May 2, 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 2, 2008"

Is it really May already? I guess time flies when you're working hard. Or something. The latter part of the week was a bit slow, but we still have a lot of great news for you, starting with a PageRank Update!

Google PageRank Update

That's right, my friends, we've observed a Google Toolbar PageRank update and some people are very happy to see it. Still, as commenter Rob Abdul points out, it really doesn't mean much.

Google Sitelinks Update

Along with a PageRank update came a Google sitelinks update. Other people are happy to see this too. A few problems have arisen, but nothing too serious, so carry on.

Google Leaks Ad Scores

Earlier this week, a few people reported leaked Google AdWords scores by the name of Pscore, mCPC, and thresh. We're not really sure what they mean and Google has no comment, according to Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal. What we do know is that they're related to ranking.

Google's Spider is Tired

As am I. But computers are supposed to work harder than humans. Yesterday, we reported news of Googlebot not crawling as often. But in this particular case, it was actually not an issue of the spider in general but the person's website. If your site is not easy to access, Googlebot won't come as often. That said, good hosting is critical! However, we're also quick to note that this may not necessarily be isolated to one guy's slow website. It may be an overall issue where we need word from Google.

META Keywords: Who Cares?

The verdict is in for a META keywords case: they don't matter, according to the US courts. The word used is "immaterial." But that's really a ruling that they made based on Google. What about other search engines? Did they forget? Or were the lawyers on the case not well-educated in area of search?

Get Your Google TV Ads Today

All US advertisers: your time on TV is coming up. Google has opened TV ads to those of us American people and there's a promotion where you can get up to $2000 off. What a bargain!

Mapping the World with Googoel and Yahoo

Yahoo has added circles to local search, and Barry has a video explaining how it's done. Ask.com has had this for awhile; I remember Gary Price explaining it to me over the phone. That man was really passionate about the technologies Ask has had to offer. :(

On the other hand, you know that a person like me loves schwag, but I'd never hide schwag forever. But the stickers are now gone! It seems like we'll never get these cool pieces of Google history. Google, it's time to print out more, mmkay?

And finally, Google has combined driving directions with street view so you can see where you're going before you get there.

VisualRank is Coming

We had PageRank. Now we're going to see VisualRank, Google's new way of weighing similar images. Will it kill SEO? Nah. Two out of three commenters think it's a good idea but wanted it earlier.

Search Conference Controversy Ensues

The battle of SES vs. SMX is continuing on Sphinn. Kevin and Danny are head to head with commentary that has been updated as recently as this morning. I love both SES and SMX guys, so obviously, I'm keeping my head out of this, but for the record, we reported on it here because the thread itself had a lot of comments and we thought it'd be relevant to the search industry at large.

Artist? Check iGoogle Themes

Google is pushing out artist themes for iGoogle to personalize your search experience even more. Not a bad idea.

Have a great weekend!

In order to make it easier to get driving directions and see an intersection or area before you actually get to your desired location, the Google Maps team has integrated driving directions with Street View.

For example, take a look at this:

When you first click on the map, you get the driving directions.

More specifically, in this new update, click on the camera next to the driving directions to see the specific place where you'll need to make a turn:

Cool stuff. :)

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

Update by Barry: More specifically, you can click from directly within street views to your next turn. Plus it shows you what turn to make from within the street views overlay:

Before reading on, would you consider forums "social media?" This is the question that is posed on a High Rankings Forum post.

Many people find that the answer varies. Forums, after all, are inherently social -- they bring people together on common ground. But others disagree. Forums are not "social media" because they don't like the negative connotations of social media (such as being "poked" like on Facebook). In other words, the person finds social media as meaningless but forums are meaningful. Your mileage may vary.

Forums really do predate social media. If I'd give my insights, I think forums are not "social media" per se (the way we social media folks see it), but they certainly were a stepping stone and precursor to "real social media." However, of course, there's the other side of the coin: social media is, after all, the technology that people use to share their opinions and insights, and forums definitely provide that.

Yay or nay? Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.

CNBC interviewed Google's CEO Eric Schmidt earlier this week and the informative interview is now live for everyone to read. Video is available in three parts: part 2, and part 3.

In a nutshell (thanks to engine and nomis5), Eric Schmidt says that he is not aware of the specifics of the Microsoft-Yahoo deal. We know what he knows -- whatever the press people are telling us.

Additionally, Schmidt mentions the difficulty Google is facing when looking to monetize on social media. On the other hand, mobile growth looks promising. The scariest challenge for Schmidt in the future is language translation.

Finally, he says that there's dramatic market growth in the Japanese, Chinese, and European markets, and that Google is a very strong brand in Europe.

In other words, really good stuff. Sit down and give it a listen or read the 6-page interview that I found that nobody posted on WebmasterWorld. ;)

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn and WebmasterWorld.

Want to do some keyword research? Check out this cool tool that Cre8asite Forums member eKstreme found: Search Radar and take a look at it in action:

The tool looks like it pulls a variety of resources, so there may not be good results, for, say, search engine optimization. As iamlost points out, of the 4 main results there, only two (Bruce Clay and SEOBook) actually knew how to define SEO. But you can't count that as a real fault for Search Radar; it's what they're querying from the internet and the error of other firms that define SEO as "cultivating professional relationships especially with small to medium businesses." (Say what?!)

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums

Google AdSense publishers are reporting via WebmasterWorld that Google is testing new fonts for the ad titles of the Google contextual ads.

The new font styles seen include:

• Comic Sans
• Times New Roman

The folks in the forum find the Comic Sans font to be funny. FYI, I am really font blind - if that is a real eye condition. :) In any event, this is what Comic Sans looks like, via Wikipedia.

Seems somewhat curvy and cartoon-like. I personally have not yet seen this test on ads that I have been looking at. But this is not the first time we had reports on Google messing around with the title fonts. Google tested italics font titles in the AdSense ads in the past.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Last night, the big news was again Microsoft/Yahoo/Google business dealings. You can see all the headlines at Techmeme, including (1) Microsoft might start the hostile takeover today (tomorrow) and (2) Yahoo might announce they will continue to carry Google ads on the Yahoo search network. Greg Sterling has a post on that news at Search Engine Land.

I know that many advertisers would be delighted if Yahoo used Google's AdWords network as their ad base. We have positive feedback from when Google powered Yahoo's ads just a couple weeks ago. So, if Yahoo continued this test and made it a full deal, I know many advertisers who would be delighted.

I am sure there would be many who would be upset, but I think more would be happy. Out of curiosity, let's poll our readers on this. Would you be happy if Google powered Yahoo's search ads in the future?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

The SEOmoz team released a two page PDF based SEO Web Developer Cheat Sheet that I personally printed out and gave to my RustyBrick developers.

I did make a couple changes to it, nothing major. For example, as a matter of style, I personally like to reverse the suggested "Recommended Title Tag" from having the web site name go last, instead of first - or even not show the web site name at all. Update, it seems like SEOmoz updated their PDF to have the title tag start with "Keyword" then go to "Category" and then show Web site name. That is exactly the change I made when I printed it out and gave it to my developers. In addition, I typically would tell my developers to add the first two lines of content from the database into the META description field.

Overall, this cheat sheet, should be on all web developers desks. It is a great guide and it looks pretty.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Yesterday I reported that GoogleBot is crawling less pages then they once were, based on a large WebmasterWorld thread. Now, I spotted a response from a Googler at a Google Groups thread with similar complaints.

This time, I decided to login to Google Webmaster Tools and check my crawl stats, which can be found under Tools and then at "Set crawl rate." I noticed the same thing for this site, as well as my other sites. Here is a graph from this site:

John, the Google representative, blamed the Google Groups thread specific example on a slow site:

Looking at your graphs, it looks like the number of pages that we're crawling has gone down because it's taking so long for us to get each page. In general, there could be any number of reasons why that could be and I think that it may make sense to diagnose it properly, as the others have suggested. Having a slow site is not only bad for search engine crawlers who can't crawl as much as they would like, it's also something your visitors won't be happy about.

But the issue seems way more wide spread then what is in that thread alone and maybe we really do need a response from Google? My traffic referrals from Google seems to be about the same as it was throughout the crawl patterns. But SEOs and webmasters become concern that slow crawl rates and mean slow traffic from that engine in the future.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Google Groups.