October 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: October 31, 2008"

Happy Halloween! The year is almost over, we're celebrating the spooky holiday, US elections are next week, and you're reading this. High five!

Halloween Hits the Search Industry
Today, you can check out the various Halloween logos around the search industry and see that many are happily celebrating. I noticed on Twitter last night that most people weren't too thrilled with Google's logo. (What do you think?)

Your CTR Will Impact Your Quality Score
Higher results in the SERPs usually get more clickthroughs than lower ones. Right? It makes logical sense. Google has decided that it will take ad position into account for the quality score, so you don't get penalized if you are in position 13 and aren't getting lots of clicks. This has always been the case but for some reason Google AdWords sent out emails to some AdWords advertisers about more precise calculations; perhaps that's what it is.

Subscribe to Google Alerts via RSS
Annoyed at all the Google Alerts you get in your inbox? Sometimes, I am. Subscribe to your alerts via RSS instead, then. You can check those alerts at leisure instead of feeling like you are obligated to read the email as soon as it hits your inbox (especially if you have email OCD).

PDF + OCR = Copy and Paste <3
Google has made it easier to copy and paste PDF files using OCR technology. Fortunately, if you wanted to plagiarize copy get inspiration from a PDF document, you can now just highlight the text, hit Ctrl C, and viola, it's in your clipboard!

Google Doesn't Know the Exchange Rate
You'd think Google, with all its information, is able to actually know the darn exchange rate and not screw it up hundreds of times. Well, you'd think wrong. Google has screwed up the exchange rate for Indian publishers -- AGAIN. Don't you get it, Google?

Google AdSense Ads Testing New Formats
Want to save big in this crappy economy? Get your Google AdSense coupons today! I wonder how many people will click on this -- probably a lot, don't you think?

Similarly, we observe a new Google AdSense ad style. I'm not sure I am swayed by the design.

Google AdWords Editor Continues to Be Annoying
There have been reports of slowness in Google AdWords Editor for a long time. There are also other issues being reported on forums about the new Google AdWords Editor. Google has released a fix, and that's great.

Google AdWords Accounts Hacked by Chinese
Sometimes, I wish we had a unified front in terms of policies relating to accessing domains that are abroad, because when Google AdWords accounts are hacked and you see the Chinese capitalizing off of the spam, you wonder if there's a way to beat up those pesky brats who are living abroad. Seriously.

Microsoft adCenter Changes Logo, Gets New Features
This week, we note upgrades in Microsoft adCenter that include improvements for campaign management, editorial improvements, user management, and content ads. They also sport a new logo that some people say looks like a drain. Well, if you insist...

Sadly, not everything is dandy for adCenter. Perhaps they don't have enough members to demand Sunday service, and thus, they've dropped Sunday support. There are other options if you are busy on Sunday, I suppose.

Google's Webmaster Chat Recap Live
So you're a Jewish chap and missed the Google Webmaster Chat like Barry and me since it was held during a Jewish holiday. Great! The recap is live and you can hear what you missed.

Jonathan Simon to the Rescue
We posted about lots of bugs in Google Webmaster Tools and Googler Jonathan Simon has given some good insights into what Google is working on. I have to say that the Google Webmaster Tools team rocks! GO JONATHAN GO!

Church SEO is Possible
So, you need religious links to your site. Is it hard? Not so much. Church SEO is a new discipline that helps non-profits gain fame in their communities. You can try it and you, too, can succeed.

Google CEO Makes Political Endorsement
We're running a poll on whether it was appropriate for Eric Schmidt to endorse Barack Obama. With all the information Google is armed with, what do you think?

Jeeves Retires, Becomes a Porn Star
Remember Jeeves? Sure you do. Well, did you know that he retired and became a porn star? If you link to his retirement website, you'll notice that he is. In fact, it makes sense in the bigger picture. In this economy, retirement funds are pretty lousy. You need to make supplemental income somehow.

Have a happy autumny weekend!

It's one thing to be a celebrity and endorse a political candidate. It's another when you're supposedly a spokesperson for a company that purports to be unbiased -- and yet, you clearly and openly endorse a candidate. Over at Search Engine Watch, forum member Discovery has a problem with one of the recent "infomercial" endorsements that Barack Obama created to further his presidential campaign. In the infomercial, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, announces that he stands behind Obama. Naturally, Discovery has a problem with this because Eric Schmidt's "fame" comes from being affiliated with a clearly unbiased search engine (unless Google really is biased against results -- but I find that hard to believe), and since Schmidt is currently in so deep with Google, some feel that it's completely unethical for the company's CEO to say that he approves of Obama.

From Schmidt's endorsement (which was thought out and likely even practiced), Discovery makes the assessment that Google stands by Obama:

Google told me: We are Democrats, we support Barack Obama.

If the "unbiased" Google associates itself with a particular political party, it paints suspicious picture. How many people can trust Google as an actual technological innovation if its CEO cannot keep his distance from political endorsements? Further, did we not forget that Google has a huge digital footprint on us -- that Google knows our emails, searches, and we are entrusting the search engine with a lot of private information that we would not give to just anyone?

What makes Eric Schmidt different? He's the company's CEO; he has access to all of this information. Discovery says that this is much worse than Martha Stewart's or Donald Trump's individual endorsement as those celebrities don't have intricate details about our lives like Google does. Schmidt has treaded very dangerous waters.

This isn't about whether Google endorsed Obama or McCain, but I'm sure many people have a problem with the CEO of Google making that endorsement -- it blurs the line and perspective of the company.

How many of you think it was appropriate for Google to step into the political endorsement arena? Take the poll.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Watch Forums.

In a Google Groups thread, AdWordsPro.Sarah tells us that there will be a new forum opening on November 5th .

The new forums will boast user posting incentives, integration with the help center, enhanced user profiles (personalization with social -- photos too!), rich text posting, and video capability.

Meanwhile, the Google AdSense team reports that they, too, have started a new forum, and it's already available. Here's the link and here's an interactive feedback forum that complements it, where you can report bugs with the specific forums.

Google Chrome is also changing its home, according to another Google Groups post. There's no date on this launch, but with the AdSense forum debut, it looks promising for all Google Help properties.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums, Google Groups (AdWords), and Google Groups (Chrome).

Yesterday, several Google AdSense publishers and I got this email. I never get anything from Google AdSense, so I found it interesting that they cared. Here's a snippet:

We understand that the recent economic turmoil has created a lot of uncertainty in the lives of AdSense publishers. During these difficult times, we're continuing to invest in innovations that improve publisher monetization and advertiser value in the content network.

We're focusing on further developing our product offerings and boosting ad performance for publishers. We recently announced advancements in AdSense for search and experiments to make ads more effective. We're bringing DoubleClick technologies to AdSense publishers, and we'll continue to launch new products and features. We're also continuing to improve our offerings for AdWords advertisers, making it easier for them to target the Google content network. Features for advertisers, such as the new display ad builder, are designed to improve ad performance on AdSense publisher sites.

We'll keep driving technological progress, but our best asset will always be our publisher partners. The strength of AdSense lies in the value of the content you bring to users and the quality of the sites you bring to advertisers. Our success is tied to yours. We look forward to partnering with you for the long term, and remain dedicated to helping you succeed.

Why now? The economy has taken a turn for the worst, or so many people think, and Google wants to assure us that they are innovating and that things will be fine with our Google AdSense accounts. But it's also a way for Google to keep the relationship with publishers close to their hearts and let us know that they value us.

Plus, Google wants our continued business!

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums

Google announced that they are now using OCR technology to index and show an HTML version of a scanned PDF document. In the past, Google only showed an HTML version of PDF's created with text enabled formatting. But now, if a document is scanned as an image, Google can create an HTML version using OCR.

For example, this PDF is a scan of a cooperative agreement between Google and Regents of the University of California. You cannot copy and paste the text from the PDF document. But now, with Google's OCR capabilities, you can view the HTML version and use this text in your own agreements, saving you the expense of starting from scratch on your own agreements.

Ever find that perfect document that you wanted to reuse for contracts, marketing material, how-tos, and so on? But you were unable to reuse it because it wasn't copy and paste friendly? Well, now you can use Google to get to it. From now on, when searching for documents like this, try filetype:pdf in the search box along with your search query.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Typically, if you see an ad first, you are more likely to click that ad over the ad you see later. Meaning, in Google, the search ads are listed along the right hand column. If you are in position one or two, you are more likely to be clicked on than if you are in position seven or eight. Now, the quality score used by Google AdWords takes CTR (click through rate) into account as the primary quality score metric. Ads doomed to be at the bottom of the page, will receive an impression but not a click at a higher rate than an ad at the top. So those ads, sometimes, tend to be doomed, if the CPC is not increased to move the ad up.

Update #2: Google gave me this statement, basically saying, this is an update to how they normalize the CTR. "The first change mentioned in yesterday's blog post simply gives advertisers advance notice that we'll soon be making improvements to the existing technology that we've already been using to account for ad position. We'll employ fresher, updated data that will help us calculate Quality Scores even more precisely," said a Google spokesperson.

Google is now going to change the quality score algorithm to take ad position into account. So while one ad in the top position might have a higher CTR, an ad in the seventh position with a lower CTR should not impact the quality score as much as it did in the past. This should allow all the ads to "compete fairly," as Google said and thus make for a more relevant ad space in Google.

An additional change is with the ads above the organic results. Only ads above a certain quality threshold can be in the top spot, above the organic results. The thing is, if a ad in position 1 did not meet a threshold but ad in position 2 did meet that threshold, then ad 2 would not be promoted to the top spot. With the new algorithm, ad 2 will not be held back by ad 1's lack of quality.

I think these two changes are very encouraging. We have very little forum discussion around it right now.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Update: Jeremy Mayes reminds me that Google has always normalized the CTR calculation based on ad position. So as Jeremy asks, what is new here? Google made this calculation better? If so, how exactly? I emailed Google to find out more information, I will update this post when I get that information.

Mike Blumenthal has been covering Google Maps spam since Google Maps came out. I guess he got sick of covering the issues and not much being done about stopping it. He decided to do something a bit extreme. He hijacked Microsoft's listing in Google Maps and made them a Microsoft Escort Service. He also messed around with profiles, here is one example:

Danny Sullivan has a really enjoyable read on how Mike did this.

While some SEOs and webmasters are shocked this can happen, those of us who have been around and watching the space has known this has been going on for a while now. Who is to blame? Businesses should validate and acquire their Google Maps listings? Do they even know they are able to do so? Are they aware? Is ignorance an excuse?

Meanwhile, Maps Guide Brian, an official Google Maps representative posted a Google Groups thread stating that they will be upgrading the Local Business Center:

Please note that that the Local Business Center will be undergoing scheduled maintenance today, October 30th, and again on November 6th. We appreciate your patience as we work to continue to improve this product!

Hopefully this upgrade or maintenance will help prevent some of these issues. I know Google is a big target and the more features and tools they release, the more susceptible they become to becoming targeted. It is a tough business and sometimes it can be hurtful. You build tools to help people (of course also make money) and people come in and abuse it.

Forum discussion at Sphinn #1, Sphinn #2 and Google Groups.

These are the days of cut backs. We've seen it at Yahoo and now we are hearing about it at Microsoft's adCenter team.

adCenterRep posted a thread at DigitalPoint Forums announcing the support details for the Microsoft adCenter product/service. The representative did drop a new detail that they are discounting support for US advertisers on Sundays. If you visit the phone support page, you will notice the new hours are 06:00 - 18:00 PST Monday - Saturday.

So while they are updating their logo and adding a bunch of features, if you have a problem on Sunday - you are out of luck. Some support documents for US advertisers still say seven day support, but they should be updating all the documents soon to say Monday through Saturday email and phone support.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Here are various logos from the search industry, including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft's Live.com, Ask.com and many others. Some are pretty spooky, including our theme.

Google's Halloween Logo:

Yahoo's Flash Halloween Logo:

Yahoo's Static Halloween Logo:

DogPile's Halloween Logo:

Live.com's Halloween Theme:

Ask.com's Halloween Theme:

FriendFeed's Halloween Logo:

Cre8asite's Halloween Logo:

The PPC Hero's Halloween Logo:

Search Engine Roundtable's Halloween Theme:

FYI, the Search Engine Roundtable's theme is animated and pretty entertaining, if I might add.

Trick or treat at the 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: October 30, 2008"

There are a lot of reports lately of issues with Google Webmasters Tools. Issues are fixed but then they return. For example, we have this post reporting 0 crawled pages from October 23; on October 24, we still had individuals leaving comments saying that the problem wasn't fixed. In July, we had a 404 reporting error but it was later fixed. We have reports that Google Webmaster Tools are inaccurately displaying keyword positions among other issues.

In the forums, we have a lot of other reports. One webmaster finds that Google Webmaster Central is showing the title of another website as associated with his site. Hacked? No. Bad coding? No. Google Webmaster Tools? Yes--at least, the evidence in Google Groups and other related reports points to that.

Another forum member says that regardless of what she does, Google gives her the warning that there are "too many URLs for Googlebot" -- even if she uses robots.txt to block off the offending URLs.

Also, earlier this month, WebmasterWorld had a thread about how Google now tells you where your 404 errors are coming from. Many people are happy with this tool but others actually think it's inaccurate.

There's a lot of forum discussion, so here are the links if you want more information:

• Webmaster Tools Bug? My Site Shows Title of Another Site
• Sudden drop - but maybe Google WMT bug
• GWT: "Too Many URLs for Googlebot" - But All Are Disallowed
• Google Webmaster Tools now shows you where your 404 errors come from!
• Sitemaps Bug in Google WMT? showing 0 URLs indexed

Numerous webmasters are reporting that Google News (and Google Book Search results, as we reported) are showing up in the SERPs for particular Google searches. However, these news stories aren't recent; they are relatively old and dated.

Unfortunately, I'm not able to reproduce the search (perhaps I'm searching for terms that always have associated news), but there's a question about Google's relevancy if it's providing old news stories.

Further, to that end, there are also observations of MSN and Yahoo shopping results. Interesting.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Bloomberg reports that Yahoo has gained search share in September 2008 while Microsoft has lost some of its share.

Yahoo had about 20.2 percent of queries in September, up from 19.6 percent in August, Reston, Virginia-based ComScore said today in an e-mail. Microsoft's share fell to 8.5 percent from 8.9 percent. Google Inc. handled 62.9 percent, compared with 63 percent in August.

Some feel that Yahoo's numbers are grossly miscalculated; one forum member has never seen more than 13% of Yahoo visitors and thinks that comScore's assessment isn't correct. However, pageoneresults notes that Hitwise also does a similar calculation with Yahoo at 18.06% for September. That said, the data is said to be based on "speculative algorithms."

I would argue that different users use different search engines. Maybe they aren't searching for your site/product.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums

A Google Groups thread discusses a classic SEO challenge, passing link popularity for tracking URLs. Honestly, I cannot sum up the issue better than the original poster:

Our site uses query string variables in our URL's to track traffic and internal vist patterns. As an example our email offers our external ads will use a URL similar to: www.website.com/shop/scarfs.asp?cpn=bbl2345

And then upon entering the website they might click on internal links
like: www.website.com/shop/scarfs.asp?sc=2332

Those Variables have the capability to combine: www.website.com/shop/scarfs.asp?cpn=bbl2345&sc=2332

Over time this has created millions of variables in Google's index.

How can this webmaster keep the tracking capabilities but at the same time, keep the link popularity to the main URL?

With Yahoo, they give you a tool within Site Explorer named Dynamic URL Rewriting. This tool allows you to tell Yahoo that these dynamic URLs really refer back to this main URL. You really do not have to do any coding on your site or server to communicate this to Yahoo. All you do it plug in the information into Yahoo.

With Google, it is not that easy. In Google, you need to make sure you set up your site and server to communicate this to GoogleBot. JohnMu, a Googler explain:

Assuming you want to keep track of those numbers, move them to a cookie and out of the URL. If you can do that, you could 301 redirect from the tagged URL (with the numbers) to a clean URL while setting a cookie on the user's side. In other words, everyone is redirected to the clean URLs and users can still be tracked appropriately. Of course, this involves changing a bit on the server side -- and depending on how much time you have it might be hard to get done anytime soon...

There are other solutions, but they don't work as well as this one.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

We have reported time and time again about Google AdWords accounts being hacked into and abused. Typically, the hackers gain access, set up a new campaign, generate tons of ads, pointing to temporary domains and use your credit card to pay for that traffic. But I have never really noticed the ads in the raw search results for such hacked campaigns. Until now, that is.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread lead me to a search for earth4energy in Google. The search ads returned, in some cases, returned as many as 7 of the 8 search ads that lead, to what looks like, spammer sites. The ads were probably generated via a hacked AdWords account and they used .CN TLDs to set up temporary landing pages.

Here is a picture of two of those ads that I personally can see right now:

All the domains listed for this search result seem to have the same owner:

Domain Name: asweg.com.cn
ROID: 20080813s10011s06156148-cn
Domain Status: clientDeleteProhibited
Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited
Registrant Organization: 陈
Registrant Name: 陈诚
Administrative Email: yjc20047@hotmail.com
Sponsoring Registrar: 易名中国
Name Server:ns1.hostmonster.com
Name Server:ns2.hostmonster.com
Registration Date: 2008-08-13 17:40

For our past coverage of AdWords account hacks, see below:

• When Will Google AdWords Prevent Account Hijackings?
• Increase in Google AdWords Accounts Being Hacked Into?
• Google AdWords Account Hacked: False Ads & False Charges
• Alert: More Google AdWords Phishing Attempts
• Beware of Google AdWords Phishing Email
• Google AdWords Phishing Attempt Via Google Legal Subpoena

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Google held their third webmaster chat session about a week ago. I was unable to provide you coverage of the event, but I knew they would be posting a recap of the event for us all who were unable to attend.

You can read through the questions and answers discussion from the live chat. It is incredibly long, but you may find a nugget or two you would like. I heard there were some technical issues throughout the chat, but that is expected with newish software.

They have also published the presentations, here they are:

John's slides on "Frightening Webmastering Myths":

Jonathan's slides on "Using the Not Found errors report in Webmaster Tools":

Maile's slides on "Where We're Coming From":

Google hinted they may be having a German-speaking version of this chat. If you are interested in that, subscribe to the German Webmaster Blog.

Looking forward myself to the fourth chat.

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: October 29, 2008"

The Online Marketing for Marketers blog has a goo blueprint that you should adhere to if you're looking for a successful search engine optimization campaign. Your blueprint should include:

* Defined goals
* Keyword and competitive research
* A content outline
* Evaluation of technical issues
* Offsite marketing

Then, you need to lay out the action plan. Who in the team is responsible for what?

Would you add or remove anything from this blueprint?

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Two days ago, we reported that adCenter has a new logo. It looks like Microsoft is not stopping there in terms of giving adCenter new enhancements. These include:

• Campaign Management: you can now pause/resume ads/keywords. There's more geo-targeting options, and performance reporting has gotten enhanced.
• Editorial Improvements: You'll know much sooner why your ad has not been approved and get inline notifications on exceeding limits imposed by the system.
• User Management: You can now add more than one user!
• Content Ads: In the US only, you can get keyword suggestions/performance estimates for Content Ads

Initial feedback is that this is good stuff, but many wonder when adCenter will catch up to AdWords.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

At the Web Build Pages blog, Jen writes about how link building is like picking up women. She explains the parallels:

* The opening line is everything -- not much else needs to be said.

* That the right circumstance are also crucial (you need finesse) -- women who are surrounded by friends are harder to get than women who are alone. You need to find the sites that are small and accessible.

* Insecurity helps you go further: By showing that you're not interested, you are piquing interest in the other party. If you let them know that they "forgot" your link, you're exploiting a vulnerability.

* You need to prepare for rejection. Not all sites will give into the request.

And as MikeDammann says, that's why nofollows are like condoms.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Earlier this week, we had a webmaster ask how to tell Google that they have adult-themed images (mixed with regular images) and didn't want Google to filter out their site because of the few questionable images. Now, we're seeing a related issue to the extent that the webmaster actually has an adult-oriented page and he wants to denote this in his sitemap file so that the crawlers could process this accordingly.

JohnMu says that crawlers understand the ICRA tag. I suppose that's great, but the next step would be for Google to actually acknowledge in a webmaster tools document that they are processing those tags.

So -- Google, what's the verdict here?

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups (original question) and Google Groups (ICRA tags question).

If you are a big Google AdWords API user and you have been messing around in the API's Sandbox yesterday or today, you may have been experiencing some issues. Many API users are reporting weird glitches with the sandbox.

Errors are being returned to API users after API calls. The errors are all over the place, but you can see a few mentioned in the Google Groups thread.

Jeff Posnick of the AdWords API Team confirmed the issue, saying:

I can answer the "SandBox wigging out?" question in the affirmative: yes, the Sandbox is wigging out. It's having some trouble coming back after one of its periodic data refreshes. The engineering team is aware of the issue and is working on normalizing things.

Typically, AdWords API Sandbox issues are not a priority for Google's engineering staff. Why? Well, the sandbox is for testing purposes only. So it is not a live production issue that impacts real users, with real dollars. It is a sandbox, playground, if you will. So hopefully this will be taken care of shortly, we will see.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

I am shocked this happened once again! Just a month ago, Google messed up and paid out Indian based AdSense publishers the wrong amount, a lesser amount, due to exchange rate conversion issues. Yes, they went back and paid the difference to those publishers, but now I am hearing new reports of these same Indian based publishers being paid the wrong amount again!

A WebmasterWorld and Google Groups thread reports Google is paying out a 1:1 rate of the US dollar to the Indian Rupee. Yes, the current exchange rate is $1 US to 49.660 INR - again, major difference.

So this is the fourth time, that I found, Google messing up paying their publishers. First time was with Australian publishers back in December 2007, then with Canadian publishers in early September (August pay period), then with Indian publishers last month and now again with Indian publishers.

This might be just a reporting glitch but it is a major scare for publishers to see something like this, yet again! What happened to three strikes and you are out?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Google Groups.

Update: They have fixed the issue, and have used the rate of 49.780 : 1, which is reported the "highest ever."

But we are also having complaints about the conversion rate Google is using in the UK and in Canada.

About a year ago today, we wrote about a Google experimental test for voting up web results. Well, it seems like Google is now pushing that test out to users. Several folks are now seeing it.

We have a WebmasterWorld thread with some people noticing it. We have blog posts from Justin Hileman, Garett Rogers, Alex Chitu and a German blog noticing this. Here is a video that demonstrates it all:

Alex notes that all users are not yet able to see this, but you can see "traces" of the Google SearchWiki by appending &swm=2 to the end of your search result string.

Going back in time, Google had a remove result feature, which they dropped a while back. This is a bit more sophisticated than simply removing results from the search results.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

As expected Google has quietly launched RSS feeds as an option to Google Alerts. Google Operating System discovered this last night.

All you need to do is login and click on manage your Google Alerts. Then you can set up new alerts or modify current ones to be via RSS. Here is a screen capture of several RSS based Google Alerts I set up, plus at the bottom, I show how to add a new RSS version:

Pretty neat! Google just made reputation management just a bit easier for many folks.

The one disappointment might be the fact that the web search results are not set for auto-discovery as some were expecting. But this is a huge improvement of Google Alerts and I'll take it.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Sphinn.

There has always been this myth that Google and other search engines cannot crawl or process more than 100 links on a single web page or document. That truth is that Google and other search engines can and do crawl over 100 links per page.

Yes, the Google Webmaster Guidelines page says keep it under 100 links per page. But the reason behind Google adding that as a guideline is for usability purposes. Typically, a web page with over a 100 links can be extremely cumbersome for your users. So if you keep the number of navigational options to a bear minimum, your user will appreciate it.

Now we have a Googler even telling us the truth on this matter. In a Google Groups thread, Googler, JohnMu, clearly stats Google can handle 100 or more links per page. He said:

Just for the record, we can process more than 100 links per page :-). We do however recommend the limit of 100 because it generally makes sense for users (and search engines).

This probably comes to no surprise to most SEOs and webmasters, but it is good to have this from the horses mouth (so to speak).

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: October 28, 2008"

The Google Base Blog announces new updates to Google Product Search. The post explains that the product_type attribute has been added and should apply the category and values from the taxonomy listed here. Further, the blog post states more about the taxonomy:

The Google product taxonomy is a tree of categories that describe product families, with verticals (Electronics, Home & Garden, etc.) at the highest level, followed by more specific product families or products within these broad categories (such as Electronics > Audio > Audio Players & Recorders > MP3 Players).

While Google finds this value optional, I'd consider it pretty helpful and I'm sure others would agree.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

So, your Google AdWords rep invites you to spend the day at Google for optimization tips and tricks. What would you do if you had that opportunity? What would you ask Google?

Most forum members are concerned most about the Quality Score. One forum member poses that the following question be asked:

Ask them for specific, concrete examples of what factors and strategies have a direct impact on improving the various quality scores in your account (account, campaign, adgroup, ad text, keyword, landing pages, geo-targeting).

Others find that having this opportunity won't be that helpful; Google will likely take a politician's stance here. However, there are people who argue that Google may respond more positively in a one-on-one rather than providing the same information for the general public.

Who knows, though -- maybe this meeting will prove fruitful. Wouldn't you like to sit face to face with a Google rep?

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

There is a discussion on Sphinn about WordPress, probably one of the biggest blog platforms on the Internets, and meanwhile, it doesn't even rank in the top 10 for "blog" or "create a blog." Does Google not like WordPress since it's a competitor to their Blogger platform?

Well, some individuals would say this, but I think the person who submitted the story was a bit short-sighted in that it really relates to how the site is optimized for Google, and I have a feeling that the sites ranked higher than WordPress are there for a reason. Further, in terms of why they don't optimize, it's probably because they don't care -- they don't need to. They're definitely the highest-regarded blog platform and have word of mouth marketing going for them, which (in this case) may be more potent than search engine optimization.

Let's revisit the question: does Google like WordPress or not? It seems that WordPress blogs do show up in the SERPs. After all, I believe Matt Cutts has his blog listed in the top 10, and his blog is based on WordPress (which you can also see by looking at the source of his site). Further, WordPress blogs are ranked pretty well in the SERPs in general for less competitive phrases (I'm not sure searching for "blog" was the right example here).

While the discussion is lengthy and ongoing, I think the vision is short-sighted and wasn't properly researched. But hey, that's just me.

In fact, Google does love blogs, according to Matt Cutts. (And why shouldn't they? Blogs love Google!)

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Raise your hand if you're a religious SEO. I'm sure you've faced battles and challenges that were hard to overcome, especially since your site is religious in nature and the traffic and links don't appear to be there -- for now.

Interestingly enough, a webmaster has just built his church-oriented website and is upset that he can't get the traffic for it. I'd argue (and other forum members already did) that traffic is not the goal here -- perhaps the goal is awareness of the existence of the religious establishment.

You created the website for a purpose: to serve the congregation. Promotion, therefore, should be focused within the actual congregation (and not elsewhere). In the event that the church wants to reach out to prospective new members, what options are available?

There are a number of strategies that can be employed to garner those links.

1. Churchgoers who already maintain blogs can write about the church with a link.
2. Consider thinking about other events that have some religious correlation, such as weddings and funerals. When digging into these, consider service providers (florists, photographers, caterers, etc.) Address the concerns about weddings/funerals on your site -- be sure that the site welcomes and addresses those needing to make arrangements for either occasion.
3. Make sure that the URL of the church is highly visible in program materials (and I'd say signage too outside the church's physical location). Put the URL in your answering machine messages.
4. Document church events from the perspective of your congregation. For example, a bake sale can be posted with a video on YouTube (with the URL embedded on the bottom or at the end, of course).
5. Ask charities that your church participates in to add a link to your site.
6. Get your pastor to blog.
7. Build a directory of local churches so that out-of-towners can find you.
8. If the church is affiliated with Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts, create a home on the web for these guys.
9. Find niche authority sites in the church atmosphere.
10. Get links from other churches in the area.
11. Get links from location authorities, such as media and government.
12. Get links from local non-for-profits such as local entities that use your premises for events.

What would you add to this list?

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread is bashing the video Google AdSense unit. Many AdSense publishers call this unit earn nothing or next to nothing with this unit. The question is, is the forum bias or is it true?

Please do comment below but also take our poll. Which Google AdSense unit is the worst performing unit you are running?

I left out referrals because those have been discontinued. Looking forward to the responses.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Google Groups thread has discussion from SEOs and a Googler on the topic of removing the default.asp from your web site, through a redirect method on an IIS server.

What is the typical issue with IIS servers and redirecting? As the thread creator said:

I just realized that I have a different page rank for www.mywebsite.com and for www.mywebsite.com/default.asp. I would like to combine them into only one: www.mywebsite.com

From my default.asp page (wich is my default page off course...), do you know a way to make a 301 redirect to the root / without doing an endless loop?

John Honeck has tips at his blog post named 301 Redirects in ASP on an IIS Server. Does this answer all the questions? The forum discussion makes it sound like it does not.

Googler, JohnMu, called this the "big issue with IIS". John suspects the "newest version of IIS can handle things a bit better," but he said that most hosting companies are not running that version of IIS yet. So what options do you have?

John explains that using sessions to manage this won't work for search engines, because spiders don't handle sessions well. Thus if a spider find it, they will just run into an infinite loop on your site and that can be bad for many reasons.

John recommends the following:

The best solution is to make sure that there is absolutely no mention of "/default.asp(x)" on your site, instead only mentions of "/". You can confirm this by using a crawler such as Xenu's Link Sleuth. However, take care that you do not use forms anywhere, because they will generally return their results back to the file ("/ default.asp(x)").

For more details on this issue and troubleshooting it for your site, I highly recommend you read the whole thread.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Yesterday we reported about a new type of Google AdSense ad. I wasn't sure if it was new, and even one commentator added another option, that the ad could be an image ad.

In any event, today, I spotted a unique type of ad via DigitalPoint Forums. The ad seems to be a Google AdSense ad, but it looks like a specialized coupon formatted ad. Here is a picture of the ad:

Now, this too can be an image ad, but for some reason, I think this might be an interesting test by Google. Maybe Google will be releasing Google Coupon Ads from AdSense? I have no evidence of this, but I can speculate, can't I?

Forum discussion DigitalPoint Forums.

A HighRankings Forum thread asks which type of degree should a person looking to go into SEO or SEM pursue?

The logical answers, at least to me, would be either marketing, programming, maybe math or statistics. Copy editors might want to get an English degree. But core SEOs or SEMs, what would be the best degree for them?

Here is a poll, please vote on it, and you can select multiple:

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

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: October 27, 2008"

In May, we talked about getting your images out of Google's SafeSearch filter. That is, Google may deem your images somewhat "questionable" (maybe lewd and lascivious) and won't list your images within the standard (SafeSearch-enabled) image search results.

We've been posed with the opposite question in Google Groups. One guy has a few questionable images but doesn't want all of his images being blacklisted just because of a few instances of questionable adult images. JohnMu suggests that if you have some images that are naughty and others that are nice, you could put the naughty ones in a separate directory or even allocate a separate subdomain to the other images. However, he also notes that it may be problematic to have adult-oriented images on the same domain as "safe" images. My guess is that this means that Google could still have a problem with it.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

How many of you have received a link to a lengthy video with the following note: "It gets good at 6:15."?

My guess is that you've seen that before and you are not a fan of having to go to YouTube, wait for the video to buffer, and then find out exactly where to put your mouse on the 6:15 marker so that you can see exactly what the guy who was sharing the video was talking about.

A DigitalPoint Forums user points out a very cool trick for viewing a YouTube video. He says that if you want to link to designated point in the video, you should append the following format to the end of your video URL:

#t=1m45s

This lets you start watching the video at 1 minute 45 seconds of run-time -- and the first 1 minute and 45 seconds doesn't even buffer. Cool! For example, try this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OP1-5uxZffE#t=5m45s.

All I have to say is that this rocks.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

There are a few unhappy campers who are a bit disappointed with some of issues that relate to Google AdWords and its tool. In a Google Groups thread, a user discovers that he can't actually "Accept" the terms of using the program on a Mac -- it's grayed out. Unfortunately for him, he had to uninstall and reinstall 3 times and he found out that it was actually an application bug. Google has since released a patch.

Meanwhile, over at WebmasterWorld, similar frustrations were discussed. One forum member hates that 6.5.0 runs 50% slower than previous versions, which is something we reported two weeks ago as well (though this is the same discussion). However, not much has changed in the past two weeks, hence the reason for bringing this thread up again. Forum members have even attempted to roll back to a previous version without success.

After several days of discussing and ranting, however, AdWordsAdvisor has announced a fix -- version 6.5.1. This new version fixes the Keyword Opportunities tool (which was reported to have been broken on 6.5.0), fixes the Terms of Service (thank you, Google Groups member), and addresses other issues. The speed concern, however, is not mentioned by AdWordsAdvisor, but forum members report that there's no issue anymore.

One forum member seems to still be reporting issues, though, and nobody seems to know what the problem is. The problem is that he is getting an error saying: "The procedure entry point sqlite3_prepare_v2 could not be located in the dynamic link library sqlite3.dll". Even an uninstall, reboot, and registry clean isn't isolating the issue for him. Can Google help?

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups and WebmasterWorld.

Few noticed last week that Google seemed to have had a broken link on its homepage. The link "Advertising Programs" was bringing a 404, I believe:

I, too, didn't notice, but DigitalPoint Forums members were not the only people who noticed it as I recall seeing a mention of it on a social network I was active on the night of the 24th when this was reported.

The link pointed to http://www.google.com/intl/en/ads/ which didn't exist on the day that this problem was reported. Now, however, you'll see what I believe Google wants you to see -- and that's information about the various advertising options you have on Google.

Curious -- does anyone still not see that page linked above?

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

I am often very reluctant to show some of the threads I find discussing new Google AdSense ad formats. But this one, might be new or might be an extension of Google Gadget Ads, I am not sure. Having said that, let me show you what I found.

A DigitalPoint Forums member posted a screen shot of this Google ad.

Is this a new AdSense format? I am not sure, but it does look unusual. A few options:

(1) Google is testing a new ad format.
(2) This is a Google Gadget Ad
(3) This is a fake, photoshoped ad.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

In February 2006, Jeeves was retired by the folks at Ask.com. It was a sad experience, but it happened. Back then, the Ask blog thanked Jeeves for all his work and set up a special site at (WARNING, do not click this yet) www.jeevesretirement.com/desk/.

That website was devoted to Jeeves Retirement journal. What Jeeves, the fictional character, did while on his vacation, where he went, what he enjoyed, etc. Ask.com linked to this site from their home page, for a noticeable period of time, back then. Here is a picture:

I noticed via a comment left on this site, that Jeeve's retirement site is now a porn site. Yes, a pornographer picked up the domain when it expired, possibly two years after it was first set up.

So is Jeeves now a porn star?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

If you visit adCenter's home page you will notice that Microsoft now has given adCenter a logo. The logo is a oval like blue symbol, next to a small "Microsoft Advertising," with a larger "adCenter" imprint below. Here is a picture:

The logo seems relatively new. WebmasterWorld member rehabguy called the logo, "a tornado or a drain," depending on which you find "more relevant" to the brand.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The other day we reported Google Webmaster Tools Showing 0 Pages Indexed For Sitemaps Users. In short, some of those who have submitted a Sitemap file via Google Webmaster Tools were having issues with those Sitemaps.

Many saw their Sitemap files remain in the "pending" status, while others noticed the index count of their Sitemaps stats were reporting 0 pages indexed. Now, none of these reporting glitches have a direct impact on the Google search results, but nevertheless they can cause webmasters to worry.

Google is aware of the issue and opened an official thread at Google Groups where Googler, JohnMu said:

As some of you have noticed, things are still a bit slow over on the Sitemaps side of things, especially regarding new Sitemap file submissions and the indexed URL count shown in Webmaster Tools.

Rest assured that the team has been busy working on these issues. We're hoping that things should be back to normal within a few days or so. As I have more information, I'll post here to keep you updated.

Keep in mind that we'll still continue to crawl and index your websites normally, so you shouldn't see any change in the way your site is indexed and ranking in our search results.

One webmaster at WebmasterWorld noticed some improvements. He said:

I've seen some change... a few sitemaps that were *pending* are now showing normal, but others have not updated. A mixed bag.

Hopefully things will clear up soon.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, Google Groups (official) and Google Groups 2.

Google said, loud and clear, the first click free program can be used for web search. Google improves Analytics and ties in AdSense data. Google hosted their third webmaster chat event, I was unable to attend. AdWords is taking up the organic results with a new product listing feature. Yahoo Search Marketing targets local more accurately. AdWords releases API version thirteen. Google Webmaster Tools has a Sitemaps bug. Google sending love letters to Sitemaps users in XML format. IM Broadcast launches to be the YouTube of Internet Marketers. 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:

• Webmasters Discuss Google's "First Click Free" Program for Web Search
• Google Analytics Adds Features Plus AdSense Integration
• Google to Host Third Webmaster Chat Event on Wednesday at Noon
• Google Showing Product Images in AdWords, Where The Organic Results Go?
• Yahoo! Search Marketing Rolls Out New Features
• Google AdWords API Version 13 Released
• Google Webmaster Tools Showing 0 Pages Indexed For Sitemaps Users
• Google Webmaster Team Sending Letters To Sitemaps Users?
• IM Broadcast is a YouTube for Internet Marketers

Please do subscribe via iTunes or on your favorite RSS reader. Don't forget to comment below with the right answer and good luck!

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: October 24, 2008"

The holidays are over and Barry and I are back -- for real. In the flesh. We even have a video recap on Sunday if you tune in.

Google's First Click Free Program Discussed
A week ago, we learned a little more about the First Click Free program in Google. In essence, First Click Free allows you to protect your content (say, if it's subscription based) while still getting the full benefit of being in Google's index. Some webmasters are wondering about how this is working, with some worried that this is no different from cloaking. Others think that it's unfair that the savvy internet surfer will be able to pretend to be Google to get on some private sites. Whatever the case may be, it's definitely an interesting development.

Google Analytics Now Integrates AdSense
We asked and Google delivered. Google is slowly adding AdSense integration to Analytics users. It looks great and hopefully we'll have screenshots of the process and outcome in action soon.

Google Hosted a Webmaster Chat, and We Have No News for You
On Wednesday, Google hosted a Webmaster Chat. This is the third one but unfortunately none of us were able to listen since it was the holiday. Google will likely publish an edited version in a week or so, but it's just not the same.

Google Integrates Product Images In Sponsored Results
Barry notes that AdWords shows product images in searches. If you look at the illustration he provides, you can see diamond rings when you expand the ad. How much does it cost to sign up?!

You Can Get a Quality Score of 10
We have highlighted yet another successful experiment on how to get a quality score of 10. The idea is to really minimize overhead -- focus on very target keywords (no more than 3 per campaign) and write very targeted landing pages.

Yahoo Search Marketing Rolls Out Desired Features
The Yahoo Search Marketing team announced some new features that will enhance the YSM experience with regards to targeting They are country/city targeting, and language targeting. People are happy and that's always a good thing.

Google AdWords API v13 Released
Just in time for the holidays, Google AdWords API has released a major update with some enhanced features. They are also offering 20% more API units for free through January 15.

Google Webmaster Tools Errors Reported -- but Fixed Now
Earlier, we saw some issues with Google Webmaster Tools reporting 0 indexed URLs, though the issue seems to be fixed. Gotta love the glitches.

This is a Glitch I Don't Like: Google Terminates Accounts
Loren Bakers Gmail account was terminated over the weekend. As someone who is pretty dependent upon my Gmail account, that just sucks. He wrote a plea to Google to revisit the issue, but I'm curious to know why it keeps happening. Seriously -- what's the issue here, Google?

IM Broadcast Launched: Internet Marketing Video Portal
If you like videos and you like internet marketing, you'll love the new IM Broadcast site, which was launched earlier this week. Very talented minds were behind this launch, and it has a ton of potential, so I'm happy. Maybe I'll start watching video too!

I want the Google Webmasters T-Shirt
Google has sent out very cool t-shirts for Webmaster Tools users, and I want one. How do I sign up?

Have a great weekend!

Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal teamed up with two great guys, Jordan Kasteler and David Snyder of Search and Social to launch IMBroadcast, which is advertised as the "first ever UGC video site dedicated to the Internet Marketing industry."

If you've taken a look at the site already, it really appears to be one of those sites with a ton of potential. Since as you know, Barry loves Video Recaps, I bet this is right up his alley too. At Cre8asite Forums, forum member Barry Welford also sees the potential. Many forum members think there are still opportunities to add text to the video, and that's still true. But there are opportunities to enjoy video as-is too--and we're not talking about from the perspective of search (not yet, at least).

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums and Sphinn.

Google's Gmail is getting more and more interesting features. First, I heard via Mashable that Gmail Labs has added support for canned responses. The Official Gmail Blog writes:

If you're sick of typing out the same reply every time someone emails you with a common question, now you can compose your reply once and save the message text with the "Canned responses" button. Later, you can open that same message and send it again and again.

As I mentioned in the subject of this post, Canned Responses is only available if you actually turn on the feature in Gmail Labs. Head on over to Settings on the top right hand corner of your Gmail account, click on the Labs tab, and then Enable Canned Responses. Then, whenever you reply to a message, you'll see your Canned Responses; you can add as many as you want.

Given that I use Lifehacker's Texter to help me with canned responses, it's nice to know that Gmail cares and I could do without Texter -- which is helpful when I'm composing a message on a computer that doesn't have Texter installed. This is a much welcome change.

But that's not all Gmail has whipped up for us this week. A day later, we found out that Gmail now supports humor and emoticons, as seen below:

The Official Gmail Blog explains more. To be frank, I'm surprised it took this long. Still, it's nice that they finally included emoticons. Now how about converting my :) to an actual smiley face?

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Cynthia at Google Groups must be a new FeedBurner user. After all, Feedburner has seen regular drops in subscriber count (maybe once or twice a month) and even ran into a zero subscriber count issue with some users earlier.

But Cynthia dropped 300 subscribers yesterday, according to her FeedBurner count (which makes her lucky, because I dropped 700+). What could have possibly been wrong?

From Google FeedBurner's team, Matt S. informed us that there were issues with FeedBurner and Google Feedfetcher. Naturally, when you get a drastic drop in subscribers, it's no reason to be alarmed; it happens way more often than it should.

Personally, I think asking my peers on Twitter is a great way to be kept abreast of the situation. :)

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

First go read Greg Sterling's write up at Search Engine Land named Location in the Browser: What Does It Mean?

Now that you read that, you will realize that the implication of Google adding geolocation capabilities to your desktop browser can be huge. The Geolocation API can run on any browser that has Google Gears and automatically will run on Android and Google's browser, Chrome.

Google currently knows your approximate location for when you do searches only via IP data, personalized search data or other, less exact methods. But now, if the browser can detect wifi locations and/or cell towers, Google will know where you are, almost to your exact location. GPS is supported, but most laptops or desktops do not have GPS devices built in yet (yes, yet).

The reaction to this from advertisers and searchers are split. A WebmasterWorld thread has advertisers excited that Google's geolocation capabilities will be able to target their ads better. But searchers are not yet 100% comfortable with Google knowing their exact whereabouts, at all times while using Google properties. Personally, I am not about privacy - I actually am considering wearing a GPS enabled device with me at all time to track me where ever I go and then publish that data on my personal web site. :)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I am not sure about this, but it seems that Google's webmaster trends team is sending out snail mail letters to some Sitemap users in the Google Webmaster Help forums. I believe the letters read:

<url>
<loc>
http://www.google.com/webmasters
</loc>
<created>
2006-08-04
</created>
<priority>
Help webmasters create great sites.
</priority>
</url>

I think this is a gesture of appreciation to some of the more active members in the Google Groups support forum. Again, I am not 100% sure about this, because I do not have a picture to prove it and the language used in the Google Groups thread is a bit cryptic, but I think I am right about this.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Update: I have been informed that these are not letters, but rather T-Shirts that have the XML above written on the back of the shirt. I hope to acquire a picture of this T-Shirt. And here is a picture provided by John:

Google AdWords: Now With Images that I wrote at Search Engine Land described a newish AdWords interface I spotted. In short, a search for diamonds or other searches that would bring up an ad from Blue Nile, would show a special type of AdWords ad.

The AdWords ad is similar to what we covered in November and January but without the pictures. In short, the ad shows a + sign that reads "Show products from Blue Nile for diamonds." When you click it, it opens up three additional product results, with images.

Look at how much screen real estate it takes up. I made sure the screen captures are exactly the same height:

Closed:

Open:

I have a pretty big monitor. So, let's look at this on a very popular resolution of 1024x768:

All you see are ads!

Is this good for the advertiser? I assume it is. How about for the searcher? They do have the ability to close those results.

Forum discussion at Google Blogoscoped Forums.

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

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

Michael Gray explains why PageRank sculpting is important. He explains that Google has downplayed the use of PR sculpting but it seems that it's working pretty well for some people. Using an analogy with two very different cars (one, an old shoddy car; two, an expensive powerhorse) he says:

The links on your website are touch points between your website and Google’s crawling and indexing spiders. Much like cars not all websites are the same, not all websites have the “horsepower” to take advantage of tactics like nofollow and pagerank sculpting. The key is figuring out if you are closer to the Ford Gremlin or the Ferarri Enzo and adjusting your strategy accordingly.

Indeed, many forum members agree that PR sculpting is beneficial especially for small sites where you can drive the link juice to the proper pages.

In a second thread, PageRank is dissected by Ann Smarty at Search Engine Journal. Ann summarizes a WebmasterWorld discussion about the Graybar and how the PageRank toolbar, if gray, can mean two things: either the site is broken (not SEO'd) or the site is penalized. She also discusses some myths and truths regarding the gray bar. Some items of note include the fact that the gray bar is not equivalent to PR0, it actually doesn't mean the site is deindexed/penalized, it can indicate improper behavior, PR can change with no impact on performance, and more.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn (PR sculpting) and Sphinn (PR myths).

Yahoo has released its Q3 earnings report with some interesting observations. First, the earnings this quarter are $1,786 million, which is a a 1 percent increase compared to $1,768 million for the same period of 2007.

Currently, fifteen thousand employees work for Yahoo (though layoffs are being reported), and some forum members wonder why. Most importantly, they wonder why Yahoo's CEO is still in play especially given the huge missed opportunity with the Microsoft deal. Here's one statement about the poor direction of Yahoo:

Yahoo, IMHO is terribly mismanaged to the point that it no longer is credible as a search engine or directory as search results are severely lacking.

There's still hope, though, as some people say. Yahoo needs to be a lot more innovative. The question, probably, is: how?

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

AdWords API Advisor informs us via Google Groups that Google AdWords API v13 has been released. Though mentioned in the release notes, the these new features include enhanced geotargeting options, ability to retrieve only active campaigns/ad groups, campaign budgeting suggestions, new report types, mobile image ads, quality-based bid/Quality Score support, and more.

On a somewhat related note (but not really), the AdWords API Blog announces that in time for the holidays, Google is offering a bonus of 20% more API units at no additional cost through January 15.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups and WebmasterWorld.

YahooPete has written on three of his usual forums to let us know that Yahoo Search Marketing has come out with many desired features. They include:

* Country-level targeting
* City and zip-level targeting
* Targeting English-speaking US and Canada Internet users

The Yahoo Search Marketing Blog goes into these changes in more detail.

As forum members are writing, these are changes that they really appreciate.

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

Microsoft has been really focusing on building out support and tools for webmasters for their Live Search product. It is beginning to show. A DigitalPoint Forums thread reports one webmaster who has been trying to gain assistance for two years, was now able to get clear and useful feedback from Microsoft.

Why all of a sudden? Well, because of Microsoft's Live Search Webmaster Tools and their now active Live Search Webmaster Forums. This particular webmaster was able to figure out the issue through the use of both the tools and forums.

So, if your having issues with your website in Live Search, make sure to register with webmaster.live.com and check out the Microsoft Live Search Webmaster Forums.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

US law requires an age verification page for when someone visits a web page about pornography, alcohol or other adult oriented pages. But this comes with a challenge for webmasters who want to make sure those pages are accessible to search engines.

For example, if you search for vodka one of the top results is for absolut.com, and if you click on it and in your in the US, you are taken to absolut.com/us and it pops open an age verification box. At the same time, absolut.com has over a thousand pages indexed in Google, how so?

A Google Groups thread has a response from a Googler on how to handle these situations. Susan Moskwa of Google said:

This topic comes up periodically for sites (alcohol, porn, etc.) that need to serve an age verification notice on every page. What we recommend in this case is to serve it via JavaScript. That way users can see the age verification any time they try to access your content, but search engines that don't run JavaScript won't see the warning and will instead be able to see your content.

Google won't run the JavaScript request and GoogleBot will simply bypass that page and crawl the site. Of course, what if JavaScript is turned off on a child's browser?

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

If you login to your Google Webmaster Tools account and notice that Google is reporting that they have indexed 0 of your submitted pages through Sitemaps, then don't worry - you are not alone.

A WebmasterWorld and Google Groups thread has several webmasters who have noticed the same issue. I suspect it is either already fixed or that it is impacting a select number of accounts. I personally do not see the issue when I check some of my sites.

Clicking on your Sitemaps section might show something like this now:

Sitemap stats
Total URLs: 171
Indexed URLs: 0

Total URLs would be the number of URLs submitted to Google via Sitemaps. So yours may be larger or smaller.

Is this still an issue for you?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Google Groups.

Ever want to stop Google from translating your pages? You know, when you view a page in Google and it says, "translate" this page. Well, now you can.

A Google Webmaster Central blog post explains Google has added a new class or meta tag, that allows you to block Google Translate from translating a whole page or a specific portion of the page.

To block your whole page, add this meta tag to your header element:

<meta name="google" value="notranslate">

To block specific content, wrap that content in class=notranslate, for example:

You can translate this content <span class="notranslate">but don't translate this content</span>

Webmasters are pretty happy that Google is enabling this feature. I do wonder how many webmasters will actually use it.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

As we expected, Google Analytics has integrated with Google AdSense. An AdSense blog post contains the details on how to hook up your AdSense account with your Analytics account - I personally tried this and I am unable to do so. As Google said, "this feature is not yet available to all our publishers, but please keep checking your account for an invitation." In any event, AdSense publishers are extremely happy about this new feature. Here is a video on how it works:

Now, this is not the only additional feature in the new Analytics. Google also added or is adding:

• Advanced Segmentation
• Custom Reports
• Motion Charts
• New Account Management Dashboard
• The Data Export API
• Integrated Reporting with AdSense

Forum discussion at:

• Google Integrates Adsense , Cre8asite Forums
• Google Analytics AdSense Integration, WebmasterWorld
• Google Analytics New Features Announced, HighRankings Forums
• Integrate Google Analytics with Adsense, DigitalPoint Forums

Maybe the reason why persuasive web site design fascinates me so much is because I'm a cold call sales person's worst nightmare. The best invention ever made was "Caller ID". They want me at the wrong time.

For a web site or web-based application to rock someone's world, many factors have to miraculously kick into place at once. They may be credibility, trust, easy to read content, etc. And you can still miss your mark because you didn't take into account your target users' mental or emotional state.

For example:

Say you have a weight loss product web site. Customers can order more products online.

Why do they come?

1. Because their doctor told them to lose weight and eat healthier? What state of mind is the potential customer in then?

2. Because someone called them "Fat"? Perhaps they've arrived to the site and want to be comforted.

3. To purchase for someone else? They may know what they need and will expect fast, direct access with no browsing.

4. They've just ate a brownie! They want to starve for a week. Does the site have a section for rescue, with call to action prompts to suggestions for what to eat so they don't punish themselves?

This is why search behavior is so meaningful and dangerously overlooked by companies.

Cre8asiteforums members amuse themselves with this topic in Do You Know All The Who's, For Whom You Are Developing?

I'm inventing a whatchamacallit device that will enable me to run in circles, cut a chicken, and light up a lamp... or not. But what happens if you were enlisted to help someone optimize a website that performs activities that you never heard of or never meant to combine? A Cre8asite Forums member is running into this issue. SEOigloo says that she has been contacted by a company that wants her to optimize for a product that nobody will ever think to search for. How does one accomplish this task?

This is hard to say, really. If someone isn't going to search, perhaps search engine optimization is not the ideal approach for awareness. Instead, it may be better to consider social media marketing. Perhaps better, blogger outreach in relevant areas may be most beneficial for the product.

You can still leverage search engine optimization, however. Michael Martinez says that in terms of optimization techniques, you are the one who is able to "build a new query space." He explains:

You choose what the relevant keywords will be for the space, then optimize the site for those keywords. When the site ranks for the keywords, you start a branding campaign to teach people to search for those keywords.

The bottom line is that you can still utilize basic SEO tactics -- sure, you may have to be creative in terms of what keywords and queries you'll optimize for, but it's going to work after the initial investment. Additionally, social media marketing may be fruitful as well depending on the product and buzz.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

This post was pre-written and scheduled for publication on October 22, 2008.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks how much traffic Yahoo sends to your site. So I thought it would be fun to poll our audience. I assume many of you use Google Analytics, so login to https://www.google.com/analytics/ and click on "Traffic Sources," and then "Search Engines." Then below the chart, but above the graph, it says, "Views", click on the circle or pie chat image. Then it will show you, by search engine, how much traffic each engine sent your way for the past month.

This site received 5.81% of our search traffic from Yahoo. Google sent a whopping 87.19% to us. How about you? Here is our search traffic from Google Analytics:

Please share your stats at this poll and/or do a blog post sharing the chart above:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This post was prewritten and scheduled for delivery today.

Do you want to become a Google Audio Ad specialist? A Google Groups thread explains how.

It's easy, but new specialist positions are not currently available. Still, if you ever want to become a Google Audio Ad specialist in the future, here's the application:

http://www.google.com/support/adsmarketplace/bin/request.py

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

This post was pre-written and scheduled for publication on October 22, 2008.

A HighRankings Forum thread has discussion around an old patent from IBM named Prediction of query difficulty for a generic search engine. In short, the patent describes ways to determine how difficult a specific keyword is. Now, the patent was filed back on October 19, 2004 and issued on July 29, 2008 - so it is old.

What tools can SEMs and SEOs use today to figure out the competitive landscape of a keyword phrase?

1. One of may favorites is to look at the search results page. If there are many organic results with matching title tags then you got a competitive landscape.
2. If there are many paid search results on the page, then it is competitive.
3. If your competitors have tons of links, then it is competitive.
4. If your keyword phrase is at the top of Google Suggest, as you type, then it is competitive.

But is it often nice to catch the wave of a spiking competitive term. Seasonal terms, news oriented terms, and so on. You can catch many of these at Google Hot Trends.

Do you have more ways of predicting the competitive nature of a search word?

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forums.

This article was pre-written and scheduled to go live today.

An interesting and detailed discussion on various marketing funnels looks at Traditional, Web 2.0 and Holistic methods.

Most of us view conversions within a more restricted scope. And that scope is often prescribed by being one of four basic site types: content (conversion == subscriptions, ads), ecommerce (conversion == sales), lead-generation (conversion == form completions, whitepaper downloads), or self-service (conversion == fewer complaints).

In the end, however, it is up to you to decide what makes a conversion. And of course it is perfectly acceptable to target multiple conversions.

In practice poorly converting buckets outnumber high conversion funnels.

Delve into this one at Cre8asiteforums in Traditional -> Web2 -> Holistic, The Conversion Funnel Mindset

AdWordsPro.Sarah has utilized Google Groups to provide some insights into how to use Google AdWords to prepare for the incoming holiday rush (provided that the recession isn't going to cramp your holiday gift-buying style). Recently, an Inside AdWords blog post was written that explains some tips and tools for getting the most out of holiday preparation. Suggestions include leveraging Google Product Search, targeting your Google AdWords campaign with the proper keywords, using Google Checkout, and optimizing with Google Analytics.

The post also includes three videos with tips:

Setting the Stage: Make the Most of the Holiday Season

Expanding Reach: Find Your Target Audience

Analyze & Simplify: Measure Success & Streamline the Buying Process

Sarah tells us that it's important to start thinking about the holidays now and to optimize early, since changes don't go into effect instantaneously. Plus, a lot of people are already beginning holiday shopping -- or will next month!

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

This post was pre-written and scheduled for publication on October 21, 2008.

A High Rankings Forum member questions the actions of current SEOs and wonders if the real SEO "doers" are actually working behind closed doors. He says that the SEOs who consistently tell secrets are putting themselves in danger -- the more secrets revealed, the less likely it will be for them to get clients since new "SEOs" who absorb that knowledge claim themselves to be experts and snatch up those who need SEO services. There's also the possibility of SEO secrets becoming useless over time (think: Give It Up at SMX).

I'm not sure that all SEO experts are really in hiding. Sure, I've seen a ridiculous amount of quacks claiming to be SEO geniuses probably because they've read someone's SEO guide once or twice and think they know it all. But there's no secret sauce, as many people say, and SEO isn't so much about knowledge but about application, a concept that many SEOs know quite well. SEO is also a forever-changing methodology; you'll never stop learning -- there are always new ideas and thoughts that may need to be integrated into your mindset.

Most SEO experts who claim themselves to be experts are probably fooling themselves. You can never be an "expert" in this field -- or at least, it shouldn't be a self-designation. (Other people will know if you're an expert, and if you deny it, then you probably are an expert after all.)

At the end of the day, there may be some truth to the invisibility claim (for example, I may not know all of the SEOs out there who are great at what they do), but there are just as many prominent SEOs who are also experts.

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.

This post was pre-written and scheduled for publication on October 21, 2008.

What would you prefer:

* A pretty website that has no content
* An ugly website that has a lot of content

If you were building links, which kind of site would you prefer to link to? In a WebmasterWorld discussion, it seems that appearances may not matter. A "nice clean" look may be fine, though.

Some disagree and believe that aesthetically pleasing sites are likely to be linked more than other sites. Most people do not feel that this sentiment is appropriate -- the content is really the most important thing for link-building, according to many webmasters. Of course, it depends on the niche, but people want informative content. Think about Wikipedia, for example. Is it "pretty?" Nope -- it's clean and neat -- but it has a lot of content that many people are looking for.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

This post was pre-written and scheduled for publication on October 21.

I reported this news yesterday at Search Engine Land, in short, Yahoo is expected to layoff thousands of employees and cut costs across the board.

Last time Yahoo laid off employees, we were sad - cause we knew several of those hit with the layoffs. I suspect we will know many of those hit by today's announcement.

It is sad to see this happening, and it is not just Yahoo. Many companies are reducing their work force and dropping cause, in preparation for the recessionary times. Yahoo would have likely done this anyway but now they need to do this possibly at a whole new level.

We have discussion from SEOs and SEMs at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums. Most are concerned over the competitive landscape of the search space.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

This post was written on Monday, October 20th and scheduled for Tuesday, October 21st.

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: October 20, 2008"

Adam Lasnik of Google announced in a Google Groups thread that they are going to be hosting the third webmaster live chat event this Wednesday, October 22nd and noon (EST) or 9am (PST).

I am personally upset at the time. It is a Jewish holiday and I can not be online to participate, which means I cannot provide a recording and commentary after the session is done. I am sorry about that, but there is no way I can be online at this time.

They are planning on using the Google Moderator tool to facilitate the live chat, plus the audio won't require phone - as they are broadcasting the audio online. JohnMu will be covering a topic named "Scary Webmastering Myths" and there will be tons of Q&A time.

You do not want to miss these events, so make sure to stay tuned to the Google Webmaster Central blog for the official announcement. Personally, I hope they change the time before posting the official announcement (note, Thursday is fine, Friday is fine up until Sundown in EST).

Google's first webmaster chat event was back in March 2008 and the second event was in June. We have a full recording and transcript from the second event.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Update: It is now official, more details on how to join over here. The date and time are final.

A WebmasterWorld member reports that he was dependent on the Top Search Queries report in Google Webmaster Tools and has found it to be providing incorrect data. After all, using another rank checker proved to see no results and there were no visitors to that page.

This is likely to be a bug, according to Tedster:

Webmaster Tools reports of all kinds are known to contain wrong information at times. This kind of wrong information would be particularly distrubing, but in any big system errors do creep in. The evidence of your own server logs is more dependable.

He adds that it's possible that the ranking is achievable:

[M]aybe the WMT report is pulling the position information before some filter is applied to come up with the final rankings. Even though that would certainly be buggy behavior, it might accidentally be showing you that your url COULD rank that well, if only you weren't tripping some kind of filter.

Still, though, the tool in Google's backend is misleading.

Would you consider this a bug?

On a related note, The Official Google Webmaster Central Blog says that this could be an issue with the kind of data that WMT sees. They suggest that you add the www and non-www versions of the same site to Webmaster Central, do a site: search to look for any anomalies, set your preferred domain, and set a site-wide 301 redirect to www or the non-www. Of course, this is probably not applicable to the reporting issue in WebmasterWorld, though it may be related to other issues within Google Webmaster Tools.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Sphinn features the unfortunate story of a guy named Loren Baker who woke up one morning to find that his Google Account -- Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Reader, Google Talk, and all -- terminated. He has no idea why this has happened and has written an open letter to Google to assess the damage that was done, since now Loren cannot communicate with his clients and his business activity has been halted.

It's deeply upsetting that Google has done this on more than one occasion and seems to have done nothing to rectify the issue. Personally, as I noted in the Sphinn discussion yesterday, I have no idea why there appears to be a handful of Google employees who are trigger happy, but this may be a good time to actually capitalize on the recession that is happening and take those employees out of play. Of course, that may be a little harsh, but I have to ask: what did Loren do that is so wrong? He can't work now either.

Some have criticized Loren for actually using free services for mission critical business practices. That's a fair statement, but how many people do you know would abuse their "free" account to the point that it would be terminated -- especially if they're this heavily dependent upon it? It still seems like a mixup on Google's side, and some staffers there should actually be held accountable.

It's time for Google to be a lot more transparent about this than they have been. This should not happen again to anyone.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Update: You can block your pages from SEOMoz. SEOMoz documented the procedure, but it is as simple as a meta tag: <META NAME="SEOMOZ" CONTENT="NOINDEX" />

At SMX East, SEOmoz launched Linkscape, a powerful tool that will give you competitive analysis of linkage data. The tool has been lauded as extremely powerful though there have been some criticisms. In the Smackdown blog, Michael VanDemar attacks the credibility of the tool and claims that there is no way to block the user agent, at least not now. Therefore, we're still waiting to hear from SEOmoz on how to block the Linkscape tool from crawling their pages.

In Barry's coverage of the launch of the tool, he noted speaking with Rand about this issue. Rand told Barry that they will announce a single useragent that people can use to block the SEOmoz bots from crawling their site The question is, when will this capability come?

There's a lengthy discussion on Sphinn about the issue.

Ever since Google launched the real time quality score metric, where Google rated keywords between 0 and 10, 10 being the highest, I have rarely seen threads on documenting how to receive a 10 out of 10. Tamar blogged about How To Ensure That Your Google Quality Score is 10/10 based on an experiment by abbotsys. Back then, it was simply about matching the domain name to the keyword phrase, but can it be achieved with out that?

A DigitalPoint Forums thread reports another advertiser receiving the 10/10 score. He documented what he did to obtain the score:

1. Eliminated all the keywords that google had suggested and only used a maximum of three keywords per ad campaign.
2. Used only 1 ad campaign per landing page and made each landing page specific for that keyword.
3. Put the cost per click up high enough to give me around third spot.
4. Geo targeted the campaigns only in the areas he can sell to.
5. Limited the time his ads were on only to the times where there is really interest.
6. Used three version of each keyword "keyword", [keyword], and keyword and then eliminated which every wasn't working well.

If you want to reach that perfect 10, maybe try these tips and see what works for you. There is no guaranteed checklist of items, so keep experimenting. And when you get your perfect 10, do share!

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A typical thread I see from time to time in the forums are from webmasters who see Googlebot trying to access their site, but their site is not publicly available.

For example, a Google Groups thread has a webmaster from davenjudy.org asking why does he see GoogleBot requests to his fubar.local.davenjudy.org when that page won't resolve?

The simple answer is because there may be links still pointing to that address.

In fact, in this case, Google's JohnMu said there is. A page has a link directly to that page, here is the link:

<a class="exlink" href="http://fubar.local.davenjudy.org" rel="nofollow">http://fubar.local.davenjudy.org</a>

With that link pointing to the page, GoogleBot will continue to crawl that link, from the linking page, until it is removed.

Is this an issue? John from Google explains, "When we find links, we'll try to follow them just in case there is something that is crawlable :). In your case, we aren't able to resolve DNS for the host name, so we leave it at that."

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

A WebmasterWorld thread has users noticing changes over at Google Image Search. The changes may be a filter or may be a full-blown image index update, hard to tell at the moment.

The last Google Image update seemed to be an image filter update in September. But now, the update seems a bit more outside of the scope of what we would classify as a filter.

WebmasterWorld administrator, tedster, observed:

I started seeing some really wrong captions on some images, where the algo is pulling the caption from on-page anchor text. How can on-page anchor text be a candidate for naming for an image that is also on the page?

Senior member, zeus, who reported the image update has seen tons of images drop out of Google Image search, plus he has seen a possible hotlink image bug. The hotlink image bug happens when a third-party site links to a specific image and Google classifies that image from a a third-party domain.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld .

Google's JohnMu from the Webmaster Central team has done a blog post named First Click Free for Web Search where he clarifies that the First Click Free program is allowed to be used for web search as well. In short, the First Click Free program allows Googlebot and users who click from Google to your site, see your content for free, on the first click from Google to your site. It was designed originally for Google News, to allow sites like the New York Times to be syndicated and give users a taste of their content, and the next time they came back, it would require that user to login to view the content. It is the acceptable way to handle this for Google web search.

This is not new, Danny highlighted a Google post which said it was okay for web search. In fact, JohnMu from Google, originally was confused about this, as we covered a while back. But then Matt Cutts of Google came in and clarified things. I have some of the history on this topic at Search Engine Land.

There is a WebmasterWorld thread discussing the recent Google blog post on this program. In short, some webmasters are upset that savvy internet users can gain access to paid content for free, through Google. Some users want this expanded to be allowed to block certain countries from viewing their content, while allowing Googlebot to access their content and still be listed in Google.com. And some users are bit confused as to how this impacts Google's cloaking stance, still.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

What would you prefer:

* A pretty website that has no content
* An ugly website that has a lot of content

If you were building links, which kind of site would you prefer to link to? In a WebmasterWorld discussion, it seems that appearances may not matter. A "nice clean" look may be fine, though.

Some disagree and believe that aesthetically pleasing sites are likely to be linked more than other sites. Most people do not feel that this sentiment is appropriate -- the content is really the most important thing for link-building, according to many webmasters. Of course, it depends on the niche, but people want informative content. Think about Wikipedia, for example. Is it "pretty?" Nope -- it's clean and neat -- but it has a lot of content that many people are looking for.

Forum discussion continues 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: October 17, 2008"

Another holiday week had me offline for 2 days. In case you were all wondering, it's not a vacation when you have no access to email and then come back to the real world and have 500+ actionable emails. There's one more of these 2 day chunks next week, and then you'll have both Barry and me posting on a daily basis. Until then, enjoy the "break" and be advised that there's no video this Sunday.

Yahoo October 2008 Update
It seems that Yahoo's October 2008 update is finally noticeable along the hallways of Yahoo, and reports show that "SERPs are on the move." How have you been impacted?

Time to Lose Your Money Gamble in the UK
It looks like Google AdWords UK is allowing gambling ads, so you may get suckered when you least expect it. On a similar note, Mike McDonald pinged me this morning with bad news on the US horizon: Kentucky is seeing seizure of over 141 domain names. Life's just not as good on this side of the ocean right now.

Google Webmaster Tools Features Crawl Issues, Removes Home Page Crawl Date
Ben Pfeiffer has written an informative post about the reactions of SEOs on the crawl issues on Google Webmaster Tools. It's a great tool that helps you find broken pages and also fix URLs. Have you tried it yet?

On a somewhat sadder note, Google has removed the home page crawl date from the backend, which I thought was pretty cool and useful. I'm a bit sad to see it go, but JohnMu explains that the date wasn't really accurate anyway. Still, it's a date! What if Google stops being able to access your page for awhile?

Google AdWords: Search Partner Network, Display Ad Builder, Quality Score Added to Reports
Lots of news in Google AdWords realm this week. First, we see that Google has finally allowed you to split traffic between search partners and Google.com. On a related note, your Quality Score and estimated first bid is being added to Google AdWords reports. Perhaps most exciting in Google AdWords this week, though, is the useful tool for display ads that removes the need for expensive graphics designers to create these ads for you.

Google AdWords on Social Media
When I think of Google, I still don't think of social media. Sure, you have some sites out there like Orkut and YouTube, but they were never Google's original idea. It's interesting to see that Google AdWords plans on using Twitter for communicating. Really, this isn't very new; the YahooAdBuzz team is doing that now. I kind of feel smug about being an early adopter of Twitter (since December '06, baby!), that's for sure.

Yahoo Improves Publisher Network Visibility
Relevancy is an issue to Yahoo, and the Yahoo Publisher Network has improved relevancy for advertisements so that they will target the right individual. Cool.

How Long Does it Take for Google's Reinclusion Request to be Addressed?
We asked, you answered. Most of you had an unpleasant "more than three month" wait for Google's reinclusion requests to be answered. Some of you didn't have to wait more than a month (or a few days, thankfully), and some of you are still waiting. I guess you should try to avoid getting on Google's bad side.

Will Google Prevent You from Earning from AdSense?
Let's say you're running a really profitable AdSense business. Will Google stop you from earning to your heart's content? We asked and most of you thought that Google will let you earn and earn.

Woot's Crafty Marketing Shot Down by Google
With this recession, people are already considering taking their lives ... or so some think. Earlier this week, Woot.com's "tacky" recession ad was removed because it mocked suicide. But really, I don't agree that it was a wise move, and the poll we are hosting (it's still ongoing, guys) indicates that I'm not in the minority. Thanks also to Todd Mintz for agreeing with me in the comments; Woot's marketing message causes people to glance and actually pay attention to sponsored ads, and isn't that what we all want?

Google is Still Richer than You
Google's Q3 earnings have been extremely favorable despite the economy's failures this past week. Are they feeling lucky?

Did You Forget About Paddington Bear?
This past Monday, we celebrated the adventure of Christopher Columbus here at Search Engine Roundtable with a Christopher Columbus logo. But Google forgot about that, or rather, they prepared with something completely unrelated: Paddington Bear turned 50. Happy birthday, old bear. How much is that in human years?

I'm sure you all know that we're in a recession. Most companies are reporting layoffs and lowered earnings. Of course, if you're living in the bubble that is Google, you don't have $700 shares anymore, but you are doing pretty well financially, according to reports from CNBC and other sources (including the official release). It's as if Google is not in much of a recession at all.

Google has earned $4.92/share in Q3 (excluding one-time items) on a topline of $4.04 billion, according to the report. Eric Schmidt of Google has said "While we are realistic about the poor state of the global economy, we will continue to manage Google for the long term."

Google is lucky, but above all, they earned it. Congratulations to them!

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

How does the Google Quality Score work? The Official Google Blog explains how Google takes preference for quality score in the display of ads:

The quality score gives search engines a way of aligning the incentives of the buyers, the sellers, and the viewers of ads.

The article goes on to say that ads that don't get many clicks will not be shown. It then ends with the idea behind the quality score:

So why are quality scores important? Answer: they lead to a better auction by allowing advertisers to buy clicks, publishers to sell impressions, and users to see relevant ads

The article is appreciated to an extent. Forum members are a bit upset that there is no new information, that the details about the Quality Score are very basic, that Google is only showing ads that make them money, and that it seems (from many forum members, hence why it's being repeated here) that the article was written by a drunk person.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday morning, my friend Sam from Oh! Nuts candy sent me an email asking me if the screenshot below (click for a larger image) was new.

After a two-day holiday offline, I wasn't 100% sure, but I also remembered glancing over this WebmasterWorld home page discussion that announced a new tool for Google AdWords. This tool, according to the Inside AdWords blog, creates professionally looking advertisements without needing to hire a designer. Here's the actual tool, and below, a video of what you get:

The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive so far. It also, according to one forum member, explains why Google performed so well in Q3: Google is a "highly imaginative company."

You don't say.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Google has added two fields to the AdWords reports section. Those two fields are:

• Quality Score
• Est. First Page Bid

It took Google about a month to add this level details, since launching the new real time quality score calculation. But now, a month later, advertisers can use this reporting data to measure how quality score and/or estimated first page bid relates to other performance or keyword metrics in the reports.

Advertisers are happy that Google has added these fields to the reporting center.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion around Google now telling you how the search results were either customized based on your previous searches or personalized based on your web history. This is not all that new, relative to search, Danny wrote about it at the end of July.

Let me just catch you up quickly. Search for pizza st louis and then search again for just pizza and you still should get customized results for St Louis. Here is a screen capture:

Yes, it says, "Customized based on recent search activity. More details." When you click on the "more details" link you are taken to an explanation page:

Google has several types of pages like this, explaining how the results were customized or personalized based on your location, previous searches or web history.

In fact, Bryan Horling, Software Engineer, Personalized Search was on the Personalized & Customized Search at the SMX East conference, where Danny and him went back and forth on those features. So for a detailed explanation on this stuff, check out that session coverage.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The Google AdWords Blog announced you can now separate out the search traffic between coming from Google.com versus coming from Google's search partners (such as AOL and Ask.com). How do you see it? As I explained, you login, pull down the menu to “Split: Google search/search partners/content network.”

It will then break the results out for you. Awesome first step. But now advertisers can see exactly what they have been missing, performance of traffic from Google search compared to Google's search partners.

The reports are also coming to the report center.

There are two caveats as it says here:

(1) Due to the way we previously stored performance data, search partner statistics dated before January 1, 2007 will be categorized under 'Google' in your account.
(2) You may find that your content network clickthrough rate (CTR) and conversion rate statistics are lower than you expected.

Of course, advertisers want more - more features based on this data. I assume those features will come in time.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

If you login to Google Webmaster Tools you may notice that something is missing. Google has removed the date from the Home page crawl field from the site overview page. The field was grouped in the "Home Page Crawl" section.

Here is a before shot:

And now:

Why was it removed? Google's JohnMu was asked this in a Google Groups thread, where he responded that the date was "frequently incorrect and not really that useful."

John is just being honest and I commend that. Just less than a month ago, we gave Google a hard time about Google Webmaster Tools Slower In Reporting Than Google Cache, specifically calling out that date. John and Google agreed, John explained:

It's generally more useful to look at it on a page- by-page basis, which you can do best either in the Google Cache or by checking your server's logs. Usually there's not much need to check the exact date a page was crawled - it's more important to see that we're continually crawling and indexing the site in general.

So the field is gone - at least for now.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

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

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: October 16, 2008"

A UCLA study has found that web search activity may stimulate and improve brain function among web-savvy adults. In the article, we are told that "researchers found that during Web searching, volunteers with prior experience registered a twofold increase in brain activation when compared with those with little Internet experience."

Details of the study will be published on the American Journal of Geriatric Psychology.

Is this why you're online? :)

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.

Last week, an AdWeek article was published that noted that the iPhone, with its powerful capabilities, is changing the landscape of advertising. Google has reviewed options to make iPhone-only specific channels to target ads to searchers who use an iPhone on which to perform that search. The article explains:

Unlike phones that browse the mobile Web, the iPhone pulls up sites directly from the Internet. This means the ads users see, unless a publisher creates an iPhone-specific site, are the same as those viewed from a computer. The new option would in essence build a bridge between repurposing Internet ads for a mobile experience and creating a parallel structure for it.

Given the dominance of iPhone in the market (yet I do not have one and won't till they support Sprint...nu, Apple?), this all makes a lot of sense. The iPhone really does help users make better decisions; one forum member sees that there are more conversions than just clicks.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Google lost their Gmail dispute in Germany and they had to remove redtube.com (and the like) from Google.de, plus other cases I am missing right now. This week, Bloomberg reports that Google "lost two copyright lawsuits in Germany over displaying photos and artworks as thumbnails in a preview of search results."

In short, let me blockquote:

Google's preview of a picture by German photographer Michael Bernhard violates his copyrights, the Regional Court of Hamburg ruled, his lawyer Matthies van Eendenburg said in an interview today. Thomas Horn, who holds the copyrights on some comics that were displayed in Google search results, won a second case, court spokeswoman Sabine Westphalen said in an e-mail.

I love the responses in the WebmasterWorld thread. Moderator, incrediBILL, said it well:

This is stupid because the solution is technological, not legal:
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /

I cannot agree more. This is pretty immature. Why sue? Why not just use the simple tag? Am I missing something? Don't say, to make money or because people hate Google.

What is going to happen now? These sites will drop in traffic, they might regret suing and who knows. This is not the first time. Same thing happened in Belgium over news content.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Beu has done an outstanding job testing how Google truly handles Flash indexing and crawling. To take you back, Google began indexing Flash in July 2008 and then we had a follow up post on it in late August.

Let me summarize Beu's four findings:

(1) Google has an issue associating text content within a Flash document with the correct parent URL or as a single entity.

(2) Flash documents does receive PageRank "independent of their own parent URLs."

(3) Google does not index URLs "containing #anchors (fragment identifiers) in Flash per W3C Guidelines."

(4) Google does not translate Flash content into different languages.

I would recommend you see his Flash SEO Tips for 2009 as well.

Based on Beu's tests, he has asked Google a fairly sophisticated question at Google Groups. I'll quote the question:

Can anyone confirm that Googlebot "sees" text content provided via PE (progressive enhancement) since support for simple JavaScript like SWFObject was introduced? If so, what causes Flash files to be indexed in many cases and not the parent URL where content provided via PE resides? Is there anything webmasters can do to request which version (Flash or (X)HTML) is indexed in SERPs, for example like www or non-www in webmaster tools?

That would be a nice addition but personally, I don't think it will be coming any time soon.

Forum discussion at Sphinn and Google Groups.

As I reported minutes ago at Search Engine Land, Google UK will now be allowing the advertisement of gambling related products in AdWords.

We were one of the first to report the initial ban of gambling ads in the UK back June 2007. But the NHA has confirmed reports from Google that they have reversed this ruling.

In fact, if you take a look at the AdWords Gambling Policies you will notice, they amended the policy for the Great Britain (England, Scotland, and Wales) region. They have also added a form to legally be allowed to post gambling ads in the UK on Google.

Ciran at Sphinn said:

This is absolutely massive news - I trust that some of the big US sites will write about this as, with the UK being Google's 2nd biggest market, this could do some very nice things to their share price.

I agree, the news that Google disallowed the play gambling ads was massive, but the news that gambling ads are now allows is even more massive.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

The Yahoo Search Blog announced a "weather report," signifying a search update was taking place. No one really noticed anything, not until last night - at least.

Last night, I saw a post at WebmasterWorld reporting that the "Serp's are on the move." Member, Vimes, said:

any one else seeing the serp's move, from my location I'm seeing the weather start to change looks like I'm expecting bright spells with a little rain later ;)

No one else replied, nor do I see any other discussion in any of the search marketing forums I track. But Yahoo did tell us to expect changes a day ago:

We'll be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days and expect the update will be completed soon. As you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index.

Good luck with this update.

The last update we observed was around September 29th. Yahoo told me it was not an official update, the last official update was on September 6th - 9th.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

If your like me and other obsessive SEO’s addicted to the details of fixing everything on your own or a client’s website then Google’s recent addition of showing you where your 404 crawl errors come from is a much applauded feature. Before you might ended up in the Web Crawl section of Webmaster Tools only to scratch your head quite a few times and ponder how Googlebot has discovered many of these broken links in the first place. Could this be Google’s attempt to make us better forensic SEO’s or torture us with a dribble of incomplete crawl information? You might even take it a step farther and scour the Google index and your logs trying to locate those errors. As of Monday, those headaches have ended and we can now get a source on those sneaky broken URLs and sites linking improperly to your site.

Since this information is a couple days old, I thought I would explore some of the discussion on the benefits of this new tool. WebmasterWorld has a pretty healthy discussion about this new feature and examples of how people using this tool to locate incoming links to valid urls and other 404 errors.

G1smd explains “I think people will be extremely shocked as to how many duff links they have pointing at their site and how careless the average netizen is when they cut and paste links. My pet peeve is people who post links with lots of unnecessary parameters in them, including session IDs”.

This tool has also served to help find pages that might have disappeared due to a server move or site redesign as icedowl says “I found that I'd lost the page when I did a site rebuild back in 2005.”

The discussion moved to how Google might be trying “guess” at url structure on websites and the resulting 404 errors generated because this.

“WMT also shows some 404s with no linking page for www.mysite/dir/zzzz.html where zzzz is a random number. Is Google guessing at pages on my site ? ”

SEO Mike explains “GBot will do that sometimes in order to determine how your server responds to random queries.” However, I can’t confirm myself whether Google is actually doing this or not. If your learning about this new feature for the first time I would recommend logging in and check you web crawl report and fix those urls!

Discussion continued on WebmasterWorld

Stoney DeGeyter has written an insightful piece on Search Engine Guide on what you should expect from your SEO consultant. Obviously, depending on your goals, this may differ, but the ideas are the same. He explains that traffic is something to look at, but that's not what the client should only seek. Conversions are obviously important, and so are rankings, but that's not how to prove the effectiveness of the campaign. At the end of the day, ROI is really the most substantial measurement of this kind of engagement.

Stoney mentions that communication is key to make sure that expectations are set and followed throughout the duration of the contract.

Indeed, this article is pretty informative and should help you review the precautions before starting your new SEO campaign.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

This post was pre-written and scheduled for publication on October 15th.

In case you felt that the English version of Sphinn is not souped up enough for your needs, there's another version of Sphinn in Japanese for other internet marketing news. Danny Sullivan has announced that now there be no spam complaints when legitimate Japanese internet marketing posts get submitted -- and this is the suitable home for these posts.

As a note, if you're already a member at Sphinn.com, the user base is NOT shared so you'll need to sign up to Sphinn Japan to participate.

Now why are there no women under the "Special Users" box?! ;)

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn (English!) ;)

This post was pre-written and scheduled for publication on October 15th.

I have a personal pet peeve with YouTube. Way too often, when I try watching a YouTube video, it simply won't play. The message I get is "We're sorry, this video is no longer available." The thing is, the video is available. All you need to do is refresh the page and play it again and often, it will work.

Here is a picture of what I normally see:

Why does this bother me? I don't watch man YouTube videos, but I do offer a weekly video blog that is published to iTunes and also to YouTube. And for each person that hits play on the YouTube version, I would say about 50% get this error. It is not limited to my videos, it happens to virtually all the videos I try.

YouTube has an on going thread on this at Google Groups but all we have are complaints, moderated by a YouTube representative. There are over 200 messages in that thread. The solution? I do not know.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

This post was written on Monday, October 13th and scheduled to go live today.

In September, we ran a poll asking Does Google Limit The Amount AdSense Publishers Can Earn?

The majority of respondents don't believe so. 57% do not believe in a ceiling, while 28% do and 15% said that the ceiling applies to only select publishers.

Personally, I doubt there is any ceiling for 99% of the publishers. I would not be surprised if there were special agreements with some publishers that may limit the amount some can earn - but that is just a wild guess.

Here is the breakdown of the results:
:: No AdSense Glass Ceiling said 38 respondents or 57%
:: Yes AdSense Glass Ceiling said 19 respondents or 28%
:: Some AdSense Glass Ceilings said 10 respondents or 15%

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

This post was pre-written and scheduled for publication on October 14th.

When faced with marketing a brand new product or idea, how do you optimize for keywords that nobody is searching for yet? Can you find other ways to present the product, such as focus on value proposition? Would social media help here?

SEO For the Unknown explores this interesting topic at Cre8asiteforums.

Facebook was in the news recently because they hadn't met revenue projections. Why? Their target users are coming to network and "be social" rather than to buy something. Their ad-based revenue plan is missing its mark.

Another example are spam blogs ("splogs") that steal content from authentic blogs, buy a junk domain, and slap on Google Ads in the hopes of generating revenue. Perhaps some of these nonsense beggar sites do earn a piddly wage, but not to the tune of millions of dollars.

Are we "banner blind"? Yes. Are you stuck in the "Build it and they will come?" mindset? Are you a print advertiser trying to learn the ways of web marketing?

Once you begin to sell ads directly all the old offline knowledge sets come into play. Have you studied how best to adapt advertising theory and practice to the web? To your sites? Just as many webdevs instinctively optimise both for users and SEs, and some for ppc, they should also be optimising their ad offerings, their major revenue streams. You've built it, they are actually coming...now sell some drinks and fast food and ad space...

Cre8asiteforums discusses the topic from all angles in You Optimise For Users And Ses. What about your revenue sources?

In August of 2006, Rohit Bhargava coined the term SMO for social media optimization. Now search engine optimization has been around a little longer than that, but where did it come from? According to Bob Heyman, in a guest post on Search Engine Land, he did.

Bob explains that it was 1995 when the name came to mind. Once upon a time, a rock band created a website with a URL that couldn't be recalled without pulling it up in the SERPs. Unfortunately for the rock band, however, the official web page for the band was on page 4 of the SERPs. Bob explains that after that call, he resolved to make search engine rankings a priority, and thus, "search engine optimization" was born.

So why, then, is Jason Gambert claiming that he coined the phrase SEO in 2007? Give it up, Jason.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

This post was pre-written and scheduled for publication on October 14th.

The other day, I held a poll asking SEOs how long it typically took for their sites to be reincluded into the Google index after submitting a reconsideration request. We have complied 72 responses and I thought I share the results.

As I thought, the responses are really all over the place. Let me break them down for you.

Google Reinclusion Took Me...
:: More Than Three Months said 18 respondents or 25%
:: 1 Week To 3 Weeks said 12 respondents or 17%
:: A Month said 12 respondents or 17%
:: A Few Days said 11 respondents or 15%
:: A Week said 6 respondents or 8%
:: Three Months said 6 respondents or 8%
:: Other... said 4 respondents or 6%
:: Two Months said 3 respondents or 4%

Other responses were from "never" to "8 months" to "still waiting."

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

This post was written on October 13th and scheduled to go live on October 14th.

In late September, we ran a poll asking AdSense publishers if they are earning more or less than the previous year. The results are now in and honestly, don't tell us much.

Most said they earn more but just about the same number of respondents said they are earning less.

Here is the break down:
:: Earning More said 49 respondents or 42%
:: Earning Less said 43 respondents or 37%
:: About the Same said 19 respondents or 16%
:: Other answer said 5 respondents or 4%

So the results are pretty much all over the place.

Tamar covered the question on if the economic downturn is hurting publishers or not. We have added a new poll to that thread, so please participate!

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

This post was pre-written and scheduled for publication on October 14th.

Are you a Google AdSense publisher who has taken a hit from the recession? A few forum threads, one at WebmasterWorld and the other at DigitalPoint Forums, discuss the impact of the economic crisis on money earned through the Google AdSense program. What have publishers noted?

Some publishers haven't observed a thing. The behavior is expected with no indications of decline. On the other hand, though, there are a few publishers who have spotted some decline, though they have no idea about whether to attribute the financial crisis to it. Some have seen reduced click-throughs, and a small percentage of folks are actually making more money.

Where are you at?

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

This post was pre-written and scheduled for publication on October 14th.

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: October 13, 2008"

We all know about Google's latest change to the webmaster guidelines, where they removed directories as a good source of links. Having seen that, SEOs and webmasters ask themselves, if seeking links from directories is worth it anymore.

A WebmasterWorld thread has a large discussion around the topic. Old time memeber, pageoneresults, said:

Personally? I feel it is a waste of your time to do something like this. 750 directories? Did you see that Google recently removed the suggestion of submitting to directories from their guidelines? Ya, that is how much they despise these things now. There are probably a million directories. 99.5% of them were built solely for this purpose that we are discussing and are typically of little to no value. It is the same thing as submitting to 100,000 search engines. Probably the same group of people too. ;)

But I still personally believe that some directories have value. Can I name which ones they are? Not really because I don't think it is Yahoo or ODP or so on. I think it depends on the section you are in and the quality of that section. Of course, I believe Yahoo is top-notch in the directory space, but the value is way down from what it was years ago, in my opinion.

In any event, this is going to be a hot topic for the next few months. Join the discussion.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Michael VanDemar blogged about apparent Google AdSense insensitivity as it relates to the recession. He says that there's a possibility for the suicide rate to skyrocket, just like it did in the Great Depression. Thus, he's a little disturbed by a Google AdSense ad for Woot.com which said the following:

"Before you jump out of
that window, why not spend your
last remaining dollars at Woot?"

Naturally, Michael has found that quite offensive and tasteless, and many users agree. It's possible, though, that Google missed this one for removal. I think it may be questionable, but I understand the sarcasm in Woot's usual marketing messages and this is no exception.

Should it be removed? You tell me. Take the poll.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn. And a hat tip to Gary for spotting this as well.

It appears Google AdWords is going to start using Twitter for communication purposes.

AdWordsPro Sarah started a Google Groups thread announcing this as a possibility. So I tried a few Twitter accounts and spotted http://twitter.com/insideadwords that contained some early Twitters, mostly with announcement like notifications, linking back to the AdWords Blog.

It seems like this Twitter account has been set up since August 18, 2007 as a twitter feed but Google has yet to really announce it. There are only about twenty followers right now, and I suspect that will jump tremendously with this write up and then even more with any announcement Google makes on the topic.

Sarah from Google said:

But, as it turns out, Google is currently exploring the use of Twitter as a different support model. Which got me to wondering if my fellow forum members used Twitter? Would you be interested in AdWords Twitter support? Is this idea crazy or worth exploring (or maybe both!)?

So, she just became aware of this Twitter feed? She seems interested in expanding this feed, even more. But before she does this, she wants feedback.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Postscript: The Microsoft adCenter team notified me they have had a Twitter account for a while at http://twitter.com/adCenterBlog. The announced this a while back on the adCenter Blog.

Yahoo has said they have improved the relevancy of their ads in the content network, or as you know it - the Yahoo Publisher Network.

Yahoo's official forum representative, YahooPete, posted threads at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums and Search Engine Watch Forums with the details.

In short, not only does Yahoo look at the content on the page, but also tailors the ad to the specific user viewing the page. I'll quote Yahoo on this:

The new technology not only attempts to understand what the content is on a page, but also, who is viewing it, which helps you get your ad in front of the right customer. Content Match now combines a better understanding of web page and ad content with insights from users’ geographic and behavioral profiles.

This leads to a higher click through rate and hopefully more conversions for advertisers participating in the content network.

Yahoo ends off with this reminder, when using content match:

• Create Content Match-only campaigns to manage bids and budgets separately from Sponsored Search.
• See how much you can afford. If you add a Content Match campaign, you may need to adjust your spending limits accordingly.
• Write specific ads and have targeted keywords for your Content Match ads, so that the ads appear only in the type of content where you want them.

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

Today is Columbus Day and we have a special theme up for the day. It looks like this:

But if you visit Google, you will see a Paddington Bear 50th birthday logo up for today. The logo looks like this:

Boy does that bring back memories. Of course, the logo links to a Google search result for paddington bear.

Happy birthday Paddington Bear and happy Columbus Day also!

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: October 10, 2008"

After a long week of conferences followed by a holiday, we're back for just 2 more business days until another 2 days of holidays kick in. Enjoy us while we're here!

Google Giving More Snippet Data
Searching for articles on Google is now showing content attributes in the results. You can see articles that have more than one author or you can see the author of the article.

Google Reverts PageRank Data
In case you're wondering why your PageRank has been fluctuating like mad lately, it's probably due to the observation that Google is reverting PageRank values. That or you're looking at the PR from another data center. Regardless, most people don't really care. ;)

Make Money from Google Maps with AdSense
So you're searching for something and find it using Google Maps. You may also find another targeted result that you never anticipated due to Google AdSense's integration into Google Maps. Who didn't see that coming?

Google's Attempts to Make More Money with Affiliate Marketing
Google has seen success with Amazon and iTunes, and they want to eat some cake too. That's why you'll see that Google is now an iTunes and Amazon affiliate. Surprised?

Google AdSense for Games
More ability to monetize is seen with the announcement of Google AdSense for games. If you have a popular site, you're game (no pun intended) to be considered. It's in beta, now, though, but if you want to make some dough, go for it.

Don't Use Google AdWords Editor 6.5.0...Yet
Google AdWords Editor 6.5.0 was released but not without a slew of problems. There are errors, slowness, and more. If you haven't upgraded yet, don't.

Microsoft adCenter Upgrade in Fall 2008
We're actually in Fall of 2008, so in the upcoming weeks, we should expect a big Microsoft adCenter update to give more billing/payment options, campaign management simplification, report analysis, and more. Stay tuned!

Google's Search Results Coming in RSS Format
It's taken them years, but Google will offer its results in RSS format so that you can watch for scrapers and all that other good stuff. Can we say "huzzah?"

Linkage Data Provided by SEOmoz
SEOmoz has launched this comprehensive tool called Linkscape that has crawled 30 billion pages to provide detailed linkage data. This tool has received a lot of kudos and I'm sure you'll like it!

Ask.com Loses 3D, Goes to "Less is More"
This past week, we've heard reports that Ask.com has redesigned their page to eliminate the complex 3D interface and to give less information. Is Google responsible for this? It's possible, since Ask.com is looking for money above all else.

Yahoo to Offer Web Analytics
Yahoo's acquisition of IndexTools means Yahoo Web Analytics. The tool is being rolled out on a limited beta and is free. Yahoo Web Analytics boasts real time tracking which many people are looking forward to. I can't wait to try it myself!

SMX East
As I mentioned, we were at SMX East this week. What does that mean? Well, I'm sure you saw our conference coverage. If not, here you go -- enjoy!

• SMX Boot Camp: Link Building Fundamentals
• Search and Reputation Management
• Ad Agencies & Search Marketing
• The Ten Truths Every CMO Must Know About Search Marketing
• What's New With Video Search Marketing
• Social Media Marketing for Newspapers and Magazines
• What's New With Local Search Marketing
• Search Marketing For Newspapers & Magazine
• Search & The iPhone
• Search Integration: Are We There Yet?
• Googleopoly
• Enhanced Listings
• What Is Ethical Social Media Marketing?
• Personalized & Customized Search
• What Is Spam?
• Internal Linking Tactics
• Keynote with Google's Tim Armstrong
• Tools, Glorious Tools
• A Day In The Life Of A Successful In-House SEO

Thanks again to Marty Weintraub for his guestblogging!

Administrative Note: No Video This Weekend
Due to the holidays, our next video recap is not going to occur until October 26th. You'll just have to read us!

The Live Search blog announces a partnership between Facebook and Microsoft for search and ads. You can now either "Search Facebook" or "Search the Web" using Live.com. Additionally, adCenter ads will be delivered alongside those search results.

So far, it's good to integrate search on Facebook with search on Live.com to prevent opening a second tab/browser to perform searches. However, as one forum member points out, this looks like an attempt for Microsoft do dominate the search realm.

Other implications of this search partnership will relate to the personal information Facebook has about you and how Microsoft should probably leverage that with this search integration. I'd admit -- if I'm searching on the Web using Facebook, I'd definitely want more personalized results than generic SERPs for any random query.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and High Rankings Forums.

We've prided ourselves on Google Analytics. We've seen Gatineau make its debut last year. Now we're looking at something new: Yahoo Analytics. As part of the acquisition of IndexTools, Yahoo will be launching Yahoo! Web Analytics.

It's not live for everyone yet, as we're made aware that it's currently only available to Yahoo! Small Business customers who host e-commerce sites on Yahoo and Yahoo! Custom Solutions/Yahoo! Buzz Marketing advertising partners.

Is it free? Indeed, it will be (which comes at a shock to many). It also is making past paid customers of IndexTools at $400/month happy.

The best part of IndexTools beyond it being free is that it has real-time analytics tracking rather than a 24-hour delay.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld, High Rankings Forum, and DigitalPoint Forums.

Google is on march to make sure to continue monetizing searches in any way possible. This time, Google has added AdSense to Google Maps, in some cases. This was reported at Search Engine Land, Digital Inspiration and Bloggle first. Let me take you through it.

Doing a search for my corporate address returns a map of my location, with businesses listed on the left hand side. If you click on a business, let's say the first dental one, Google then displays a small single line ad (AdSense like) to the bottom of the map. Here is a picture:

The ad shows a relevant dental ad. But sometimes you do not need a business address, sometimes an ad for office space might come up. It has in my case.

This seems to be a test right now, so we will see how long this lasts.

Google has been testing and posting local ads for a while now. For more on local business ads at Google, see here.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The other day, we reported again that Google Testing Dates on Search Snippets. But it is much more than just dates. Google is now showing additional attributes from the content on the page. For example:

Notice how the above result shows post numbers, author numbers, and the last post date. Clearly, in this case, Google thinks this blog post is a forum post or maybe not, maybe Google classifies the "comments" in the blog post as a threaded type of discussion.

They also pull out author names, for example in a case of searching for minotti, the last result looks like this (hat tip):

Will this stick? I am not sure - my gut tells me no, Google won't keep these in most cases. Maybe specific queries will return these details, but I just don't feel that Google will keep these additional attributes on the search results pages. At least not in this fashion.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Yesterday, Google announced the release of AdWords Editor 6.5. I did a detailed post on the new features at Search Engine Land. But, since I posted the second Google released the news, I did not yet get feedback from advertisers on the new release.

All the threads I see are scary. Not only do errors pop up when some advertisers are using it, those who do not get errors say it is about 50% slower than the previous version. In addition, the new editor does not bring in the new quality score metrics.

One issue can be addressed, if you make sure to uninstall the old editor first and then install the new editor. But the slowness and other issues seem to be bugging many advertisers. I am sure subsequent releases will fix the issues.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums and Google Groups.

A couple days ago, Matt McGee at Search Engine Land confirmed the reports the Wall Street Journal that Google will be offering web search result notifications not only via Google Alerts, but also via RSS format.

Yahoo and Live Search both have RSS results enabled in auto-discovery mode on the search results pages. Google does not and has not enabled this ever. Why now? Honestly, I am not sure why Google has waited this long? I know they don't want their search results to be used for many purposes outside of searching. Does this mean that rank checking tools can go the RSS route, as opposed to the scraping route? I doubt many will change and it is hard to know exactly how Google will release the RSS flavored results. Will it be only via Google Alerts or will Google enabled auto-discovery like Yahoo and Live does? Many of the other Google search properties, like Google News and Blog Search have auto-discovery enabled.

Time will tell - but I am happy about this. It makes Google's web results more accessible.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

A WebmasterWorld member is spotting some interesting Google interface tests with regards to placement of dates on snippets of SERPs. pageoneresults writes:

In performing certain search queries, Google appears to be inserting the date of the page in front of the Snippet. I just performed one search and 5 of the 10 results had dates preceding their Snippets. One of them had the date towards the end of the Snippet.

Of the 6 dates shown, all were within the past 10 days with the exception of a Press Release from 2007.

Michael Gray has spotted this as well. (Note: this differs from the visits that are recorded by Google if you're logged in.)

He believes that Google is finding that the dated results is actually faring well for Google. From my experience, the inclusion of the date has helped especially since dated results feel fresher.

In fact, if you do site: searches, you can find some good results as well, and another person agrees that the dated results are obviously incredibly helpful, especially in a technological field where things are always changing.

I'm guessing we'll be seeing more of that in the future.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

This article was pre-written and scheduled for publication on October 9th.

This year, Pubcon 2008 is going to be held between November 11 through the 14th in Las Vegas. Both Barry and I will be blogging and speaking, but the best news is all about the keynote speaker -- the Pubcon blog announces that producer George Wright of Blendtec's "Will it Blend" series will be keynoting the event.

How are people reacting? Well, in a paid WebmasterWorld discussion, people can't believe it and can't wait.

Are prizes on the horizon? I've been a huge fan of Will it Blend for such a long time and want to get one of those blenders myself, but my $25 blender seems to do the job. I'm not alone, it seems:

I so covet one of these, but $350 is a little steep for a blender (last I checked the price).

If you're not going to Pubcon, then, it's time that you signed up!

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld (paid link).

This post was pre-written and scheduled to be posted on October 9th.

Hopefully by the time you read this post, the issue will be resolved. However, yesterday afternoon, a Google representative, JohnMu said there is currently a display issue in the Google Webmaster Tools.

A Google Groups thread reports several webmasters who have submitted their Sitemap files days ago, but the Sitemaps file status is still in the status of "pending." Typically, a sitemap file should be accepted within 24 hours.

JohnMu of Google said:

This is currently a known issue, the team here is working on resolving it as quickly as possible. Generally speaking, it's normal for some sites to take a while before the "pending" status disappears. At the moment however, it looks like this is taking a bit longer than usual.

If the "pending" status for your site has been showing for a while now, I wouldn't worry too much about it for now. It's not something on your site, or anything that you need to resolve on your end.

I'll update this thread once it gets resolved. Thanks for your patience!

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

This post was written on October 8th at 1:30pm (EST) and scheduled to go live on October 9th.

Jeffrey Posnick from the AdWords API Team announced at a Google Groups thread the AdWords API Local Database Sync Project. The details of this project are located over at code.google.com/p/awapi-local-db-sync/.

Here is the summary:

The AdWords API Local Database Sync project is designed to simplify the process of maintaining a local store of AdWords account data. The scripts that make up the project can be used to schedule reports using the AdWords API, store the results in a local database (using SQLite), and then run queries against the database to determine, for instance, what AdWords account data has recently been added or updated.

The scripts are written in Python, and make use of the SOAPpy libraries for accessing the AdWords API SOAP service. The Python code is written against the dbapi2 database API, and by default it will use the SQLite implementation and store the report data in a SQLite database file on the local file system. It is possible to swap out the SQLite libraries for another database library that supports the dbapi2 interface.

So, for you AdWords techies, you may really enjoy this.

Jeff explains that this script allows you to "schedule reports using the AdWords API, store the results in a local database utilitize (using SQLite), and then run queries against the database." Of course, some of you may have built this already using your own code base, but if you have not, you can now use this code base.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

This post was written earlier in the week and scheduled to go live today.

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: October 8, 2008"

This session takes you on a whirlwind tour of search marketing tools you’ll want to consider adding to your toolbox.

Moderator: Chris Sherman, Executive Editor, Search Engine Land

Speakers:

Ken Jurina, President, Epiar
Debra Mastaler, President, Alliance-Link
Stephan Spencer, President, Netconcepts

Ken Jurina talks about his tools first.

Firefox extensions:
- They work right into your browser. They're quick, powerful, and free.
- Not many critiques.
- Great for auditing websites, there are many extensions such as SEOpen, SearchStatus, Groowe Toolbar, PDF download, Roboform Toolbar, Web Developer, Customize Google, and more.

SpyFu gives competitive insight into PPC/organic insight. It works within the browser and is free but you can pay for more things.

Browsershots shows what your site looks like in many browsers. It's a bit slow and may time out but it's great becasue you can taggle screensize, Flash, Javascript, and more. It's also fun if you're bored. It's free!

GSiteCrawler - gsitecrawler.com
- You an simulate crawls, get XML sitemaps, and view duplicate content issues. It's slow, though and it can get in a loop with dynamic URLs.
- How much does it cost? It's free!

Google Insights for Search identifies phrases by topic/brand/category you want to rank on. You cna geotarget where you sell your products, identify product seasonality, and identify if news tories relate to spikes in searches. The critique is that there are no "real" search frequency number - only relative comparison. There's this cool breakout tool area that shows phrases that spike in search frequency which can help in keyword research.

Time Fox - functionfox.com
This is a time tracking tool that will help you from a productivity perspective. It has free upgrades and no contracts.

Epiar Marketview lets you datamine and analyze keyword research and isolates what people put into a search engine.
- It's not free though :(

Deb Mastaler is up next. She says that her focus is on tools that help link building.

She talks about RoboForm and how when you're link building over and over, the redundancy kills you. Use RoboForm as a timesaver. It's very inexpensive and you can control the data that gets input into different directories.

Free tools include:
- Xenu's Link Sleuth : checks for broken links and verifies normal links, images, frames, plugins, backgrounds, local image maps, stylesheets, and whatever else. It takes a lot of room but it's the most thorough app for checking links.
- Link Valet: it does the same thing but doesn't require a download. It's not as inclusive as Xenu.

When you're looking for authority sites, you want sites that rank well. You can try
- The Langreiter Tool: this compares site rankings across different search engines in a graph.
- Googleguy.de: compares sites and linked side by side.
The downside: they can't be exported.

Searching for authority sites:
- Deb mentions that SEObook has some great tools, including HubFinder which is at http://www.linkhounds.com/hub-finder/hubfinder.php
- HubFinder is a colocation tool. It compares backlinks of 2 or more sites and points out their co-occurring backlinks.

Link Harvester makes sorting out duplicate links from the same site eash, which allows you to quickly and deeply query the Yahoo or MSN backlink database. It's at http://www.linkhounds.com/link-harvester/backlinks.php

Paid tools include:
SEO Elite: seoelite.com
PR Prowler: prprowler.com

Backlink Analyzer: http://tools.seobook.com/backlink-analyzer/ - it does the same exact thing as SEO Elite and PR Prowler but it is free!
- It's a free link analysis tool that shows what anchor text is linking to a page or site.

Firefox backlink analyzers:
- SEO Link Analysis: http://yoast.com/seo-tools/link-analysis/
- Link Diagnosis: linkdiagnosis.com
It gives you visual representations and link data on the site.
- Bad Neighborhood tools scan outlinks on your website. You're not responsible for the links that go to you but you can control outbound links. http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm

Utility searching sites:
- SoloSEO and Backlink Builder find sites that give you the ability to add links.
http:/www.soloseo.com/tools/linkSearch.html

She talks about directories and places to find relevant links. She also emphasizes that hiring an intern is gold!
- Directory Big Boards, ISEDB, Blog Catalog

You also need to utilize social media tools
- Buzz tool from Pierre Far - ekstreme.com/buzz - follows trends from Technorati, Google Trends, blog posts tagged with a keyword, social bookmarks, and more.

Backlink Social Celebrity will tell you how many times you site has been socially bookmarked and where. It's also made by Pierre: http://ekstremecom/backlink-social-celeb - look for these sites that make a lot of noise.

Competitive Research: Domain Tools is helpful as well. You can get similar domains and their age starting with the oldest.

The Dapper.net tool lets you provide users with content and services through widgets, RSS feeds, Google gadgets, and many others. In a nutshell, it creates RSS feeds for sites that don't have them.

Email extractor: A commercial tool - http://www.webextractor.com/index.htm - it pulls contact info off pages and onto spreadsheets for easy contact.

Twitter Alert tool: www.tweetbeep.com - get an update each time your URL/name/keywords are mentioned on Twiter.

Last up is Stephan Spencer.

seo-browser.com - you go to any URL and see what the spider sees. It's handy because only the first anchor text counts

Command line fun
- wget, lwp-request, lynx (which is a text-only browser)
You can also use strings, od, rsync, convert, etc. He wrote a blog post on these on stephanspencer.com.
lw-p-request -S bananarepublic.com
- shows headers, for example.

Thumbshots.com
- give a search term, choose engine, and compare it with another search term.
- you can even do operator searches

InternetMarketingNinjas.com - expensive tools but worth it
- Strongest Subpages, Top 10, Forward Link Title Tag tool,

SEOmoz Pro
- Linkscape
- Trifecta
- PageRank Strength tool - which has historical PR

Raven toolbar for Firefox allows for fast switching between multiple social media accounts, link acqusiiton planning, and ROI tracking

Metatags sidebar tool for Firefox.

Netcraft toolbar lets you know what the site is running (Apache, IIS, etc.)

WASP - Web analytics solution profiler - it gives you data on the analytics and the parameter that are being passed in Javascript.

Woopra - cool analytics tool for Wordpress

Robot Replay - a fun tool that lets you paste Javascript and it will record the mouse gestures as the users traverse your site so that you can play those back and watch the users move the mouse around

YSlow is a Firefox addon and shows you the things that are slowing down your pages for loading.

Xino (spelled correctly) checks PageRank, Backlinks, Indexed Pages, Rankings, and more.

QuarkBase is a handy tool that shows different stats about your website and competitors.

Enquisite is a search analytics tool that rocks. It allows you to see which search terms are on page 2 and also city by city, you can see the varied search rankings (not only on datacenter, but city!) They're releasing a feature on Friday that lets you look for converting terms on one engine that are not converting on another engine.

Stephan also preaches GTD (getting things done, David Allen) and says that Things for Mac is awesome. Journler is another tool. OmniFocus is like Things. iGTD is a final tool.

Some guy in the audience preaches Excel. Stephan says that Text to Columns and Pivot Tables are awesome.

Moderator: Jessica Bowman, Founder, SEOinhouse.com explains that this room is for in-house SEOs, all day.

Eileen Winslow, Sr. Director of SEO, MeziMedia is up first to talk. She worked at Shopzilla and even BruceClay in the past. She believes in having a devoted SEO team.

Top 10 Questions She Gets:

(1) How Does SEO Work? She explains how it works. Basically getting your site more and higher visibility in the search engines.

(2) What Does SEO Do? There is technical optimization to make them search engine friendly. Then content optimization, then link building and then reporting.

SEO Projects:
- Tech optimization
- Page Revamps
- New pages
- Reporting
- Etc

SEO Operations:
- Keyword Research
- Taxonomy
- SEO tags
- Link Requests
- Content
- Community

(3) Why Should I Care? Free Traffic + Conversions = Bottomline Revenue

(4) Who is on your team? Director, manager, analysts, and assistants.

(5) Who does your team work with?
(A) Product owner; content, usability, network admins, project managers, engineers
(B) CEO; biz intel, sales, sem, biz dev, and PR

(6) How Do Projects get on the Site? From idea to approval, to spec, to build, to priority, to plan to demo to QA and to launch.

(7) How do projects get high priority?
- Forecasting is critical
- Join efforts
- Piggy backing on things already being done
- Trading resources
- Building SE into roadmaps
- Success breeds confidence
- Tip: Not everything is high priority

(8) How do you target operations?
- 80/20 rule
- Marketing calendar
- Thematic clustering
- Project support
- Glory keyword
- Tip: You cant fix everything, especially at once

(9) How do you measure success?
- SEO revenue, SEO incoming, conversion rate & RPI
- When to report? weekly, monthly and quarterly also post launch and 2-8 weeks post launch.

(10) Why is traffic up or down?
- Give clients an action plan on what you will do.

Brian Piepgrass, from UpTake is next up.

Start ups.... You likely have a small budget. You also likely have strong motivation, because time is of the essence. Space might be tight in your office. You also have very little process in a start up. You do get to work with your whole team.

4 Habits of Successful Start Up SEO:
- Insert yourself into the important process
- Build Rapport
- Limited Budget
- Missed this one

Suggestion 1: Get involved in the development process
Suggestion 2: Take on an "official role" if you can
Suggestion 3: Promote a "culture" of Traffic & SEO

Building Rapport:
- Target Your Boss
- Target your brand guy or traditional marketer
- Target your developers

(1) Drive links every day
(2) Check stats every day
(3) Recognize when your in over your head and if you need, find great people

Bill Scully from Siemens is next up.

Invest in yourself:
- Listen to SEO and Online Marketing Podcasts
- Checkout WebmasterRadio.FM and Search iTunes
- Read newsletters and blogs
- Download whitepapers
- Check on twitter

Analyze your web logs and reports
- Key campaign traffic changes
- Goal changes
- Overall traffic changes
- 404 errors
- Optimize problem areas

Work with Teams:
- Conduct weekly meetings
- Conduct one and ones
- Attend IT/Web Dept meetings
-- Application changes
-- Structure changes
-- New project scopes
-- Remind them of SEO

Finding the Right People is hard

Attend a WebEx
- Search Marketing Expo
- SES
- Marketing Experiments
- Schedule demos with companies

Communicate with everyone, supporting them, and make sure they feel they are getting credit. They will keep coming to you, and you can gain bigger budgets. Make them feel like they are successful.

If you can, create a quarterly newsletter to send out to the teams.

Experiment with things, try new things, try ad formats, ad networks, try SEO techniques. Go to SEO conferences at least twice per year.

Audit templates
- Check nofollows
- Make sure robots.txt is ok
- Check 404s
- Check redirects

Schedule training sessions

Update XML Sitemap
- Rerun your site map software
- Upload new file to site
- Submit it

Closing
- Plan your calendar
- Invest in yourself
- Communicate
- Make internal customers successful
- Always sell value

Laura Lippay, Director of Technical Marketing, Yahoo! Inc. is last up.

She came into Yahoo as a one person team and had to build things up.

(1) The main thing she needed to do was get buy in from the top level.
(2) Then create accountability
(3) Set up underlying process and train teams such as training, resources, CMS that are SE friendly and reporting.
(4) Implement the work

She then lists out the teams and players...

Challenges:
- Where to Start?
- Lack of top level buy in
- Lack of accountability and no implementation
- Lack of education
- Chasing your tail with search site refresh
- Closed doors

And she showed us this new video, Ill embed:

Awesome!

Stick and ad here, an ad there, and how about an ad up there, or maybe in your games? That's right, Google finally announced the beta launch of AdSense for Games. More details about the ads can be found at google.com/ads/games and you can request to be in the beta program over here. You must have at least 500,000 game plays and have 80% of their traffic from the U.S. or the U.K.

We knew this was coming when Google bought AdScape back in February 2007.

Here is a video that helps explain things:

Are we going to be seeing a how new slew of Flash based game spam?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums and more blog discussion at Techmeme.

A WebmasterWorld thread shows how a webmaster is sad that his competitor out ranks him. This webmaster is upset because he feels his competitor is outranking him due to the number of complaints his competitor has. Since he has so many complaints, he is getting many links from people pointing to his site, complaining about him. The links are helping the site rank higher and thus get more complaints, which leads to more links.

Here is the webmaster's complaint:

One of my competitors has apparently scammed lots of people. So webmasters and forum participants post things like "Beware of X Y Z. They took my money and I never heard from them again!" Where X Y Z is a very lucrative keyword. X Y Z's site sucks really bad, and it has practically no value for that keyword, but they are still ranked #2.

In fact, by having those anchors and being ranked so high, they get to scam more people!

Clearly, there can be other factors this webmaster is missing. But there is no doubt, that honest reviews, good or bad, can lead to good quality links. Even if the review is bad, it would be hard for Google to say - hmmm, this is a bad review, I'll rank the site lower. In fact, Google tends to like negative reviews high - or at least, those are the type of sites that get a lot of attention from me.

I wish I had more time to delve into this thread but it does make for a good discussion.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

If you are browsing videos on YouTube and spot affiliate links to Amazon or iTunes under the movie frame, don't be surprised - it is part of Google's new monetization efforts for YouTube.

I wrote about this at Search Engine Land last night. In short, it starts with select publishers - specifically music video labels and can move on to other videos. You can read more about the specifics at The Google Blog. Here is a picture of the current affiliate links:

So far, the forum discussion around this topic is pretty low.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google Maps Guide Tom has given us a summary of the most recent updates the Google Maps team enabled on the Google Maps for Mobile product. Tom created a Google Groups thread detailing each point and they include:

• The Sony Ericsson device memory issues should be addressed really soon.
• Touch screen support coming to LG Vu users soon
• Internal/External GPS issues are being worked on
• Google Maps desktop version data takes several weeks to come down to the mobile version

If you want more details, make sure to check out the Google Groups thread.

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: October 7, 2008"

Googleopoly - With its search share approaching 80% in the US by some measures — and a deal to put paid results on the second largest search engine Yahoo — and expanding into new areas all the time, are we in Googleopoly? If so, can anything slow Google down? And if we are in an era where Google will be dominant for some time, are there strategies search marketers need to keep in mind?

Moderator: Jeffrey K. Rohrs, Vice President, Marketing, ExactTarget

Speakers:

James Grimmelmann, Associate Professor of Law, New York Law School
Shelly Palmer, Managing Director, Advanced Media Ventures Group LLC
Kevin Ryan, CEO and Founder, Motivity Marketing
Jimmy Wales, Founder, Wikia Search

When you think of Google, who do you think of?
Jeff Rohrs talks about the exposure of Google and its reach. He asks if you're afraid that Google is too ubiquitous. He asks if you think of Google as Sergey/Larry or if you think of Google as the Borg and something that will assimilate you and take over. Is Google a monopoly or not?

Jeff: When does antitrust law come into play?
James: It's the opposite of competition of undercutting each other. Monopolists raise their costs sky high. It's not illegal to have a monopoly but you can't do unfair things to get one and once you have one, you can't exploit them unfairly. It's illegal if you have a monopoly to drive competitors out of business.

Jeff: Google is not one thing. It is many many things. There's organic and paid sides of the house. As someone who runs SES and SMX, are you hearing concerns about advertisers worrying about this growth of Google?
Kevin: When you look at search traffic, every service uses a site of measuring. Advertisers are concerned obviously because they are not liking this Google/Yahoo partnership. The details of this partnership were intentionally vague so that you couldn't understand it. Someone from the DOJ isn't going to know. The rest of the world doesn't know what they don't know. As a general rule, people don't know that having one source of information and being restricted to this is a bad thing.
Jeff: In organic search share, Google's growth is huge in many countries.
Chris: We're going to see competitive responses. I was at SMX China last week and of all companies and all places, Microsoft revealed a new suite of tools for advertisers for complete transparency for bidding process, quality score, and more. I found the transparency remarkable. I think this is going to force Google to open up. Wikia search and so on are pushing the transparency. We're seeing other forces here. Google is not interfering with the competition and it's increasing in a good way.

Jeff shows a few graphs on the dominance of Google on a variety of properties, like maps and video. Does that concern Shelly?
Shelly: We have to think a little bit about this before we decide it's a concern. Google is an ecosystem and it's not likely to go anywhere unless someone forces them to. Google, unchecked, is pretty much unstoppable. All of my clients are really caught in a funny place. Not only is Google a medium but it's a metric. It changes the game. Here, the medium is the metric. I want to look at my Google Analytics to determine how I was as a brand marketer through other media. Google is a metric by which I measure my business. When you talk about things that are crept into the fabric of my business this way, there is a lot of dissent. They sell the currency of intention. They won't stand in your way. Google wants to get you from where you are and where you want to go. They charge you a toll if you click on the non-organic side. But they just need to make you stay. Google is so part of the metric of how you do other media and that's because of its size. That's something you can't unseed culturally. People say to run a campaign and look at Google. Google is a deliverable metric to your client.

Jeff asks Jimmy about Google growth and Wikia Search as a potential competitor.
Jimmy: When I think of Google's monpoly, I want to make a distinction between the search service and the advertiising business. Search doesn't have many network externalities from the end user. If we're all friends on Facebook, however, and I want to switch to another service, it will be hard. This is very different from the advertising marketplace, particularly the intentionality marketplace where the buyers need to go where sellers are and the sellers need to go where buyers are. It's really hard for anyone else to supplant that. I can launch a search engine anThd I'll be thrilled to get 1-2% of the market. To launch an advertising marketplace, it's really much harder.

Jeff: On the paid search discussion, on the advertising side of the house, are there any legal implications for dominance?
James: It depends on what they do with that dominance. You need to think what the substitutes are. The Google/Doubleclick merger was more worrisome than the Google-Yahoo deal because buys on Google/DC. It's hard to see people being clobbered by Google.

Jeff: So let's see who is worried about this partnership. Rather, let's see what it even is.
Kevin: If I've understood the 17,000 documents, it's an exchange of inventory or a handshake to figure out how to monetize together.

Jeff shows a list that has more skeptics than advocates in the Google and Yahoo deal. He also shows the Google-Yahoo advertising agreement fact page. <