August 22, 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: August 22, 2008"

Can you believe the summer is almost over -- for real? And can you believe that SES San Jose is over? I can't--and I still wish I went! (As you could probably tell, I didn't. I'm moving in 2 weeks!)

Search Engine Strategies San Jose 2008

So what did you miss this week? Well, we had some nice bloggers help us with great coverage of Search Engine Strategies. All in all, the 4 days were packed with great informative sessions and we have the liveblogs for you.

• Day 1
• Day 2
• Day 3
• Day 4

Thanks again to our livebloggers, Keri Morgret of Morgret Designs, Sheara Wilensky & Avi Wilensky of PromediaCorp, Carolyn Shelby aka Cshel, Chris Boggs of Brulant, and Dave Rohrer.

Google AdWords Quality Score Update

Yesterday, Google announced that the quality scores were changing in real time. They also added in a relatively professional way that they'd be raising costs. Forum members are not particularly pleased with that part.

Yahoo Redesigns Explored

This week, we've seen Yahoo indent site results in a format that is similar to the layout we're familiar with on Google. It's not all that bad. Yahoo Site Explorer has also been redesigned with several new features. I recommend that you sign up.

Google Integrates 404 Widget Experience

Got a 404? Google has a widget points you to the proper page. Except it didn't work at first -- mostly because the server was returning a 200 response on our test page. Google then fixed it but JohnMu tells us that we shouldn't be returning a 200 response on any of these pages. So yeah -- it was our fault for the most part, but we has fun blogging that. ;)

Will Your Penalized Site Get Trusted Again by Google?

If your site is penalized for doing something wrong, does Google hold it against you forever? According to a recent discussion on the topic, no, if you clean up, you're given a chance. I like that computers are so nice to us. I wish people were just as nice. ;)

Desperate for Link Exchanges? Hit Up Google Groups!

If email fails you and you can't get those links you're begging for, you can always troll on Google Groups. But fortunately, the folks at Google have a good sense of humor and respond in kind. ;)

Is the Apple Store Cloaking?

As you may or may not know, RustyBrick is building a Jewish prayer book for the iPod Touch and iPhone. We've had a lot of success with it thus far, but Barry recently discovered that the Apple store may be cloaking. In this particular case, the Google cache shows information that is only available in the iTunes store. The big question: is the Google cache really crawling the iTunes store? (What do you think?) Thus, is this cloaking?

Google AdSense Font Tests Occurring Again

What do you think of a Google AdSense unit that matches the font of your site altogether too well -- or not at all? Well, Google is running limited tests on fonts for AdSense units. Google is looking for feedback as well, so be sure to give them your $0.02.

WebPosition Rankings Update Forthcoming

Do you rely on WebPosition? We've had a lot of recent coverage about the issue that ranking reports stopped working, and WebPosition is working on a fix that many forum members feel is going to be short-lived. We shall see.

Congratulations to Search Marketing Standard Magazine!

If you missed the announcement, we're here to tell you that Search Marketing Standard was acquired by iNET Interactive. This is a huge milestone for the print publication and great news for readers. Congratulations to you all!

Read This

If you're dependent upon the video recaps instead of the text recaps, I'm sorry to say but Barry is on vacation this weekend. Thus, you're stuck with me for this week's report. So sorry to disappoint! :)

A week ago, we blogged about the effectiveness of Google Base and the shopping SERPs. To reiterate, webmasters have wondered whether Google Base would help them achieve better traffic or if there was no change when utilizing this other Google product.

In a blog comment, an anonymous retailer says that using Google Base has helped him/her get an increase in traffic and the person encourages others to try it out.

On WebmasterWorld, many people say that it has helped them as well. Netmeg, for example, says that "everyone we've submitted a feed for is doing surprisingly well with it."

"What if you don't have reviews?" one member asks. A useful tip is provided:

Reviews are hard to get. We find that only 3% of the people who buy actually leave a review.

What you have to do is to break out the adwords budget a bit, get that nice badge and start driving traffic to your top 10 selling items. If you use two or three check out methods, offer some kind of discount for people to use Google check out for payment. We used a 5% off your order type of coupon we made in our Google Checkout panel if you placed your order online.

From there, service your customer and wait for the reviews.

As another forum member says that you don't have to focus your energy *all* on Google. "[T]he more shopping engines you advertise on the more reviews Google will pick up, assuming you get reviews on those other shopping sites."

Google Base program policies are here if you want to try it out.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

At the end of June, we announced the launch of Google Map Maker. Now, two months later, Google has its own update. From a Google Groups thread, we're told that Google Map Maker is now available in 57 countries.

Again, here are some features available to you when you utilize the Map Maker:

There's a Map Maker User Help document for more ways to use this tool and a Google Map Maker Group as well.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

Google has new and important information about the Quality Score, according to the Inside AdWords blog. According to the AdWords team, the Quality Score is more accurate since it will be computed during every single query. Keywords will no longer be marked as "inactive for search." Also, there's a "first page bid" to replace the "minimum bid." The AdWords team explains:

First page bids are an estimate of the bid it would take for your ad to reach the first page of search results on Google web search. They're based on the exact match version of the keyword, the ad's Quality Score, and current advertiser competition on that keyword.

Forum members are reacting with much cynicism toward this approach. On DigitalPoint Forums, a well-seasoned advertiser worries that first time bidders will "start raising bids to get on the front page when they should probably be bidding using an ROI strategy."

Over at WebmasterWorld, similar sentiment is expressed and there's a lot more confusion. What happens if an advertiser wishes to lower his bid from the first page bid? Google has yet to answer that.

Other people think this is a nicer way for Google to say that they're raising advertising costs. Surprised?

However, one advertiser says that the "first page bid" may actually help since it's saving time on testing. It's a good point but I still think the skepticism needs to be addressed as those points are a lot more worrisome.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

The Yahoo Search Blog tells us that Yahoo! Site Explorer has a new interface with more dynamic features. Additionally, the redesign boasts a new Site Summary page that provides interesting statistics for sites that have been authenticated with Yahoo! Site Explorer. You can see this and more at https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/new/. (The blog post already has some nice comments, including a bunch of spam comments that I hope Yahoo deletes, like this: "Hi, This new tool is ok, though i haven't checked it but just uploaded my new website on low cost health insurance..." Enough said.)

Barry has already blogged about the new features on Search Engine Land and explains that the new Site Summary page gives you a nice bit of information as seen below:

+ Site URL
+ Number of pages known
+ Number of pages crawled
+ Number of host on this domain
+ Number of inlinks
+ Number of inlink domains
+ Number of outlinks
+ Number of outlink domains

Here's an image of the new interface as well:

It looks good. Thanks for the update, Yahoo!

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Over the past few weeks, my brother and I have been working on a side project at RustyBrick on building out iPhone Apps. During this process, I took detailed notice to how iTunes works, how their API functions, and how Google indexes that content and it has raised some questions in my mind.

Let me step back and take you through this. We build an iPhone or iPod Touch application for the Jewish community. It is called Siddur, which is a Jewish prayer book. In short, it has Jewish prayers and tools to aid in those prayers. The community loves it, so I wanted to share the "reviews" that are on the iTunes Store with everyone, so we looked into using the API or XML from the iTunes store. As you can see on the iPhone Siddur, we added customer reviews pulled dynamically from the XML. How did I find the XML?

When we were looking at some Google search results, I discovered this result. If you click on the link, it actually will open up iTunes on your computer but if you click on the cache link, it shows you the content you would find in the iTunes application.

Screen Shot Search Result:

Screen Shot of iTunes App in Store:

Screen Shot of Google Cache:

So I did some forum research, to find an old WebmasterWorld thread. The thread talks about Apple's relationship with Google but then interestingly enough has a link. The link is http://google.com/itunes, which then links to http://services.google.com/marketing/links/itunes. Now, that is interesting, but I can speculate on it or it can be something that is 100% unbiased and not "evil." Update: It appears that the Google iTunes link in this paragraph no longer redirect to Google AdWords. They did last night and they did in 2005. Update 2: Matt Cutts of Google explained below that the google.com/itunes link was an old promotion for music labels. Basically, Music Labels received a promo to sign up with Google AdWords to promote their music. The promo is no longer valid, so Google dropped the link. So it seems totally unrelated to this story.

So why am I uncomfortable with this? Well, not everyone has iTunes on their computer. By listing the content of what is found in iTunes, in Google, as if it was a document accessible on the web... Well, that seems not so useful. Why not label these results as "iTunes" is required, or something like that? Why not let other developers build this into Google through Sitemaps?

Yes, I know Apple provides these iTunes hyperlinks so people can easily send the link to friends to download music, movies or apps - but again, these are not real "web documents." Or maybe, I am just being too picky?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A question I get quiet often is, my site has been penalized, and I want to know if I will have to start from scratch, to earn Google's trust back? I often say that I doubt you have to start "from scratch," but I am sure you won't be at the level of "trust" you once had with Google, after they have learned that you once did something that was not so good in their eyes.

A Google Groups thread asks that question and Googler, JohnMu, responds. Here is the question:

While waiting to see if a recent Reconsideration Request is accepted, I have been wondering whether or not Google regards any domain that has ever been penalised as less trustworthy than a domain that has not.

Or is it the case that once a penalty has been removed and a site is placed back in the search index, it can compete on a level playing field - as it did before the penalty?

JohnMu of Google said:

If a site cleans up issues so that it complies with our Webmaster Guidelines, then there's generally no reason why we would treat it as something less trustworthy. Cleaning things up is always a good idea :).

I always wonder what this "trust" factor is. Can it visually look like some sort of trust slider? The more trust, the more the slider goes to the right, the less trust, the more it is to the left?

How I see it, if a site is penalized for links, the day before the penalty, Google has your trust at (let's say) a 8.5 of 10. Now, Google flagged many of your links as part of a link scheme and your site and those links fall in trust. Now your site drops to a trust value of 1.5 of 10. Now that you have been penalized, you work on cleaning up your links by getting rid of the bad links. As you do this, Google may say, okay, we now trust your site, so you slide back up to maybe a 5.5 of 10. But those old links, the bad ones, that Google once trusted, are now gone forever. So you won't reach the 8.5 of 10, like you once had.

Now that is how I envision the link side of things. I can be 100% wrong, it is just how I imagine it working.

According to Google's response, it is possible to gain all your trust back. But, for some reason, I don't think it is possible to get it ALL back overnight.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.