July 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: July 31, 2008"

The Google team has just announced that your Google Sites web site -- that is, the sites.google.com properties -- can be submitted to Google Webmaster Central. This fixes a bug with verification that we reported on June 16.

Google has written up a help document on how to submit your site but also how to verify it.

Great news for those hosting their sites on Google properties; you weren't left in the dark!

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

In case you didn't know, Microsoft Live Search has been redesigned:

WebmasterWorld members are appreciative of the new change. It's different and unique.

But wait ... there's more. If you hover your mouse around certain areas, you can see where Microsoft is headed:

Their goal: to emphasize other features of search. Right now, there's an emphasis on Botswana, but forum members suppose that Microsoft will switch up the images a bit and offer different searches in the future, which one calls an "interesting strategy." (Agreed.) At the same time, this may have people wanting to "capitalize on those keywords" to get maximum search traffic. That, too, would be an interesting strategy.

Additional discussion can be read at Techmeme and forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

How does one who may sell SEO services in the future give away information without giving away too much information (and fearing that the client will run away with the proposed strategies and implement them himself/herself?)

That's a difficult situation and one I think a lot of people find themselves in. They are compelled to sell themselves by proposing a strategy but are afraid it can backfire. However, many clients who solicit the advice of SEO services are doing it because they cannot execute that detailed plan.

noel_x99 makes a great analogy that should make you feel a little bit better about providing that information:

Here's an example: We were recently at an arts festival watching an artist scultping a log with a chainsaw. Suppose that artist were to spend time with me explaining his technique and showing me how to do it - even what he was thinking when he applied his technique. Then suppose he handed me the chainsaw and told me to do it myself. I couldn't do it. Because I would lack the basic understanding of the skills of using a chainsaw. And even though he explained the technique...I couldn't do it. It's a combination art, technical ability, and experience that I don't have with a chainsaw.

That should alleviate those fears you have about giving away ideas (unless the client is well versed in this area of marketing). Most people can hear your suggestions but have no idea about how to execute. In the end, giving out more information does seem to show that you have the expertise and indicates that you're willing to help.

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.

A Cre8asite Forums forum member asks the community about their biggest pieces of advice as it relates to search engine optimization.

What are those tips?

1. When you start doing SEO, write down every thing you do and monitor results closely. If you make a change, write that down too -- and continue reviewing.
2. If you work with clients, you may want to opt in for an NDA so that they don't "reuse any specialist codes you might be using as part of [your] strategy to work that magic."
3. Content creation is a full time job and SEO "is five minutes at the start and five minutes at the end." Content creation entails keyword research, articles targeting the proper keywords, using appropriate titles, and using keyword-targeted links.
4. Create accessible sites and follow accessibility guidelines.
5. Review your analytics and see what works and what doesn't.

These are just a few of the tips offered by the experts on the Crea8site Forums thread; forum discussion continues there.

Earlier this week, the Cuil search engine (from past Googlers) was launched, ridiculed by the SEO community and just about everyone else. In a Search Engine Land post, Barry showed the "relevancy" of the images as related to notable figures in the search industry. Barry Schwartz (yes, our Barry) is the renown psychologist, Danny Sullivan is the race car driver, Dave Naylor is a can of spam, and I'm a photo of a scantily clad Danny Sullivan.

We tried to do the Cuil search on a lot of forum personalities, but we didn't get so far. Instead, we saw some more industry figures, and here they are:

Here's a photo of Jerry Yang, or so they say:

Here's Eric Enge posing as Bill Slawski:

This, supposedly, is Jeremy Schoemaker, aka Shoemoney:

This is supposedly Chris Boggs. I've never seen this person before in my life and I know what Chris Boggs looks like.

Here's forum personality Kim Krause Berg. Who is this lady for real? I don't know!

And Matt Cutts debuts again...as The Lisa Barone:

Here's the most relevant picture EVER: Matt Cutts attacks Greg Boser -

If anything at all, you can have a lot of fun with Cuil. That's the extent of it, though.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Ever wonder how exactly Google/YouTube counts a "view" in YouTube? Is it each time a video page in YouTube is opened? Is it each time a video is played? Does "Autoplaybacks" count?

YouTube Anna, an official YouTube representative has confirmed that "autoplaybacks" do not count towards the view count of a video. She said,

View counts are important to the community and are a reflection of the interests and intents of video viewers. Autoplaybacks are not counted toward the visible "views" numbers displayed on the YouTube site because autoplaybacks are not viewer initiated.

It appears that a view is counted only when a user initiates the play feature on the video. That can be at YouTube.com, at a third-party site with the embedded version of the video or in a search result.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Earlier this week I reported that Yahoo publishers noticed a major pay decrease from within the Yahoo Publisher Network. I asked then, "Do you think Yahoo is skimming their publishers or do you think it is a temporary reporting glitch?"

Well, it turns out to be a reporting glitch.

An official Yahoo representative, YahooPete, replied to the WebmasterWorld thread saying:

This was the result of a technical issue that affected Content Match Thursday afternoon. The issue has been resolved.

So your revenue numbers should now be reporting properly.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Maps Guide Sirene announced in a Google Groups thread that Google Maps has finally added the "fix incorrect marker location" back to the Google Local Business Center.

If you login, and edit your business listing, you will see a link that reads, "Fix incorrect marker location" on the right side of the page. Clicking on that link will open up a smaller window that looks like this:

Then you can click and drag the red marker to the new location and click save. Google Maps will then register that update and in the future note the new location for your business's listing in Google Maps.

We have been reporting the outcry over Google removing this feature for over a month now. You can see how the old version worked over here.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

A Google Groups thread has confirmation from Google that Google's Webmaster Tools may be reporting incorrect 404 status reports.

In fact, for this site, Google has reported over a 150 pages not found, in the webmaster tools section. The fact is, most of those pages are not reporting a 404 error and are functioning just fine. I have a screen shot of one of the pages of the report at Flickr. One of the 150 or so reported URLs by Google is this one of Guy Kawasaki's keynote at WebmasterWorld. If I plug in that URL into a http header checker tool, it returns a HTTP Status Code: HTTP/1.1 200 OK, not a 404.

In any event, JohnMu of Google said that they are working on it:

It's come to our attention that some URLs are listed as 404s for some sites in Webmaster Tools even though they were apparently crawled correctly. In general, even if we were not able to crawl some URLs correctly once or twice, this should not affect a site's crawling, indexing or ranking in our search engine.

We're currently analyzing the situation and will give you more information as soon as we have it.

He did say that this "should not" affect your actual rankings. It does seem to appear the above page I mentioned is ranking in Google just fine.

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: July 30, 2008"

Last week, one of the smaller SMX conferences, SMX Local and Mobile, was held in San Francisco. We didn't cover it here at Search Engine Roundtable, because we know other bloggers would be able to pitch in.

That's where my buddy David Mihm comes in. He blogged The Mother of all SMX Local/Mobile Recaps and summarized the key points that were expressed by many participants. He also broke down the pros and cons of the entire conference.

Some takeaways:

Gib Olander of Localeze: “Other” is the fourth-largest Local search engine, meaning it’s critical to syndicate this content on as many platforms as possible.

Michael Jensen of SoloSEO/CityMarketer: Reviews can help mom & pop’s compete with and outrank national chains, especially in non-competitive areas

Jordan Kasteler, UtahSEOPro: Give Google plenty of signals to signify that your site is mobile-friendly.

There are so many more, but I need to point you to David's recap of SMX Local and Mobile to get the most out of what you missed.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

In the Google Maps Help Group, you're introduced to 7 new and old Googlers who will help make your Google Maps experience a more pleasurable one. The Google Maps Guide folks are:

• Maps Guide Jen, from Illinois
• Maps Guide Sirene, from Michigan
• Maps Guide Tom, from Massachusetts
• Maps Guide Ravi, from California
• Maps Guide Brian, also from California
• Maps Guide Adam, from California as well
• Maps Guide Mike, from Switzerland

Cool stuff. Welcome aboard, all Maps Guides! :)

There's no forum discussion here, but this page gives you a little more biographical information on the new Googlers.

Does Google have a tool for suggesting misspellings for your AdWords campaign? Nope! Instead, a Google rep, AdWordsPro Sarah, recommends someone else.

Can you guess who?

Well, in case you didn't read the subject of this blog post, it's Microsoft! A Google Groups thread suggests that you try the Keyword Mutation Detection tool from Microsoft!

However, you also can try to use Google's keyword tool; it just needs to have sufficient search volume to be recorded:

If the misspelling or typo of a keyword has a consistent amount of traffic, you will see these results in the AdWords Keyword Tool. All you would need to do is type in the correct keyword and then sort through the results.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

Last week, there were reports of the Google AdWords API not functioning properly. In particular, the "quota units used" counter was not changing, nor were usage counters retrieved via API.

When this was reported (7/21), Jeff Posnick (AdWords API Advisor) acknowledged that there was a database issue on Google's end and reported this to the engineering team.

Yesterday, Jeff updated us to say that the Google engineering team has fixed the problem. Missing data from July 17th and onwards was backfilled and Google believes the problem to be fully resolved at this time.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

Recently, I have been hearing a lot of buzz on the topic of links from blogs. Some are suggesting that blog links don't have the 'oomph' they once had. Now, I suspect when these people are classifying "blogs," they mean a standard personal blog and not an industry niche blog or news site. But you never know.

There is a thread at WebmasterWorld discussing the pros and cons of blog links. Many blogs link out freely, as the web should. But one webmaster says that blogs give out links way too easily. Obviously, that sounds like a generalization to me.

WebmasterWorld moderator, martinibuster, looks at it this way:

Producing something definitive, original, or authoritative is (blog)link worthy. What's spammy about that?

Looked at from that direction, blogs are one of the last places you can obtain an honest link. It generally holds true to the original web excitement over hyperlinks where a document is studded with references to other documents illuminating the current text you are consuming. It's from this original conception of the what the web could be that PageRank was conceived from.

What are blogs linking to and what can you produce to fit that general trend?

So, what are your thoughts, here is a poll:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

When a search engine spider, bot, crawler visits your site, they should all be capable of passing what is known as a reverse DNS test. I have details on how this works over at this article.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports that Google's Webmaster Tools verification bot is not always passing the test. A user said that he first noticed this when he had to keep in reverifying his sites with Google Webmaster Tools. Sometimes the verification worked and sometimes it did not. So he checked his log files to see that some of the IP addresses being sent by Google were not passing his reverse DNS test, thus he was blocking Google for verifying his site.

I have no exact proof of this actually happening but we do have a "me too" post supporting this webmaster's findings.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google announced that they have updated Google Maps with a new design. They made the top cleaner and bluer. But with that, they removed some features that really make Google Maps users upset.

Last night, I saw the new Google Maps interface, but this morning, it seems like Google reverted back to the older interface. Why?

A Google Groups thread announced the update and has a lot of criticism from users. Here are the main problems users are citing:

• You can no longer reorder your destinations
• You can no longer collapse the details of each destination
• The driving miles & estimated drive time have also gone missing when searching multiple destinations

Google Maps Guide did say some of these are just temporarily missing:

Don't worry...you'll still be able to drag destinations in the left panel. The only difference is you'll use the little green circles in the "launcher" area where you input each address. I understand that this functionality isn't working properly for everyone, and I've escalated these issues to the appropriate parties. They're taking a look to find out what's going on. I'll keep you posted.

But interestingly enough, Google Maps now is the old yellow version now. Maybe they decided to revert back until they get the blue version working with the features above?

Here is a list of the new features in the blue version, in case you missed it:

• You can perform all types of searches using the single search box at the top of the page
• The "Get Directions" link is now in the left panel, right underneath the Google Maps logo
• You can collapse the left panel by clicking on the double arrow ( << ) that appears in the upper left-hand corner of the map view.

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: July 29, 2008"

Google's SMTP server, smtp.gmail.com, has just expired a couple minutes ago. Here is the SSL certificate expiration notice:

It appears Google has forgotten to renew the certificate, even thought a Google Groups post had a warning to Google that it would be expiring today:

Is Google planning on updating the certificate for smtp.gmail.com port 465? I noticed that it's expiring today which could cause a lot of issues with email clients sending email today and tomorrow.

This is not the first time Google forgot to renew their certificates. They forgot to renew the AdWords conversion tracking certificate in the past as well.

Stuff like this happens. Google seems to be secure but they just forgot to renew the certificate.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Update: A Google spokesperson told us:

For a short time this morning, some Gmail users sending mail via POP and IMAP saw a notification on their mail clients that the SMTP certificate had expired. We identified the problem and fixed it promptly. We know how important Gmail is for our users, and we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Shimon Sandler wrote a controversial post about the options available to sites who cannot actually make code changes to optimize their site. He explains that you can build links, and that's perfectly legitimate as it's called "off site optimization."

The question is: does that really help "optimize" the site at all? If the website was poorly coded, will those links really help? Probably not.

Sphinn forum member JohnHGohde notes that this is not SEO at all:

The most positive comment that I can come up with is that link building is called SEM, rather than SEO.

In other words, SEO (search engine optimization) is about optimizing the site, but SEM (search engine marketing) includes all the other factors, like link building.

Further, if you're only going to optimize based on links, you're probably Google bombing. This reminds me of when the SEO community tried to rank Stephen Colbert as the Greatest Living American Dude. That's not the way you're supposed to do it, according to forum members. Further, it can be really difficult to rank at all with a poor quality site; Jill Whalen calls it an "uphill battle."

Other people believe that you can still optimize your site with link building, but that if you do that, you're not doing the complete job. Hugo Guzman says the following:

The proof is in the pudding. It's been done countless times (link-building without site-side). That said, not optimizing site-side elements is definitely an incomplete approach to SEO.

Like I said, Shimon's post was really controversial -- but there are a lot of great comments.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Using the Google Keyword Tool, since search volume numbers are now available, you can estimate (with a degree of success) the kind of traffic you'd get for key phrases that you optimize for. In a particular webmaster's experiment, he ranks 1 and 2 for a specific phrase. The keyword tool reported 2500 monthly visitors. In reality, the webmaster only gets 600 visits (which is about 25% of what the Keyword Tool reports).

In another experiment, he's seeing only 10% of the visitors that the Keyword Tool reports. He suspects that there could be other factors in play, such as the newness of this site or the fact that these results may vary by market.

Another webmaster reports that he has only seen 5% of reported visits.

Still, though, it's interesting to see how the data from the keyword tool comes into play. Surely, there's a lot of factors, and it may possibly also relate to the accuracy of the keyword data altogether.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Numerous webmasters are learning that Google News considers freshness of stories first and foremost. Google News only shows 30 days of news, and once that 30-day window has passed, your news gets dropped into the archives.

But not always.

According to the folks at Google, if your news stories are older than 30 days, they don't automatically get archived. In fact, you need to request that Google archive the stories for you. Should you want to be included in the archive search, you need to follow the instructions on this form and submit the proper material to Google for consideration.

Google News Archive Search launched on September 6, 2006.

Note: We recently updated our posts on How to Rank in Google News and Getting Into Google News Revisited.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups (#1) and Google Groups (#2).

Google Maps Street View feature has always been on the to-do list of privacy advocates. Over a year ago, Google gave us a way to report images to be removed from Google Street Views. Tamar did a great job walking us through the Report Inappropriate Image feature in Google Maps. Does it work? I am not sure - but I suspect it does. We do know it doesn't work too well with Google images.

In any event, it is a bit funny when these privacy issues actual hit home and impact one of us. By us, I mean the SEM industry and specifically a well-known and respected journalist in the industry. Greg Sterling, journalist at Search Engine Land and quoted all over the place, wrote at his blog StreetView Now Shows My Driveway. That street views picture shows his two cars in his driveway! Yes, the license plates are blurred out but still.

Greg said, "now the joke is on me" and it is.

Here is a video on how to remove images from Street Views, I do wonder how long it normally takes:

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

WebmasterWorld's founder, Brett Tabke, noticed Google changed the design for the AdWords ad search feature and posted a thread about it at WebmasterWorld.

Before, when you used google.com/sponsoredlinks to find ads, Google will list out the ads in one long column, left aligned. You can see pictures of the old layout over here or here.

Now, Google lists out the ads in three columns and four rows, with a total of 12 ads per page. Here is a screen capture:

People do like the new look and layout, I do also. But there is confusion over how the rankings of the ads work. Do the highest ranking ads go left to right or top, down and then right? Some even say that the ads in this search do not rank in correlation to how they actually show up in the Google web search results. I suspect that is right, so the ad layout really doesn't matter in this case?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

About 15 days ago, I reported on the Google Yo-Yo Effect. This yo-yoing is a lot different then the typical ups and downs of Google's rankings. I know many of you are going to say, Google's results always differ. Trust me, I have been covering search a long time, this is different.

Over the course of the weeks, I have obtained results that are experiencing this "yo-yo effect." I am sorry, but I promised not to share the actual results. But I can tell you, this is real. Let me explain what I see with the fictitious keyword phrase [blue widget] and domain acme.com.

Acme.com has been finding itself ranking well in the morning hours for the keyword phrase [blue widget] over the course of the past few weeks. But it is only the morning hours. After the morning hours, acme.com's Google rankings for [blue widget] drops to the third page or so. Why? It is not known. But the pattern continues each day for the past few weeks.

There are some theories, as Tedster summarizes in WebmasterWorld. Here they are:

1. Maybe Google is counting clicks and after X number of clicks, Google is pushing that result back.
2. Maybe this has to do with Google Universal Search and the position acme.com shows up for correlates to the universal search spot?

The first theory just makes no sense. Why would Google cap a specific page from getting more than X clicks per day. It just doesn't make sense to me and to most people.

The second theory might just fit. Tedster notes:

Watch that #4 position on the SERPs that don't have Google News in the spot. It seems to be the position of choice for some kind of testing. I see urls that yo-yo between page 2 and position #4 during different times of the day. Then the SERP sometimes changes and Google News is back at #4.

But it's always #4. Universal Search technology, I assume, allowing Google to force feed certain tests into specific positions - maybe even the same kind of goodies that blew up a few months ago and gave us the position #6 bug.

Maybe Google is testing throwing in certain pages into the universal spot, as a test? Or maybe it is the opposite? Maybe Google is giving up the #4 spot of acme.com for [blue widget] and pushing acme.com to the third page?

It just doesn't seem like normal Google behavior. It just doesn't seem like a "feature," but more like a bug. It would not be totally unreasonable to suggest Google does create bugs, accidently, that appear to be some sort of ranking algorithm or penalty. Just take a look at the minus 6 penalty bug, which was reversed.

I do wish I could share examples, I apologize again.

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: July 28, 2008"

YahooPete has visited the forums lately to announce a number of new features within Yahoo Search Marketing for the month of July.

Now, there are ad performance report enhancements which contain three new columns: your ad ID, a visual representation of your ad, and the destination URL.

Additionally, status changes have been implemented. Some example statuses include "bid too low," "inactive," "min bid: $0.40," etc.

Great news for those on the advertisers side of the Yahoo Search Marketing team -- Pete and his crew keep us abreast of the latest. Now they just need an offline editor like AdWords Editor, which seems to be important to many advertisers.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

In May, we blogged about Google VP of Engineering Udi Manber's post where he introduced search quality. In the same post, he says that Google has "made significant changes to the PageRank algorithm in January." Last week, Matt Cutts told us that we're in the midst of a PageRank update, and now forum members are wondering what kinds of changes were made to the PR algorithm. In a WebmasterWorld thread, Tedster says that he thinks that a few things may have been altered:

1. Internal links and external links on the same page may not be splitting the PageRank vote equally.
2. Depending on the location of the link, PR may be weighted differently.
3. Multiple links to the same url from the same page may not each get the same piece of the PR vote.
4. "Run-of-site" external links, like Blogrolls, may now have diminished PR.
5. Links between domains that Google sees as "related" may have their PR significantly damped down. Possibly the same goes for sites that link to subdomains.

Are Ted's observations correct? Some of the ideas he proposed may be difficult to fathom. For example, subdomains that are not owned by the same user (think blogspot here) may interlink, and why shouldn't their PR count?

A lot of these ideas are simply that: ideas. They're based on conjecture and not on evidence. Some forum members find that it's important to actually test these theories before calling them as they seem to be.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

SEOAly, an up-and-comer blogger who has been writing some really great blog posts lately, has shared the reasons why "SEO consultation" is ruining the reputation of an entire industry. In the piece, she explains that SEO is not about implementation -- it's about education. The right kind of client relationship is one where the small business owner is ready to apply the advice provided by the SEO.

The consultant may be holding their hand along the way a bit, but the site owner is ultimately responsible for actually doing all of the work that will be required to make the site perform better in the search results.

But not every small business owner is ready to do the work. They expect the SEO to do the work, and that's why the entire SEO consultancy practice ends up being blamed, says Aly. The article goes on to say that SEO can help everyone, but if unrealistic expectations are being placed on the SEO, they may not benefit from SEO after all. All in all, it's a really good read for small business SEOs.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

CNet reports that Microsoft has announced BrowseRank, which they feel may help boost the search's popularity. CNet explains the difference between BrowseRank (BR?) and PageRank:

Essentially, the researchers tested out a system that replaces PageRanks' link graph--a mathematical model of the hyperlinked connections of the Internet--with what they call a user browsing graph that ranks Web pages by people's behavior.

Basically, it comes down to user behavior. The more clicks and actions they can record, the more likely the page is favored (rather than emphasizing links). Since millions of people are using the Live.com search engine, the researchers claim that this evolution just makes sense.

Forum members are afraid that they've been targeted for the purposes of this study without realizing it (even though it is in the Terms of Service). Well, I guess that it's important to read these things.

Still, despite this, the same member who thought he was being spied on thinks that "[t]he BrowseRank algorithm is a thing of beauty, and their methods are brilliant." This is agreed by other forum members who feel that human behavior is the best way for search engines to go. (I'd argue that this is what humans do when they purposely link to certain pages versus others, but moving on...)

Is Microsoft offering brand new technology? One forum member says that FAROO, a P2P search engine, has the same kind of technology. Perhaps it is the mindset behind Microsoft, but it's not revolutionary, he argues. Still, making it more mainstream is a step in the direction that many webmasters are hoping for, provided that it doesn't get gamed.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums, and Sphinn.

Last night, Cuil (pronounced "cool") launched and every article out there compared the new search engine to Google. Just scan the Techmeme headlines and see the coverage for yourself. Of course, Danny Sullivan does an excellent job going through the important aspects of the search engine.

Cuil should be taken seriously, if you need to know why, read the articles above.

But let's take a look at what SEOs have to say. We have threads at DigitalPoint Forums, WebmasterWorld, Sphinn and Matt Cutts of Google has a pretty comment heavy discussion going on at his FriendFeed.

The comments in Matt's FriendFeed all suggest that Cuil is a poor search engine with little relevance and technical issues. Yes, Cuil had some server issues last night but they seem to be corrected as of this morning. The WebmasterWorld thread has much of the same reaction, but does take notice to the impressive nature of the management team, the new search interface and the size of the index. Overall, it seems as if SEOs are not all that impressed with the current results, but many do believe Cuil does have a shot.

I personally liked this comment at WebmasterWorld:

When Brett makes a dedicated forum for them, I would like to be the mod. ;)

Webmasters, Cuil has a webmaster section at cuil.com/info/webmaster_info/. They have a robot named twiceler, yes, the user agent is twiceler. They crawl from the IP addresses of 38.99.13.121, 38.99.44.101, 64.1.215.166, 208.36.144.6, 38.99.13.122, 38.99.44.102, 64.1.215.162, 208.36.144.7, 38.99.13.123, 38.99.44.103, 64.1.215.163, 208.36.144.8, 38.99.13.124, 38.99.44.104, 64.1.215.164, 208.36.144.9, 38.99.13.125, 38.99.44.105, 64.1.215.165, 208.36.144.10, 38.99.13.126, and 38.99.44.106.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums, WebmasterWorld, Sphinn and FriendFeed.

Google pushes out toolbar PageRank updates every 3 months or so. The most recent one was over the weekend, which helped generate some buzz. But the reality is, what Google shows as PageRank in the toolbar is way out of date. How do we know?

The Google Blog wrote Friday, We knew the web was big..., which talks about how big the web is. Google said they have "processed" 1 trillion unique URLs on the web. Right, Google did not say they have indexed 1 trillion pages, but they have "found even more than 1 trillion individual links." The number of web pages or documents they lead to, is unknown - to Google at least. Google said, they "don't have time to look at them all," to figure that out.

But what is extremely interesting is that Google says they reprocess "the entire web-link graph several times per day." That means Google will recalculate and process those links, about a trillion of them, not just once per day - but several times per day. Can we infer from that, that Google will reprocess the true PageRank of a web page several times per day based on that linkage data? Maybe.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, Cre8asite Forums and DigitalPoint Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread has several reports from publishers of the Yahoo Publisher Network complaining that their income is down over 50%.

The publishers suspect fraud! They suspect that Yahoo is not reporting the true impression and clicks, thus skimming earnings off the top. Here are some of the accusations:

Last night I took a look before heading off to bed and this morning noticed it reported yesterdays commission as 1/2 of what it was reporting.

Yahoo is definitely not counting everything properly. Our stats have been very reliable for over 2 years, and we are receiving the same amount of traffic.

I agree, they count it properly during the day, then the next day the revenue gets reduced...not just a little, but 50%? I'll keep a look out as well.

Good to know I am not alone. The numbers being reported in the morning are not the same as the night before; they are less. YPN is on only one site anymore but it's probably time to take them off of it.

Alright, I can't quote all the complaints, because they go on and on. Do you think Yahoo is skimming their publishers or do you think it is a temporary reporting glitch?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Google Groups thread shows the tail of a webmaster who had issues with his robots.txt file. The robots.txt file was uploaded in what is called byte-order mark (BOM) encoding, which threw off Google, when trying to retrieve and understand the webmaster's robots.txt file.

Google Groups member, Phil Payne noticed the issue right away, by using rexswain.com/httpview.html. The HTML editor this webmaster was using uploaded his robots.txt file in the BOM encoding. Google and other search engines prefer to see the robots.txt file in UTF-8 encoding.

Googler, JohnMu, confirmed the issue saying:

Phil was right on target there, it seems the BOM at the beginning of the file might be throwing us off. The easiest way to get around this issue is to have an empty line (or a comment) in the top of your robots.txt file -- that way it'll work even if you have a BOM in your file.

In short, the webmaster fixed the encoding issue by editing the file manually and reuploading.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Google is updating toolbar PageRank. Google shows off a kid being educated. Google updates cache design, dates and explains the importance. Google time stamps Sitelinks and Yahoo makes their Quick Links more like Google. Does Google forgive and forget penalties? Yahoo is discontinuing their Ambassador program. Google Maps added walking directions. Google launched Knol. Google gives out their cookbook. We looked at Hot Dog day. And I talked about the SEO industry's state. More details at SERoundtable.com.

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 (note: If YouTube shows a video not found message, just refresh the page and play it again, it is a YouTube bug):

For the original iTunes version, click here

Some Of The Topics Discussed:

• Google Announces PageRank Update - Thank You
• More Inappropriate Images Popping Up in Google Web Search
• Google Updates Design of Google Cache Page
• Google's Cache Database Back On Track?
• Google Addresses Cache and Related Concerns
• Google Sitelinks Adds Time Stamps in Webmaster Tools
• Yahoo's "Quick Links" Looking More Like Google's Sitelinks
• Google Webmaster Tools Warns Of Spikes in Bandwidth Fees
• Google Sitemaps URLs Have "High Response Time" Message
• Does Google Every Totally "Forgive" A Site For Being Penalized?
• Yahoo To Discontinue Ambassador Program As Of September 30, 2008
• Google Maps Now Has Walking Directions
• Google Launches Knol: Project Wikipedia
• Google Gives Long Time Advertisers The "Google Cookbook"
• Happy Hot Dog Day
• Sadness In The Search Industry : Respect Each Other

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: July 25, 2008"

Happy Friday everyone! This week, we experienced the normal bit of search news with some exciting developments (PageRank updates pending, for example) and expected news (or is it -- Google and Digg -- again?)

Expect Your Google PageRank Update Soon

Matt Cutts announced last night that Google will be updating your PageRank soon. Thank you Matt for thinking of the SEO industry in light of other news.

Search and Ye Shall Find

Want to find funny images when you least expect it? Just search for short-tail keyphrases, like "educating" -- and you'll see what people are being educated about. In this case, there are some rather disturbing images due to Google Universal search. In a way, I'm sure people find it humorous. ;)

Google Cache: Discussion and Redesign

Earlier this week, we learned a little from JohnMu about Google cache. If your page isn't showing up there, it doesn't mean anything, for example. Interestingly enough, this week wasn't the last we heard about Google's cache. We saw that forum members were reporting that cache dates were relatively old. Additionally, the design of the Google cache pages changed too. It's a much more elegant design, I must say.

Sitelinks: A Good Idea

This week, we saw that timestamps were added to Google Sitelinks in Google Webmaster Tools, so you can see when Google generates them, which is pretty sweet. I guess it inspired Yahoo too, because they're moving toward sitelinks with their similarly-designed quicklinks.

Google Alerts You Via Webmaster Tools Message Center

Have you logged into Google Webmaster Tools recently? Well, you might want to. This week, we have reports of Google finding way too many URLs on your site and high response times on pages included in your sitemaps file. Are you having these problems? You might want to check!

Will Google Ever Get Over that Penalty?

If you get a penalty in Google, will they forgive you for that penalty? According to forum members, yes. (Don't you wish people were the same way?)

Goodbye Yahoo Ambassador Program

The end is near for the Yahoo Ambassador Program which is ending on September 30. Current ambassadors will be dropped, and you won't be able to participate in the program. Oh well.

Much Ado About Google

This week, we discovered that Google has a governmental search engine dubbed "Uncle Sam." We also saw that Google added walking directions to maps. And in the bigger picture, Google launched its Wikipedia killer, Knol. Is it too late for Knol? Maybe.

Google Schwag!

Long-time advertisers this week received the Google Cookbook, and as a huge fan of Google schwag, I WANT SOME.

Hot Dog Day

This message is for Jill Whalen, who has no idea what the significance of our hot dog was this week. Well, it was Hot Dog day. Unfortunately, we got to look at it but we didn't eat any (or I didn't). Barry, next time, you need to have a SERoundtable BBQ on hot dog day ;) Nobody is allowed to argue that one!

Would linking to your landing pages be bad for your organic rankings? This is the question posed on Cre8asite Forums, where a webmaster wonders the benefits of possibly linking to a completely different type of page (in terms of layout, etc.)

The answer: probably not. EGOL mentions that "they would probably be filtered from the search results." But if they are unique pages, that may not be the case.

Moderator iamlost says something else, though: why would you want to link to your landing pages? The point of having such pages is so that you can track your incoming traffic from PPC. If you interlink them on your web page, the metrics will be off. This is a thought that is echoed by forum administrator sanity.

Make your life easier by isolating your landing pages from the rest of your site. It's a way in from your ads only, not a way out (from your site).

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

According to The New York Times, Microsoft will soon be advertising within Facebook. Perhaps this is because Microsoft currently has an ad deal with Digg and Digg might be acquired by Google soon, possibly nullifying the contract (though I don't really know the legal ramifications of such an acquisition).

There's no forum discussion just yet, but the writer of this article wonders how well-targeted those Microsoft ads are ... considering she used to see weird ads on Digg.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

As many people will attest to, it can be a reputation management nightmare when you are trying to push down negative press and remove the websites that speak badly of your company and your brand. But why are these sites incredibly popular? In a nutshell, they give people a voice when they previously had none. The thought process (sometimes) is that the companies will help the consumer to save face (and hopefully the negative press will be pushed down).

There are other ways to address the problem, though. Loren Baker writes about how to combat the reputation management problem and suggests that other channels are utilized, including blogs, media channels (.tv subdomain to share videos), get positive press coverage from other bloggers, brand social media profiles, get hosted/cobranded subdomains, and utilize video/YouTube for more "universal" search results.

Still, the fact that these sites exist create a huge problem for forum members who participate in the conversation on Sphinn. Instead of calling it a reputation management fiasco, they call it "defamation." But IncrediBILL says that you need to think about what you're doing at all times to avoid the Internet being used as a channel for negative press.

HINT: Don't do anything to generate a complaint in the first place and you won't have to combat those sites.

What about real defamation that can be generated by the competition? That's where the courts should come in.

Additional Search Engine Roundtable discussion: Personal Reputation Management: The Reactive Approach, Out-Ranking Negative Reputation Sites, Secure Your Brand Name on Social Sites, and Addressing Reputation Management Issues with Search.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Google's Matt Cutts announced Google is pushing out "new toolbar PageRank values," over the course of the "next few days."

Yes, I keep saying toolbar PageRank is really all that not important. You can read my thoughts on that over here, but I honestly think this toolbar PageRank update is the most important one ever. Why?

Matt Cutts said, and I quote:

I figured the SEO industry could use something to discuss, so I thought I’d give people a heads-up about the toolbar PageRanks.

Yes, we 100% need something to discuss, other then ourselves. It has been a very rough week for the SEO community and this distraction will hopefully set things back on track. So, thank you Matt and Google for that.

Matt also notes that he is "expecting that also in the next few days" that Google will "be expiring some older penalties on websites." By penalties, we assume he means the Google Toolbar PageRank downgrade for selling links. Some were hit by this toolbar PageRank downgrade and have not yet seen an increase in their PageRank.

Forum discussion on the Google toolbar PageRank update at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums and we have additional discussion at WebmasterWorld specifically on the topic of Google "expiring some older penalties on websites."

A Google Groups thread has a webmaster who was very concerned when he logged into Webmaster Tools to find out that his site was not indexed by Google.

The reality was, it was indexed by Google, but Webmaster Tools showed the site not to be indexed by Google. Why did Google Webmaster Tools show the site not to have been indexed by Google? It is basically a feature. :)

JLH along with Googler, Reid, suggested the issue was with him not setting the preferred domain. Why is this an issue? Well, Reid said that he was looking in his Webmaster Tools report for the WWW version of his domain. But Google decided the non-WWW version was the primary site. So the Google Webmaster Tools reports showed that the WWW version was not indexed.

Googler, Reid, recommends that this webmaster to "verify the non-www version in Webmaster Tools and set the preferred domain to the non-www version." Reid said that will set the Google Webmaster Tools reports right.

This is an interesting thread because this issue really doesn't come up all that often. So if this does come up for you, this is your answer.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

An updated WebmasterWorld thread notes that Google has appeared to add a time stamp value to the last date Google updated your Google Sitelinks. The time stamp can be found by logging into your Google Webmaster Tools, clicking on "Links" and then on "Sitelinks." Here is a picture:

All the screen captures I have from before, including the latest one from December 2007 did not have this time stamp marked on the links. I am not sure how recent this time stamp is, but I think it is a nice enhancement, especially because I often see people ask the question - when did Google last update my Sitelinks.

So, now I know Google last updated this site's Sitelinks two days ago, on the 23rd.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google has just updated the design of the Google Cache result page. For example, a look at the Google Cache for RustyBrick.com, shows:

Just two days ago, when I reported the cache dates were off, I took a screen shot of the Google Cache top header. Then it looked like this:

As you can see, this is a major difference. I wonder if they made this change for mobile searchers? Most folks in the forums are happy with the change. They call it much "cleaner" and "simpler."

For more of our coverage on the Google Cache, see our Google Cache tag page.

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: July 24, 2008"

Big technology blogger Kara Swisher shares an internal memo of a Microsoft reorganization. Its Platforms and Service division will be split into 2 groups: Windows/Windows Live and Online Services, of which members will report directly to Steve Ballmer. Microsoft's press release elaborates more on the company reorganization and explains that a number of former Microsoft executives will be moving to other opportunities outside the company while others are seeing promotions within the company. One of the people moving on is Kevin Johnson, who we covered in a keynote conversation only last month.

What does this mean for search? Nobody is sure yet. We'll just have to wait, hold on, and be hopeful.

Techmeme has a lot of blog discussion, and forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Six months ago, we reported that Microsoft Live Search was sending spammy types of referrals. Rogerd reports on WebmasterWorld that he's not seeing the same types of referrals we reported back in January, but he's finding some even stranger ones. For example, he saw a search for "computers" and this is a term he doesn't even rank for.

Other forum members report similar suspicious activity. As robzilla says, all hits have a referring URL that includes the variable "form=QBHP". After analyzing his logs, he says that the user agent is consistent across the board: "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.2; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)".

Is this another spam or quality check? We've yet to find out.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

After we first announced Google's intention to launch Knol, their knowledgebase, we learned yesterday that the project is finally live.

Here's a small little screenshot of Google Knol:

Will it be the Wikipedia killer, a many people have been wondering since Knol was announced last year? Well, so far, Knol is extremely medicine-focused and apparently has very bad navigation, according to forum members.

Will it be useful for SEO in the long term? If those results get spidered and ranked well in Google, it will have a traffic value, most likely. But the links are nofollowed as many forum members note.

Additional discussion is on Techmeme.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

In May, we reported that Yahoo stopped enabling signs ups and enrollments for the Yahoo Ambassador Program. The Ambassador program is basically a higher level of support for the Yahoo Search Marketing product and service.

Today, I noticed a WebmasterWorld thread that reports Yahoo is fully dropping the Ambassador program, even for those already enrolled. The program is reportedly closing down on September 30th.

WebmasterWorld senior member, Philosopher received the email notification from Yahoo. He said,:

I just received an email stating that the entire Ambassador program will be terminated as of September 30th.

I wonder what the bigger meaning of this is.

Current Ambassadors will be able to continue displaying the Ambassador logo, but that's pretty much it.

So why can Ambassadors continue to display their Ambassador logo if there is no such program anymore? Now that I don't understand. In fact, you can still see some ambassador confirmation pages working, I guess this means they will continue to work after September 30th. The Ambassador FAQs are still live, but the main page is redirects elsewhere.

In any event, we all know Yahoo is struggling to compete with AdWords. Maybe this is just another step in the direction of outsourcing paid search to Google?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: PPC Hero has text of the email available:

The Yahoo! Ambassador program was specifically developed to help marketers drive sales leads to their clients. For the last four years, Yahoo! has made an effort to enhance the program to provide the greatest added value to our users. After a thorough evaluation of the program, we have decided to discontinue the program. The Ambassador Program, except for the limited use of the Ambassador Logo as noted below, shall be terminated as of September 30, 2008.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks if Microsoft is not serious about webmasters. Why? Well, if you use Live Webmaster Tools and you click on "Add Site," you will see funny messages.

For example, when they ask for your email address Microsoft says:

We don't send chain letters, lame jokes, or other unrelated stuff.

And then the sign me up for emails message reads, "Sign me up for the way cool and at most monthly newsletter for webmasters."

Here is a screen capture:

Personally, I think it shows humor and makes it feel more inviting. I agree with WebmasterWorld admin, Rogerd, who said:

They're just trying to soften up the old Evil Empire image with a little humor... It's a new fun, playful Microsoft. Think of Steve Ballmer as your best bud... :)

But I guess not everyone will feel that way.

For a look at what Live Search Webmaster Tools has to offer, see our first screen shots.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Google Groups thread has discussion around a site that was hacked and because of it, now has many broken (dead) hyper links. The question then came up, would Google penalize a site that had broken links?

The simple answer is no, you generally will not be hurt by broken links. Googler, JohnMu said, "In general those broken links will not negatively affect your site's crawling, indexing and ranking."

But it really depends on many variables. In general, if you have a small number of broken links on your site, it should make no difference in your rankings at Google or any other search engine. However, if your site navigation and linking structure is in complete disarray, then you can expect your site to have major issues ranking well for your content. Does this mean your site will be "penalized?" No, not at all. But it does mean the search engines will have a rough time crawling your site and understanding your content.

Ben covered this topic back in 2005 under the title Do Search Engine Penalize for Dead Links? Yes, it still makes for a good read.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Google seems to have been adding new alerts or messages sent via the Google Message Center in Webmaster Tools. We saw an alert for high bandwidth access rates and now I am seeing reports of messages warning of "high response times" within your Sitemaps. The message reads:

Subject: "Some URLs in the Sitemap have a high response time."

Description: "Some URLs listed in this Sitemap have a high response time. This may indicate a problem with your server or with the content of the page."

In these reports, Google may tell you the average load time they see on your site. For example, a WebmasterWorld member said he was told he has an "average load time is about 1.1 seconds. The one page the singled out seems to take about 2.0 seconds to load." So, it seems that Google will list out the URLs that load slowly and give you a time associated with the load. I do not have screen shots of this in action.

I did find a confirmation from Googler, JohnMu, at a Google Groups thread from about a month ago. John said,

You might want to check your crawl rate graphs to see if you can spot any periods of high latency. We moved them to the "Statistics" section, under "Crawl stats." If you feel that we're crawling your site too quickly, you could set the crawl rate to "Slower" instead of "Normal."

This some what implies that Google is noticing a slow response time from the site and Google actually recommends, in some cases, that Googlebot might be causing the site to load slow. So he recommends that you slow down your crawl within webmaster tools, the set crawl rate feature.

Google Web Search Page Load Time Factor
It is interesting that this seems to be a fairly recent error message from Google. The interesting part is, I believe, that it was released about the same time Google AdWords released page load time factor into the quality score. Could Google be using the same metrics for this statistic on both Google AdWords and Web Search? Possibly.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: July 23, 2008"

Greg Sterling shares a blog post from the Patent Law Blog that says that "the Patent and Trademark Office has now made clear that its newly developed position on patentable subject matter will invalidate many and perhaps most software patents, including pioneering patent claims to such innovators as Google, Inc."

Does this mean that PageRank and search algorithms are going to be dissolved under these new restrictions -- since the claim is that they may inhibit future development? Yesterday, during the Daily Search Cast, Danny Sullivan said that the Google PageRank patent has changed so much that this is a nonissue, so perhaps not.

It's really hard to say that this will happen. I suppose that where there is no wiggle room, the patents will be revised to avoid being invalidated.

With regards to Google PageRank, if it ever does go away due to governmental restrictions, will they lose much? It won't be a competitive disadvantage, forum members say. PageRank is not that substantial in the grand scheme of things.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

Many people who use Google AdWords will opt out of the content network because they feel that since people are not actively searching when they find ads in the content network, they conversion rates will be lower. But in a recent WebmasterWorld thread, Roger Montti explains that the content network isn't as bad as it's hyped up to be. The important thing is that it's really different from the search network.

Roger points out that there are different types of ads in the content network. Some blend in and can resemble navigation. Even contextual ads are different, he notes. But it's similar to the search network too, because some pages have more quality conversions than others:

Some sites convert better than others, sometimes sites you never thought would convert. That's why I am bidding on a wide assortment of sites, then removing those that refuse to convert regardless of the different approaches. In this regard, it's similar to the search network

Better yet, cost per conversion is lower than on the search network. This is probably because advertisers who currently use the content network aren't really acknowledging the differences between the content network and the search network as Roger has done.

The issue is really that a lot of advertisers are a lot lazier -- some may "set it and forget" -- and this is a tactic that won't yield the conversions they're looking for.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Did you know that Google has a search engine related to governmental queries? Google's Uncle Sam search engine includes White House news, top governmental stories, American Forces Information Services, the Washington Post, and more. The search engine also searches .gov sites only.

It's pretty useful for "official" information, and one forum member who is a political science student is particularly thankful for a search engine that is targeted to such queries that are related to official government pages.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

CNET and a number of other blogs report that Google may buy social news site Digg for approximately $200 million. This has been something we've been eying for awhile, with Reuters photographing Digg CEO Jay Adelson with Larry Page of Google (as seen in Valleywag). As a former Digg addict myself (with an emphasis on the "former"), I guess I wonder what Jill Whalen wonders on a Sphinn submission: why would they want it?

Many other forum members are a little baffled by this. In my opinion, it is happening way too late. An acquisition last year would have been more beneficial with the dedicated userbase. One forum member calls this another "fascinating toy for Google guys" and that Google is pulling what Microsoft did years ago: they're acquiring without stopping.

Several forum members across many forums, however, say that they thinks Digg could do better than $200 million. Actually, I think Google could do better than $200 million....

Others think that the search engine takeover was a matter of time, especially since Google has been testing voting features within the search engine for some time. But is Digg really profitable? It might be, and that's because they force you to click twice to get to a page you want to vote upon (which was an issue of contention last September when it was implemented -- but they never responded to this -- since they were aiming for the monetary gain).

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums, and Sphinn.

A WebmasterWorld thread had reports that Google had all old cache dates for most sites on the web. By old, I mean, the last time Google said they "retrieved" the site was on the 15th or 16th and it was already the 22nd before Google showed new cache dates.

Here is a screen capture of what the cache date looked like on many sites:

Google is known for having fairly frequent cache dates and crawling patterns on most sites, even sites that do not update all that frequently.

Last night, senior member Atomic noticed Google started to update the cache dates with fresher dates. But until then, Webmasters were really worried. One even joked, "maybe they've ran out of room."

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Conduct a search for educating in Google and you will see an image of a teacher standing over a student holding a small rod, with the student's pants down leaning over a desk. This is not what one would expect to be seen for a search on educating. At least, I would not want to see this for a search like that and I would not want your kids to see it.

Clearly I find this image 'clean' enough to post here in small format

Now this is far from the first time Google placed images that might not be appropriate on the ordinary Google web search results. This is by far not even close to the most inappropriate image I have seen come up. But Google added a report images feature, so I decided to test it out.

When I first spotted this image for this search result, via DigitalPoint Forums, I immediately used the "report image" feature. That was just about three days ago. So when I decided to check the status of this report, I was a bit upset to see the image still there. I was hoping it would be gone after reporting it 3 days ago!

This is the only reason I am blogging it, to document it can take more than 3 days for an image to be pulled. I assume if Google received hundreds of reports then they would act faster. I wonder what that threshold is?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

An interesting thread at WebmasterWorld has discussion on the topic of less small businesses using Google AdWords. The thread create, senior member, annej, said:

I have a hobby related site and use AdSense. Ads from small online businesses were especially interesting to my visitors as they sell the hobby supplies. These small business ads have decreased.

I'm wondering if there is a reason. Have recent changes in AdWords affected small businesses? Or is the sinking economy the cause?

Have you also noticed a drop in small business competition in your AdWords sector? Let us know by taking this quick poll:

Many of the responses agree, but do you? As to why, many suspect it has to do with all the advanced features bundled into AdWords. Now, these are all features we have been asking for over the course of the years. But these advanced features simply make it hard for new advertisers to get started.

Senior member netmeg added that Google does have a starter edition but the issue with the starter edition is it is a form of "Budget Optimizer, and that lumps Search in with Content, no geo targeting, and sets an absurd maximum CPC amount." So small business allegedly are stuck paying a premium for not having the time to become an expert. I guess that is the price you pay - you either learn it yourself, pay someone to do it for you or pay the cost of competing against more seasoned advertisers.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Just to liven things up a bit, we decided to put up a special theme for today. Today is supposedly National Hot Dog Day, so hence, the hot dog theme. Here is a picture for archive purposes:

Doesn't that make you hungry?

Last year we celebrated the day with a theme as well, which can be seen over here.

Happy Hot Dog Day!

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: July 22, 2008"

The very smart Sarah Bird at SEOmoz has recently blogged about the importance of managing client expectations when working in this area. She says that it's normal for people to overpromise and underdeliver. If you run into a client who has extremely high expectations, what are you to do when they aren't getting what they want?

She says that it's important to have something in writing (a warranty):

Including solid warranty language in your client contracts serves two important purposes. First, it helps manage client expectations. Clients forget and/or misinterpret verbal conversations. If it is written down, your client is more likely to remember that you didn't promise the moon and the stars. Thus, your client will be less upset on the day their rankings drop by five results for no apparent reason.

This is a great way to manage expectations and keep yourself out of any possible legal entanglement.

If you manage SEO clients at all or operate a consulting business, this jargon is very important and it can make sure you have covered yourself in the event of any problems.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

A WebmasterWorld member is working on a site and is running into difficulty with rankings that are dropping. When checking Google Webmaster Tools, the big issue is that the pages have the same meta tags, descriptions, and titles.

What kind of options does the webmaster have to recover his falling rankings?

As Tedster reports, sometimes it may be better not to index paginated pages -- it can cause confusion. Many people agree that indexing the first page may be the best option and then disallowing the second page and subsequent pages from being ranked.

Another proposal from Tedster is to think about the user experience.

The need is to have alternate click paths, beyond offering just one set of paginated results . The key to creating that is to forget about databases autogenerating the entire website, and in fact forget all about technology for the moment. Just think like a visitor. How many ways can you help them find what they might want?

To achieve this, you can categorize the results if possible.

Other people have tried "noindex, follow" and that has worked well for them.

There are many ways to go about it. You need to find the solution that's best for you.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Everyone emphasizes that content is king. But does the amount of content make a difference? This is the issue that is currently being discussed at High Rankings Forums.

Well, contrary to what they usually say, size doesn't matter this time. The number of pages is insignificant. Content still is king, but the amount is up for discussion.

When it comes to content, quantity is not the concern. Instead quality is of utmost importance. As forum member Torka puts it, the most valuable sites to search engines (and users, of course) are those that offer useful and original content, provide a useful service, and sell products that people want or need.

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forums.

There is an excellent thread at WebmasterWorld discussing if Google will ever fully "forgive" a site after it has been penalized.

For example, let's say you have been slapped with a link penalty, and you remove all those bad links. Will Google every rank you as well as you once ranked? The thread has some excellent experience to quote:

Senior member, netmeg, said that Google does completely forgive:

one of my clients was completely banned from Google for a spammy link exchange program; we cleaned 'em all up and filed a reinclusion request, and they are currently #1-3 for just about every relevant search phrase you could think of. They're ranking higher now than they ever did before the penalty - but it did take about a year to work their way up to that point.

Yes, I agree that it takes a long time to earn back your trust from Google.

But WebmasterWorld administrator asks a key question, Google may forgive, but do they forget? Tedster said:

I do think Google always has a record of the past penalty somewhere, and any future infractions might be dealt with quite harshly.

I am very confident Google records each and every penalty for a website, historically. This is incredibly important data for Google to have when manually reviewing a reconsideration request. Does Google have a three-strikes and your out rule? I doubt it, but all this information is 100% relevant for the process.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I have a client with a very large database driven site. The site is extremely crawlable, which makes for a really nice amount of pages for very specific search terms. I cannot share the site I am talking about, because I do not have client approval. But I did want to share a new Google Webmaster Tools message that this client received, that, in a sense, warned the webmaster that Googlebot may "consume much more bandwidth than necessary."

The subject line of the error reads: Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site

The body of the message reads:

Googlebot encountered problems while crawling your site http://www.domain.com/.

Googlebot encountered extremely large numbers of links on your site. This may indicate a problem with your site's URL structure. Googlebot may unnecessarily be crawling a large number of distinct URLs that point to identical or similar content, or crawling parts of your site that are not intended to be crawled by Googlebot. As a result Googlebot may consume much more bandwidth than necessary, or may be unable to completely index all of the content on your site.

More information about this issue
Here's a list of sample URLs with potential problems. However, this list may not include all problematic URLs on your site.

Here is a picture of the message:

Google goes on to list 20 or so URLs that they found to be problematic. A few of those URLs are 100% already blocked by the robots.txt file on the site, so I am not sure why they show up. The others, I can see why Google might consider them to be "similar content," but technically, they are very different pieces of content.

In any event, I had two major questions:

(1) Do you think this means Google will trust this site less? I don't think so.
(2) To me, this makes me feel that Google is giving us the option of blocking these URLs or Google will simply drop them from the index. Google does this all the time already, dropping what they believe to be duplicate URLs. Why does this require a specific message? Does it mean that Google won't drop them but warns that the crawlers will crawl and your bandwidth will just spike?

I have never really seen a discussion on this specific Webmaster Tools message from Google, so let's start one. Please comment here or join the Search Engine Roundtable Forums thread.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

I honestly hate to write about this and I will not be talking in any specifics. But in the past week or two there has been a lot of sadness around the industry, the search industry of course. No, this does not relate to Microsoft or Yahoo. No, this does not relate to Ask.com possibly giving up on search. This relates to the SEM/SEM community.

I will link you over to three Sphinn threads, all with opinions and comments that might make an outsider go - wow, this is sad. In all the years that I have covered this industry, and I have been doing this a really really long time, I have never really seen it at this level. It is like three or four different events and actions have overlapped at the same time to cause an incredible about of hurt throughout the industry.

If you are unaware of anything that is going on, then that is good and I suggest you do not get involved. As a matter of covering this as at this particular site, I must. As promised in our mission, I must report on the "Pulse of the Search Marketing Community" and the pulse right now is in hyperdrive and much of it is over anger, fear, dislike, a ton of miscommunication and it all amounts to not having respect for each other.

Respect is a key element in my personal life. Before doing anything, anything at all - I try so hard to think and say, is this how I would like to be treated. Like I said in the Search Engine Roundtable's Code of Ethics back in 2005.

What it comes down to is a deep consideration of respect towards the industry and the people within the industry.

In any event, I can just hope this short post impacts those who read this and understand what is going on.

Here are the three threads at Sphinn. Each thread links to a blog post, each blog post has comments and there are also comments at the Sphinn threads. Again, if you think nothing is going on, then I honestly would not read them - because they place a sad light over our industry and industry that has been struggling externally with respect issues and now has major respect issues internally - more than ever before.

• The Sphinn Expose - My Story About Social Media Networking, Sphinn
• I Refuse To Participate In The Vicious Nastiness Going On In Our Industry, Sphinn
• Unintended Consequences, Sphinn

A Google Groups thread lead me to believe that Google Maps will soon be offering walking directions to everyone, in the near future. So, I decided to check the example I was watching, i.e. 200 Madison Ave to 200 Lexington Ave in New York and I see walking directions!

I lead off this post that this was coming soon, but it is now here, at least for me.

Yes, I covered signs of this at Search Engine Land, where Google Operating System had screen captures of Google testing out walking directions within Google Maps. Again, now I personally see it, do you?

Here is a screen shot of the NY example I mentioned above:

For a full size screen shot, check the image on Flickr.

So, when Maps Guide Brian from Google said in the Google Groups thread "stay tuned here for updates," in regards to the release of walking directions, then I guess he means now?

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Update: Everyone I asked to try my example above was able to see walking directions. I have several responses already at my Plurk request, so it seems like this is indeed live.

Update 2 (at 1:45pm): The Google LatLong Blog has now officially made it official with one of their own blog posts announcing the new feature.

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: July 21, 2008"

A WebmasterWorld forum member is a bit disturbed by a #1 Google ranking on one of his own websites -- that is BROKEN. It's an old site with many pages indexed and strong inbound links, but every single time he's checked the site for the last 4 months, he gets a "cannot connect to database" error. Still, the site has stayed in the #1 position. Why is it that Google prefers this irrelevant site over better content?

He puts the concerns simply:

Anyone landing on my site in the last 4 months would be greatly dissappointed. In google as much as me.

The site has no meta tags, but it lost its sitelinks. Still, the fact that it has a #1 ranking (with Wikipedia being #2) is substantial to him and others. He's not complaining about his #1 ranking but he can imagine the frustration others feel for not being able to rank when they're probably optimizing very well to get that #1.

The question really comes out to be -- if Google once considers your site and authority, is it always an authority?

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

In a Google Groups thread, a forum member wonders about the details and logistics about Google's cache. JohnMu, a Google representative, offers his $0.02 and gives some interesting tidbits.

First and foremost, if you experience any cache issues or errors, or if you run into a "stuffed" cache, you need not worry, says JohnMu.

What if you don't want your site to be cached? Use the "noarchive" meta tag, he says. He explains that the "no-cache" meta tag and similar HTTP header tags (on the other hand) are for browsers only.

Do you suffer any penalties if your page can't be cached or if the cache is not coming up properly? John says no.

Though I realize there are sometimes situations where the contents of a cached URL can help determine what is happening (say when a hacked page is returning different content to the Googlebot), I haven't seen many (or any?) situations where a missing or "broken" cached page has had any impact on crawling, indexing or ranking of a site.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

Microsoft has re-announced its ContentAds program last Friday. The program is currently in private beta, as we have reported at the end of 2006, but we have covered it since the beginning of 2006 Microsoft's post seems like more of a clarification, based on the recent TechCrunch post, which called the launch new.

About 11 months ago, ContentAds was rolled out to US publishers but Microsoft acknowledges that it's in a "private pilot phase."

Many publishers, particularly as voiced at WebmasterWorld, are excited to try this program out. They don't, however, have access yet. You can see the login/signup page here.

I, too, can't wait to hear the first impressions of ContentAds.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

In a recent video where Matt Cutts aims to address the German webmaster community, he shares some information about Google -- about how he discovered his first spam site, how being creative, quick, focused on a specific niche may put you ahead of the game, how Google Webmaster Tools rocks, how white-hat SEO is the best way of "getting away with" anything on Google, how Google is handling more difficult queries (since user expectations are changing) and his personal preferences: gadgets, Ubuntu, and plugins, among others.

The 10 minute video is below:

It's definitely an interesting video to watch, and Matt is a great public face for Google.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn and Cre8asite Forums.

WebmasterWorld administrator, Tedster, started a thread at WebmasterWorld suggesting that Google may begin indexing audio files in the near future. Tedster linked to the recent news on Google announcing that they are "automatically" transcribing YouTube videos "from speech to text" and then indexing that content in a searchable format.

Personally, I think if they got that technology down, it would simply rock. But it would make much of the audio files, MP3s, videos and multimedia content all searchable.

Many operating systems have speech to text technology. They make software that tries to transcribe your voice as you speak to it. They make technology, OCR, that reads text as an image and translates it to machine readable text. None of this technology is perfect, or even close to it. Google has dabbled in all of this in the past and I am sure they continue to experiment with this now and in the future.

So keep watching the accuracy of search results such as filetype:mp3.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A supporters-only WebmasterWorld thread (and now a standard WebmasterWorld thread) have discussion around the new look of Yahoo's Quick Links. Yahoo's Quick Links, which we first reported on back in 2005, and then again a year ago - is basically a way to give Yahoo's searchers a quick way to dive deeper into a search result, typically tied to navigational-like queries.

In the past, they looked like this:

Then Yahoo changed them in 2007, to look more localized:

But now, when you do a search for walmart in Yahoo, you see two types of Quick Links.

(1) The first looks almost identical to the style Google uses. Here is the new Yahoo version:

Compare that to the Google Sitelinks for the same search result:

Yes, very similar.

(2) But directly under the first Yahoo Quick Link, in position number two for a search on walmart is this, single link Quick Links:

This version is not labelled Quick Links, like it was in the past, but it looks more like a standard Yahoo Quick Link.

Google has gone through many implementations and layouts for their Sitelinks. So has Yahoo, but it seems they are now converging on a very similar design.

Is this a standard Yahoo Quick Link or can we attribute this to a new form or even maybe Yahoo's new Search Monkey version of the implementation?

You can find a bit more about Yahoo quick links via that link.

I hope to get more information on how these new Quick Links are being generated. Is it a standard Quick Link with a new design? Is it a submit pro version of the Quick Link? Is it a hand made Quick Link? Or is it a Search Monkey Quick Link?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld (paid access) thread and WebmasterWorld (free access).

Update: A Yahoo spokesperson told me this has nothing to do with the SearchMonkey. He added, "we are increasing coverage for quick links as well as continuing to experiment for the best way to convey deep site links to our users."

Two months ago, we noticed Google testing a green look, but since then - it seems Google stopped that test.

I spotted a new DigitalPoint Forums thread with new reports of Google testing out the green look. Here is a picture of what this member sees, compared to the standard blue bar, which is what I see:

Green top Google bar (larger):

Blue top Google bar (larger):

Maybe Google is getting serious about implementing green as their user interface? Or maybe not. For more pictures, see our older post on this Google test.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

If you have been advertising with Google AdWords for over six-years, you may have received a little present in the mail, from Google. The present is the Google Cookbook.

In the box, you should be able to find:

• Google Cookbook
• Google Apron
• Advanced Tips from Adwords Experts Book
• Google Thank You Letter

Here is a picture of it, I found on Flickr in AuthenticEccentric's photostream:

We have discussion on the Google Cookbook at WebmasterWorld and ABestWeb Forums. One member said:

Did anyone else get the package of goodies from Google on their account's 6 year anniversary?

I got a Google Cookbook with gourmet recipes created by Google Chefs, a Google Chefs Apron (black with colorful logo) and a book entitled Advanced Tips from Adwords Experts ... plus a nice cover letter.

I don't cook but it's a nice gesture and over the years they have sent out some nice gifts.

If anyone photocopies the cookbook, please do let me know, so I can share with everyone (if that is legal).

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and ABestWeb Forums.

Google reveals the technology behind their rankings. Google AdWords links up keyword campaigns to placement targeting. Google gets slapped with a class action lawsuit over $136. Google search results continue to yo-yo. Google drops in traffic are due to links? Did you notice more Yahoo Search updates? Yahoo's site command is no longer needed. Has Ask stopped crawling the web? Google and Microsoft announced earnings that do not impress. Yahoo rejects Microsoft's bid, yes again. Google removes comic sans font from AdSense. Google Fridges begin to melt down. Check it out at SERoundtable.com.

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 (note: If YouTube shows a video not found message, just refresh the page and play it again, it is a YouTube bug):

For the original iTunes version, click here

Some Of The Topics Discussed:

• What are the Technologies Behind the Google Ranking?
• Google AdWords Allows Deeper Targeting With "Keywords + Placements"
• Google in Class Action Lawsuit Over AdSense for Parked Domains
• Google Continues to Yo-Yo the Search Results
• Huge Drop in Google Traffic? Can't Find The Problem? Check Your Links 
• More Yahoo Search Changes in July? Oh, Also Google
• Yahoo Site Command Works Without Applying [site:]?
• Did Ask.com Stop or Slow Crawling the Web?
• Google and Microsoft's Second Quarter Results Revealed
• Yahoo Rejects Microsoft's Offer -- Again
• Google Finally Removes Comic Sans Font From AdSense Ads
• Google Fridges Begin To Melt Down

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: July 18, 2008"

Today's my dad's birthday, so before I actually start off the roundup, I just wanted to say HAPPY BIRTHDAY DAD!

There, now that I got that out of the way, it's going to be 97 degrees today in New York. Nice! But thankfully there's air conditioning to hold me over for this recap and all.

Google Shares its Ranking Technologies

Amit Singhal of Google has written yet another post about the technologies behind Google rankings. Among them: understanding the query, understanding the user, and understanding the pages. It's not shocking data but it's still pretty information. Thanks for sharing it, Google.

Google AdWords Deep Targeting

This week, the Google AdWords team announced that you can include keywords and placements in a single campaign type instead of creating separate campaigns. Doing this "combine[s] the benefits of contextual targeting with placement targeting," according to Google.

Lawsuit for Google AdWords over Parked Domains

While Google AdWords made strides this week, a lawyer is suing Google over a little more than $100 because he had AdSense on parked domains. Um, yeah.

Yahoo Prices to Go Up -- Maybe

With the potential Google and Yahoo advertising deal, your minimum bid prices may go up. Commenter Janeth is worried for Yahoo in this relationship, because they may actually lose advertisers due to the raised prices. Definitely a good point. Thanks for the comment, Janeth!

Google Rankings - Verdict: Confused

Google has been yoyoing search results lately with webmasters reporting huge fluctuations in their rankings. Others may experience these rank drops because of possible link penalties.

Yahoo site: Operator -- No Longer Needed?

It seems that users are reporting that searching Yahoo for www.domain.com without the site: operator actually yields the same results as if you would use site:www.domain.com.

We Ask: Where did Ask Go?

It seems that Ask.com stopped crawling the internets. I am saddened to report that Ask.com really doesn't look like its priorities are in order. :(

Yahoo, Google, Microsoft...!

Well, after the debacle of Yahoo potentially merging with Microsoft, it may be over again (for now). Politics are definitely getting in the way here.

On a somewhat positive note for Microsoft, their Q4 earnings went up from last year though it was a penny short per share to analysts' expectations. Ah well. In a recession, this is still good news, I guess.

I Hate Comic Sans

THANK YOU, Google, for removing Comic Sans from AdWords ads. That is the ugliest. font. ever. I have no idea why people would design their website with that font, let alone have Google use it for what looks like a professional search engine.

I'll Take Your Google Fridge Even if it's Broken

Forum members report that their Google fridges that they got as AdWords advertisers are breaking down. I don't care. They're pretty. Send me yours as long as it doesn't smell or anything.

Have a great hot weekend!

A WebmasterWorld member says that when he changed his meta description, his rankings plummeted on his site.

In the past, US courts found META tags immaterial but Google has recommended it. Tedster points to previous WebmasterWorld coverage that shows that there are "indirect ranking effects from the meta description, including lower clickthrough rates that can cause a decent ranking to fall away if the url doesn't perform." Barry agrees as well.

Is Google using clickthroughs as a ranking method? Forum members are not entirely sure, but one points out that Wikipedia has no meta description -- which may count for something (avoiding that lower CTR, perhaps?)

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Techmeme has the big buzz about Google's second quarter earnings. Google claimed this was a strong quarter with 35% in profits ($3.92 per share), but their earnings still didn't meet analysts' expectations.

Meanwhile, Microsoft's earnings also rose. The company's fiscal fourth quarter ended on June 30th, with an approximate profit of $0.46 a share. While this is better than their earnings the previous year ($0.31/share), analysts were hoping for just a bit more ($0.47/share). Much of its failure, according to the report, is that Microsoft still has a weak online presence. Its profits are related to their operating systems and applications.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld (Google) and WebmasterWorld (Microsoft).

Google announced an exciting feature for AdWords advertisers yesterday. Google explained the feature as, "instead of creating separate campaigns for keywords and placements, you can now include both in any campaign. All ad groups now have tabs for both keywords and placements, and the two can work together to target your ads on the content network."

So, if you want to target an ad on my personal blog, which runs AdSense, but only want to show your ad when I talk about SEO or search topics, you can do that now. By combing your placement targeted ads with specific keywords you want your ads to show up for, you can say, only show my ad on cartoonbarry.com when the content matches the keyword [search], for example.

Advertisers are really happy with this feature. A WebmasterWorld thread shares some of the advertiser's delight over this feature:

This is huge news. Using the content network, you can now target specific keywords on specific sites.

I'm hoping this will help get our content campaigns working better. This is definitely a step in the right direction.

This "idea" - the ability to target ads by site - was discussed in the Adsense Forum probably 3 years ago. I guess it has taken all that time to work out the technology because clearly this "solution" made sense a long time ago (in WWW time). Bravo. You're gettin' there Google. Bravo.

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread does complain about the feature being a bit too hard to understand. Moderator Discovery said:

Did you have lawyers write this stuff?

AdWordsAPI Advisor also chimed in at a Google Groups thread. The advisor explained that they were beta testing this feature on a select number of advertisers accounts. The advisor added that there are ramifications to this feature and you should read this thread if you are concerned. If you use the API, the ability to control this feature is in the "production version of the CampaignService WSDLs since v12 was released, and it's the contentTargeting attribute of the Campaign object. It can be set to one of two values:
AllPlacements or SelectedPlacements, corresponding to the values in the web UI." For more information, see here.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, Search Engine Watch Forums and Google Groups.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports Ask.com's crawler has seemed to slow down to a halt. Some webmasters are reporting zero crawling activity from Ask.com, while others are reporting extremely limited crawling activity.

WebmasterWorld moderator, jdMorgan, noticed the slow down to, he said:

I have noticed that they have dramatically slowed down their crawling on my sites, but they have not stopped.

Yes, this fuels me more on my write up named Sorry, Ask.com -- I Still Don't Think You're Focused On Core Search at Search Engine Land. Yea, Ask - is this a sign that you are giving up on the unstructured web? Let's just hope it is a temporary slow down that people are noticing. Honestly it would not surprise me if you guys gave up on crawling the unstructured web.

Also make sure to read my write up here named Search Community Reaction to Ask.com New Search Strategy.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Google Groups thread has discussion on the topic of dynamically creating pages to target localized searches. For example, this particular webmaster wants to be able to target 28 different zip codes for his client's A/C business. He summarizes what he wants to do:

Johns A/C does work in 28 different zip codes. He creates 28 webspages, page names reflect the township AC_service_City_zip.htm, meta tags reflect city, zip such as Johns AC serivce serving the "City" and "zip code" area. Then the body is a template and the city and zip are filled in for each city/zip area.

This way when someone does a search for AC service "zipcode" or "city" there is a good chance his page will be included.

This was a popular SEO tactic years and years ago. These days, it is much harder to rank well for terms using the automated city database methodology. We actually covered some of the databases you can purchase to accomplish this back in 2005. But is this legit?

According to Google, no it is not. In fact, Googler, Reid, said that the manner in which this webmaster wants to go, seems to be a "doorway page." Reid said:

I agree with webado in this scenario. If the body of these pages is a template and the only thing that changes is the city and zip code, this sounds a lot like doorway pages:

google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66355

Why push the limit on how much duplicate content a page can have? Pages with unique content often perform the best in Google's search results, are better for users, which in turn, is probably better for your business.

Your best bet in this situation is to create useful and unique content for each page. How? Well, take a look at some of the major local portals and see how much effort they put into their localized pages.

But would you consider these to be doorway pages? Google defines a doorway page as:

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.

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: July 17, 2008"

InformationWeek reports that there's a class action suit against Google about having AdSense on parked domains when they aren't likely to yield conversions. In the specific case, a legal services provider had his ads running for about 6 weeks on parked pages. He received over 200,000 impressions, 668 clicks, and zero conversions. The plaintiff spent $136.11 and is disappointed that he had nothing to show for it. By forming a class action suit, he and his lawyers are hoping that this affects other Google advertisers.

Barry writes about the lawsuit at Search Engine Land and makes sure to point out that the ads were running when Google announced that advertisers can opt out of AdSense for Domains.

Meanwhile, forum members say that this can put a damper on the domaining industry. It also makes the lawyer (specifically the one behind the lawsuit) look silly for suing Google when he isn't seemingly reading the fine print and learning how to use Google AdWords effectively. They feel that the plaintiff, an individual named Hal K. Levitte, is just looking for a big fat check from Google but that he's wasting his time. Other people think that Google's "AdSense for Domains," specifically for domains that lack content, is a bad strategy.

This sentiment is echoed by others as well. Why would you want to spend your money on parked domains? And why would visitors actually hang around?

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

The official Google Blog had a post yesterday about the technologies that are behind the Google ranking, following up from a post about how Google ranks results. Amit Singhal is at it again and he talks about the importance of information retrieval (IR). He goes on to say that Google crawls and indexes pages to understand them and associates important concepts to a page when they're not actually obvious on the page itself.

But what about what the users are looking for? Amit says that to understand queries, Google has incorporated a "best-in-class spelling suggestion system, an advanced synonyms system, and a very strong concept analysis system." Google often can read the typos and give you better options when you misspell words. It is a little more difficult, however, to work with synonyms. Also, Google tries to derive the main concepts from a query.

Finally, Google needs to understand users. Google's motto here is that the "best locally relevant results [are] served globally." Google also utilizes personalization and universal search in this area.

Google also has developed something called Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR). According to Singhal:

CLIR allows users to first discover information that is not in their language, and then using Google's translation technology, we make this information accessible. I call this advance: give me what I want in any language.

WebmasterWorld members are suggesting that a lot of what Google is saying here is reflected in many of their SERP changes reports. Specifically, there are changes in "relational term weight," probably as a result of the weight on concepts.

Some people think that Google used this to brag about how far they've come. Yet others are upset that Google didn't even really mention the "technologies" as stated in the title (instead, the article is more focused on results). Also, this article doesn't seem to be particularly groundbreaking.

Still, it's an interesting read.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

I've personally found a number of people who consider that because SEO seems like "optimizing title tags, doing keyword research, and adding a little extra to a website," they can be search engine optimizers too. In the past few weeks, I stumbled across two very problematic websites from so-called "SEOs" who offer nothing but spammy services.

The problem is that they think they're 100% right. And that's a discussion that High Rankings Forums members are talking about right now.

There are so many clueless individuals in this industry. But they're likely not even reading this post or so many other posts like this that are aimed to educate. In the meantime, the issue on High Rankings Forums is that a particular SEO (who doesn't code) gave a developer a specific set of guidelines to build up a website for a client. Only after the website was live did the member realize that the developer stuffed rows of hidden keywords on the bottom of the page. When the forum member approached the developer, he got flustered and said that the page would be doomed without it.

The "know it all" approach is the kind of attitude our industry could do without. Unfortunately, it's very widespread. Further, unfortunately, it's also something that many innocent clients are easily conned with (and it gives the whole term "search engine optimization" that "snake oil" distinction).

Does that mean you shouldn't ever show your ego when you work with your clients? According to forum member qwerty, you do need it -- to educate the client, especially if the client doesn't possess the common sense and can't figure it out

But is this really different from any other industry? You can step into your local electronics store and some salesperson can tell you that your decision to buy that phone is a bad one, because "this one is just so much better." These things happen. It's not specific to our industry.

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.

Since the tide seems to be shifting and more and more advertisers are opting for Microsoft adCenter over Yahoo Search Marketing, I thought I share with you a recent adCenter related thread from WebmasterWorld.

Let's say you wanted to track your adCenter search traffic differently from your adCenter content network traffic. How do you do it? Well, in Google, it is easy. You just add {ifsearch:} and {ifcontent:} parameters to the URLs and it is done. With adCenter, it may not be that easy.

The official Microsoft representative, adCenterRep, said this cannot be done with Microsoft. Instead, you need to set up two different adGroups for each campaign. Let me quote you:

At this time, the only way to keep the data seperated is by having two adGroups. Although I have submitted your feedback and will have the developmental team review the idea.

May I suggest that you use the 'Give us Feedback' link from within your account requesting this as well?

So if you want this feature, login to adCenter and suggest it by clicking on "Give us Feedback."

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This may be an obvious fact for many Google AdWords professionals, but I am sure many people do not know this. According to a Google AdWords representative, Google only uses exact match data for quality score analysis data.

AdWordsPro Sarah said in a Google Groups thread,

Match types does not affect Quality Score (we only collect Quality Score data when the query matches the keyword exactly. The exact match Quality Score is then shared with broad and phrase match).

So, if you are bidding on [blue shoes] and you get a click from a search on [red shoes], due to broad match - then Google won't use that click for quality score purposes. Google will only use the exact match of a click, i.e. [blue shoes] search to [blue shoes] keyword ad. It doesn't mean Google won't rank your broad or phrase match ads based on your overall quality score. It does mean that your overall quality score is made up of only exact matches.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Let me take you back a few steps before getting into this update. On June 30th, Yahoo announced an update that did not update any of the search results around that date. Several days later, around July 7th, webmasters began to notice a July Yahoo update. Now, I am seeing early reports of an additional Yahoo update.

The reports come from WebmasterWorld yesterday, saying that in the real estate niche, "80% of the sites" are no longer in the same position they were the day before. They have been replaced by "gov and org or small old sites," said WebmasterWorld member Garya.

Member, supafresh supported Garya's post by saying:

Yahoo changed today in my sector, we moved from the 3rd page to the first page. From my analysis a few days prior I think they tweaked the algorithm on template recognition.

Did you notice a change in Yahoo in the past twenty-four hours?

On the Google front, we continue to see yo-yoing, even today.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Over the course of a month or two, many Google Analytics users began distrusting the reports provided in Google Analytics. We now have more reports, this time via Search Engine Roundtable Forums of Google Analytics not reporting accurate numbers.

I noticed yesterday's reports for this site was down about 20%. I immediately thought, give it a day and see if the numbers are higher tomorrow. They were. The numbers reported for Tuesday on Wednesday, was at normal levels when I looked today, Thursday. So I thought, maybe Google Analytics changed the time they are processing these reports (i.e. pulling in less data because they are running the reports earlier).

For example, let's say, Google Analytics typically runs the reports at 3am every morning. If Google Analytics pushed the report runs to 10pm every night, then you will be missing out on 2 hours of traffic, from the previous day. That means, you would have to wait a two-day period to see your full traffic data for the previous day. Hope I explained that well.

In any event, I am also hearing these reports outside of the forums - so this seems fairly widespread. Is this an bug or a feature - now that is the question.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

The YouTube Blog announced that they have launched a YouTube support forum at Google Groups. The forum can be found at groups.google.com/group/youtube-help. As you know, we track forums for new discoveries, insights and hot topics. So we will be adding this forum to the list of discussions we are tracking.

What I find interesting is that the YouTube representatives do not have the standard blue G logo [] by their posts. Instead, they have a special red YouTube mini logo by their name, which looks like this .

The forum is currently structured with these sub-discussion forums:

• Announcements
• How do I...?
• Bug Reports & Issues
• TestTube Feedback

We promise to keep an eye on this forum and report back any news, topics and discussion we think will interest our readers.

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: July 16, 2008"

Michael VanDeMar wrote an interesting post on his blog about the uselessness of the Google Keyword tool for SEO. He explains that while we reported that the tool is showing keyword numbers, it still isn't helpful. His rationale is that the numbers refer to PPC search behavior only, not overall Google.com search behavior, and then he explains how past research has given him this perception. He writes:

For instance, for [birthday poems] the tool gave a number of 27,100 (which would be an average of 903 searches per day) and bidding on that keyword for 3 days gave me 2,411 impressions (or 803 impressions per day). This is fine and dandy if I am only concerned about getting traffic from AdWords, of course. The thing is, if I rely on this data for my SEO efforts I will at best be most likely wasting my time.

Interesting analysis. Jill Whalen admits that the numbers seem rather high but it now makes sense because they use the content network in their numbers.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Earlier this month, we reported that Viacom ordered Google to turn over YouTube records. Google will now have to give Viacom the records, but in a compromise, without data that will identify users, according to BBC News.

Many people are now breathing sighs of relief. But others think that this is Google trying to forge for itself a victory that was already assured and think it was just a public relations play:

But: (1) Viacom is still getting the data it wanted. (2) While Google will anonymize user names and IP addresses of YouTube users, Viacom has has said it never wanted the identities of YouTube users anyway. So it's just Google PR that claims victory. Hoorah!

Some people think that the way Google played this card is "sickening."

There really have been no opposing statements--they think this was the motive of Google all along.

As an aside, Danny Sullivan writes at Search Engine Land that anonymizing the data in Google's suggested way may still lead Viacom to actual video watchers based on personalized behavior. What comes to mind? Thelma Arnold.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

CNet reports that the search advertising agreement between Google and Yahoo can seriously impact advertisers -- in a bad way. CNet's report states that "A Yahoo-Google deal could drive up Yahoo keyword prices by an average of 22 percent." The end result: Google and Yahoo win, but the smaller people (read: the advertisers) may not necessarily fare well.

Advertisers are starting to feel the heat of the potential "monopoly" as one forum member puts it. One forum member on WebmasterWorld wonders who will be paying the 22%. I'm going to assume it's coming from the advertisers.

Maybe this is a partnership that people should hope doesn't go through!

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Part two of the WebmasterWorld thread on the July 2008 Google update discussion is virtually all about how Google is yo-yoing the results. Meaning, one day a site can have top positions for a keyword phrase in Google, the next day it would drop off and then it would come back. This yo-yoing continues to cycle back and forth according to many many webmasters.

WebmasterWorld administrator, tedster, has confirmed the issues himself:

The most perplexing new SERP observations are those that report cycling, sine waves, yo-yo, rollercoaster, or pick your favorite synonym. Sometimes these cycles happen down in the deep results pages after a url has dropped from page 1 - an apparent penalty. And sometimes the cycling appears on page one - from 3 to 10 to 3 to 10, day after day or week after week.

I don't have a site under my auspices that is showing this effect, but I've been asked to look at few that are - and so far, I can say that the phenomenon is real, but am mystified by it. I felt this way when the -950 first appeared back in 2006 or so, and slowly some understanding of that has emerged. Sure hope we can get some understanding about the yo-yo phenomenon, too.

Scanning through the reports myself, all show that this is more than the typical complaints you see from webmasters and SEOs on Google's fluctuations. It seems to be more extreme and more frequent then in the past. Tedster coins it well:

That name we use - organic rankings - is proving to be more and more accurate.

This leads me back to why I purchased Yo-Yos as schwag for the Search Engine Roundtable. I said back in early 2005, "Since the SEO world is filled with such ups and downs, we thought it would be clever to give out yo-yos. Then we added the glowing aspect to the yo-yo to make it "pulse" a bit." That still applies today, but it seems even more so. Heck, if you want a free Yahoo, send me a 6"x9" cushioned envelop with postage and your mailing address on it and I'll send you one. You can mail it to my office, attention Barry Schwartz.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yahoo has been having a rough time over the course of the past several months. But that doesn't mean the company stops working and competing, at least that is what you would think.

YahooSarah, the official Yahoo representative at WebmasterWorld, has not posted a response at WebmasterWorld in exactly a year from today. YahooSarah's last post was in a thread named Publisher broken? on July 16, 2007 at 3:50 pm (EST). She said:

I wanted to chime in briefly to let you know that we are aware of the problems you are experiencing and are working to resolve as soon as possible. Apologies for the inconvenience.

I'll post again when I can confirm that we have resolution.

But not post came after that. Yes, YPN was fixed, but no confirmation from Yahoo was received - even a year later.

Yes, we still have YahooPete posting in the forums. His last post was about three weeks ago. But YahooPete is responsible for Yahoo Search Marketing topics, while YahooSarah is responsible for Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) topics. Maybe YPN is dead and there is no need for YahooSarah's posts?

There is a newish WebmasterWorld thread that is just getting started on the topic of tips on outsourcing link building to India, South America or other countries outside of your local region.

Here are the initial tips this SEO learned and wanted to share:

• Do not pay in advance...
• Sign a contract
• Try to have exclusivity for your niche
• Force your SEO to not ask links to your competitors
• Give them a real email from your domain name
• When possible, don't outsource.

Do you have tips? Let's add them to the WebmasterWorld thread.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Google Groups thread asks if having two Sitemaps for the same site will cause an issue with Google. In short, Google said no.

Why does this site have two Sitemaps? Well, the only way for multiple Google Accounts to gain access to the Webmaster Tools verified access to a particular site, is for Google to verify both sites with unique verification codes. In each of those verified accounts, the account holder does have access to upload a Sitemap. In addition, one account holder can upload more than one Sitemap.

In any event, Google does not frown upon multiple and duplicate Sitemap submissions. Google said, they can sort it out for you. The main question is, do you want Google to sort it out for you or do you want to sort it out for Google?

Googler, Jonathan Simon, said:

Having separate Sitemaps with similar URLs for each site owner is not a problem. The Sitemaps system will properly handle any duplicate URLs found within the same Sitemap or across multiple Sitemaps.

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: July 15, 2008"

On the first day of this month, we reported that Google and Yahoo were to begin indexing Flash files. According to the pertinent Google Webmaster Central blog post, Google is able to crawl the contextual elements in these blog posts. The post itself has been updated with Google mentioning that it rolled out even more features:

For our July 1st launch, we didn't enable Flash indexing for Flash files embedded via SWFObject. We're now rolling out an update that enables support for common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, including SWFObject and SWFObject2.

Those using SWFObject should appreciate this new functionality. But there's one concern expressed by tedster. Hopefully, the spiders won't ignore HTML content on those pages that also utilize SWFObject.

I use SWFObject to serve alternate HTML content to user agents that are not flash enabled. So I certainly hope this change doesn't mean Google starts to ignore the actual HTML! I can't imagine that happening, at least not intentionally.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Do you frequent Google Groups for help on your Google AdWords account? AdWordsPro.Sarah says in a forum post that the AdWords team is looking for feedback to improve the forum user experience.

If you want to offer your feedback, respond to the Google Groups thread and the AdWords team will contact you via email (your Google Groups email account) when they're ready.

The deadline to participate is July 25th.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

Recently I have been reading and hearing a lot of webmasters complain about a huge drop in their Google traffic. There are just too many threads to reference, so I thought I reference one valuable post by JohnMu of Google.

John said in response to why a site lost virtually all of their traffic, in a Google Groups thread:

Looking at your site, it might be that one issue could be that links pointing to parts of your site are not valued in the same way that they used to be.

This is a guy who has exhausted looking at coding issues, all on-page SEO issues, crawling issues, indexing issues and so on. Google then came in to tell him, you know all those links you have - well, they may be the cause for your site not being ranked well in the Google search engine.

The question you get from such a response from Google is two fold:

(1) Is this a link penalty? If the webmaster can somehow drop those links, will you see an immediate recovery in rank?

(2) Are the links just devalued? If so, then if the links don't count, should the webmaster just focus on getting better quality links and not worry about those "bad" links?

We know Google has said time and time again that links can't hurt you but most SEO's don't believe it.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

I am not sure if this is new but it seems if you search in Yahoo for www.domain.com, Yahoo will return results as if you submitted a site command to Yahoo. For example, a search on www.seroundtable.com returns about 18,800, only from seroundtable.com.

If you conduct a true site command at Yahoo Search, i.e. site:www.seroundtable.com, Yahoo will automatically redirect you to Yahoo Site Explorer. Yahoo actually started redirecting these types of queries to Site Explorer almost exactly two years ago, today.

Has Yahoo decided using a simple www.domain.com syntax should stay on Yahoo Search and not be redirected to Site Explorer? Has Yahoo always returned a site command like result set for www.domain.com searches? I know Google does not return site command like results for a www.domain.com search.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Diacritics are those letters that have a small sign added to a letter to alter pronunciation. For example, Mexico is often spelled México, with the special é.

So when you want to tailor your ads to a specific region and what to show them you know what you are 'talking' about, some advertisers use diacritical marks to accent that point.

However, if you use the Google AdWords API's Sandbox, you cannot properly test those ads.

AdWordsAPIAdvisor at a Google Groups thread has confirmed reports that "the Sandbox is rejecting those Cyrillic characters in Campaign names." But this does not mean it does not work on the main Google AdWords server. AdWordsAPIAdvisor said, "if you send the same request to the Production servers it should go through without issue."

This has been a bug in the Sandbox environment for a while and there is currently no estimate time for it to be fixed. AdWordsAPIAdvisor said that it is on the engineers list but it is not as important as fixing bugs in the production environment.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Back in April of 2006, Google began sending out Google Fridges to some of their larger advertisers as a thank you. Well, I am now seeing reports via WebmasterWorld that those fridges are beginning to break.

WebmasterWorld's Hubie said:

I got the Google Fridge about 1.5 years ago, and the damn thing stopped working! the power cord still works, but my fridge aint getting cold anymore. I love this thing...how do I fix it? I'm assuming sending it back to google for repair is not an option:)

He is not the only one. Senior Member, Poster_Boy said, "of the 5+ fridges that I know of via various colleagues... all have broken."

I guess that is what you can expect from schwag that is a fridge. To be fair, Google did send out more Fridges last year and if you really need a new one, you may be able to buy one on eBay. We bought RustyBrick Fridges for clients last December and they are currently still operational - I wonder when they will blow up.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: July 14, 2008"

After several months of indecision regarding the Microsoft-Yahoo merger, Techmeme shares multiple reports that Yahoo and Microsoft are no longer going to consider any sort of partnership (including one from the Yahoo press room.. The reasoning behind this is likely because of billionaire Carl Icahn's possible involvement; it would be too complicated to have a partnership that included the billionaire.

Still, forum members wonder why this even happened. Why does Microsoft want Yahoo so badly? According to forum members, it's because Microsoft hasn't had the history of building such great products internally, so they buy products that are built by another team and then they rebrand them. (This is similar to big brands' approach towards other products, though, considering that Google is the company that bought YouTube.)

One WebmasterWorld member says that this is more of a political battle than anything else:

Yahoo's refusal to accept a deal with Microsoft is much more to do with [their] directors history and sentiment and directly acts against the interests of [their] shareholders.

That could be true. A DigitalPoint Forums thread shows that Jerry Yang isn't very happy.

Meanwhile, one wonders if there's going to be another Yahoo/Microsoft thread in the upcoming months. It seems to be like "one big mess," but it's also a never-ending one at that.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums, and DigitalPoint Forums (#2).

Ever since Google launched Universal Search, SEMs have been trying to leverage it to get their site into the first position within the vertical search engine that is ranking in the top slot.

So for searches like new york hotel where Google Local results dominate the top of the first page, securing a spot in those results may be critical to your SEO campaign for those search terms.

One webmaster posted a thread at WebmasterWorld that suggests his local result, along with the 8 other competitors of his, were "hacked" out of the listing. He explained that a new site popped out of no where, somehow displaying all the other sites. He did notice this weird behavior:

I checked the reviews for the site which has appeared all of a sudden and all of the 475 reviews are guest reviews for a large local hotel. It looks like someone has somehow hacked the local business listing for the hotel and changed the contact info to their own.

Forum administrator, Tedster, thinks it may be a data import issue - while some others feel it may be some sort of Google Maps spam.

This has been reported to Google and they are looking into the issue. Google maps is known to be plagued with spam issues.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

After Google began testing new AdSense fonts back in May of this year, including testing comic sans - Google has finally decided to drop it based on publisher complaints.

AdSenseAdvisor at WebmasterWorld said:

Based on publisher feedback, we have removed Comic Sans from the current ad format experiment. Thanks again for your continued feedback and suggestions. We welcome any further feedback that you might have and assure you that it'll be passed onto the relevant team.

I am not sure if they should have removed it completely. It would have been nice to have it as an option and give publishers the ability to pick and choose which font types they would like to opt in on. Why are you able to pick your sizes, backgrounds, corner styles but not your font type?

In any event, Google removed Comic Sans completely from the font selection for AdSense.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I am sad to report that Mark Berghausen, aka Bergy, of Google Webmaster Central, has decided to leave Google to pursue his legal profession.

Bergy, as he likes to go by, has responded to well over a 100 questions in the Google Groups forums, contributed countless blog posts, participated in the webmaster chats and come to many search conferences.

Berg's first post as a Googler was on May 17, 2007.

John Heneck notified me of Berg's announcement post. Is this the end of us hearing from Berg? Berg said no!

It's been a lot of fun spending time with you here. Also, this isn't exactly goodbye either, since I will definitely be stopping by without my big blug [G] and contributing in my personal capacity when I'm not reading about contracts or rules of evidence. :-)

I certainly hope it's not the end of his posts. When Vanessa Fox left Google she did stop posting under her Google Groups profile, but she did not stop contributing to the SEM community. I certainly hope to see Berg post under his profile in the future.

Berg, I am sure you will be very successful in the legal field. Thank you for all your contributions and please do stay in touch!

Forum discussion at Google Groups and Sphinn.

Over the weekend, we learned that Bill Slawski, aka bragadocchio, has stepped down from his administrative duties at Cre8asite Forums. Bill has been with Cre8asite Forums, pretty much since the start, back in the Yahoo club days - as a moderator in the Yahoo forum.

Bill said he will be stepping down from moderating but will hopefully continue to be active in the forums as a typical member. Bill said, "I am stepping down as an administrator at the forums, though I hope to continue as a participant." Why? Bill said, "I've been going through many professional and personal changes recently that have begun to limit my ability to give my role as an Administrator of Cre8asite Forums the time that it deserves."

Bill reassured me that he won't be leaving completely. Bill told me, "You'll see me here. I just won't be in the back rooms cleaning up spam, or participating in some of the threads back there. "

So, all in all, this is not a complete loss of a legend. I honestly cannot see Bill stop contributing - it is just his nature and without those contributions, the SEO/SEM world would be at a great loss.

Also, make sure to check out Bill's excellent blog named SEO By The Sea.

Bill, on behalf of the SEO community and myself, thank you for all your contributions over the years and we look forward to even more as the industry continues to grow and mature.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

This may be the quickest recap I have done. I typically have to keep it under 10 minutes, due to the YouTube restrictions but this is even shorter. Why? Because I produced it on Friday, the day I got the iPhone - so I was tired. Yahoo and Live Search had major search updates. Google added search volume data to their keyword tool. Microsoft adCenter may be overtaking Yahoo Search Marketing. Google slapped AdWords advertisers, again. Google flipped colors of the AdWords ads. AdWords Editor 6.0 is bugged out. Yahoo's Garg gave us insight into Yahoo Search's algorithm. Google Trends showed off a swastika and Google Image search called "special people" "retards." Finally, Sphinn turned one year this week. Check it out at SERoundtable.com.

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 (note: If YouTube shows a video not found message, just refresh the page and play it again, it is a YouTube bug):

For the original iTunes version, click here

Some Of The Topics Discussed:

• Apple iPhone Day: I'm At Tice's Corner in NJ
• Yahoo Search Begins To Update
• Major Live Search July 2008 Update
• Google's Keyword Tool Now Showing Search Volume Numbers
• The Tide Has Shifted: Microsoft adCenter Begins to Outpace Yahoo Search Marketing
• Google Slaps AdWords Advertisers Again Over Landing Page Quality Factors
• Google AdWords Tests Flipping Background Colors
• Google AdWords Editor 6.0 Users Report Statistic Download Glitches
• Insights Into Yahoo Search From Interview With Priyank Garg
• Google Trends Displays Swastika
• Another Insulting Algorithmic Search Result from Google
• Site Sphinn Turns One Year 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: July 11, 2008"

Today is 7-11, which means that there's free slurpees for those of you who are in the US who actually have a 7-11 store nearby. I think I'll be getting my free slurpee in the late afternoon -- but don't forget that you can get it too! Oh right. It's also a big day for iPhone geeks, as Barry blogs his nerd mentality on this blog. Are you shocked?

Yahoo and Live Search Updates

This week, we acknowledged both updates within Yahoo Search and Live Search. In the former situation, anchor text seems to be weighted a little more than it had been previously. In the latter situation, for Live.com, people are seeing big shifts in the rankings -- some going from page 1 to page 4 and others going from page 6 to page 1.

How Many People Search for that Phrase?

If you used the Google AdWords External keyword tool this week, you may have noticed that it now reports search volume. That is, it will tell you how many people are searching (approximately) on Google for certain phrases. It's useful information to gauge the effectiveness of some keywords and perhaps for inspiration for others. It's definitely a nice addition.

Microsoft adCenter > Yahoo Search Marketing

Life for Yahoo doesn't seem to be doing so well lately. Forum members are acknowledging that Microsoft adCenter is performing better than Yahoo Search Marketing. One of the primary reasons for this is that people are seeing that Yahoo isn't doing so well for them in terms of conversions and the bid prices are incredibly low lately. adCenter is outperforming Yahoo in at least two separate instances.

Google AdWords News: Landing Pages, Background Colors, Download Glitches

This week has also seen a lot of news on the Google AdWords front. First, some Google AdWords subscribers are doing poorly on their AdWords score due to bad landing pages and are seeing much higher minimum bids. Google explains that when this typically happens, the landing page may have been crawled and didn't fare so well in the system. Therefore, make sure your landing pages are optimal!

What's the best AdWords background color? Google is trying to determine that this week -- with a mixture of blue and yellow backgrounds. It'll be interesting to find out what they settle on. Personally, the yellow background for the ads is less intrusive and may perform better, but that's just my guess.

Finally, Google AdWords 6.0 editor is having problems and people are not so enthusiastic about the time it's taking to download data. From what I'm reading, AdWords 5.0 editor seems to be a better choice.

Yahoo BOSS

Yahoo's "Build Your Own Search Service" has been announced earlier this week. It's an API with some cool functionality, but so far, its announcement has had some mixed reviews. People think that Yahoo should focus on its content rather than it search, but others think that Yahoo's search may have more potential. Either way, it's something you should watch closely.

Yahoo's Priyank Garg Interviewed

Eric Enge of foosball fame has interviewed Yahoo's Priyank Garg and posted some interesting information on his blog. Garg says that the footer information is not used for rankings but for crawling, for example. Yahoo detects spam with human editors -- and algorithms (of course!). Garg also says that spam might be in Yahoo's index, but it won't rank well, that Yahoo doesn't discount paid links automatically, and that quality still trumps quantity in terms of inbound links.

Google's Results This Week: Strange

The hottest trend in Google yesterday? A swastika, which is a Nazi symbol. Was it malicious? We don't know. We don't care that much either (but thanks, James), but when people point out these things, we report it for the search industry. As many people acknowledge, it's a shame that a religious symbol got so tainted in the past century, but moving along...

My friend Joe was doing a search yesterday for "special people" and Google asked him if he was searching for retards (since that seems to be a related search). I doubt that's intentional, but these things happen. And still, people talk about it because it shows that algorithms aren't perfect.

Sphinn is 1

Today's my little cousin's 1st birthday. It's also (well, tomorrow, really) Sphinn's first birthday, and Sphinn has had a great first year. Are you signed up? If not, you should be!

Enjoy your iPhone slurpee!

Earlier this year, we discussed the possibility of page sculpting or siloing where you point your link juice to the more important pages and nofollow the less important pages. A month after the original post came out, we looked into the possible penalties for controlling that link juice.

The issue is being revisited again on WebmasterWorld. Why do people nofollow their unimportant pages? As stated in the previous paragraph and as reiterated by Tedster, it's so that the "target URL cannot play a part in circulating PageRank for the site."

But some forum members, likely accidentally, suggest that adding a meta tag for "noindex, nofollow" might be sufficient. As Tedster explains, those pages will still get PageRank, so it's not the same as applying rel="nofollow" to a link. Lord Magestic seconds this sentiment:

nofollow in META and tag have 2 very different purposes - the first one is to actually prevent bots from following those links (ie crawling), where as the second does not hold such prohibitions and used to reduce value of backlinks for PR-like calculations.

Of course, if someone else links externally to these internal pages, you might be out of luck, but the question, after all, was about controlling internal link juice.

You can also remove the Sitelinks through the Google Webmaster Tools, as another forum member suggests. But the downside to doing it that way is that you can't suggest a link replacement. Once you remove a link, it's deleted. So exercise this with caution.

The interesting forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

The Yahoo Search Blog recently announced the launch of BOSS -- an "open platform that offers programmatic access to the entire Yahoo! Search index via an API." BOSS currently lets you re-rank and blend results, gives you flexibility on presentation, includes a mashup framework, has web/news/image search, and entitles you to unlimited queries.

The BOSS platform has had a lot of Techmeme buzz, but forum members doubt its capabilities. As WebmasterWorld members claim, search is not one of Yahoo's stronger suits. Yahoo has much better content.

However, not all are quick to discount BOSS. Brett Tabke, WebmasterWorld administrator, believes that this is one of the "most interesting development in search in a long time" and is willing to give it a try. Giving you control as boss (no pun intended) may be a really good direction for Yahoo -- and for you as a searcher.

Forum discussion continues at WebmastwrWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums.

Last year, the internet marketing and forum discussion site, Sphinn, was launched. Today, it's one of the hottest forums around and we post a lot of discussion from it here at Search Engine Roundtable.

So how's your stay at Sphinn been so far? For many, the Sphinn community is vibrant, active, and incredibly awesome. And the news shared within the site is top notch. If you've waited a year to sign up, your wait better be over. There's really good stuff there!

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

This morning, I got to the Apple Store at Tice's Corner in New Jersey at about 4:30am. I was about the 20th person in line and now, at about 6:45am (1 hour and 15 minutes until the iPhone goes on sale), there are probably about 60 people at this store.

The iPhone has seriously taken mobile search and browsing to the next level. Many search companies, tools and social applications are already available for the iPhone 2.0 software. In any event, I am very excited to upgrade my iPhone 1.0 to the 2.0 model.

Here are some pictures from the Apple Store at Tice's Corner:

If you are in the area, stop by. :)

More pictures at 2 hours, 30 minutes, 24 seconds to 8am:

1 hour, 22 minutes, 20 seconds until iPhone, the line behind me:

For more see my personal blog.

Forum discussion at Plurk.

The incredibly popular NewsDay.com was at a PageRank of five recently, and Google specifically confirmed that NewsDay received this PageRank penalty due to "selling links that pass PageRank." But when I look at the Google Toolbar now at www.newsday.com, it shows a PageRank of 8, not a PageRank of 5.

On June 8th, the webmaster reported the PageRank penalty in a thread at Google Groups, on June 9th in the afternoon, a Googler spotted the thread and replied:

Thanks for your post. I'm glad you're posting here in the Webmaster Help Group, because the discussions here help educate webmasters around the globe. I just checked over newsday.com and compared it to the most recent version of newsday.com that was indexed by Archive.org: http://web.archive.org/web/20070829225145/http://www.newsday.com/

Scrolling near the bottom of what your site used to look like, I see the following "Featured Links": Mesothelioma Lawyer Lung Cancer Personal Injury Law Firm Buy Mets Tickets Buy Yankees Tickets Wicked Tickets Hamptons Travel

Please remember that participating in link schemes intended to manipulate search engine rankings, including buying or selling links that pass PageRank, is a violation of our Webmaster Guidelines, and may impact your site's standing in Google: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66356

If you believe your site was at one point in violation of the Webmaster Guidelines, and you have since made changes to your site so that it fits within the guidelines, you can request reconsideration of your site by following the steps here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35843

But now, the site is back at a PageRank of 8.

In any event, I do not believe that Google typically has called out major sites for this in the past. I know this is known as a valid reason for Google to downgrade a site's PageRank (just look at ours). But it is always interesting to see the discussion around a major news site, like NewsDay.com.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Today we have Google ranking a swastika on Google Trends due to a Google's "machines and algorithms." And now we have Google offering a related search phrase for a Google images search on special people. The related search displayed is "retards." Here is an image:

Yes, I know related searches are based on algorithms of how people use Google, but some (those who don't know how search engines work) might be really insulted by this interpretation of [special people].

Google has actually instituted fresher and more frequent related searches, so maybe this is why it is showing up.

I do not blame Google for showing this result, I do however blame Google for not placing a quick link to what "related searches" are - so that the average searcher would click it, read it, and then possibly understand.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums and hat tip.

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: July 10, 2008"

Earlier this morning, Barry reported (as per Dave Shaw) that Google Trends was displaying a swastika, which at one point was the Nazi symbol for superiority.

I was able to find the trending myself just a few minutes ago:

Why is it a hot trend? We're not sure, but Sphinn members hope that it's because the character is a religious Hindu symbol (or Chinese character).

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Update: A Google spokesperson gave us a statement:

The Hot Trends list is automatically generated by machines and algorithms that detect hot or breaking queries. In this case, it appears that the html code for this query was posted on a popular internet bulletin board, which led to quite a few people searching to find out more about this symbol. The Hot Trends list reflected that surge due to people searching with this query.

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread asks whether SEOs perform their link building inhouse or if they outsource the link building efforts. Only two people answered the poll but both said they do it in-house.

It's no surprise, really, since we covered this issue over a year ago and it's best to keep the link-building efforts in-house. Many companies (not all, of course) don't build the best links. It's up to you to find the most ideal links for your company's website. Quality is significant.

On that note, we don't want to shy you away from this question, but do you build your links internally or do you focus on people outside your organization to build them for you? As AussieWebmaster points out in the Search Engine Watch forums thread, if you're short-staffed, outsourcing may be the right way to go.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Watch Forums.

On the Official Google Blog, Amit Singhal wrote about the Google Ranking. Rankings are broken down into three core parts, explains Singhal. First, the best relevant results are provided in what Google calls "no query left behind." Second, Google likes to keep it simple without compromising quality. Finally, Singhal says that there's no manual intervention. The rankings are powered by algorithms that weigh the behavior and linking patterns of people.

The ranking discussion has moved over to WebmasterWorld where one of Singhal's statements stood out at a reader. In response to the "no query left behind" principle," Singhal acknowledges that there may be "less than ideal results for any query" and that Google uses the knowledge of these results for future improvements.

The question that forum members have is "what are less than ideal results?" How does Google know what is and isn't ideal? One forum member speculates that user data may be involved in this. If a user doesn't click on the result at all, that may be an indicator that the result isn't ideal (on the other hand, their curiosity might be piqued and they might click anyway). It's also possible that Google's human evaluators look at the SERP results to find any anomalies.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

JohnMu, an SEO turned Googler, back in August of last year, has been one of the most active Googlers in webmaster communication in the past recent months. On July 4th, he announced he is taking a vacation until July 21st, but he hasn't.

Since his announcement, he has posted in the Google Groups webmaster help discussion forums four times:

• SEO and Still a No-Show
• swf ad triggered "this site may harm your pc" ?
• Problem with Google Translate - indexing 404 errors
• swf ad triggered "this site may harm your pc" ?

John, you need a break. Working over New Years and other holidays, is cool - but we don't want you to burn out and get sick. So rest up.

There is no doubt Google has a human touch, we reported they may have close to 10,000 evaluators and their guidelines were leaked - so this is no secret anymore.

The question is, how do you know if one of these evaluators are on your site, sniffing things out?

A WebmasterWorld thread suspects that the Google evaluators come from cart.corp.google.com. In fact, WebmasterWorld administrator said he always sees the "first parameter" string along with a "?cmd=review." To him, this implies it is an evaluator.

Should you worry if you see this in your log files? Depends, are you doing anything shady or borderline?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google's sitelinks, which we have covered extensively are the little links you see under a search result in Google, typically between 4 and 8 sub-links. Here is a picture of our Sitelinks:

A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion about the importance of Sitelinks. Here are the key points:

• Sitelinks do not directly influence your search rankings
• Sitelinks can be removed but not changed via Webmaster Tools
• Sitelinks appear to be constructed based on your site architecture, as Google understands it
• Sitelinks can strongly influence your click-through rate on your search result listing
• Sitelinks, when removed, can be gone as long as a year or more

Those are some of the key points I pulled from that thread. Getting deeper into the ranking component. Although removing a Sitelink should not impact your search rankings, you need to understand that Google gives you your Sitelinks based on how they understand your site. So if you see a Sitelink that doesn't make sense, then maybe you need to think about your site navigation.

The WebmasterWorld talks in general terms, but this webmaster also posted a thread at Google Groups, which has specifics. In this case, the webmaster had "Fiber Optic Lights" as his Sitelink, but then Google changed it to "Optic Lights." The change happened around June 26th and he noticed a big drop in search traffic for "Fiber Optic Lights" but a spike in traffic for "Optic Lights." This clearly implies that Sitelinks are somewhat important, but yet - you need to understand that the Sitelink represents what Google understands about your site. Removing a Sitelink won't necessarily change the way Google sees your site.

In fact, in the Google Groups, Googler, Jonathan Simon said, "we don't take action on Sitelinks feedback for a specific site." He said that in the context of having a Sitelink changed, but it also may prove to be evidence of the above.

In summary, Sitelinks do not have a direct impact on rankings. They may increase your click-through rate on your search results. They do have a reverse affect, i.e. because Google feels you deserve a sitelink for a particular phrase, Google clearly thinks that page is relevant for that phrase, so you may rank well for that phrase - but that is the chicken before the egg scenario. :)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Google Groups.

I am hearing major reports of a major "smack down" on Google AdWords advertisers who have been hit with major spikes in their minimum bids at AdWords. The increase in minimum bids seem to branch off the landing page quality score component, for virtually all advertisers who are complaining.

The landing page component was introduced back in December 2005. The first major smack down was the AdWords Landing Page Epidemic of July in 2006, but not everyone was impacted - many were but not everyone. Since then, we have seen thread after thread with individual advertisers getting hit with spikes (overnight) in their minimum bids due to "quality" reasons.

This is the first time, in a long time, that I have seen such a wide spread of reports on a quality score "slap" from AdWords.

We have two threads at WebmasterWorld, a few at Google Groups thread with a comment from an AdWords representative.

All the reports, like I said, seem to stem from the landing page component of the quality score. Here is what AdWordsPro Sarah had to say at the Google Groups thread:

From what you are describing it sounds like it may be a problem with your Landing Page Quality. The quality of your landing page is a component of your overall Quality Score, and, as you probably know, Quality Score is what determines your minimum bids.

A sudden jump in minimum bids often indicates that your page was recently crawled and marked for poor quality. You can read the complete landing page and site quality guidelines at http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=46675. In addition, we recently started taking page load time into account when determining quality. If your page is slow to fully load, this could also be responsible for the bid jump.

Finally, there are several threads on Landing Page Quality on this forum that you may want to check out.

Best of luck,
AdWordsPro Sarah

Yes, Google did launch the Page Load Time factor, but it doesn't appear that this is the issue for this group. They all say that the landing page quality and relevancy isn't being reported as quality.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, 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: July 9, 2008"

The small folk wonder how the bigger brands succeed at their link building efforts. In a big corporation, it would take jumping through a lot of hoops to get the correct managers to sign off on link building approval, especially as they may want to verify that every site that they link build upon is kosher.

But do big brands really do link building? Not so much. They are already known so well within the sphere that their links usually come naturally. However, if they really wanted to engage in building other links, it's suggested that they participate in some viral marketing campaigns and linkbait.

If, though, you wanted to look at the effectiveness of existing inbound links, you can contact webmasters and have them point their links to the best possible spots. Some may honor such a request.

Once you're that big, you may not have to worry about "link building," per se, but other strategies, according to nethy:

I suppose you could say that past a certain point its more a matter of being aware of links, how they work & the value they do or do not bring. When opportunities come up, maximise them.

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.

A High Rankings Forums member accidentally let his domain expire, and some company snatched it. The company stole all of the old content. Is there anything he can do besides tell them to take it down?

Well, in this case, yes. Since the new company is using the old content, it is likely to be a DMCA violation since the forum member likely holds all copyrights to the content that is currently being used by the unrelated party. The recourse here would be to hire an attorney and have them demand takedown.

But on the other note, this may just be a grace period if the hosting and registrar are the same. So before one goes to the extremes, it's best to check with the hosting provider and registrar to make sure of ownership.

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.

Google's Lively project, announced yesterday and is somewhat of a Second Life clone (a virtual world within a web page), has gained a lot of momentum with a lot of Techmeme discussion.

But can Lively help your search rankings? Probably not -- unless your Lively page is, well, lively. As Tedster puts it, your backlink profile is still the strongest indicator of your search rankings.

When it comes to PR, that only comes from your backlink profile. If adding Lively functionality ehlps earn your site more more natural backlinks, that can help PR. But links will mostly be based on what you do with Lively, and not the mere fact that you've got the technology.

So will the mere fact of sticking Lively onto your page do anything? It's unlikely. You need to still have that killer content and whatever else it takes to boost that backlink profile.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion around the META description. There is no doubt that most search engines look and use the META description on some level. Google and Yahoo and Live Search may use it for your search results snippet, the text under your site's listing in the search results (illustrated here). But does that META description actually have an impact on how well your page will rank in Google for a specific keyword phrase?

Most people say no, the META description will have no direct impact on you ranking higher for a keyword phrase. I honestly do not know the actual value in the META description's power to help you rank better.

While there may not be a direct impact in ranking improvements, as g1smd said at the thread, it does "give the appearance of a ranking increase." How so? Well, one thing the meta description will do for you is help ensure you pages don't look like they are all the same page (i.e. supplemental index) when doing a site command search. More on that over here.

Google also recommends using the META description on your pages.

But does it impact your rankings directly? Hard to say.

Google has a whole section in Google Webmaster Tools, under content analysis for "Short meta descriptions." In that section, Google says the "Meta description information can give users a clear idea of your site's content and encourage users to click on your site in the search results pages." Google then links to more information at this page.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

First there was Goto.com (aka Overture.com) as the leader in PPC by advertiser spend. Then Google outpaced Overture. Overture was bought by Yahoo and Yahoo's Overture (now Panama) secured the second place in advertiser spend. Well, now, it seems like a couple advertisers are beginning to report a major milestone for Microsoft adCenter. Two very well respected and seasoned PPC specialists have announced that Microsoft adCenter has accounted for more spend then Yahoo.

Is this the beginning of Yahoo falling behind Microsoft in search ads? Google still secures a strong lead in the area, but Yahoo has been experiencing a slow death.

A WebmasterWorld thread has a post from a senior member, Beren, who has been at WebmasterWorld since 2003. Beren explained why Microsoft is beating Yahoo:

June 2008 was the first month when our MSN AdCenter spending exceeded our YSM spending. A milestone has been passed as YSM becomes our number 3. And it wasn't because MSN spending rose; it was because YSM spending sank. I almost feel sorry for this company when I look at how they have fallen. (But I'm not really sorry because I don't like spending money and because they brought it on themselves.) A few years ago, our AdWords and YSM spending were about equal. In June AdWords spending was 35 times YSM spending. Our YSM spending went from six digits per month back in 2005 to four digits in June 2008.

Is the lower spending because we are getting fewer clicks, bidding on different keywords? No. It is almost all due to the collapse in price at YSM. The competitors in this industry realized the poor quality of traffic out of YSM and drove the bids down, down, down.

Yes, that is a true shame.

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread has a post from moderator Discovery, saying the same thing:

For the past 3 years or so Adcenter has provided a nice but small supplement to our daily conversion count. Decent conversion costs and good quality customers. The only issue we had was that the volume of traffic and conversions were low. No matter what we tried, traffic didn't budge and Adcenter sat as a distant 3rd to Google and Yahoo.

Last month we saw an uptick in traffic as well as conversions at Adcenter. This trend continued for the last two weeks of June. Our latest numbers show that Adcenter has outpaced Yahoo in both conversions and CPL over the last 30 days.

Wow, the tide is turning and it seems like Microsoft is well on their way to beating Yahoo at the search ad business. But is it because Microsoft is doing something right or because Yahoo is doing something wrong?

Forum discussion at and Search Engine Watch Forums.