June 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: June 30, 2008"

We've repeatedly recommended Google Webmaster Tools to help you assess problems with your website. It can help you figure out if you're having some problems somewhere and then you can get to the bottom of them. In a specific example, a Cre8asite Forums member is finding that Google is crawling absolute paths, such as http://domain.com/var/www/html/page.php and /home/public_html/admin.html, which shouldn't ever happen. Is it a problem with Google, or is there a structural issue with the site that the webmaster is not aware of?

It's likely that the problem is not Google, in this case. Somewhere, somehow, there's probably a link there that Google found because it was referred to on your site. Use a tool like Xenu Link Sleuth to figure out where it's located, as many forum members recommend.

In this case, it was a broken link -- and no, Google does not crawl the pages as JohnMu mentions:

At any rate, we can't view your servers file-system (at least not if it's configured correctly), so even if we happen to stumble upon a URL like that, your error page should keep us from worrying too much about it (make sure it returns 404).

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

While SEO becomes more and more important, people try to find angles that they can exploit or take advantage of so that they can achieve good rankings. In one specific instance, High Rankings forum post asks if there's a minimum number of pages that need to be targeted to achieve decent rankings.

It's important to note that in general, a site as a whole is collectively not ranked. Each page ranks individually. Therefore, you need as many pages as possible to say what you need to say in a manner that is understandable by your visitors.

Of course, this means doing keyword research and then writing content in such a way that benefits the visitors in as many pages (or as few pages) as possible. There's no set number.

But what about theming? Does Google look at similar pages and throw a site in a single category? It's an ongoing debate, where some people say that Google does this, while others say that they don't.

In general, it's agreed upon by all to perform diligent keyword research and to write from the start with keyword phrases in mind.

Forum discussion continues at .

At SEO Refugee, Skitzzo talks about how the SEO blogosphere is starting to shift drastically and people are giving their opinions as fact. Instead of using jargon like "in my experience" or "as far as I can tell," they think that their specific experiences mean that these statements hold true in all circumstances when in fact most of these experiences are circumstantial and they may not entirely hold true in all instances.

The discussion moves over to Sphinn, where Jill Whalen kicks things off by saying that 90% of what she's reading nowadays is BS. But Chris Boggs, who contests the post entirely, takes a different approach: we're not expected to find the secret recipe of SEO in blog posts nor are we supposed to find them in forum discussion.

It seems, though, that people are starting to take these theories as truth. For example, DazzlinDonna says that she learned of a new SEO firm that will be charging considerable amounts of money for "advanced SEO tactics." What, exactly? Using the meta tag. Apparently, he heard it from some SEO and now he's ready to start monetizing off of. This is something that people are starting to take for granted, and it's absolutely dangerous.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

A few weeks ago, I joined Plurk to mess around with the newest social media buzz. After playing around with it for a few weeks, I have really grown to enjoy many of its addictive features. The main thing I want to explain is that Plurk feels to me like a micro-forums format. Just like Twitter is a micro-blogging system, Plurk is really a micro-discussion forums platform.

Plurk works where you can post a 140 character message (a plurk) and then other plurkers can respond to your plurks. The more active you are on Plurk (i.e. more responses and replies), the more "karma" you earn. As you earn Karma, you earn more privileges, such as unique profiles, more smilie options, stars near your names and so on. Those with a lot of Karma downplay Karma, those with a little Karma desire the additional Karma. That is how Plurk encourages participation.

But participation grows more from the discussion forum like feel of the network. While Twitter has @replies as a way to respond to a twitter, it is often hard to isolate the response with the specific twitter message. Plurk threads responses directly into a specific Plurk. Here is a picture of my timeline at a specific point in time:

As you can see, the timeline shows Plurks before or after my Plurk. To reply to a specific Plurk, you click on the message and it opens up. As you can see above, that specific Plurk has several responses (as annotated by the number at the right corner of that Plurk). You can see that specific Plurk page over here and can reply there as well.

As you can see, Plurk looks and feels more like a discussion forum then a blogging format. Limiting the Plurks to 140 characters, makes it the Twitter for discussion forums. In addition, you can create "cliques" within Plurk to subgroup your friends on Plurk into categories. For example, you can make an SEO clique, SMO clique and so on. Cliques help you manage your audience so that you can send plurks to only the friends who need to be notified.

Plurk is a lot of fun and can be very addictive. It is worth exploring because it can send some traffic your way. It is all about your friends and how you use it. I am still fairly new to Plurk but join in and let's explore this tool together.

If you are going to join, please use this URL to join, so you are friended to me right away.

Forum discussion at Sphinn with the following threads:

• Plurk: The Power of Wasting Time...
• Plurk - An investigation into the benefits and detriments of micro blogging
• Five great Plurk tools to feed the need!

Stuart McDonald posted a thread at WebmasterWorld explaining how you can use Google Ad Manager with Google AdSense to specify a minimum eCPM.

You must keep in mind that you need to have other ads in your Ad Manager inventory to compete with your AdSense ads, in order for this to work properly. Google Ad Manager allows you to set a minimum CPM for most ad runs. By specifying the minimum CPM with house or remnant ads in Ad Manager, your AdSense ads will compete on the CPM you set and will not show for a lower CPM.

Stuart explains you will likely see that the "immediate result will probably be a drop in your AdSense income, as long as you're running other, better paying ads (from direct advertisers, another network or whatever), your end resultant income for the total number of impressions, should be higher."

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

It seems like some webmasters are becoming fed up with the activity of Yahoo's crawl, Yahoo Slurp, relative to the amount of traffic Yahoo Search is sending the web site. In fact, some webmasters have taken the plunge and banned Yahoo from crawling their sites.

It is funny, because some webmasters were or are afraid to ban Yahoo because they think it might have some sort of impact on their Google results. One such webmaster got over it and decided to ban Yahoo despite his fears.

There is a thread at WebmasterWorld discussing the pros and cons. Some also wonder that will banning Yahoo have a negative impact on the Yahoo SearchScan & McCafee partnership and might have your site marked as harmful? I doubt it.

If you want to block Yahoo Slurp, learn how to at this page.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks how much of an impact will a site see if it is moved from a Dubai host to a USA based host? The answer is not really all that known.

This webmaster's main concern is that he receives "80% of traffic from UAE and have lots of content and back links related to UAE." He wants to continue to receive higher rankings in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) regions. He is concerned that by moving his site to a host in the US, it will drop his rankings for searches conducted in the United Arab Emirates region.

Senior member, wheel, said that when he moved a site from one country into the US, he said Google has yet to pick up on that change. He said, he had a "heck of a time getting Google to realize it was a US site." Wheel explained that the site still comes up for "country specific searches" in the old region.

The overall recommendation is that the webmaster continue to obtain links from the UAE region. Plus, if possible, specific in Google Webmaster Tools that the site is specific towards that UAE region. But before doing that, Tedster warns, specifying the region in Webmaster Tools may result in you "forfeiting a lot of international traffic."

I'll track this thread and write a new post based on the results seen by this specific webmaster.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Matt Cutts, of Google, posted a blog post at the official Google Blog named Using data to fight webspam. In that post, he describes how the web spam team uses log data, IP addresses, and cookie information to help prevent search spam. The question in the forums is why? Why is Google handing over this information?

Let me quote a snippet from Matt's post:

The IP and cookie information is important for helping us apply this method only to searches that are from legitimate users as opposed to those that were generated by bots and other false searches. For example, if a bot sends the same queries to Google over and over again, those queries should really be discarded before we measure how much spam our users see. All of this--log data, IP addresses, and cookie information--makes your search results cleaner and more relevant.

David Naylor takes issue with that, in that you can also seem to spoof this information. Dave asks why would Google come out with this information?

In addition, a WebmasterWorld thread asks the same thing. WebmasterWorld administrator, tedster asked, "I do wonder why it was published at this particular moment (I'm always looking for that hidden motive these days) but I do appreciate the look behind the scenes that he gives."

We do know that Google promised to be more open about the inner workings of how the search algorithm works, on some level. You have to admit that Google would not give over information that would harm the quality of the search results. I believe, for the most part, all Google is saying here is that they use log data that is available to them to simply see if they are improving in search quality or not. They can analyze various queries, and see if user behavior on those queries have changes for the better or worse over the course of releasing new spam prevention methods. Matt clearly shows how they can use log data to see when a spam injection in Google has started, which helps Google fight back as well.

All in all, I really don't think that Google is telling us something we did not suspect. Google continuously says they are a data driven company. To use log data, IP addresses, and cookie information in an effort to fight spam really doesn't surprise most SEOs. I know there are many questions still, so I leave it open. Why did Google post this information? Why now?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Sphinn.

You love basketball? I do. This video recap, I play some basketball and you can score some great schwag by watching me play. Learn how by watching. So what did I chat about? Google proves to everyone out there that they know who you are, what you are doing and how much you can spend with Google Ad Manager and Google Trends for Websites. I discuss the long URL post I wrote this week on Google. Google added porn to search results, but allows us to report it now. Yahoo drops the Overture keyword suggestion tool. Google Webmaster Tools gives us an API. Ask.com is not focused on search and I give some reasons. Yahoo is in shambles, can they pick themselves up or is it too late? Google turns five years old!

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:

• Detailed Screen Shots of Google's New Ad Planner :: Wow!
• Google Launches Ad Planner - What Google Really Knows About Your Sites
• Google Trends for Websites : Rather Not Have It? Seriously?
• Google Says, Long URLs May Hurt You
• Porn Continues to Invade Google Web Search Through Universal Search
• Yahoo Finally Kills Overture's Keyword Suggestion Tool?
• Finally, We Get an API for Google Webmaster Tools, But...
• Ask.com: Not Focused on Core Search, or is it?
• Yahoo Prepares Massive Upper Management Reorganization for Possible Acquisitions
• Google AdSense Turns Five Years Old

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: June 27, 2008"

Our favorite (and least favorite) search engines have had a share in the spotlight this week, with news coming from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Ask, and we're here to summarize the happenings of the week. To start off, what do you think about security? I know our kids -- Gen Y -- doesn't mind about their information being all over the internet. Others, however, don't feel the same way. That brings us to ...

Google's Omniscience

This past week, we saw the launch of Google Trends, and many webmasters were disappointed in the new tool with regards to how it's providing information that should be private -- public. Barry writes in a detailed post about the practical applications of the tool, but many people don't want to share their data as freely. Michael Gray, specifically, thinks it's not cool that Google is providing data about websites whereas google.com is nowhere to be found. He's got a point, guys.

After Google Trends was released, Google Ad Planner was also released. It's still invite-only but gives you detailed demographic information so that you can target your ads better to your site visitors. In a detailed screenshot tour, Barry sums up his ad planner walkthrough as "wow" since there's so much information available. It's scary to know how much they know about us.

Use Your CMS Wisely

I'm always happy that WordPress allows you to edit your post slug so that you can shorten your URL where necessary. This is coming to be an issue especially due to a report this week that long URLs can hurt you. Keep it short, sweet, and descriptive. A spammy URL doesn't add value and probably confuses people. The URL in particular in that post (http://www.gadgetguy.com.au/small-kitchen-appliances-toaster-kettle-coffee-machine-blender-juicer-channel7-sunrise-australia-42.html) is way over my head, for example, and I'm sure I'm not alone. Why is there a coffee maker in sunrise in Australia? What?! And what happened to channel 5? I like it better than channel 7.

Want Porn? Surf Google

With universal search still in its infancy (though in tech years, it may be in adulthood -- I really don't know), people are finding ways to take advantage of whatever they can. In this case, comes down to pornographic images in universal search results. If you ever want a new bathroom, chances are it's going to come with a sexy naked blonde chick, according to Google. Hot. But in the post, Barry notes that if you're offended by the unwelcome guest, you can report images and have them removed. The party's over, guys.

RIP Overture... and maybe the rest of Yahoo

Yahoo's massive staff reorganization comes at the same time as the death of Ovetrure's keyword tool, which is a shame, since people liked it so much. I wonder if that has anything to do with the people behind it no longer being at Yahoo. Either way, from an observer's perspective, there's a lot of movement going on in Yahoo, with staff reorganization and unexpected departures, so maybe everything is intended to crumble at once.

Google Won't Let You Point AdWords Display URLs to Itself

First, you were able to manipulate Google AdWords and set the landing URL as google.com. Since Barry reported on it though, Google disabled ads that had Google.com as the landing URL. In other words, don't try to dupe the system because you will get owned.

Google Webmaster Tools API Launched

There's a new API in town: the Google Webmaster Tools API. This is really exciting news, albeit with a catch: right now you can't do anything with linkage data, and that'd be sweet so that you can do some analysis. However, it's not an option -- yet. I hope Google takes note!

Ask.com is Not Focused on Core Search

Barry had a lengthy chat with the busy Jim Safka of Ask.com 3 weeks ago while Safka was traveling, since I guess he doesn't have much time to sit at a desk and have a real heart-to-heart with Barry. That's a shame. I don't think I could ever get on a business call that would be on the record while I'm traveling through tunnels with poor cell reception. It makes it seem that his heart and mind is in the wrong place. Also, Ask.com's core search is in the wrong place too. And that's sad, because the old Ask.com crew really did seem to care about everything about the little engine that could.

A Prodigy of a Baby

We'd like to extend a happy birthday to Google AdSense. It's now 5 years old and has made people millionaires. So, thanks Google AdSense, and keep it up until 120! :)

In response to Andrew Goodman's summary of SES Toronto, The Lisa wrote a really great and informative post about how white hat SEO has evolved and "advanced SEO" is really traditional SEO. She explains that traditional SEO still works, and in many cases, can be more powerful than newer technologies (like web 2.0/social stuff). As a huge social person myself, I'm inclined to agree. A "technically sound" website will probably perform better than your social media campaign.

Lisa summarizes her points succinctly here:

...the power of white hat search engine optimization has been proven over and over again, even if it is considered boring or square to promote it. White hat works. Every time. Don't discount it.

Absolutely.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Recent news in Yahoo has a number of innovators -- primarily young, talented, and influential Yahoo employees (in addition to some bigger execs) -- leaving the company. Among those have been Joshua Schachter of delicious, the Flickr founders, and big blogger Jeremy Zawodny. With the blogosphere abuzz of these recent developments, Yahoo must have decided it had to act. CNET reports that Yahoo upper management has been restructured to improve operations within the company.

Will this be the final reorganization? Probably not, as forum members suggest. With Yahoo and Microsoft not teaming up in the near future, CNN Money writes that Google, who may step in, is feeling the heat from Microsoft on claims of antitrust (which I find rather ironic, but moving on.). At the end, though, these two components together may improve all things for Yahoo. Yahoo has told its shareholders that a partnership with Google is better (and well, they may be right considering Google's search share). The reorganization may also help boost Yahoo's image in the eyes of shareholders.

Not everyone agrees with this sentiment, as there is still a concern about Google's control of 90% of the market. Many would rather see a Yahoo-Microsoft partnership than a Yahoo-Google partnership. But that's not happening right now. And forum members say that Microsoft should focus on creating sites with better user experience than to whine about antitrust.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld (Yahoo reorganization), WebmasterWorld (Microsoft vs. Google), and WebmasterWorld (Yahoo's message to stockholders).

AdSensePro Stephanie has posted in a Google Groups thread to announce two new additions to the forum.

AdSensePro Jennifer and AdSensePro Adrian are going to be the two newest forum guides in Google Groups and will answer your questions about Google AdSense. AdSesnePro Stephanie will be checking the forums, albeit less frequently due to "other projects."

Best of luck to Stephanie and welcome to Jennifer and Adrian!

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

It seems like the day has come, the day that Yahoo has killed the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool. Now, if you visit inventory.overture.com, you are redirected to http://sem.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/searchenginemarketing/. In fact, it is a permanent redirect, not just a temporary redirect, as you can see by using the URI Valet tool.

We knew this was coming, we have story after story reporting outages and downtime for this tool. Here is a run down of some of the stories we wrote covering the tool:

• Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool Offline? on January 29, 2007
• Overture Keyword Selection Tool Back Online on February 2, 2007
• New Free Yahoo! Keyword Tool Coming; Overture Keyword Tool Suffering; & Other Tools on January 31, 2007
• Yahoo! Removes UK Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool on May 2, 2007
• Yahoo To Stop Updating Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool on May 8, 2007
• Is Yahoo Working on New Keyword Tool with Search Volume Data? on May 10, 2007
• Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool Seems Dead on September 17, 2007
• Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool has Returned on September 24, 2007
• More Server Problems With Overture's Keyword Tool on December 6, 2007

So does this end the saga with the Overture Keyword Suggestion tool or as it moved elsewhere?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports that Google has made a small change to the location where you can find your crawl rate charts. In the past, as I described on May 2nd, Google placed the crawl stats under the "Tools" and "Set crawl rate." None of us thought that was the most logical place for the chart. So Google has moved the chart into the "Statistics" section under the "crawl stats" section - which previously just had PageRank data.

Here is a piece of that screen:

Under these charts, you will find the "The PageRank of your pages in Google" and "Your page with the highest PageRank" charts.

Another small but significant change was reported via Google Groups. These charts always showed data back a month. For example, the chart above shows the crawl stats through the end of June, which is current data. Here is a picture zoomed in:

But if you look at the past chart, you will notice Google shows the chart by plotting the months 30-days behind. The date I published that post was on May 2nd, but as you can see, the chart beginning in April:

In summary:

(1) Google moved the crawl rate charts to the statistics section, under crawl rate, in Google Webmaster Tools.
(2) Google updated the chart to show the correct month labels.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Google Groups.

The other day we reported on how you can Get Google.com in Your AdWords Display URL via a Search Engine Watch Forums thread. The results were tremendous according to abbottsys, who summarized the success of the ads as having a "conversion rate at about 3X that of a regular ad."

But Google just removed all of his ads. They cited trademark compliance issues as the reason, according to abbottsys. Why is it a trademark issue? Well, since the ad displays Google.com in the display URL, Google is a trademark of Google and thus Google doesn't like it. So his test is over.

A Google representative has not yet replied to the thread. I know they are watching, but they remain silent.

But hold your horses. abbottsys said he "discovered a variation on this ad test technique that seems to satisfy all Google trademark concerns." We don't know the actual ad test technique yet, but he said he will share soon. I will keep you posted.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch 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: June 26, 2008"

Rae Hoffman wrote a post at Search Engine Land about the opportunities you have if one of the links you have points to a 404. You can create a relevant 301 redirect, a user-friendly 404 page, or a custom non-404 error page that catches broken links. Rae goes through the various pros and cons of each strategy in a very useful and informative post.

It's really important for you to reclaim those broken links. Vanessa Fox comments on the Sphinn discussion that you can check your 404s using Google Webmaster Tools. Internal links can be fixed, but you should contact the people behind the external links if you can.

An important note is to avoid getting those 404 pages indexed as Vanessa and Rae agree:

One problem with redirecting all requests that would ordinarily return a 404 response with a 301 to a 200 is that search engine bots will think all non-existent pages are real pages and lots of badness can happen because of that. As Rae notes, your 404 pages will get indexed.

Therefore, you may want to be careful when implementing these strategies.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Our boss man Barry spoke with Jim Safka of Ask.com in a lengthy interview three weeks ago, and he's come out unimpressed by Ask.com's approach toward search. In the interview, Ask.com takes a stab at larger search engines (the big three) because he claims Ask.com is "smaller" (and can push things out quicker) and Safka also said that Ask "greatly over indexes in certain categories" (entertainment, health, hobbies, references). However, it seems from the conversation that Ask.com is not focused on the core algorithm.

"Have you or would you test Google organic search results in place of your organic results?," I asked. Jim initially gave me the PR speech consisting of, "we are completely devoted to our own search results." I then blatantly asked, "Is that a no?" He said it was a no and that no, Ask did not test Google results in the past six months.

Barry has admitted to Safka that core search is far from where it should be and it's not evolving as many of us are hoping for. He ends his article with "Ask Not What Is Best For Market Share, But What Is Best For Core Search." At least, that's what it should be for us. I'm not sure I am confident in Ask.com either at this point, and I know that I am not alone.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Let's face it. Link building is all the hype in the search sphere. Google loves good kosher links. People like good relevant links. Whether or not there's a debate about paid links or links to bad neighborhoods, links are simply awesome when applied right.

So what are the right ways to apply those links? A WebmasterWorld member wants to know.

There are a number of tactics that can be employed to build natural links (and perhaps a few unnatural ones). They are: press releases, social bookmarking, blog posts, article submissions, forum posting, getting relevant links from .edus and library websites, posting original research (as per Matt Cutts), and creating good content that people will naturally link to.

This is definitely some good advice for the link building newbie.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Do you hate how WordPress and other blog platforms immediately add nofollow to any links in your comments -- including (and especially) your name? Well, Search Engine Roundtable Forums member inertia created a very cool Google Custom Search Engine that searches a number of SEO and internet marketing blogs for those that say no to nofollow. Currently, the engine is searching a whopping 359 blogs. That's pretty awesome and I can imagine it took a really long time to compile. But hey, it was worth it as I'm sure many of us will find it valuable.

Thanks, inertia, for the awesome gift to the community. :)

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Google has been updating the link reports in Webmaster Tools more frequently, so I stopped reporting them. But Google also removed the download this table feature from those reports back in February of this year. It was at that time, I was no longer easily able to provide you a report of my top links as reported in Webmaster Tools.

First, here is a screen shot showing the "download this table" is finally back in the reports. I am not sure when Google added it back, but I know it was missing for months and months:

Now that it is back, I can share with you my top pages based on the number of links pointing to them, according to Google Webmaster Tools. So here they are:

I did not include major index pages, such as the home page, archives, and so on, just articles. I have noticed more of the "index" pages to be closer to the top of the report, then in the past. Meaning, more of my informational pages (not articles) have more links then in the past. In addition, I noticed that many of my top pages from the past were no longer top this time around. This seems to imply that those links dropped off the planet and no longer count as much. But I am not sure if that is correct. In fact, I tried to write about that theory in my write up named The Life Time Value of Links Based on Google Webmaster Central from April of last year, but it was very hard to prove - so it is still a theory that I and many others believe in for numerous reasons that I won't get into here.

For the past updates see:

• Google Webmaster Tools Link Update More Frequent?
• October 2007 Google Linkage Data
• September 2007 Google Linkage Data
• August 2007 Google Linkage Data
• July 2007 Google Linkage Data
• June 2007 Google Linkage Data
• April 2007 Google Linkage Data
• March 2007 Google Linkage Data
• February 2007 Google Linkage Data

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

It is not uncommon to see websites infected with malware. In fact, I see more and more cases of sites being removed or warned by Google for containing traces malware. Sites being hacked is way too common these days. Many of you have not experienced the consequences of a site hack. I have with Jennifer Convertibles and honestly, it was invaluable experience to deal with first hand.

In a Google Groups thread, JohnMu of Google, posted a screen shot of what a Google Malware warning would look like in Webmaster Tools. I have never seen such a warning posted before, or at least, I don't remember seeing a screen shot of a warning posted before - so I thought I share it with you all.

So, as you can see, the warning is served up directly on the overview page of Webmaster Tools. It is a big, huge warning, which you should not miss. This is one major reason (there are others) why you should verify your site with Google Webmaster Tools and check it regularly.

Google began showing malware warnings in Webmaster Tools just about a year ago. But they have been offering warnings via email way before that.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks a question most people who participate in search forums ask themselves. Does Google, on occasion, update the toolbar PageRank score of a particular web site between the major and mass toolbar PageRank updates we report?

Why do we ask this question? Well, if you visit enough forums, you are bound to see a thread or five with the title, "PageRank Update." These threads are fairly noticeable at DigitalPoint Forums but they are found at many other forums on a fairly recent basis.

Real Webmasters are noticing updates to their PageRank scores in the Google Toolbar. This happens all the time, and then they jump to the forums to be the first to announce the next PageRank update. But then you see a mass response of replies saying, "no PR update here."

So is it possible that what that Webmaster noticed was a true toolbar PageRank update for his site? Maybe. There are a few possibilities, the most likely is that he or she is hitting a different data center with different PageRank scores. But I would not rule it out that Google does push minor PageRank scores to the toolbar between major updates.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Last night I was looking up a phone number for my wife and I noticed that Yahoo People Search has been totally redesigned and repurposed. The new design is extremely clean, compared to the old interface. In addition, when you conduct the search, it takes you directly into the Yahoo Search interface, as opposed to just showing you phone numbers.

Here is the before screen shot that I took back in May 2004:

Here is the new home page for Yahoo People Search:

Here is the search results page for a search conducted in Yahoo People Search:

By the way, Yahoo was able to find the phone number I was looking for, while Google failed in that search.

I really like the new interface and manner in which Yahoo People Search functions. So good job on this Yahoo. I have no idea when this was launched, it may have been months ago, but I have not read or seen any reports on this new launch.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable 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: June 25, 2008"

A High Rankings Forum member has an interesting question about a website he maintains. In the particular example, he is selling a niche item within a broader category. I'll use an example for illustrative purposes: he's basically selling "children's books." However, he notices that he's getting general traffic from "books" sites, though his specific focus is children's books. Now he realizes that he could potentially benefit from the "books" site traffic, so he's coded some different content to be served based on a particular search phrase. If you're searching for "books" in general, you'll get different content than if you're searching for "children's books," he explains.

Is this a problem?

High Rankings forum member rolf says it might be. It feels like a win-win situation -- you're serving the right content for your visitors while still benefiting from the traffic. But is it safe? It's hard to say. As rolf puts it, "you are technically breaking the rule about serving one thing to spiders and another to visitors."

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings.

A Google Groups post by Google Maps Brian announces the launch of Google Maps Maker, which is a "service that allows you add or edit features, such as roads, businesses, parks, schools and more." Only Brian forgot to add the critical parts: how do you actually get to Google Maps Maker? It isn't quite straightforward. Fortunately, Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land had the answer. By navigating to the Google Maps Maker documentation, you learn that it's not available to every single spot on the map and is instead available to places where Google lacks data (Bermuda, Grenada, Jamaica, Barbados, etc.)

Here's what it looks like when I try to edit the ocean around Bermuda:

Unfortunately, then, you can't even play with Google Maps Maker with your own "My Maps" (which I tried but failed at). But for a seasoned traveler of the Caribbean, this may be a fun tool.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

I'll take you through screen by screen, so here we go.

(1) Login and you will be given the option to "create media plan" or "begin research." You should start by creating a media plan, I started with research - which was a bit of a mistake:

(2) On the research screen, it defaults by showing you all sites in the system. Here is the overview:

(3) Most advertisers don't want all publishers, so this is where you can begin filtering down to specific sites. Here is the demographic filter which gives you the ability to filter based on gender, age, education and household income.

(4) You can also filter based on online behavior. In this case, you specify a site and Google will show you sites that those people also visited:

(5) I picked Search Engine Land and I received this list of sites. The list looks pretty accurate to me and it goes on and on:

(6) Clicking on the little graph next to the domain name will bring up a world of information about that site. Here is information from this site, the Search Engine Roundtable:

(7) You can then add sites to your media plan. You select the sites from the left hand side by checking them off and click "add to media plan." This is where you need to make sure you set up a media plan (just give it a name). Here is a screen cap of my first media plan:

(8) Let's zoom in on the graph and you will see icons that symbolize the ad placements available via Google AdSense on some of these sites. Notice only one that I have in my list has Google AdSense available. The first icon represents the text ads, the next is the image ad unit and the final one is the gadget ad unit:

Notice, you also get impression data directly from Google AdSense!

(9) Zooming in on some of the other columns:

Here is what they mean:

• Comp index: Score showing how concentrated your audience is on a site relative to users in your defined country (example)
• Unique visitors: Estimated number of visitors from your defined audience you can reach on a specific site
• Country reach: Estimated percent of total internet users within your defined country
• Page views: Number of times pages on a specific site have been accessed by your defined audience
• Content network: Websites, news pages, and blogs that partner with Google to display AdWords ads (more)

So there are many of the screens in Google Ad Planner. Seriously, look how much information Google has on sites. This is just the information they are providing to us for free. I wonder what they are holding back!

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

Several webmasters are noticing new errors found in their Google Webmaster Tools Sitemaps error diagnostic section. The new error is:

All the URLs in your Sitemap are marked as having dynamic content.

We have threads at WebmasterWorld and Google Groups on the new error.

No one knows exactly what makes this error spring up. We do not have a response from a Googler on this error, at least not yet.

Google Groups member, Phil Payne, has a nice theory:

As an aside - Google thought this scheme up and defined 'always' all by its little self. So - assuming they meant to do it all along - the only meaning of "Because dynamic content is difficult for search engines to crawl and index, this may impact your site's performance in search results" that makes sense is the implication that putting incorrect information in a sitemap might result in some sort of penalty.

So it's becoming more important to make sure that a sitemap truly reflects the site - most of the sitemap generators need a fundamental redesign.

I will keep watching and let you know when Google does respond.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Google Groups.

If you had to pick between using an Alt attribute in your images versus a Title attribute in your images, I would go with an Alt attribute. The alt attribute is basically "alternate text" for your image, it is used to describe the image. For example, an image tag for a boat might look like this:

<img src="boat.gif" alt="Big Boat">

In a Google Groups thread, Googler, Reid said that Google "concentrates on the information provided in the alt attribute." He did not say that the title attribute is not used, in fact, he said that the title attribute can "complement" the alt attribute. But Reid does make an effort to say that Google "concentrates" on the alt attribute when it comes to pictures.

In addition, Reid links to Using ALT attributes smartly by Matt Cutts at Google Webmaster Central Blog. Here is Matt's video on the ALT attribute:

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: June 24, 2008"

Yesterday, USA Today published an interview with Google's Matt Cutts about how webmasters can optimize their sites for Google. In the article, Matt provides five tips on improving visibility. They are:

1. Figure out what people are searching for and put those search phrases on the page.
2. Ensure that your title tag, at the minimum, is not generic. (The article also mentions meta description tags so that the search will return a descriptive snippet in the SERPs.)
3. Get other sites to link back to you, because the more authoritative links you have, the more popular you are.
4. Create a blog and post often so that you have a regular flow of content.
5. Use free tools available to you. Google's Webmaster Central Tools is one. Google Local is another.

In the article, Matt also advises against keyword stuffing and says that sites like Digg and StumbleUpon can give bloggers the right inspiration to get started with their blog. And Matt adds as a final note that you don't have to advertise to get to the top of the SERPs.

This is definitely a good primer to some basic SEO for those who read USA Today and have no clue about search engine optimization. However, one member notes as a disclaimer that it would have been helpful if the writer of the article mentioned that there's no guarantee that you'll rank on the top after following all of these tactics. It helps, but you still may not be on page 1.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn and WebmasterWorld

Google has announced the launch of Google Ad Planner. Ad Planner is Google Trends for Web Sites on steroids. Basically, it gives you site data for publisher sites you might want to place your ads on. You "enter demographics and sites associated with your target audience, and the tool will return information about sites that your audience is likely to visit." This works both on Google's content network and off the content network. Here is a screen capture of a report from the system, a full size is available over here.

How do you gain access to this tool? You need to be invited, and you can request an invite over here.

What is a bit important to understand, and Brett Tabke says it best in a comment at our older post:

The single biggest issue that the new website trends should drive home, is that we should all now have a good understanding and insight into the bulk of data that Google knows about our websites. There are so many people that are naive about this issue. Google knows so much more than is generally acknowledged.

This plays on many areas, including AdWords and organic results.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Update: I have just gained access to Ad Planner and posted detailed screen captures of the tool. I am in awe.

Last week, we talked about Google's new tool: trends for websites. In response, Michael Gray wrote a fantastic post about how Google gave us access to our website data, but not Google's itself. When you search for Google.com, you get "Google.com has no data available for ranking."

Not so fair, is it?

Barry Welford takes the discussion to Cre8asite Forums where he says that it may be a good idea for Google to look for an ombudsman to ensure equity. Should it be done?

In theory, it's a good idea. Will it work, though? It's hard to say. The concept of "fairness" on the Internet is difficult to ascertain, according to Joe Dolson. In another counter-argument, iamlost says that the web developers need to grow up. This is exactly what happens because you're using Google Analytics. (Thus, the Google Trends data is actually an opt-in procedure.) Still, however, just because Google is so big doesn't entitle them to do whatever they want. An ombudsman would be a private entity (hired by Google) to ensure fairness on all fronts. Personally, I think that it's a very smart idea.

The discussion ensues on Cre8asite Forums, with many people thinking that it may not work out, and others believing that Google already has a right to use this information in this particular case, so applying the ombudsman theory to this argument is a weak one. Check it out at the Cre8asite Forums.

Google has a policy that your display url must match your destination URL.

As most advertiser's know, having google.com show up in your ad, can drive a huge click-through rate. So what can you do to get google.com to show up in your display URL without breaking this rule?

Search Engine Watch Forums moderator, abbottsys, tested out a theory that actually worked for him. abbottsys created an ad for a search on ivf, the ad's destination URL goes to a search at Google for site:www.integramed.com/inmdweb/ ivf. So, as you can see, the ad's destination URL is google.com, but the search results are limited to a client's site. So, his ad was approved and looks like this:

abbottsys has noticed crazy improvements over his other ads. abbottsys said, "the new ad is blowing away my regular ad both in terms of CTR and conversions. Testing really does pay." Just as we thought. Great job and awesome test.

I wonder how much longer Google will allow such a test. If this sticks, maybe other advertisers will try it out. Very innovative and creative abbottsys.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread argues that Google's AdWords search is too inclusive. Why? Well, if you search on keywords, Google will return keywords that match not just the ad title or description, but also the display URL.

The advertiser in the WebmasterWorld thread is upset because one of his affiliates have threatened to drop him and not pay him for the revenue he brought in. Why? Because they are using this search feature and finding that the trademarked term of the company is coming up. But the trademarked term is only displayed in the display URL, not in the title or description of the ad.

For example, a search on .net returns ads that have [.net] in the title, description or display URL.

Rehan said this is not necessarily a bug in the search but rather a "feature." Rehan said:

I found some info at http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=53502 ... Apparently sometime in May, Google changed the Sponsored Links results behavior to be an "Ad Search feature" that searches ad text. In other words, before it was essentially "Show ads for the keyword _____" and now it is "Show ads that contain the keyword ______". That's why when you search for brand keywords like "Myspace" or "Yahoo" you see a bunch of ads that contain those words but are not running as ads for those keywords.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I continue to report porn on Google over here, at Search Engine Land, via email to Googlers, via Twitter and Plurk and so on. But it seems that this is a battle Google is not winning. Why is this such an issue, because if a kid searches on his or her new bathroom, he or she may see this result:

I blocked out parts of the image for obvious reasons. But this is an issue that I see prop up time and time again, since Google began adding images to search results.

But now Google has added a "report images" link, it looks like this:

So I clicked it and was shown this:

I clicked "Confirm" and was offered a thank you:

It is nice to see Google adding that method of reporting offensive images but it might be a bit too late now?

Forum discussion at 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: June 23, 2008"

Last year, we looked at the impacts, if any, of negative SEO on websites, a discussion which arose from a Forbes article on the saboteurs of search. One year later, we're still discussing the consequences and seeing if negative SEO is still possible. In a WebmasterWorld thread, we learn that there are still ways to sabotage websites and rankings, from hijacking competitor's DNS to doing it to yourself by killing your URL structure. Now, though, there's more with new technologies and new concerns about sabotage, from cloaked sabotage to reputation sabotage. There's also the concern of parasite hosting and embedding hidden links.

As one webmaster says, you need to be the one who protects your site, because Google isn't necessarily reliable in that regard. (After all, Google is tracking billions of pages.) However, not many people know how to protect their own websites.

Tedster recommends that you can look into a variety of these problems by changing the user agent, disabling cookies, turning off meta refreshes, etc.

But how does it happen? As Receptional Andy says:

A lot of SEO sabotage attempts involve trying to trick Google into thinking that a site should be penalised and does not meet guidelines. That can be by directly modifying the site (through legitimate mechanisms to do so, or by finding vulnerabilities and exploiting them) and by modifying or setting up external references to a site.

You may think it won't happen to you, but don't be overly confident. Take a read and follow up with the discussion on WebmasterWorld.

Google AdSense was formally announced on June 18, 2003. Now, it is five years old and still going strong. Within 2 days, WebmasterWorld had its own Google Adsense forum where people are talking about how Google AdSense has helped them.

In five years, some have been making enough to earn a decent living off of Google AdSense. Many admit that Google AdSense is the best monetization program for their website. Martinibuster adds:

For a program that you can just set it and forget it, it is without peer. There's nothing out there that approaches it if you have the right niche and have cultivated the right traffic.

Many people's reflections on Google AdSense over the past 5 years has been a positive one. May the next 5 years be just as fruitful for these people and newcomers to Google AdSense.

Want more coverage of Google AdSense? We have 658 articles in Search Engine Roundtable's Google AdSense category.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

In a Google Groups thread, a number of small businesses are noticing that their location marker isn't quite on target; they would like to edit it out. In the past (and unfortunately I don't have a screenshot), there was a feature that would enable users to "edit incorrect marker location." (A similar feature is discussed in our screenshot tour of the "move the map marker".) Google has acknowledged that they removed this, thinking that it wasn't important.

However, a few business owners admit that the location marker is not pointing to their business location as accurately as they'd like, and they want to change it. The only way around doing this, at the moment, is to delete the entire business and start again from scratch. Naturally, since there's a lot of information that goes into entering a business on Google, it's not the ideal solution.

With the few people who are impacted, it's probably true that a lot of other individuals are affected but haven't used Google Groups to voice their concern. Maps Guide Jen, however, says that there is "clear evidence" that this feature is needed and Google will be adding it back in soon.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

Google has confirmed the Google AdSense Fonts tests as being tests at WebmasterWorld. Since then I have tried to compile some real world examples of these fonts in action. Thanks to a DigitalPoint Forums thread, I was able to find a new AdSense font. Here it is:

Compare that to the normal fonts:

Compare that to comic sans font:

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

We have talked about long URLs are spammy in the past. But now we have a Google Groups thread with a Googler, JounMu, actually commented on a specific URL as being a bit too long for comfort.

The example URL in question is:

http://www.gadgetguy.com.au/small-kitchen-appliances-toaster-kettle-coffee-machine-blender-juicer-channel7-sunrise-australia-42.html

John said "Now I'm all for having descriptive URLs, but .... this seems to be taking it a bit too far and I have a bit of trouble identifying anything that matches in the content of your page." Too far? Does that mean Google will penalize really long URLs? Or in this case, it just looks spammy to a manual review?

Digging in deeper, John noticed that you can find the same page as long as you include 42 at the end of the URL. Now, this is a common CMS issue with many sites. What should be done in this case, is a 301 redirect from the broken URL to the true URL.

I assume in this case, the CMS identifies the page by having the ID (i.e. 42) in the URL and then returns the dynamic content. The CMS should contain a real URL and then 301 redirect any other URLs that have id 42 in them to the real URL.

So, when building a CMS, you might want to do a couple things in terms of URLs:

(1) Restrict the length of the URL to something normal
(2) 301 Redirect any duplicate URLs to the real URL

Now, I may have stretched John's words here but it does seem that he is pointing out the URL as being something that may raise a red flag in Google.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

I can't express how happy I am to see a real live API available for Google Webmaster Tools. The announcement came late Friday, telling webmasters and developers that they can now use an API to access and communicate data back and forth to Google for the Webmaster Tools portion of the site.

The tool supports some but not all of Webmaster Tools features. It gives you two overall capabilities, one with managing site and the other with managing Sitemaps. You can do the following:

• Managing Sites
  • Retrieve a list of your sites in Webmaster Tools
  • Add your sites to Webmaster Tools
  • Verify your sites in Webmaster Tools
  • Remove your sites from Webmaster Tools
• Working with Sitemaps
• Retrieve a list of your submitted Sitemaps
• Add Sitemaps to Webmaster Tools
• Remove Sitemaps from Webmaster Tools

As you can see, it doesn't allow you to manage everything with your sites. The key missing component to most SEOs is the linkage data. You can't build a tool to analyze your links. You also can't access diagnostic data or statistics data. Not yet. I am sure it will all come down the road. This first step shows that Google obviously is working towards the API, they built out some core features now and I suspect that if these core features are used, the other features will continue to be built out.

For more information about the new API, check out http://code.google.com/apis/webmastertools/docs/developers_guide.html.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I had the honor of breaking the story on the Google Trends for Websites announcement. In fact, I was on a call with Sundar Pichai (VP, Product Management), R.J. Pittman (Director, Product Management), and Matt Cutts (you know him) of Google the day before. They showed me a tool that shows estimated traffic data for many sites, plus gives you search data and much more. I was very excited about this launch, as you can tell from my write up at Search Engine Land.

Let me first show you two examples of how it can be used. Since we cover search forums here, I want to show you how search forums rank against each other. I cover WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums the most here, simply because they have the most threads - and Google Trends validated that to me, at least on a traffic volume level.

Here I plotted webmasterworld.com, digitalpoint.com, sphinn.com, cre8asiteforums.com, searchenginewatch.com against each other. Here is the chart:

WebmasterWorld just edges out DigitalPoint Forums, both seem to be getting around 100,000 visitors per day. Those numbers are nothing to laugh out, that is impressive traffic when compared to many other sites. Heck, I even plotted Search Engine Watch on the chart, which has a forum, but most of the activity on the site is likely not forum related. Google doesn't allow subdomains yet, so it would be hard to compare just webmasterworld.com to forums.digitalpoint.com or forums.searchenginewatch.com, and so on. DigitalPoint has a ton of free tools, so it is not exclusively a forum either - WebmasterWorld is primarily a forum, as far as I can tell. So WebmasterWorld may be the largest SEM related forum out there.

Another great use for this tool is to find related sites. Finding related sites is great for hunting down resources related to the site you plugged in. It is also a great SEM tool, for finding link partners or even advertisers. For example, plugging in seroundtable.com will bring up the following "also visited sites..." searchmarketingexpo.com, sphinn.com, searchengineland.com, searchenginejournal.com, searchengineguide.com, bruceclay.com, mattcutts.com, ppchero.com, jimboykin.com, and blogstorm.co.uk. These are all related sites to this one. So if you like reading this site, you may want to also add these sites to your RSS reader.

There are many great ways to use this tool. But like whenever Google launches something very useful, people complain. There are many, many people out there blogging about the negative points to such a tool. Scan some of the "discussion" links at Techmeme and you might find headlines like Google Trends Adds Another Way to Inaccurately Track Website Traffic, Google Trends for Websites? Not Cool, Google., and Google’s Two Tiered Internet World Sinks to a New Low. Lots of negative blog posts on this release, lots of it. Some say it sucks because it doesn't work on all web sites. Geez, it will come, give it time. Some say it sucks cause it doesn't work with google.com.

Would you prefer if Google dropped it? Would you prefer if Google never built it? You might come and comment here that you would, but would it seriously make for a better world? Would more people benefit from this tool, in any small way, then be hurt by such a tool? I think most people would be sad if Google said, because Michael Gray doesn't like it, we are shutting it down.

I am not going to go through all the comments and discussions at the forums, because there is a ton of it. But I will list out the major threads discussing the new tool.

Forum discussion at Sphinn, WebmasterWorld, Search Engine Watch Forums, DigitalPoint Forums and also Matt Cutt's Blog.

In this week's video recap, I announced the special Father's Day winner of the schwag, plus told you how to win this week (it's easy). I showed off the Father's Day logos from Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, Dogpile and others. I discussed the Google Webmaster Live Chat event. Did you know Page Load Time is now a factor in AdWords? I got into the topic of Google Bowling and ended it off with don't make Matt Cutts mad. If your server doesn't respond with a server status code for your robots.txt file, then you are in trouble. Finally, I mentioned the crazy AdSense fonts we have been noticing. Watch it below or on iTunes and you can win Google schwag this week!

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:

• Father's Day '08 Logos from Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, Dogpile & Search Community
• Recording & Coverage of Google's Second Live Chat Session
• Did Google Really Launch The Page Load Time Factor in AdWords Quality Score?
• Google Defends Bad Link Theory & Repeats That Competitors Can't Hurt You
• Matt Cutts Warns Against Lying in a Reconsideration Request
• Will Google Crawl Your Site Without a Robots.txt File? It Depends
• Google Sitemaps: Are They Really Important for SEO?
• Google AdSense Wacky Font Tests Continue

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: June 20, 2008"

Another Friday marks the end of another busy week. We celebrated Father's Day and had a nice hot (and a bit rainy) week over here. And yourselves?

Father's Day

Sunday marked Father's Day in just about every country (which is so cool -- I never knew this!) and search engines celebrated with all dads. We did a little unique design ourselves. What did you think?

Google Webmaster Chat Recordings Now Available

Were you not able to make it to the webmaster live event that was held earlier this week? No problems! There's a recording of the event for your exploration and edification.

Your Google AdWords Quality Score Accounts for Page Load Time

Does your page load pretty slowly? Are you running Google AdWords on that account? Be advised that it may factor into your AdWords score, so get a fast server or something if that's a problem.

Your Competitors Can't Hurt You

...at least according to Google. JohnMu says that in his experience working at Google, he's never seen anyone hurt their competitors due to bad linking practices. It's possible in theory, but it's never actually been observed by someone at the big G.

How Stupid Can You Be?!

I like the comment on my post where I said that Matt Cutts discourages against lying on reconsideration requests. Hello, instead of peeving off Matt and co. so that you can be permanently banned from the index (that'd be nice for such folks, right?), why don't you spend the time to fix your problems?

Set Up that Robots.txt File

It's possible, according to what was reported earlier this week, that Google won't crawl your site if your robots.txt file is unreachable. Make sure your server gives a normal response to Google before you assume you'll get crawled!

Google Wants Your Sitemaps Too

Also, make sure to get a sitemap for Google to spider your site. I think this is good advice as it helps rather than hurts you. Barry says you should try it out and see what works for you. Personally, I think it works for me. :)

Google.co.uk Explained

Google.co.uk is different than Google.com, but in a sense, there are some similarities. Regardless, webmasters have shared what they notice on Google.co.uk compared to the .com version and there are some notable differences, particularly with geotargeting.

Please Don't Give Us Ugly Google AdSense Fonts

Google is testing fonts for AdSense ads, and they've considered Comic Sans, which I abhor (and I know I'm not alone). Bad idea, Google. Anything but Comic Sans, please. Better yet, keep it consistent with the text of everything else on the page. ;)

Never Fall for a Phish

We get phishing scams everyday, but this is just a reminder to beware of anything that smells phishy, and in this case, that's Yahoo Search Marketing scams. (Oh, that typo was intended, by the way.) The best option is to just log into your accounts (any that require identifying information) and see if there's a warning on the dashboard to update security information or whatnot. Never click on those links or respond to them. Identity theft runs rampant and it starts with negligence that usually comes from clicking on email.

Is Google Pay Per Action Going Anywhere?

It seems that the future of Google's Pay Per Action is bleak, with Google stopping to invite users to the program and us not knowing if it has a long term future. I think it's a good idea in concept, but it'd be nice to see that it benefits both Google and users who opt in. I guess they haven't figured that part out yet. Maybe they need to open it up to more people?

The Long Tail Rocks

If you haven't optimized for the long tail, this thread about the benefits of long tail traffic should make you reconsider. Webmasters are noticing in their logs that users aren't looking for "cars" anymore. They're searching for the specific make and model ("lexus es 350"). You want to make sure you're targeting those terms or you're going to be losing out on some valuable traffic.

That's all for now. Have a wonderful weekend :)

Google.com is an entirely different beast from Google.co.uk -- and webmasters have taken the time to discuss some interesting observations on the .co.uk end.

Some are seeing results jumping around with major reshuffling. On a related note, some are seeing the same but are getting results only for very long tail searches.

Another observes issues with geotargeting. The specific scenario:

For instance many phrases for a 14 year old UK hosted global authority .com is #1 on G.com and is halfway down G.co.uk and some phrases not even ranked at all.

Forum members also observe and believe that Google.co.uk is using click-through data. That's interesting. I guess people know how to rank better, then!

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

So, you want to keep a great Google AdWords quality score. What do you need to consider in your ads? AdWordsPro.Sarah tells us in a Google Groups thread.

There are six things to consider.

1. CTR: The higher, the better.
2. Account structure: Your keywords should be in "tightly themed ad groups."
3. Landing Page Quality: More information here.
4. Account history: Your average CTR.
5. Historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group
6. Other Factors: There are hundreds, but the aforementioned 5 are good enough.

If you work on improving the top 5, your score should be fine. If you have questions, you can always ask your Google AdWords account rep or speak with someone at Google Groups.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

A Google Groups thread requests clear guidelines from Google about acceptable hidden flash content. In some cases, people are very adamant about focusing on dynamic content but don't want to sacrifice indexability. He employed a tactic that displayed content in the Flex application where a mixture of PHP and dynamic deep linking is utilized, but got deindexed as a result. He thinks it's a penalty.

Others suggest that it isn't -- it's a technical limitation because spiders cannot understand everything behind Flash content. The solution is to provide an equivalent spiderable HTML page.

Most disagree that he was penalized -- unless his tactics were spammy or questionable. In fact, Google's Bergy comes in and clarifies.

Using Flash is not in itself a violation of the Webmaster Guidelines, and we do not penalize sites simply for using Flash.

Further, Bergy clarifies the difficulty of Flash versus textual content.

I know that the tendency to build sites around Flash isn't a new trend, and we both understand that Flash is very different from HTML; HTML was designed to describe static text and images, whereas Flash was designed to describe vector-based graphics with interactive multimedia content. However, keyword indexation, the process that lets search engines be so darn fast, only makes sense for textual content.

I think this goes to show that the important thing is that if your site is detailed in Flash, you better have the same amount of detail in HTML content so that the spiders can get to your page -- and index it -- without any problems.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks if there is a way to prevent Google Bowling. Google Bowling is known as a method of using links to hurt your competitors. While Google still denies it, most SEOs believe this is possible can this be prevented?

In the thread, Tedster said:

There is one thing that protects a website against Google Bowling - a solid backlink profile of its own. The more your "real" quality backlinks grow, the less anyone else's malicious actions can affect it.

Can you Google Bowl the NY Times or Wall Street Journal out of the index? Can you Google Bowl top notch quality sites out of the index? Of course, "quality sites" are a very subjective thing and that is where things get messy.

But I agree with Tedster, the best way to prevent a Google Bowling attempt is to have a very solid back link profile.

Senior Member, CainIV, added:

A diverse, quality source of backlinks helps protect against this. The more quality backlinks you have over time, the less percentage of new links there will be pointed at you in comparison to existing links. The more trusted the website is, the more 'iffy' inbound links it can absorb.

I think this is why Googlers keep suggesting that SEOs and Webmasters focus on their own site and not worry about competitors.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

An unusual question came up at WebmasterWorld, asking if you can request a site to be completely removed from a country specific Google search engine.

For example, the site owner wants to remove his site from Google Netherlands, because the site has some issues being available to Holland searchers. So the owner of the site wants to remove it from all search results within the Google Holland/Netherlands search engine.

Is that even possible? I don't think so. And WebmasterWorld administrator, Tedster, also said he doesn't know of a way to do that.

No way that I've ever heard of, Aji. There's no pick-and-choose by country in the current set-up, except for some cases of local country laws that Google handles automatedly. Googlebots all share one crawl-cache these days, too.

I believe in the past, you can block specific country specific crawlers in your robots.txt file. I believe that still works for Yahoo Search, but for Google, they use one generic crawler these days.

Maybe a Googler can chime in here, if it is possible?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread asks if Google "hates" .info or .tv domains? The answer is simply no. This question was brought up at least three times last night in the Google Webmaster Live Chat event, which I documented and not only did Google's Matt Cutts said there is absolutely no difference in a link from a .info versus a link from a .com. In fact, there is a Googler that leaves his home page to a specific .info site, to prove that there are plenty of quality .info sites out there, Matt said.

In addition, we have JohnMu answering that question in the Q&A portion:

shantanu sikdar - 6:03 pm

Q: Hi Googlers, does your algorithm give more importance to a link from a .com as compared to .info?

John Mueller - 6:22 pm

A: Links are links :)

But keep in mind, we did document that Google has been caught downgrading .info TLDs in bulk. Not sure exactly what happened in the case. Plus we discussed the value of .edu domains time and time again.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Conversion tracking is one of the key metrics many advertisers use when determining if they will run a PPC ad and how much they are willing to spend on an ad. So when it goes missing, advertisers become really concerned.

A Google Groups thread has confirmed reports that for some Google AdWords advertisers, the screen that displays conversion tracking, is not displaying the data as it normally does. Don't worry, the data is not lost, it is just not visible in that current location, at this present time.

To see your conversion data, you must click on the "Customize Columns" link in your data table and show your relevant conversion columns. You should then see the conversion data. Keep in mind that you have to do this every time because these columns will not stay visible if you refresh the page or navigate to a different part of your account.

Google's AdWordsPro.Jordan said the team is aware of this bug and is working to address it. For the time being, you need to use the method above to get to your conversion data, each and every time.

For now, I’d suggest using the manual workaround I just described or using your reports to determine your conversion performance for now. Sorry for the trouble.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

The second Google webmaster live chat event is now over. I love these things and I wanted to make sure that you all can listen to what took place, just in case you missed it.

The agenda went as follows:

• INTRO: A quick hello from some of your favorite Help Group Guides
• John Mueller talked about personalized search.
• Maile Ohye talked about case sensitivity
• Jonathan Simon talked about getting your content out of Google (not in)
• A ton of Q&A time.

I recorded the event on my Mac and here is the MP3 file or you can listen with the player below (78 minutes or 71.82MB):

Miss the first Google Webmaster Live Chat event? You can read about it over here.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Here is the full transcript of the Q&A as posted in the WebEx system or you can download the text file and read it that way. In addition, JohnMu added a Google Groups thread for answering the unanswered questions!

Google posted the transcripts, recording and presentations on June 24th. The Q&A can be found over here, the MP3 recording is over here and you can view Maile's presentation and John's presentation as well.

Continue reading "Recording & Coverage of Google's Second Live Chat Session"

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: June 19, 2008"

A Cre8asite Forums member contends that optimizing for certain keywords isn't desirable any longer. The reason given is that people aren't ever searching for those keywords (even though it looks like a logical search term). He adds that there's no consistency in users' search patterns. The behavior differs from one searcher to another, which is entirely understandable.

If I had 'optimised' the page for MY keywords I may have lost all those visitors and THEIR keywords.

But another forum members suggests that you start optimizing based on the search phrases people use; you might even get better traffic. You need to think of what people are searching for and lengthen your articles so that you capture that desired traffic.

So should you not optimize for the original keyword list? You might want to still consider users who search for "the head and the long tail," as Ammon Johns puts it.

There's really good information here, so have a read at the forum discussion at Cre8asite forums

In acknowledgment of gay rights, Google has added an assortment of colors between the organic and sponsored results as seen below:

This was first spotted by PingPongPie, but it looks like there's a lot of momentum given this implementation. My thought is that it has to do with Google being located in California and gay marriage finally becoming legalized, but I really don't know. It's just a guess.

Interestingly enough, as per a Sphinn thread, it's only visible in some states. One member who resides in South Carolina isn't seeing it. I'm in New York; the screenshot above is mine -- I see it without a problem.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums and Sphinn.

On Google Groups, the AdWords API Advisor shares some videos and useful documentation on how to get the most out of the Google AdWords API. The documentation as provided by Google is at the AdWords API tutorial page, and there are 9 videos that can be viewed at your convenience to get more. They are:

1. An introduction to the API and how you can use it
2. An intro to web material within the API
3. How to log into the API sandbox development environment
4. How to capture debugging behavior
5. Creating campaigns around the API
6. Creating ad groups around the API
7. Creating ads around the API
8. Creating keyword criteria with the API
9. A discussion about the AdWords API

Very cool stuff. The videos are very informative.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks if it is normal to see a downgrade in rankings soon after conducting a link building campaign. In other words, a webmaster builds links to a site that ranks average. The next few days, the webmaster notices a drop in his rankings for the site. Is that something typical, only to see it go back up even higher the next few days?

The answer is no. It is not typical to see a site first decline in rankings when conducting link building.

WebmasterWorld administrator, tedster said:

The effect of good new links can grow over time, but an immediate drop in ranking is not something I've ever noticed.

He is supported by WebmasterWorld's link building moderator, martinibuster, who said:

I agree, a boost in ranking is normal. Not unusual subsequent to a temporary boost to experience a drop to a few places higher than you were before, and maybe even some bouncing afterward for awhile until it settles. A total drop in rankings sounds abnormal.

What can be the cause of this webmaster's recent drop in rankings? Very hard to say, being that there are a ton of variables in play. But maybe the type of links this webmaster obtained were not so "trusted" as they might have appeared at first glance?

Time to find a new link building company? Maybe.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

In May we first reported on Google testing out some new fonts for the Google AdSense ads. We then posted examples of Google testing comic sans font in their ad type, as you can see from the image at the right of this text. Most publishers were not happy with the extreme font change that was being tests on some publisher sites.

Well, it appears these tests are getting more drastic. Reports come from WebmasterWorld that Google is continuing with their font tests. The fonts observed by one publisher include:

• Times
• Plain Serif
• No Serif
• Vanilla
• Arial
• Big Point
• Small Point
• Comic Sans

One publisher said he noticed these as well, but also noticed that his click-through rate is "way up." That results in more cash for the publisher and Google.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google's Local Business Center, the place businesses go to add or edit their local business listing at Google Maps, is having some major technical issues.

A single post by Google Maps Guide at Google Groups really sums it up quickly:

We understand some users are encountering system errors in the Local Business Center. We're working quickly to resolve these issues. Stay tuned for an update!

Mike Blumenthal's blog has been recently covering some of the major changes and glitches with the local business center.

In short, if you are eager to make changes to your business's listing - I would wait it out a week or so. Or at least until you see the Google Maps Guide update this Google Groups thread with good news.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Last night, Google AdWords announced that the quality score now incorporates how fast your pages load. We have been hearing about this since early March and have even offered up advice on how to test your page load times. In early May, Google began displaying the page load time score in your keyword analysis portion of the AdWords console. Here is a screen capture of that.

So we know that Google is tracking Page Load times. But is it live yet? I personally looked through several of my client campaigns and did not notice any poor landing page load time scores. A WebmasterWorld thread has one PPC company manager who said of all his accounts he manages, not one was hit by a poor quality score due to page load time. The news is very early out the gates, so it still may not have kicked in fully. But I have not heard any complaints from any advertiser on the topic of having a poor page load time score - yet. If things change, I will let you know.

To be frank, I believe you need a really slow site to be impacted by the page load time factor. So all this commotion on it, may not be fully warranted.

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: June 18, 2008"

WebmasterWorld moderator martinibuster shares some valuable link building tips in what he calls the "Link Theme Pyramid." In his post, he gives his opinions on some link building techniques that have worked for him.

Roger says that anchor text should match the page it's linking to (where the page should contain the anchor text somewhere). He adds that hubs should be more than pages of links and that perhaps your home page should not be the most relevant page. This is something Jim Boykin preaches. Finally, Roger says that you should aim to focus on the long tail.

In the thread, forum members mention that some webmasters demand a link to the home page, not to a specifically targeted inner page. While that's all well and good, the problem is that it won't help your link building efforts. That's the point I believe Roger was trying to convey. Some webmasters say that the problem with linking to inner pages is that they may break over time (and I suppose it's harder to check if the page is gone). My recommendation here is a 301 redirect.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

David Mihm spent a considerable amount of time compiling a great local search ranking factors guide where he talks about the various factors that influence local search. In the document, you can see the emphasis on a variety of optimization techniques, including how experts weigh in on the importance of city/state in title tags, address/phone number in contact page, location keyword in website URL, participation in local Pay Per Click, and more. It's a very comprehensive guide and is extremely informative. David, this is awesome :)

Most forum members agree that this is a great piece of information. While there's a bit of disagreement in some of the areas, overall, the document has been very well-received.

I suggest you check it out.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

A lot of people whose websites get banned from Google eventually take the necessary measures to fix the problems on their site and then request reinclusion. Some, however, do not. They just submit that reinclusion request and assume everything is fixed. Matt Cutts isn't stupid, and you shouldn't think that's a way of getting around being deindexed on Google. In a Twitter message, Matt says that you shouldn't lie in your reconsideration requests. He says it makes him angry. Heck, I'd say that if people lie too many times, they shouldn't be reindexed at all ;)

If you ever get deindexed, you're able to determine how you can be reindexed. At that point, you can file a reinclusion request for your website or for your video.

(Thanks Harith!) :)

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

A Sphinn discussion is currently underway about Andrew Shotland's SEO for Phone Numbers blog post. In his blog post, he argues that you should optimize for phone numbers for three reasons:

(1) Displaying a phone number in your title tag might increase your click-through-rate for your search listing. That is if, the searcher is searching for your phone number.

(2) You can take traffic away from the Internet Yellow Pages that list your business's phone number.

(3) Optimize for other business's phone numbers and when they do vanity searches on their phone numbers, they will find you and maybe buy what you have to sell them.

The Sphinn thread lists other reasons why you might want to make sure you are well optimized for your phone numbers. For example, someone forgot your company name, but your phone number is listed on their caller ID. I tried to find companies this way in the past.

But if you place phone numbers in your URL, be careful not to end in a zero.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

There is no doubt that Most SEOs Believe Competitors Can Hurt Your Google Rankings specifically with using link building tactics. But when the topic was raised recently at a Google Groups thread, Googler, JohnMu, pretty much denied it.

Let me quote you John's post:

In theory, I can imagine that there might be some borderline situations where that would be possible, however in all the time I have spend diagnosing website issues I have not once run into a situation like that. Also, I know that if a situation like that were to come to our attention, it would be resolved very quickly.

When very technical people say the phrase, "in theory," it typically means its not really possible. It typically means that the chances of the event occurring is slim to none. At least, my experience around programmers all day taught me that.

John flat out said that he has never seen a situation where a competitor driving bad links to a site has hurt the site, ever. Now, John has been with Google for about a year now and during that time, I suspect he reviewed about a site per day. That is a lot of sites and not to see any of those sites impacted by a competitor sending harmful links to it, is a bit shocking to me.

Of course, John might be saying that the harmful links were not from the competitor. Or he might have perceived them as not being from the competitor. In addition, these sites may have have other technical issues that were against Google's TOS. Hard for me to tell you what John has seen or hasn't seen - even harder for me to tell you what John is thinking.

But if you read through the thread in detail, you will see some things that might be hard to explain. In the case of the thread, it seems like John is hinting that the site in question has several on-page issues that need to be addressed. But the webmaster, as are several webmasters not associated with the site, seem to believe what many other SEOs believe - that Competitors Can Hurt Your Google Rankings.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Most Google AdWords advertisers are aware of dynamic keyword insertion (also, good info here), which is a way to dynamically insert the searcher's keyword phrase in your ad copy. But there are other insertion tags available to advertisers, outside of the keyword tag.

A Google Groups thread lists the five available Google AdWords insertion tags for everyone, in one place. Here they are:

• {ifsearch:search}
• {ifcontent:content}
• {placement}
• {creative}
• {keyword}

Each is fairly self-explanatory for any of you who are at the level of using them. I just thought I would create a page that lists all the currently available insertion tags that can be used in Google AdWords.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

I found a very interesting tidbit from a Google Groups thread on unreachable robots.txt files.

I always believed that a site does not need a robots.txt file. In fact, this site does not have a robots.txt file and yet we are very well indexed. Proof that you don't need a robots.txt file to allow Google to index your site. Right?

Well, maybe not. Googler, JohnMu, said in the Google Groups thread that if your robots.txt file is unreachable due to timing out or other issues, not including a 404 not found status, Google "tends not to crawl the site at all just to be safe."

You hear that? Google might not crawl your entire site if it cannot reach your robots.txt file properly.

In the case in the thread, the robots.txt file was unreachable due to a complex set of redirects that made Googlebot very dizzy.

John explains later on that "unparsable robots.txt" files are "generally" okay, since Google is getting back some type of server response. When you have an issue is when generally "the URL is just unreachable (perhaps a "security update" that ended up blocking us in general) or situations like this where we give up trying to access the URL (which in a way is unreachable as well)," said John.

So, for those picky Belgium's, just make your robots.txt file unreachable, and there you go. :)

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: June 17, 2008"

Blogger Mathew Ingram reports that the Associated Press has gone after a news blog for infringing upon copyrights. In summary, the AP has gone after a blog that posts short excerpts pointing to original AP articles, claiming that "fair use" does not permit this practice.

What's the rationale? Some people think that they're not willing to let go of old practices.

The AP is pissed that their antiquated business model no longer exists. The AP is behaving more and more like a bully

Others believe that the AP is being fair but people are simply not abiding by their policies. In an AP statement, they say:

We get concerned, however, when we feel the use is more reproduction than reference, or when others are encouraged to cut and paste.

Not many people buy it, though. One forum member says that he'll stop quoting AP stories and quote a competitor (or a source that quotes the AP). I guess that most feel that AP really didn't do its due diligence in this matter.

More discussion on this topic is written on the SEOmoz blog and in The Lisa's wonderful summary. Even more discussion is on Techmeme.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

In a very interesting interview, Eric Enge spoke with Matt Cutts on link building. What's good link building? In many cases, Matt thinks that the best links are those that are original research and provide value to readers in the form of a Firefox extension (that's somewhat related to the website). Matt also discourages against too much reciprocal links (but it's natural to have a bit). He also discusses affiliate programs, widget bait, SocialSpark (and says that they're doing a good job), and other link building topics.

It's an informative interview that deserves a full read. While some people believe it's common sense, many people have found that it's entirely valuable.

And original research really does pay off.

That little tidbit alone is one of the best, if not the best, way to get 'white hat' links. Combine it with an aggressive link building campaign to maximize your results, but the 'original research' concept of link building works like crazy.

I've found that the best articles include a lot of original research. It looks like I'm not alone.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn and WebmasterWorld.

Today is the day that Firefox 3 is supposed to be unleashed to the wild. I don't see an official download link yet (according to Dave Woods, it won't happen until 6PM BST, which is 1PM EST), but if you're preparing to get it, note that the Google Toolbar is now available for Firefox 3.

A number of Firefox users were waiting to upgrade to version 3 based on the availability of Google Toolbar, and now that Firefox 3 is supposedly going to be released today, you should begin to make preparations. :)

Features available to the new version include custom buttons to your favorite websites, bookmarks that are accessible from any computer, direct access to Google Docs and Spreadsheets, the ability to "Send" your files to a friends or directly to your blog, and a quick way to log into your Google Account.

On that note, if you are planning on downloading Firefox today, they're aiming for a world record. Make a pledge that you'll download it now.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

Google launched their Pay Per Action ads a little over a year ago. Since then they have tried expanding it and marketing it to publishers and advertisers. We have extensive coverage of the Google Pay Per Action product at this site, if you want to check the history on it.

Today, I noticed a Google Groups thread that might imply that Google is having second thoughts of the product.

AdWordsPro Sarah, an official Google representative, responded to a question about the program:

Unfortunately, because the Pay Per Action pricing model is in beta, it is invitation only. At this time, invitations are no longer being extended while the product team figures out what direction the model will take in the future.

From this we learn:

(1) Google stopped sending out invitations for PPA.
(2) Google is not sure what direction they want to take the PPA product in the future.

Was Google's Pay Per Action model a failure? Or was marketing it a failure?

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Google has announced the details of the second live chat session for webmasters and Googlers. The first live chat session was a huge success, I posted transcripts and so on at our site if you missed it. The next live chat session is taking place this Thursday, June 19th at 5pm (EST).

To join this event, you must go here and on the top left hand side of the page, click on register and fill out the form. After you complete the form, more details will be emailed to you. I will make every effort to participate in the live session as well and we hope to cover it for those who cannot make it.

Here is the agenda:

• INTRO: A quick hello from some of your favorite Help Group Guides
• PRESO: A presentation on Personalization in Google Search by our own John Mueller.
• FAQs: We're calling this "Three for Three," and we'll have three different Googlers tackling three different issues we've seen come up in the Group recently. What will they be? You'll just have to attend the chat to find out!
• And lots of Q&A! You'll have a chance to type questions during the entire session, and we'll pick as many as we can to answer in writing and in speaking during the chat.

The last sessions was really worthwhile and I think most SEOs and Webmasters will enjoy the next one.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

A WebmasterWorld thread is suggesting that after his site was hit by the PageRank penalty from several months ago, he has been getting more qualified advertisers. Here is what this publisher is saying:

I've noticed an increase in quality advertisers since Google de-ranked our resource pages.

We used to get tons of advertising requests from sites just for our PR...we also had to refuse many of them for being off topic and low quality sites. These sites are no longer contacting us, but better sites are now advertising. They get the targeted traffic and it looks good having them as a resource.

Now, even though the PR went down, our site ranking is still high in the search engines because it is a quality content site. They didn't dink us in search ranking, just in advertiser PR.

This site has been hit with the same PageRank penalty. Have I seen a decrease in the number of people requesting I exchange links with them? Far from it. But I think there may have been a drop in the number of requests to just buy PageRank. So, on that level, I do agree - it saves me a lot of time in terms of weeding out the bad advertisers from the good.

So less advertisers are requesting to "buy PageRank" and more advertisers are interested in actually promoting their product/service and/or supporting this site. Which is exactly what I want. I also assume this is exactly what Google wanted, so can this turn into a win-win situation for Google and publishers? I certainly hope so.

For more history on the PageRank penalties, see here, but also note this also, before seeing the first link.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A couple weeks ago we reported that more Google AdWords phishing email scams were being sent out. While those emails continue to be sent out, the same scam artists are sending out similar emails branded for Yahoo Search Marketing. Here is a picture of the email I personally received yesterday, that I know many others are also receiving:

Yes, it looks extremely similar to the AdWords phishing scams, in fact, it appears to be from the same scammer. The URL that the click here goes to is:

http://yms-source.com/yahoo.marketing.solutions/adui/loadSignin.htm

Yes, the same ysm-source.com domain. So be careful and don't ever reply to or take action on these types of emails.

Forum discussion at 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: June 16, 2008"

Didn't have a chance to go to SMX Advanced? Mike McDonald and the whole WebProNews team decided to make a video to show you what you've missed in a video with Danny Sullivan entitled Love, Search, and Bots.

Here's the video for your enjoyment:

Thanks to Mike, Roger, Tiffany, and the whole WebProNews team for an enjoyable (and silly) video. It's true; we discussed a lot of those things ;)

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

As a proponent of net neutrality, Google will be developing an ISP throttling detector, according to Hot Hardware. The tool will enable consumers to determine if their broadband connections are being "monkeyed" by their ISPs.

The idea behind the tool is to give users the knowledge to see exactly how their ISP traffic -- which they're paying for -- is being allocated. Transparency is important to Google, and that's why they're offering tools to make it happen. If ISPs aren't going to give the information to the consumer, Google will make it so that the consumer gets access themselves.

The article doesn't state an ETA of the product, but it sounds promising for those ISP subscribers (especially those on Comcast and others who have been throttled) to figure out exactly what's happening to their connection.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Watch Forums.

The Google Browser Sync Firefox extension project appears to be coming to a close, according to Google Operating System. The team behind management was very small, apparently, and the tool won't be seen in Firefox 3 (which is expected to launch officially tomorrow). The extension, by the way, allowed you to sync all of your bookmarks, web history, and passwords across multiple browsers.

Unfortunately that means that some people who have relied on the efficiency of the tool are out of luck. I'm not sure if there are any suggested Firefox replacements that would work instead, but if you know of any, please add them to the comments.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Anyone who has their own Google Sites page may want to verify it for Google Webmaster Tools. At this time, unfortunately, it's not possible. Google Sites does not allow you to upload HTML files or add meta tags, so verification at this time seems to be something Google has not considered.

That said, the Google Sites team is now aware of the issue and Reid from Google has responded to the forums thread saying that they will be looking into it.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

There is an outstanding subscriber (paid access required) WebmasterWorld thread that discusses the topic of short term versus long term phrases. These are the types of threads that make me feel, hey - that $150 subscription pays for itself. Without giving up all the details, let me explain the premise of the thread.

We all know that searchers are getting smarter at searching. Searchers are now much less likely to search for [cars] when looking to lease or buy a new car. Searchers are now much more likely to search for a more specific search, such as [lexus es 350]. The same applies to electronics, instead of [digital cameras], searchers are now being more specific with [canon powershot camera] and so on. Searchers are searching less often on the short phrases, such as one or two work keywords and more often on longer phrases (long tail), such as three, four or five word keywords. The WebmasterWorld thread gives examples of this happening via Google Trends, log files and experience.

If you agree that searchers are searching less often on short tail keywords, then you might agree that SEO, today, is less about those short tail keywords and more about the longer tail keywords.

The thread discusses how many SEOs are noticing less traffic on those short term keyword phrases, then they have in the past. The debate then gets into the niche or industry of your keywords. For some industries where the searcher is less experienced, the short tail keywords still are very high. But for other industries, those short term keywords are experiencing less and less searches. Yes, this has an impact for SEOs and how they optimize sites.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld (paid access required).

DigitalPoint Forum members are chatting about Britney Spears's new official web site at britneyspears.com having Google AdSense ads at the bottom.

Britney Spears's web site seems to be currently being redesigned by MusicToday. MusicToday has placed the Google AdSense ads at the bottom of the page. Of course, the AdSense publishers are the DigitalPoint Forums thread are contemplating the positioning of these ads.

If you take a look at the thumbnail image at the top right of this post, you can see the ads at the bottom, under the main site. Need a better look, either go to the web site or click on the image.

I assume this is just a template used by MusicToday until the site is ready. I doubt there is anything to look into here. I assume those ads would monetize well, if clicked on.

Why am I pointing this out:
(1) Google is a hot topic, but so is Britney Spears, so titling a post Britney Spears and Google might bring in some interesting traffic, which I can share with you later.
(2) It is a fairly slow weekend for forums, so I figured I point you to a very active thread on a light topic.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

There are many SEOs spilt on the topic of the value in submitting a Sitemap to Google. In my opinion, it is clear that if a site has very poor navigation and on-page SEO, submitting a Sitemap might be your only alternative. But for well optimized sites, is there a benefit in submitting a Sitemap file to Google?

That is the topic of discussion in a Google Groups thread. Googler, JohnMu, gives us greater insight into how Google uses Sitemaps and why webmasters might want to consider submitting a Sitemap to Google. Here are my takeaways from the Google Groups thread.

• Help with canonical URLs. For example, by submitting your / and not your /index.html page, Google might just figure that / is the main URL and it will help with those canonical issues for that case. Of course, a 301 redirect from /index.html to / would do the same and Google recommends that even with a sitemap file, you 301 redirect URLs like those.
• The Last modification date field in the sitemap file can aid Google in quickly locating the actual change in the page. John at Google explained that Google might not have time to crawl all the pages you said changed, so if you specify the actual change in the Sitemap file, it will be easier for Google to pick up on those changes.
• The Priority, Change frequency is a lot like the last mod date, said John. If you give Google data that "makes sense", i.e. don't list 100% of your pages as the most important page on your site, then it can be useful to Google.

Those are my takeways from John's post. But here are John's takeaways:

• Yes, please send us Sitemap files, preferably sitemap.org XML files!
• Work on good URLs & use them to double-check your site's navigation
• Optional: Date or change frequency? depends on how you work.
• Also optional: Priority

I have always been a believer that well on-page optimized sites do not require or even benefit much from Google Sitemaps. But at the same time, I also do believe that giving Google extra clues about your site does help. It is something you need to think about. On one hand, by giving Google a sitemap file with all the changes, and a list of your most important pages - you are also giving those details to your competitors. Yes, that Sitemap file is public for Google and for your competitors. It totally depends on your industry.

What do I recommend. Try it out for a few months and see if it works for you. FYI, Beu also covered this thread.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Happy Father's Day fathers! We have a special video edition for you, where you can win schwag from Google, Yahoo, Live Search and others. In any event, I hope all the fathers out there have a wonderful day. Here are logos from the search engines to celebrate the day. Logos come from all the major search engines including Google and Yahoo but not Live Search, we also have logos from Ask.com, Dogpile, Cre8asite Forums and the Search Engine Roundtable. Here they are:

Google:

Yahoo:

Dogpile:

Ask.com

Cre8asite Forums:

Us, Search Engine Roundtable:

Last year, you can see the logos from Google, Yahoo, Dogpile, and the Search Engine Roundtable.

Happy Father's Day and forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Happy Father's Day to all pops out there! Only dad's can win today's schwag, to find out how to win, listen to the video and comment at SERoundtable.com with the correct answer. In this week's recap, I discussed the pros and cons for an advertiser on the Google / Yahoo deal. Some webmasters noticed a drop in Google web traffic, but others notice an increase in image search traffic. Google said the Yahoo Directory does pass PageRank. Is Yahoo nit picking on advertiser credits. I spoke about international SEO topics and much more. So check it out below.

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 To Power Many of Yahoo Search Ads: Good for Advertiser & Publishers?
• Many Webmasters Notice Major Traffic Loss From Google
• Has Google Fixed The Image Search Filter?
• Google Says, Yahoo Directory Does Have PageRank
• Yahoo Search Marketing Getting Stingy on Click Fraud Credits?
• Country-Coded Top-Level Domains Do Not Rank Worse in Google.com
• PDF Documents May Impact How Google Defines Your Site's Language
• Final Notice: Update Your AdSense Account to a Google Account Login
• YouTube Annotations in Action
• Do We Need SEO Forums?

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: June 13, 2008"

It's Friday the 13th and Father's Day is on Sunday. I know you're just as pumped as I am for that. Check out our new Father's Day theme right now!

Google and Yahoo to Partner for Ads

So this week, we heard that Google will power many of Yahoo's search ads. Then we had a poll. Do you want this to happen? The majority of you (46%) said no. Thirty nine percent of you said yes and the rest of you didn't seem to care either way.

Google Drops Traffic

What's up with the loss of traffic as reported by many webmasters as related to Google search volume? I don't know but when your eggs are mostly in Google's basket, it sucks. I noticed this a few months ago, actually, myself. Maybe I am just lucky. ;)

Yahoo Directory has a PageRank After All

Last week we reported that the Yahoo Directory had no PR. That's not the case according to Matt Cutts. TBPR is fun.

Google Image Traffic Increases

Woot! If you're optimizing your website for images, guess what? Google removed a lot of images from the recent filter that flagged images as "adult."

Yahoo Needs Money, Rejects Click Fraud Reports?

Advertisers are reporting that they are reporting that their Yahoo Click Fraud requests are being rejected. No update thus far, so I'm not sure what else to tell you, but I feel the frustration.

Google's SEO Documentation is Updated

Matt Cutts did a great job explaining the new changes in Google's SEO documentation. A lot of good kibbles and bits there :)

Google Addresses Content Scraping

A Google Webmaster dude wrote a post about how Google handles content theft and says that they've done a pretty accurate job weeding out the scrapers and keeping the original text there. Most people think that's not exactly the case. I might be inclined to agree that there's some work that can be done for a better job in that area, but I imagine a lot has been already looked at.

Your Country Coded TLD Won't Rank So Badly After All.... Unless...

If you have a website that is on another domain but you set the geographic target in Google Webmaster Central to US, you probably won't suffer from bad rankings on Google.com, according to JohnMu. However, if you have foreign-language PDF documents, you may be in for a surprise.

Linking AdSense to Google Account Inevitable

Is this our final notice about linking your Google AdSense account to your Google account? Maybe. So um, yeah. It looks like you don't have a choice. Just do it.

YouTube Annotations: Cool, but Why Don't You work in Embedded Videos?

Okay, so I just spent some time looking at this YouTube annotated video of Matt Cutts and porn. It was very enlightening. I played the video on the post on Search Engine Roundtable but didn't see the annotation, though. I tried again. And again. Then I went to the YouTube page. Viola! Annotations are there! Can you fix this please, YouTube team? :)

SEO Debate: Forums Out, Blogs In?

Are SEO forums a waste of time? or are they valuable? This is a good question. My thoughts: noise on forums. Not so much on blogs in comparison. You have a lot of new folks from a far-away timezone who haven't embraced the blog world and still preach totally inaccurate information on forums not knowing that it's outdated by like 5 years. Still, there's value in forums. Barry finds it. Let's pat him on the back. :)

Have a splendid weekend!

We've been warning you to link your Google AdSense account to a Google account for months. Google is now making it official. A WebmasterWorld member says that he received an email saying that he will have to do it soon or else. His reason for not doing it beforehand is that it wasn't broken and it's just kind of pointless for Google to fix what ain't broke.

Meanwhile, in our previously mentioned Google Groups thread, a few updates and clarifications have been made. First, Ashley from Google says that once your account is migrated, you will have to use that Google email address to log into your AdSense account. Second, she says that if you have another Google account that is not a login for your AdSense account, it can be deleted without disabling access to the AdSense account (but it will disable access to other services associated with that login).

Of note: one member is having difficulty performing the actual merge. Maybe it will still be a few weeks while Google irons out the technical problems with this. The discussion related to this technical issue is at Google Groups and additional forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

SEOmoz's Jane Copland spent months on SEOmoz's 2008 Web 2.0 Awards and I know this because I helped judge the winners. After they ranked well once the awards were announced (and even had a PR7), the PageRank went down seemingly overnight and the website disappeared from the Google index. Completely.

After investigating this with Google, it turns out that the problem was that the URL ended with ".0." There's no explicit statement from Google regarding this issue but the reality is (from extensive testing done on their end and verbal confirmation from Google) that that type of URL becomes an instant penalty.

Forums members express bewilderment. Many are confused as to why the PageRank dropped (one forum member suspects that it was done by hand) and it's a bit strange that a 2 year old page dropped out of the index. While I don't know how SEOmoz is handling that (it wasn't specified in the post written by Jane), I think that Google should use its human quality search folks for reinclusion. But hey, that's just me. After all, if the forum member who says that the PR dropped from 7 to 0 is correct in assessing it was done by a human, it should be possible for Google to revert all these penalties. The page is kosher but the URL structure is "bad." It still is a legitimate page and Google should probably figure out how to distinguish this from other pages. (In other words, its robot should crawl the page and actually make the assessment itself.)

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn and DigitalPoint Forums.

A Google Groups thread shares an interesting insight in how Google may interpret a site's language.

A webmaster asked Google why a site with no pages in Spanish is being interpreted as a Spanish site in Google. The site in question is vsanswers.com, and if you look through all the HTML pages, none of them have any Spanish words. But if you look at some of the PDF files on the site, you will discover Spanish in those documents.

Googler, JohnMu, explained:

Looking at some of the pages indexed for your site, it appears that you have some PDFs in multiple languages.

I assume that some of the Spanish keywords can be found on pages like those. In general, PDFs like that can be a bit problematic as it's nearly impossible to determine the language they're in, which could result in the document ranking for an interesting mixture of keywords. If that's ok with you, then you can certainly leave it -- otherwise you could use your robots.txt file to prevent crawling of these files, making them drop out of the index over time.

It appears to me that the webmaster has removed the PDFs from the Google index and that Google may soon resolve the site's issue.

I do find it interesting that while the whole site is in English, that a few PDF documents with some Spanish in them would cause such an issue? To be honest, JohnMu's response is a little confusing to me. So maybe I am missing something and maybe people can clarify in the comments. John said, "PDFs like that can be a bit problematic as it's nearly impossible to determine the language they're in," if that is the case, how can Google qualify the site as being Spanish, if they have a hard time determining the language in the PDF? Or maybe John means that Google misunderstood the PDFs as being in Spanish, which caused the issue? But if that is the case, i.e. Google has a hard time determining the language in the PDF, then why would Google use PDFs in the case of determining the language of the site - why not just use the HTML pages?

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Chris Boggs featured a WebmasterWorld thread when I was away. Chris focused on sharing some of the theories behind Google's trust factors. I wanted to possibly highlight this thread one more time and ask for you to chime in.

We all know that Google has various minus X penalties and most of us believe that your ranking can drop based on how Google trusts your site, as a whole. This WebmasterWorld asks that SEOs and Webmaster put their heads together to come up with some theories on what factors Google might use to apply a Minus X penalty to a site.

Factors might include:

• Site Age
• Age of incoming links
• Type of links coming in
• Outbound links
• PageRank
• Site content
• And much more...

That list can go on and on. Of course, it is almost impossible to come up with a full list and then even harder to isolate each variable and test the weight that Google applies to each. But why not try and give it a try. We had some SEOs try this in the past, but we need more to give it a try in the future.

So join the discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There is a technical discussion taking place at Google Groups on the topic of bringing back to life a deleted keyword from Google AdWords.

Jeff Posnick from the Google AdWords API Team said he isn't aware of a way to retrieve deleted keywords with the API. He said, this is a feature request:

After poking around a bit with reports and getAllCriteria(), I don't actually know of a good method to retrieve a list of deleted keywords using the API. I can tell you that there is an existing feature request in with the reports team to return deleted keywords in Structure reports, though, which is kind of the natural place for them.

But the conversation has not stopped there. AdWords API users seem to be figuring out some methods to kind of reverse engineer some of the API reporting tools to come up with a way to get those deleted keywords. Personally, I am not a heavy AdWords API user, so I don't know if any of those methods would work. If you know of a way, join the conversation and share.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Last night at 6:30pm (EST), Yahoo announced a search ad deal with Google and discontinued talks with Microsoft. As you would imagine, this made major news - so read all the news stories, go to Techmeme, they organized most of the major stories for this announcement, as they always do.

The angle I am going to take with this article is to find out if this is good for you - the advertiser and the publisher. Let me explain that I listened to Jerry Yang and Susan Decker of Yahoo on the 6:30 conference call last night. In that call, I learned that Yahoo will pick and choose which keywords and industries queries they will show Google search ads over their own Yahoo search ads. They continue to call the Google ads, Google AdSense for Search - but in my mind, isn't Yahoo just a distribution partner of Google AdWords? Anyway, that is not as important - I assume they will show up in your AdWords reports as a normal syndication partner would.

Yahoo first announced that they would be testing Google ads back on April 10th. The day after, we saw first signs of Google ads on Yahoo Search results. The ads continued for well over a week, which was a surprise to many. Some advertisers loved having only to manage one campaign, a Google campaign, to also show their ads on Yahoo. But when I polled advertisers and publishers if they wanted to see Google power Yahoo ads in the future, advertisers will split down the middle.

The pie chart above and the detailed chart below are the results of our poll:

Of course, we only polled a limited set of users - mostly advertisers and/or publishers.

I would suggest, if you haven't yet, go answer the poll so I can get more responses and publish the results again.

Clearly, the deal would make it easier for advertisers in that they only have to manage one campaign. Of course, Yahoo said their ads will still be live - so it doesn't fully take the responsibility off the advertiser to manage their Yahoo campaigns. Most advertisers prefer the Google ad management interface over Yahoos'. But having one major player in the space is also scary to manage advertisers and publishers - yes competition is a good thing.

Note: I should have added that the Google ads won't be live on Yahoo for about 3.5 months, while Yahoo awaits approval from the Senate.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums and Search Engine Watch 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: June 12, 2008"

A forum member pointed us to a Yahoo ad Library which entitles you to an on-demand banner advertising solution. You can choose ad templates and customize them for your company and service and then choose a publisher you want to run with.

The cost of the service is $167/day ($5k/month), according to the FAQ, though one wonders if this is a program endorsed by Yahoo. It looks like a reseller (adready.com) and has Yahoo branding all over it, but I don't see any Yahoo official statements regarding the service. It'd be nice for some clarification regarding this service as it appears that the reseller is selling Yahoo display ads under the Yahoo brand.

Does anyone know about this service or do they have anything to add?

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums and Search Engine Watch Forums.

A Cre8asite Forums member asks the community about the length of a meta tag (keywords, description). Is there a particular length that you should limit yourself to?

Most search engines ignore it, and a recent lawsuit said that meta tags are immaterial. Still, a few people limit their meta tags to about 60 characters, like forum member EGOL.

Ammon Johns says something interesting regarding the length. His ideal meta tag size: zero. Why? You don't get credit and people steal it.

Seriously, there's a teeny advantage to not including the tag at all (leaner page, less data transfer), and a bigger disadvantage to having the tag in there (competitors mine it - half the keyword discovery tools use the keywords meta of other sites that rank well). Google doesn't give you any credit, not even a consolatory smile, for having the tag.

Kim Krause Berg doesn't use it and Barry Welford says that Yahoo will use meta keyword information for optimizing misspellings (but otherwise completely agrees with Ammon). There's more discussion as well, so hop on over to Cre8asite Forums for more.

Marketing Pilgrim recently published a prophecy that onsite SEO is going to die. The writer says that "[a]s the search engines acquire more revenue, their pool of professionals is also drained with best brains" and that new technologies like OCR will eliminate the need to optimize for search engines.

Search Engine Journal posted its own rebuttal that onsite SEO is not going to die. In particular, the respondent says that even if there is OCR technology that can discern text within images and the like, "there’s still got to be content, regardless of development language, for the engines to read, thus, optimizing it in some way will always, always, always be needed."

The Sphinn discussion is in agreement with Search Engine Journal: on-site SEO is here to stay. Small basic changes, for example, can make or break your website in the rankings. Others say that the best SEO happens on the page, not off the page.

And others, like Jill Whalen, think that this is an issue that is beating at a dead horse. The "SEO is dead" argument is not going away.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Yahoo, historically, has always been perceived as a company that took click fraud seriously. In fact, they launched the Traffic Quality Center in 2007 to make that statement. In addition, we have seen examples of Yahoo refunding money to advertisers time and time again, without the advertiser even requesting the refund. In the past, there were times where Yahoo wasn't all that good at admitting to click fraud, but they made up for it.

Now, we are receiving a report from an old time member at WebmasterWorld that Yahoo is getting very stingy on the click fraud refunds. This advertiser said that in the past month, Yahoo has rejected not one, but two click fraud requests. The advertiser details the issue, after explaining that Yahoo has always granted his click fraud requests in the past:

Much of these clicks reside from countries outside the areas for which I'm targeting. Receiving 500 clicks from Iran in a week (when I receive only 1000 from the United States) sends up flags. Especially considering I have blocked every continent except North America. A .info domain that was registered two weeks ago was somehow able to send more traffic to me than Yahoo.com has all month.

Now, I do not know the details of his click fraud reports. I am sure Yahoo has their side. So I guess, if I hear any updates on this thread, I will let you know.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

In December 2007, we reported that Google's image search filter was a bit too sensitive and it filtered out many non-adult images as if they were adult images.

We have new early reports from WebmasterWorld that some Webmasters are noticing more and more of their images being taken out of that filter and showing up in normal "moderate filter on" Google Image searches.

A very senior member, Zeus, who once had only 80 images show up with moderate filter on, now has up to 5,000 images showing up. It has been a few days so far and Zeus had not come back to say his images were temporarily released, meaning it may show that his images are out of the filter for the foreseeable future.

Are your images still being marked as adult? I did post some tips on How Do You Get Your Images Out Of Google's SafeSearch Filter to give you some options.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread, started by moderator Discovery has experienced something very concerning. In short, he said that he was browsing the web in order to buy a PC. He did not conduct any searches that were 'buying PC' related. All he did was navigate directly to sites such as Fry's, Circuit City, HP.com and Best Buy.

After finishing some of that research, Discovery opened a new browser window and search in Google for comparison engines. The search ads that came up were ads all related to selling PCs, not the generic shopping search engine ads from Shopzilla or Google Product Search but real ads selling PCs.

Hence, Discovery asked if Google is using behavioral targeting techniques, today - to target ads based on your direct browsing behavior.

Is Google using behavioral targeting already? I had heard there were announcements that this would happen with the acquisition of DoubleClick, but I have had no notice that it was in practice?

I did report at Search Engine Land that Google: Not Ready To Behaviorally Target. Basically, Google doesn't see a need to target search ads based on direct web browsing. Instead, Google said they do and will customize ads based on your previous search, which is now a de facto. But this is new behavior, which is currently unconfirmed by Google.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A Google Groups thread has discussion about the questions one webmaster has in regards to his country-coded top-level domain (ccTLD), moonri.se.

There are a couple interesting points we can learn from this thread.

(1) As the Google help document states, you can only set the geographic target of your site in Google Webmaster Tools, if your using a generic TLD, such as such as .com or .org or .net and so on. If you are using a ccTLD, such as .se, .co.il, and so on - you can not set your geographic target in Webmaster Tools.

(2) More importantly, Googler, JohnMu said that having a ccTLD as a domain should not hurt your rankings in the main Google.com search results. John explains that by having a .se ccTLD, you might expect that a Swedish searcher "would see it [your site] somewhat higher" in the search results when searching in Sweden. But on the other hand, John said that this "doesn't mean that it's lower in the US than it would have been if it were using any other top level domain."

According to the help document on setting your geographic target information, you should know that that may have an impact on your Google.com rankings. The document says:

If you're targeting users in different locations - for example, if you have a site in French that you want users in France, Canada, and Mali to read - we don't recommend that you use this tool to set France as a geographic target.

This does not mean a ccTLD would rank worse in Google. That is kind of obvious, because ccTLDs do not qualify to use the geographic target feature. But a generic domain which uses that feature may be impacted by changing that criteria. If that is the case, it just seems logical to me that the same would be applied to a ccTLD and your rankings would suffer a bit in the main Google results. Of course, the Google document specifically mentions if you want to rank well in Google France, then don't set your geographic target to Sweden.

There you go, some food for thought.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: June 11, 2008"

A Google Webmaster Central blog post by Sven of the Search Quality Team addresses underlying concerns regarding how Google handles scraped content. In the two scenarios discussed, one (duplicate content within your domain) can be controlled. The other cannot. However, he recommends that you offer a link back for syndicated content:

In cases when you are syndicating your content but also want to make sure your site is identified as the original source, it's useful to ask your syndication partners to include a link back to your original content

If scraped content ranks higher than the original content, it is probably a technical issue on your end (a "rare case," says Sven). You should check that the content is not blocked out by robots.txt, see the sitemap file for any changes, or check if the site is in line with the Google Webmaster Guidelines.

The article concludes with some hopefully reassuring text:

To conclude, I'd like to point out that in the majority of cases, having duplicate content does not have negative effects on your site's presence in the Google index. It simply gets filtered out.

WebmasterWorld members are not sure if the article is entirely accurate. One issue of contention is the statement that scraped content ranking higher than original content is a "rare case" (and that it's really a technical issue that you'd be responsible for). Personally, I am in agreement with the forum members here as I've seen (and read about) the same thing happen(ing) many times.

Tedster makes an interesting observation: Google might get it right 99% of the time, but that 1% that they don't get right will still bug you.

Another forum member says that sometimes scraped content is masked and it's hard for Google to figure out what is the originating site:

Our biggest problem was (is) with scrapers that take our content and embed it on their site wrapped around their navigation, etc. They make a very good effort to masquerade as a legitimate site, which makes it very difficult for Google.

Overall, webmasters agree that it's not that easy to prevent content scrapers. Content scrapers are getting smarter and will try to avoid being detected by the big G.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Greg Sterling reported earlier this week on Search Engine Land that Google Trends has had an update. You can now download the Google Trends in CSV format (for later research) and can view the data on a numerical scale (on the Y-axis). Google explains that the numbers aren't exact search, but that these results scale to size:

These numbers don't refer to exact search-volume figures. Instead, in the same way that a map might “scale” to a certain size, Google Trends scales the first term you've entered so that its average search volume is 1.00 in the chosen time period.

Here's an example of what you'd see with the numerical data:

Also, on the bottom of the page, you're able to export the data to CSV format. Google reminds you that you must be logged into a Google account to get these full features.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

If you're interested in watching stocks rise and fall, the new Google Stock Screener is a tool for you.

Here's a screenshot:

You're able to see dividends, P/E ration, 52 week price changes, and more. It's a great way to get a bird's eye view of what's happening to your favorite stock.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

Gmail users can now take advantage of a lot of cool new features (all experimental) in the new Gmail Labs offering. Log onto your account, click Settings, and you'll see a link to the new Labs with a lot of cool features and ways to customize Gmail:

Some of the features include a game of Snake (remember that?), a randomized signature, mouse gestures, and more.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

There is an interesting Google Groups thread discussing how Google handles the <base> HTML tag. The base tag specifies a base URL for all the links in a page. But how does Googlebot or Google handle indexing this tag?

Google Groups member, Webado said you should be "careful using the base tag". Why?

Google's cache adds a base tag set to your own domain root url. If your page is using a different base tag this will result in broken images, missing scripts and css files - all of those end up even mroe broken than it's usual in the cache.

Member, RainboRick said that the major search engines typically "ignore the HTML mark-up in that regard (keyword density)- even MSN."

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

A weekend WebmasterWorld thread is reporting dozens and dozens of webmasters noticing a major traffic drop due to Google. Some of these webmasters reported traffic declines in the 90% range.

Many of the issues seem to be that Google has dropped hundreds or thousands of pages from these webmaster's sites. But it isn't only large sites.

The five page WebmasterWorld thread has several theories on which sites this may impact. I won't list them all, but if you were impacted, you might want to check out the thread for similarities.

Again, this issue seem to have cropped up over the weekend and many webmasters seem to have been hit. This site did not notice a 90% reduction in traffic from Google, I have not looked at my other sites yet.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Note: Just got back online after two days. I am a bit disoriented from the amount of information we missed. So I hope you cannot see that in our posts, but if you do, please be patient with us for the next few days.

Search Engine Journal writer Ann Smarty talks about how exploration of competitors' backlinks can give you an idea of your competition's link building strategy and help you with keyword research among other things. She provides some tools for how to do this. The details are in the Search Engine Journal post, but the tools outlined are:

1. BacklinkWatch
2. Smart Backlinks
3. Analyze Backlinks
4. Link Diagnosis

What's your favorite link analysis tool?

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Of course we would never lose trust in Google. This topic has to do with sites seemingly losing the trust of Google from an algorithmic perspective, and if there is any sort of SEO analysis that could be used to offset the apparent losses.

Whitey over at WebmasterWorld Forums explains:

"Two sites in our network have been behaving strangely recently, and I'm wondering if they signify how Google handles "Trust Rank" where entire sites fall into different minus levels."

"Google was much more random in it's application of "penalties" or "trust filters" in the past. A site could go anywhere in the SERP's or indeed not appear. But now it falls [ or rises ] into different levels [ minus penalties ] site wide. And sometimes for keywords from what I can see."

Join the discussion and share your experiences at WebmasterWorld Forums.

Last week, Matt Cutts told everyone at SMX Advanced that Google has updated its SEO documentation. He blogged about the changes on his own blog. There's new documentation on the robots.txt protocol, how Google accounts for user feedback, issues revolving around IP delivery and cloaking, updates to nofollow, and more. Matt also is quick to note that web pages should be designed primarily for users, because the lack of the word "primarily" used to cause confusion. Finally, Google has defined doorway pages as such:

Doorway pages are typically large sets of poor-quality pages where each page is optimized for a specific keyword or phrase. In many cases, doorway pages are written to rank for a particular phrase and then funnel users to a single destination.

Useful information. Matt goes through the details and you can comment on his post or on the Sphinn discussion for more.

My good friend Adam Audette wrote a great post on the 6 principles of ethical SEO. In his article, he explains:

1. Don't do any harm and engage in aggressive techniques. You don't want to hurt their brand.
2. Focus on the community and provide valuable information for them.
3. Fix problems, even if that means to give your clients the cold, hard truth and information they don't want to hear.
4. Internet marketing requires a combination of smaller disciplines to be powerful. Social media alone won't cut it. Neither will SEO.
5. Don't only do SEO. Teach it.
6. We should build scalable solutions so that the client will continue reaping the rewards of our campaigns.

Adam's post is interesting and a great read in itself. The ensuing discussion is also a good read -- it's all about everyone's individual ethics, and Adam has a lot of great points.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

A common question in the SEO space is should I use absolute or relative URLs. Absolute URLs are when you link a URL by using the domain.com portion as well, so linking to my authors page would be a link like http://www.seroundtable.com/authors.php. The relative URL for that authors page would be a link like /authors.php.

As you can imagine, there are pros and cons. JohnMu, a Googler, has an outstanding post in a Google Groups thread with sage advice. It would be a crime if I did not quote the whole post, so here it is:

There are pros and cons to both absolute and relative URLs in links:

Absolute URLs:
+ help keep the links pointing to your content if someone were to copy it (*)
+ help keep the links pointing to your domain name if you cannot select a canonical (can't do 301 redirects)
+ help make sure that you're pointing to the right URL even if you move things around (say for stylesheets or graphics)
- cannot be tested on a staging / testing server (eg locally) (unless you insert the links dynamically)
- makes it hard to move content (unless the links are inserted dynamically)

Relative URLs:
+ make it easy to move content around
+ make it easy to test locally and on a staging server
- are easy to break if linking to content that isn't moved as well (stylesheet, graphics, etc)
- an evil scraper would have less work (*)

There's a middle ground as well, using absolute links without a domain name, eg: < a href="/resources/green/mostly/page.htm" ...> Personally, I prefer to use relative URLs + some absolute (without domain name) ones to shared resources. The advantage of being able to test things out 1:1 on a staging server can't compete with the pseudo-protection against scrapers.

The only place I would use absolute URLs would be if the site is hosted somewhere where the webmaster can't do a 301 redirect and may have trouble with duplicates. I've seen this a lot with sites hosted on a free account with the ISP; often it will be hosted as http://isp.com/users/~name/site ..., then perhaps http://domain.com/site... and http://www.domain.com/site... . By using absolute URLs in that situation, any value passed to one of the wrong URLs will automatically pass value to the correct URLs as well.

If you have a really good CMS you may be able to change from one to another and use a staging server without much work. In that case, it probably doesn't matter which one is chosen.

Solid advice!

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

This post was written on June 5th and schedule to go live today.

John Carcutt wrote at Search Engine Journal that "real SEOs don't go to forums." That said, we here at Search Engine Roundtable cover only forum discussion, so we ask the question: are SEO forums really needed? After all, blogs have replaced forums (but this blog is a combination of both!)

After reading through his detailed analysis of whether SEO forums are needed, one can come to the conclusion that SEO forums are useful to unite people on a common ground (SEO, of course), but that there are still errors of judgment that can be made. A lot of people who post on forums really don't know the right answer to the questions. The same goes for blogs, though. There are a lot of blog posts that have been argued time and time again based on [mis]information.

Still, however, for many of the prominent SEO bloggers, forums were a staple of education and provide value for the beginners. John explains, "All in all, if you leave the forums out of your everyday SEO life you are not living as full of a life as you could be."

The discussion moves onto Cre8asite Forums where many echo the sentiment that some of the larger "SEO" forums don't actually feel like a community. There are just so many members that one can get lost in the sea of new faces. Others agree with John's assessment that forums are a wonderful place for a beginner to ask new questions and get answers from people already "in the know."

A.N.Onym makes an interesting statement regarding forums:

For me, the forums replace a chance to just talk about the topic with my colleagues. It could be discussing the latest G quirks, tactics or just bouncing off ideas/approaches. You don't get that on social sites, unless you specificially ask about it on LinkedIn or smth.

The discussion moves on and has some great insight from Ammon Johns on why SEO forums are needed. I suggest you give it a read.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums and Sphinn.

Jonathan Hochman wrote a very good checklist on Search Engine Land about 12 ways to write search engine friendly code. Some of the tips he outlines are:

• Don't repeat yourself -- use SSIs and other code snippets instead of being redundant.
• Place JavaScript in external files and reuse as needed.
• Run your code through a validator to ensure that things are being kept clean.
• Keep your site's meta description brief (1-2 sentences)

...and so on. His points are very true for any website designer and Sphinn members are quick to agree. One issue of contention, though, is how to outline the title tags of pages. Jonathan recommends "company name - page name" but another person points out that it may be better to write "page name - subcategory name - category name - company name." It all depends on what you want to accomplish, though.

Jill Whalen mentions in the discussion that it won't help rankings. That, too, may be true, but we all know to design websites for people and not for search engines anyway. :) A happily-coded website is one that gets more links which in turn translates into better rankings.

A very long and useful ongoing discussion continues at Sphinn.

AdWords API Advisor has posted on Google Groups that a new AdWords API Starter Kit is available. The goals are to teach new developers about the Google AdWords API and to provide a flexible/modifiable codebase for a variety of AdWords applications. The Stater Kit also includes a demo to see how it the API be used.

One developer has so far chimed in on the Google Groups thread and says that the API is simple, but he'd rather have very detailed documentation than a starter kit. Hey, how about both? :)

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

This post was written on Friday, June 6th, and has been saved for publication for Monday, June 9th.

The other day, I mocked Matt Cutts, by editing a video that caught him saying, "I watch porn all day." I did the video editing while sitting in the session, so the editing is subpar, to say the least.

How can I improve it? Well, I can annotate the video. YouTube now allows video annotations and here is how it works.

(1) Upload your video
(2) Wait for it to be processed and live
(3) Go to my videos
(4) Click on "edit annotations" button on the right hand side of the video listing and you should see:

(5) Use the interface to make your annotations (timing, balloons, etc):

(6) Preview, adjust, preview, adjust and so on
(7) Then publish.

Whala, my new video:

More information on YouTube video annotations over here.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This post was written last week and scheduled to go live today.

The folks over at WebmasterWorld are continuously watching everything about Google, including every data center. In a thread, they are compiling a list of current data centers that Google operators. Here is the list, as current as June 5, 2008 (when this post was written - although scheduled to go live on June 9th):

Continue reading "An Updated List of Google's Data Centers"

On Thursday, we broke the news that the Yahoo Directory had no PageRank via a WebmasterWorld thread. Matt Cutts of Google quickly commented saying that the Yahoo Directory has a PageRank of 8. Matt was referring to the home page, which we said did have a PR value but not the internal pages.

Since then I have been tracking the discussion to find out that Matt added more details to the WebmasterWorld later on June 6th, saying although it appears the deeper pages do not have PageRank, they actually do. Matt said:

It looks like it's just a matter of canonicalizing upper vs. lowercase as to why some of the subdirectories look the way they do in the toolbar. I just wanted to reiterate that the Yahoo Directory has plenty of PageRank in our internal systems.

This just seems very weird to me. I guess it just proves that what we see in the Google Toolbar as a PageRank score can be very very wrong.

In any event, it is good to know that the Yahoo Directory has PageRank to pass around.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Monday, June 9th and Tuesday, June 10th, Tamar and I will be offline and not posting, in real-time, to the Search Engine Roundtable. We do have several articles scheduled to be posted throughout the two days, but they were all written the previous week.

I have asked some of the guest authors to contribute to this site, as they see fit. So they may stop by and change things up while we are gone.

If you are still in need of stuff to read or listen or watch on the topic of search, I welcome you to check out my search videos and subscribe to the feed. You can download the videos to iTunes, iPod or iPhone and listen (don't have to watch them) at your convenience. Or you can watch them directly on the site in our search buzz category.

If you want to know why we are offline, check my personal blog.

SMX Advanced was the topic of this week, but included in that was discussion on many other search topics. I chatted about using the Google News first click free program for web search, Google's new SEO documentation and the cloaking debate. I also showed how the Yahoo Directory has no PageRank. Yahoo changes the TOS on the advertiser. Google AdWords phishing email scams are still swarming around. And much more...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:

• SMX Advanced 2008 Conference Coverage Recap
• Can Google's First Click Free Program be Used for Web Search?
• Google Ignites Cloaking & IP Delivery Debate
• Yahoo Directory Has No PageRank
• Yahoo Can Legally Create or Change Your Search Ads & Bill You For It
• Beware of More Google AdWords Phishing Scams
• Yahoo Still Trimming Off Trailing Slash, Causing Webmaster Headaches
• SEO Debate Over 1st Anchor Text is What Matters to Google
• Google's Full of Hot Air Today: Google Balloon Logo
• Google's Diego Velázquez Birthday Logo

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: June 6, 2008"

We're back from Seattle! The Third Door Media group did a great job, and we covered 20 sessions! w00tw00t!

Get Your SMX Advanced Coverage Here

Nineteen sessions are already posted on Search Engine Roundtable for SMX Advanced. The 20th will be posted on July 3rd (because it's under embargo until then). Sorry readers, don't ask me this time around. I won't post it until July 3rd just like I enforced the embargo last year. (Sorry, CK!)

Yahoo Directory Lost its PageRank, but Matt Says No

Search Engine Roundtable first reported that the Yahoo Directory had no PageRank after Barry monitored the thread for several days. Then some other blogger repeated us. In any event, Matt Cutts responded to the forum discussion, the Search Engine Roundtable thread, and that other blog to say that Yahoo Directory has a PR8 in all of Google's datacenters, so way to jump the gun on this one ;)

Matt Cutts and JohnMu Disagree on the First Click Free Program

Who is right about Google's first click free program? On one hand, Matt Cutts says that "users can see a news story they click on without having to register or pay." On the other hand, JohnMu says that it's only for Google News, not for Web Search. In the comments, Matt says that it started with Google News but it led to Web Search. So there you have it.

Google Cloaking and IP Delivery Debate Rages

After a blog post was written about cloaking and IP delivery, we saw a huge debate. Some people think that they are being told that they are cloaking when they thought they weren't. There is a lot of confusion right now. Hopefully everything will be clarified soon.

Yahoo Terms of Service: You Can be Charged Without Authorization

It looks like the Yahoo Search Marketing TOS has been updated (thankfully some people read the fine print!). It says that Yahoo can optimize your campaign without your explicit permission and you'll still have to foot the bill. Interesting, eh?

Dropped .infos Out of the Index

After hearing that .info domains keep getting dropped out of the Google index, your domain names should probably be revisited. Don't get an .info TLD. That's the moral of the story.

Don't Get Phished

Okay, seriously. If you get an email that you need to update your password on any service, don't click on the link. Log into the account and see if you have any warnings in the console. There's a Google AdWords phishing scam out there and people are falling for it. I get about 5-10 of these PayPal scams daily. Use common sense, people. (I'm not even sure why you're posting this on a forum since it happens so often that it's almost to me like banner blindness!)

Watch Your Trailing Slash

Yahoo is trimming off the trailing slash and webmasters are paying for it from 404 errors and other such issues as a result of how Yahoo is handling it. Nothing official has come from Yahoo yet, but a lot of people are frustrated.

Which Anchor Text Counts?

Does Google weigh the first anchor text more heavily than any others? It may, according to an ongoing debate on the matter. Some people say other links do make a difference, though. I think that most feel that weight is distributed throughout the document, for the most part.

Google's Hot Air Balloon and Diego Velazquez Logo

To commemorate the first hot air balloon, Google had a logo of one earlier this week. Can you believe that the first hot air balloon is over 200 years old? The first public demonstration of one was on June 4, 1783. Wow!

Today, we remember Dela Velazquez who painted things in Spain way back in the old ages. Happy birthday, sir.

This month, WebmasterWorld are reporting that there are fewer results being returned for specific queries. The suspicion lies in quality control practices that are now being implemented, but others believe that the "human editorial army" may be the reason behind this.

Other issues reported include cache problems. The cache date is current, but the cached page is 1-3 months old. Additionally, some say that pages that are cached are not even showing up in search results (even with the site: operator).

In Google.co.uk, it looks like there are some increased rankings and it's a result of the quantity of links (rather than quality). They also say that a lot of junk is showing up on the first page that are not even related to the queries being made. There are a number of UK members chiming in that the SERPs there are "crazy" and irrelevant. One #1 ranking even returns a 404. Obviously, something seems fishy over there.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Google has released version 6.0 of the Google AdWords editor yesterday. One of the notable features recognized by forum members is the ability to drag and drop groups within tree view. The downside to this drag and drop feature is that the history of old ads won't be migrated to the new group.

As always, AdWordsAdvisor encourages you to export and archive of your account in case there are any problems.

By the way, to take advantage of the new features, Google is holding a webinar next week on June 10th from 10:30 until 11:30 PDT. You can sign up if you are interested.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A couple months ago we reported on an SEOMoz post that was debated at Sphinn on the topic of which anchor text counts? Is it only the first anchor text on the page linking to a specific URL or is it all the anchor texts that are linking to that specific URL count.

Let me explain. Let's say I first link to my Big Blue Pineapple Chair with the anchor text Big Blue Pineapple Chair and then the second time I link to that exact URL, I use the anchor text Small Red Cantaloupe Chair, would Google count the second link? Hmm, so far, it doesn't seem that way - but that was not a full or thorough test.

A new Sphinn discussion revolves around a post named Debunked: Only The 1st Anchor Text Counts With Google. The discussion basically agrees that the this theory was not debunked and requires more testing. There are several SEOs currently testing the first-anchor text theory and I will keep you posted on those findings as they come out.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Video search engine optimization has been a hot topic since the launch of Google Universal Search. A Google Groups thread I have been tracking for some time, gives us some insight into how to improve the visibility of your videos in Google search.

If you take a look at the Google Video Sitemap specification, you will notice that a <video:content_loc> tag is optional, not required, for Google to index and list your video. But that isn't always the case, based on this Google Groups thread.

One video producer couldn't figure out why his video content wasn't being indexed, After some time, JohnMu posted the following answer:

I double checked with the video team on this and it appears that specifying a valid video:content_loc for your URLs would really help us in recognizing the videos directly. In general, this tag is optional, but in certain situations we may not be able to find the content easily and therefore it would help for you to specify it. I'll follow up with the video team once you have it there to make sure other issues don't come up.

So, it is optional in some situations but in this situation it is necessary. I am not sure why this situation it is a requirement. If it is ever a requirement, it should tell you in which cases it would be required but it doesn't. To be fair, Google does say:

Since each video is uniquely identified by its content URL (the location of the actual video file) or, if a content URL is not present, a player URL (a URL pointing to a player for the video), we strongly recommend including either the or tags. If these tags are omitted and we can't find this information, we'll be unable to index your video.

But for this video producer, it really doesn't help much because his videos are pay-per-view. Maybe there is a work around, John is looking into a solution for this video producer. I am thinking, a First-Click-Free solution for Video Content?

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

A Google Groups thread reports an issue (or a feature, depending on your view) with Google's Sitemap handling.

In short, a webmaster used one Sitemap file for all his content. In that file, he specified the geo data by using <geo:format> tags. When the Sitemap was produced in Google, Google returned an error that read, "Status: Invalid XML tag." This confused the webmaster, because the tag is valid.

JohnMu came in, suggesting that he split the geo content in the Sitemap into a new Sitemap file. John suggested, "that you spit your URLs into separate Sitemap files based on the kind of content they're pointing to." He explained, "make a single Sitemap file just for your geo-content, and a different Sitemap file for (X)HTML / web-search based content."

Why does Google want you to do it this way? John says, it "makes it easier for us to recognize the kind of content that you're pointing to and helps to makes sure that we route it to the appropriate group within Google."

This is something to keep in mind when creating Sitemap files.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Yet another commemorative logo is up on the Google home page today. This one is to remember Diego Velázquez's birthday, which was on June 6, 1599. Velázquez was a Spanish painter who was the leading artist in the court of King Philip IV.

Here is the logo:

Honestly, I don't personally see the search or 'tech' angle to showing a logo for a historic Spanish painter. But at the same time, I am not one to have "art appreciation."

Which leads me to my question. Is Google a bit too trigger happy on special logos?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.