not convinced. All the replies to Stephanie's post claim the reporting issues were not resolved. Of the five replies, all five said the reports still seem way off.

AdSenseAdvisor posted an updated at the WebmasterWorld thread also, this reply was at 4:06 am (EST) this morning saying the issues have been resolved. But like the Google Groups thread, the publishers in that thread are all not convinced the reports are bug free.

Forum discussion at Google Groups 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: May 7, 2008"