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:

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.

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