December 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: December 31, 2008"

If you're about to take on a prospective SEO client and they start taking the initiative on their search engine optimization (in ways you hadn't even thought of), should you proceed with the client -- especially if you're going to disagree with them (since their initial implementation was probably a measure to cut costs and keep their spend down?)

Probably not. But before you lose the client, make sure to educate them. Show them why you are doing something. Eventually, both you and the client may have a good relationship as goals and objectives are clearly defined.

What about an SEO client whose site is not accessible for you to actually perform the SEO? The other option may be link building, but on-page SEO is still very important. If you can't do that, try creating "microsites" that you actually can SEO.

What would you do?

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

Danny Sullivan writes about the problems about Microsoft search at Search Engine Land, and he explains what they need to do in order to get it together.

Some reasons are that Microsoft's key executives don't care about search. For example, in Danny's experience doing conferences, Microsoft has yet to send a key player such as Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer run the keynote conversation. They simply don't think it's worth it. (On the other hand, other conferences are fair game for these guys.)

Another reason for Microsoft's failure is that they seem to emphasize that they care about search, but they certainly aren't practicing what they appear to preach. Danny points out the following taglines: Google's tagline is "Search, Ads & Apps" and Microsoft's is "Software + Services." Where's search, Microsoft?

A third reason Danny cites is that Microsoft still doesn't get search. At least not the way we see it. He says that Microsoft perceives search as software, and that's not it. Search updates are rolled out on Google on no schedule, but with Microsoft's (cough) bureaucracy, it seems that changes must be done on some sort of schedule.

Danny goes into a lot more detail, explaining that there are executive inconsistencies, lousy advertising, requiring integration of services, and lame distribution deals that are not swaying people away from Google.

All in all, Microsoft in the search market is destined to go down. Or maybe the key players in Microsoft should take a good read at Danny's honest and forthright opinion so that they can make some real changes that can actually improve the perception of Microsoft in the eyes of searchers.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

If you're fat and get offended easily, don't use any service that uses Google AdSense. That's what WebmasterWorld members are spotting -- ads targeting the "fat" people of America. Apparently there's a conception that the holidays may have gotten people overweight. Or perhaps this is a way to ring in your New Year's Resolutions.

But that isn't satisfying publishers who are using Google AdSense. On top of other offensive Google AdSense ads, this isn't faring well for Google.

In reality, though, not every publisher is that disappointed in these ads. Some are considering clicking on the ads because they are looking to lose weight. Others are seeing a fair share of earnings from other clicks. It's certainly not as bad as ads featuring naked people, but it's not necessarily in the best taste for everyone.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Want Google to implement a new feature for Google Mobile? You no longer need to venture to Google Groups to make the request. Simply hop on over to http://productideas.appspot.com/ and submit your product ideas. So far, according to the stats, "805 people have submitted 313 ideas and cast 9,772 votes."

These include:
* "An native iPhone App of Google Reader (include a mini browser), more fast and no problem of reloading page after open a link"
* "Google Talk with multiprotocol capabilities."
* "A "Google Product Ideas" for all google services."
* "i want to be able to see my friends on maps on my phone"

If you have your own suggestions for your mobile device, go to the site and start contributing. You never know!

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

Conduct a search for the child day care site KindyList and you might be presented with a "Did You Mean?" suggestion from Google. The issue is that Google is suggesting you search for Candylist instead, which is far from a child friendly site, it is a pornography site.

Here is a screen shot of me searching for KindList:

Notice the Did You Mean? at the top. When you click on Candylist, you get this search result:

If you click through, you get nudity, pornography and so on.

Yes, Google's "did you mean" results are purely algorithmic, but I agree with the webmaster here. The webmaster complained in a Google Webmaster Help thread saying that this is just not appropriate. I agree. The did you mean algorithm is nice and very useful, but it needs checks for these types of cases. Should the did you mean ever return a X-rate set of results for a non-X-rated originating set of results? I don't think so.

Forum discussion continued at Google Webmaster Help.

Googler, JohnMu, suggested in a Google Webmaster Help thread that they give Google's Lively, Google's failed attempt at a SecondLife virtual world, a shot before it closes down.

Yesterday, John posted a thread announcing an "Informal End Of Year live-chat over at Lively." I missed it, and so did most people. In fact, I don't think it actually worked.

Looking over the thread, it seems like the event really never happened. I did see a chat room URL in there, but I don't see it anymore. So it seems like the Lively event, wasn't too lively. But it was a great idea to give Google's Lively a last whirl.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports that advertisers are having to login twice to the Google AdWords console to gain access. I have confirmed the issue on my Mac running Firefox.

In short, you go to adwords.google.com and type in your username and password. Then you click login and it takes you back to the login screen. You then enter in the information in again and it let's you in. Second time a charm? Nah. It seems to be a cookie bug of some sort.

One user said Google is aware of the issue and recommended the user switch to a different browser. But the user said that Google said it was an Internet Explorer issue, which is not the case.

In any event, member RhinoFish suggested:

go to this url: https://adwords.google.com/select/

And try and login (don't use your password manager if you use one).

If it lets you in the first time, check your password manager (or bookmark) that you've been using and see what the url is that you have been using. if the url above works, rebookmark or edit the url in your password manager.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Over Christmas and the holidays, we reported early signs of a Toolbar PageRank Update. Those reports have now been confirmed by Google's Matt Cutts via Twitter. Matt said about 6 hours ago:

Yes, Google updated our toolbar PageRank values today. Consider this the confirmation.

You can then see other Googler's like JohnMu, "liking this" on Matt's FriendFeed page.

Of course, we have a whole new slew of PageRank update threads and posts now. They include:

• Matt's FriendFeed
• Google Webmaster Help
• DigitalPoint Forums
• WebmasterWorld
• Search Engine Watch Forums

The folks over at the brand new Google Webmaster Help section are happy to see their new forum reach a PageRank of 7, in a matter of just weeks.

So there you have it, as expected, the Toolbar PageRank update has been confirmed.

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: December 30, 2008"

An article at E-Commerce Times talks about a recently-filed lawsuit against Boston.com, a NYTimes company, that is being sued for its linking practices. According to the article, the simple presence of a link has prompted the suit, but from CenterNetworks, the real reason might be apparent: GateHouse, the company suing the Times, is upset because Boston.com is linking to subpages of the site, thereby causing readers to bypass the significant advertising on GateHouse's home page.

(My commentary: If there were no links there at all, GateHouse still wouldn't see traffic to its homepage. Be happy that you got the link!)

In any event, there is some worry if merely linking will require permission in the future. That would be a pretty silly move.

Then again, I worry that the E-Commerce Times article that WebmasterWorld members referred to isn't accurate since every other article I read on the subject matter is about circumventing the advertising.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

At High Rankings Forums, there's a disgruntled individual who has been looking for honest copywriters and hasn't had any luck. All have been deadbeats.

Maybe this individual isn't looking in the right place, given that there are a lot of good copywriters out there that I know. So how do you find them?

* Get a reference before you hire them.
* Buy a cheap writing sample to see what you're getting into.
* Speak with site owners and find out if they have professional writers on staff who can help with content production.
* Copy+paste snippets of text to make sure they're providing original and not plagiarized content.

How do you spot good copywriters?

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forums.

Link building is going to happen whether I like it or not, so I better accept the 949394 emails I get per day. A WebmasterWorld thread asks link builders how they ask for links via email. Some tactics include putting the link up first (and thereby then emailing people -- they often will give the reciprocal link) and keeping the email short and brief and personal.

Ask for the link. Don't demand it.

Offer people you link to something valuable in return. For example, wheel suggests that you say something along the lines of "I've got data your visitors may find interesting" or "Here's a unique coupon code."

Since these are email requests, though, can you be reported to Google for spamming someone else? There's no answer to that -- it depends on the recipient.

I should add from my experience that it's unwise to ask big blogs for links. They might have a high PageRank and is extremely relevant for your purposes, but chances are, old posts won't be updated. (And like I said in sentence #1, we get hundreds of link exchange emails a week. That said, most aren't read anymore.)

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Know everything there is to know about search? You sure about that? Matt McGee is hosting the 2nd annual search quiz and you're invited to challenge me and others.

Last year, I won this cool contest, but this year, well, I won't tell you -- I'll wait for Matt to tell you himself :)

You have till tomorrow evening to play, so be sure to sign up now!

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

A Google Webmaster Help thread has discussion around a webmaster who noticed Google is treating his mobile site as a duplicate site to his main site. This user has his mobile site on a subdomain of m.domain.com, where his main site is on www.domain.com. The issue is that the content is exactly the same on m.domain.com as compared to www.domain.com.

So what can you do to solve the duplicate content issue?

In my opinion, the best way to provide a mobile version of your site is to use CSS. As Phil Payne said in the thread, "code each page once (in valid XHTML Strict) and use CSS to format it for the device." But as Phil explains, Google still promotes the use of "separate mobile sitemaps but also separate mobile sites." Which steers webmasters into an issue of having duplicate content. I agree with Phil, Google should really speak up on this matter.

In short, you can always do user agent detection and force mobile users to m.domain.com, while forcing others to www.domain.com, including GoogleBot (using a 301 redirect). You can also make sure GoogleBot does not index the mobile version by disallowing it in your robots.txt file. JohnMu of Google lists out many duplicate content documents to help webmasters with the issue, plus we have covered duplicate content issues over and over again.

Google's documents:

• Deftly dealing with duplicate content
• Duplicate content due to scrapers
• Demystifying the "duplicate content penalty"
• Duplicate content summit at SMX Advanced
• Google, duplicate content caused by URL parameters, and you

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Google AdWords has a newish (October 2008) feature that some AdWords advertisers have the option of giving a try named Smart Positioning (BETA). I looked back and I don't believe we talked about Smart Positioning (BETA) here, so I thought I find a thread and discuss it now.

WebProWorld has the only discussion on Google's Smart Positioning that I could find and it is not much discussion at all.

What is Smart Positioning? Google says this is a special bidding feature that is designed to get you "more clicks for the same total cost." How does it do that? Google explains:

1. Smart Positioning calculates incremental CPCs to evaluate the effects on cost and clickthrough rate that would be associated with a higher position for your ad.
2. Once our system determines the incremental CPC for putting your ad in a higher position, it compares the incremental CPC to your maximum CPC bid.
3. Your ad is placed in the highest position possible, as long as both the actual CPC for that position and the incremental CPC are less than your maximum CPC bid.

Google provides a few examples on how exactly this plays out. In addition, you can read the FAQ for Smart Positioning in detail, which includes how to turn it on and then how to turn it off.

I saw it on one of my client's account but I personally have not given it a try. Have you?

Forum discussion at WebProWorld.

We have complained time and time again about Google showing inappropriate images , including explicit porn and other nudity in the Google search results. But it has been getting better overall, that is until I spotted a thread at DigitalPoint Forums.

The thread showed a Google Image search for fat beauty returned nude images. But what shocked me is that the stricter I set the image search filter the worse the images got. Let me show you.

With Moderate Search filter on, the first three images are okay. The fifth image gets inappropriate, as do others, after it. Here is a screen capture:

But when I set the image filter to "Strict," the first three images include two nude images! Here is a screen capture:

That is pretty surprising being that the more I don't want nude images, the more likely Google is going to give it to me.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

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

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: December 29, 2008"

Every web page should have a HEAD and BODY tag, but some people, erm, forget them. What happens if your BODY tag or other significant tags are missing? Will search engine spiders ignore the web page?

Both tags are optional. The big issue is more that Googlebot may not know how to distinguish between the HEAD of the page and the BODY of the page if the code snippet is missing.

In general, though, if your page does pass HTML validation, the crawler should have a good idea of how to traverse the page and get the content. And if not, and there are some missing close-tags, some portions of the web page may go unnoticed, but it's not 100% definitive.

A test is ongoing to see how a missing BODY tag will impact the crawlers in the related discussion at WebmasterWorld.

According to MacWorld, a small company has filed suit against Google, Apple, and Microsoft over a patent for document previews, claiming it owned the patent before the three companies utilized the technology. The patent was applied for in 2001. The lawsuit was filed on Wednesday.

Will they prevail against three tremendous and very powerful technology companies? Most are assuming it will be very hard. Others are betting that they'll settle out of court.

My question: hello, guys -- this is not new technology and you had plenty of time to react. Why are you suing these companies now?

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

Additional discussion is at Techmeme.

A Google Webmaster Help thread reports that in some instances, Google will tell you that your Sitemap file is OK, but in reality, it is not.

The issue comes up when on the summary page, Google may report that your Sitemap file is set to an "OK" status. But when you click through to get the detailed report, it will then show that the Sitemap is not OK, but rather has errors.

Googler, JohnMu, said:

It looks like you've stumbled upon a bug or something similar :-).

So, don't just rely on the the summary page, make sure to click through to see any Sitemaps errors.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

A Google Webmaster Help thread has a report that Google's preferred domain setting section in Google Webmaster Tools is not working. When some webmasters click on the "Settings" link on the left hand side, they get a response from Google that says "oops!"

It works for me, personally, and for many others:

But for this webmaster and some others, it is not working.

Susan Moskwa from Google has confirmed the issue and said a fix is underway. She explained that due to the holiday weekend, it might take a few more days to fix than a typical weekend. She said:

Thanks for additional information. Sounds like an error on our end; I'll have the team take a look. FYI a fix may not happen right away since it's the holiday season and many folks are out.

Again, I personally was able to access the settings section and even set a preferred domain for a site, as a test.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

An updated WebmasterWorld thread has new reports of changes at Google.co.uk and Google.com.au.

Senior member internetheaven, who keeps an eye on the Google UK results said:

Google.co.uk is all over the place. The results for one of the more competitive terms here in the UK (and across the world!) have completely changed. All the major financial companies and associations that usually rank at the top have been pushed down in favour of a few smaller companys and the inner financial sections of "related" websites (e.g. the car insurance ad section of a used car sales magazine) -- plus several MFAs to boot!

It is a slow holiday weekend, so there is not yet much response to internetheaven's post, but this member is senior and I trust him. Have you noticed any major changes with big competitive terms?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld has recent discussion about Google Alerts sending out email alerts for irrelevant topics.

The way Google Alerts works is that it allows you to get updated via email and now via RSS to new items found for a particular search query in web results, news, blog, video or groups or all of them. So if you are into reputation management or if you want to track the search results for a particular keyword, you might use Google Alerts to help you stay on top of particular keywords or keyword phrases.

The problem is, sometimes Google Alerts sends out unwanted alerts due to some bug. The unwanted results can happen due to many reasons including a bug in Google or a spammer sending junk into Google and triggering these alerts.

First reports of this new Google Alert issue started on December 27th, the member said:

Alerts are coming in more frequently for one of our sites BUT there is no relevant content on any of the indicated sites I've look at. On some small sites I've checked all visible pages.

Several other members have complained about this as well. I might think some of this is due to the blog link command issue, which isn't just about links. But overall, that has gotten better, in my opinion. Maybe this is due to something else? I am not sure.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: December 26, 2008"

Happy Holidays from the Search Engine Roundtable. I go through the various holiday logos, talk about how Googler's are working on Christmas, how they paid publishers early and how some earned less over the past holiday. In addition, I discuss a comment Matt Cutts left on how bounce rates have no impact on rankings. I then go through a list of things Google won't do, a myth thing. I mentioned a possible Google PageRank update. Google is working through the blog link command issue. Google added search by style options. I mocked newbies, well - not really. Finally, I thank you all for reading and participating in our five years of writing at the Search Engine Roundtable. Thank you and have a Happy Holidays!

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:

• Happy Holiday '08 From The Search Engine Industry
• Googlers Working on Christmas in 2008
• Google & Yahoo Pay Publishers Early for Holiday Season
• How'd You Do With Google AdSense this Holiday?
• Google Says, Bounce Rates For Search Rankings "Spammable" & "Noisy"
• Google's Search Quality Team Says They Don't...
• Christmas & Holiday 2008 Google PageRank Update?
• Google Blog Search Fixes Link Issue But Asks For Additional Help
• Google Image Search Enhancement: Search By Style
• Letting of Newbie SEO Steam at Google Webmaster Help Groups
• Search Engine Roundtable Is Five Years Old - December 2nd

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

Happy holidays! Some of you are still celebrating and that's quite all right - enjoy the 4-5 day weekend while you can! But you've missed some happenings and we're ready to serve!

Holidays, holidays, holidays
Yesterday, people celebrated Christmas. Google anticipated the holiday for 5 days with a unique logo but we've also done some cool stuff over here at Search Engine Roundtable. Have you seen it yet?

And while we alluded to that 5 day weekend, not everyone at Google was celebrating. JohnMu visited the forums on Christmas like one helluva dedicated guy. :)

Finally, you might have gotten your Google AdSense or Yahoo publishing network checks early this year, but don't expect to have earned a lot yesterday. It was a pretty slow holiday week.

Google: Probably Not Accounting for Bounce Rate in the Algo
Matt Cutts semi-confirmed that the Google search team is probably not accounting for bounce rates because they are spammable and noisy. He suggests that the Google Analytics guys care a lot more about bounce rates than the Search Quality Team.

Other things the Google Search Quality Team Doesn't Do
People don't like what Google does but they really don't necessarily know what Google does or doesn't do. JohnMu confirms what Google doesn't do which includes Google crawling differently on sites they don't agree with, large companies being able to influence how Google crawls their websites, that crawlers can damage sites, and that Google will react to spam reports when a website is clearly not in violation of any rules. Seriously -- for at least the first three of these, it's a little outrageous to put the blame on Google.

Google Toolbar PageRank Update, Perhaps
Numerous webmasters reported a Google PageRank update. Have you noticed anything?

Google Fixing Blogroll Links in Blog Search
While I'm still encountering issues with inaccurate Google Alerts due to blogroll links showing up in Google Blog Search, Google's team is acknowledging that they're fixing it. I hope so!

Google Image Search Enhancement: Cool
If you haven't noticed yet, you can now search by style in Google Image Search. That means you can distinguish line art from photographs and faces and more. Whee!

Let's Make Fun of SEO Newbies
There's a Google Webmaster Help thread that pokes fun at SEO newbies. Hey guys, I bet you were all n00bs once!

Happy Birthday to Us
Search Engine Roundtable is 5 years old and Barry has celebrated the year by writing a "year in review" post. Whoooooooooosh!

Since there's a huge war on paid links, is it true that you should avoid link buying at all costs? That means even using sites like press-release distributor service PRWeb.

Perhaps -- but PRWeb's goals are obviously not in the link building sphere. The goal for PRWeb is promotion of a particular service or website, not for link building. It's uncertain how Google handles links that are generated through PRWeb.

Randy says an important piece of advice for how you should handle this in general:

Truth be known, all link building should be approached from a Promotions/Advertising/Marketing mindset, not an SEO one. Get links that will stand a chance of bringing you real traffic from real qualified people visiting your site.

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.

Update by Barry: See an older thread on this topic at Search Engine Roundtable Forums where Matt Cutts basically said links from PRweb releases no good.

Do people really use the Internet during the holiday season? According to the activity on Twitter yesterday, perhaps they actually do. But elsewhere on the 'net, that may not necessarily be the case. Publishers report that they get the lowest earnings during the holiday time, for the most part.

Of course, like any industry, there are always anomalies. A few publishers, but hardly the majority, report that the performance has been pretty good.

I guess I'm not too surprised.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Like last year and the year before that, this year, we have Googlers responding to questions in the help forums.

Googler, JohnMu, like last year, came in and responded to at least one thread, likely more. In a Google Webmaster Help thread John tried to help a webmaster deal with temporary down time. He gave the following advice:

Instead of returning a default website when an error occurs, it's much better to let us know that it's a temporary issue (result code 503). That way, we'll know not to look at the content and to try again later.

In addition, Matt Cutts also joined in on a Merry Xmas thread, late last night saying, "luzie, thanks for the welcome. :)"

There were plenty of other Googlers, and likely other search reps at other companies working or participating in company events, on Christmas. I just wanted to document a few.

I found a DigitalPoint Forums thread that was pretty funny. In short, they mentioned how www.yourdomain.com has a PageRank score of seven. It is true, the parked domain, www.yourdomain.com does have a PageRank score of seven.

It is a very valuable domain, not just for its toolbar PageRank. I mean, everyone uses it as an example of talking about where to place your domain. Can the owner better monetize it? I am not a domainer, so I don't know.

But it is funny to see domains with little on them be worth so much, possibly accidently?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

I just wanted to wish everyone a warm and happy holidays! Every year I try to echo the same message about our industry. From the search engines, the search marketing firms and the search community, this industry is truly a pleasure to be working in. The warmth and care I have personally experienced in the industry is very meaningful to me. So thank you and have a wonderful holidays!

As it is tradition at the Search Engine Roundtable, we have for the past five years, documented the holiday logos from the search engines and search industry. Here they are:

Google has five logos, here they are in order:

Yahoo's animated logo:

Live.com's holiday theme:

DogPile has a Christmas and Chanukah theme:

Ask.com has a nice theme:

AOL.com's logo is actually animated also:

Baidu:

FriendFeed has a logo:

Quintura's logo:

BruceClay has two logos:

Hitwise dresses up their logo:

Marketing Pilgrim is colorful:

PPC Heros is ready:

Cre8asite Forums:

Search Engine Roundtable, that is us, we have a new theme every day. Here are the ones you have seen, including Chanukah, Festivus and Christmas - but we got more to come!

That is the logo roundup, hope I did not miss anyone.

Want to go back to the past years? Here are the 2007 logos, plus Google's five logos, 2006 logos, Cre8asite in 2005, also '05 Search Engine Roundtable and '05 Google, Yahoo and Ask, plus we have 2004 and some of 2003 archived for you.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help, Google Docs Help, WebmasterWorld, HighRankings Forums, WebmasterWorld, and Cre8asite 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: Decmeber 24, 2008"

We recently covered a comment from Googler JohnMu on if click data is used in Google for ranking purposes. Of course, John gave the typical Google response.

But now we have a comment from Matt Cutts of Google at a Sphinn thread, where it appears that Matt has completely denied the rumors that Google may be using click data (aka bounce rate) to rank web pages.

Matt said:

Without reading the article, I'll just say that bounce rates would be not only spammable but noisy. A search industry person recently sent me some questions about how bounce rate is done at Google and I was like "Dude, I have no idea about any things like bounce rate. Why don't you talk to this nice Google Analytics evangelist who knows about things like bounce rate?" I just don't even run into people talking about this in my day-to-day life.

So this seems to me that Google seems not to take into account people clicking from Google's search results to a web page and then clicking on the back button. This is the strongest statement on the topic I have seen from a Googler to this date.

I also recommend checking out HuoMah.com and see his analysis about all of this.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Over the past few weeks, there have been a number of bugs reported within Google Docs. Some of these have been fixed and others are still pending. Here's the lowdown of what we've found in the forums:

* A Google Employee says in a Google Groups thread that the bug that made folders visible on the left hand side of the Google Docs pane has been fixed.

* There's still an open bug (but Google is aware of it) with regards to some spreadsheets not being viewable. The error encountered is "Sorry we are experiencing technical difficulties and cannot show all of your documents." (Google Groups).

* Related to the report above, some users cannot see any of their documents with the same error. Google is also aware of this. (Google Groups)

* When Google Docs documents are being emailed, some senders choose to CC themselves to confirm receipt. However, Gmail automatically assumes that these are spam. The Google Docs team is aware of this as well. (Google Groups)

* Google is also aware that some people can only see the first 50 folders and they are working on a fix (Google Groups)

If you're affected by any of these issues, please go to the forum discussion referred to in the bullet point for more information and related discussion.

Both Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher Network publishers are reporting getting payment early this month. Some suspect it is due to being closed during the normal pay period, due to the holidays. Some suspect Google and Yahoo are being nice for the holiday season. Some suspect it might have to do with making sure payment goes out before the end of their fiscal years (due they even go by the calendar year?).

We have a Google AdSense related thread at WebmasterWorld where many have reported already receiving the money in their bank accounts. We also have a Yahoo Publisher Network related thread at DigitalPoint Forums.

For whatever reason the payments are going out now, many publishers are finding it to be a nice holiday gift.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

I see them every day, the newbie SEO post. Almost every SEO goes through it at one point. They ask a newbie question and people in the industry are nice enough to answer it. Some mock others, but overwhelming, the community responds in good kind.

I spotted a thread at the Google Webmaster Help discussion forum, where long time members are letting off steam. In short, one member writes this long post mocking, with extreme sarcasm, some of the posts he typically sees in the forum. Of course he put in a lot of exaggeration into his post, which makes it incredibly funny.

Here is a brief snippet of just part of his post, where he asks like a person seeking Google webmaster help:

My friend, who's cousin Nora, once went out with someone who's brother built the stand at Seomoz said he heard someone saying that they oveheard someone else saying that Mattt Cutts said Google are going to stop indexing websites with less than 20 pages, is this true?

A while back, I installed the seo for lemons plug in on my blog, which might have helped, so I also added the seo made ez tool, the get google by the balls widget, the mega meta tag generator and the google number one blaster. The only hitch is that my home page now has 5 titles, 10 description tags, 7128 keywords, 233 h1 tags and 300 outbound links to the tool makers sites. This was so heavy, I had to remove all the actual content, do you think this will matter?

It goes on and on and it pretty funny if you are an active forum goer. It might insult some people, but I assume these folks who reply to twenty questions per day just need to let off some steam some time.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Senior WebmasterWorld member, Wheel, posted a WebmasterWorld thread explaining how now, the holiday season, is a great time to get quality links. How should you go about it?

Well, people love to give now. It is really the season of giving. So what Wheel did was give his industry niche a tip on how to get a solid free link for their sites. The people in his industry were so happy, they wanted to give back, something in return.

So he politely suggested that they can give him a link to his site, as a thank you. And many of these folks did. So he got several quality, targeted, related, one-way links to his site, for giving advice.

It is true, giving free advice gets links. We do it here several times per day and we get tons of links. So, let's see if it works. If you are happy with what we have done over the past five years, feel free to link to our 5 year birthday post with a thank you.

Happy Holidays!

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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

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

I totally forgot to write a special article for this site's fifth birthday, which took place on December 2, 2008. We have been writing here for five years! We have written over 9,000 articles, and over 2,300 just this year alone. That makes for over 8 articles per work day this past year and just about seven articles per work day over the course of these past five years. I could not have done it with out our contributors and a special thank you to Tamar Weinberg. This article will be my 6,270th piece at the Search Engine Roundtable - hard to believe. But it is not all about the numbers.

This year we were voted the top SEO blog and also the top conference coverage in the industry. A huge honor, which means a ton to me. I also started doing a weekly SEO video podcast, which I am pretty committed to and gets a nice number of subscribers. Yes, that also takes a lot of time, but I am enjoying it right now - so I will keep it up. Oh and I experienced waiting in line for the iPhone, the night before it went on sale - something I likely would not have done, if I wasn't blogging for five years.

I thought instead of sharing the most visited articles written here over the past year, I thought I go through each post and pull out the most important ones, at least to me. Below, you will find these posts grouped as logically as possible. For me, it helped me look back at the year in search and see what really happened and how significant each change was.

So continue reading below by clicking through:

Continue reading "Search Engine Roundtable Is Five Years Old - December 2nd"

On December 17, we announced Google's plans to push out a data refresh for the Sandbox due to some issues and bugs that users have been encountering.

The initial Sandbox refresh was scheduled for December 19th. Apparently, though, Google has announced that the Sandbox update has been postponed for about 2 weeks. No further information is available.

Update 12/30: According to the Google Groups thread, the update occurred on 12/29.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

A WebmasterWorld member is disappointed that he as a Google AdWords advertiser is unable to bid with any reasonable price on any ads because corporations, as he sees it, are greedy and are raising bid prices. He is frustrated that these corporations are not interested in lowering their bids to a profitable level and thus his ads are not appearing given that some big company is driving up the costs.

But is that really what's happening? Perhaps there are corporations that don't care to lower their bid costs, just like the guy says. But perhaps there are corporations that fired their Google AdWords consultants or Internet Marketing type people and they simply forgot to regularly review the Google AdWords accounts. That means there are hundreds of thousands of wasted dollars on ads because the companies are not evolving with the times. That's more likely in this scenario.

What do you think?

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A couple weeks ago, we ran a poll asking SEOs and link builders where they would prefer their external links show up on a page. Well, the results are in and as expected, most SEOs would like that link in the first paragraph of content on a page.

Here is a breakdown of the hundred or so responses:
:: In First Paragraph of Context said 62 respondents or 63.27%
:: Link On All Pages said 8 respondents or 8.16%
:: Menu said 8 respondents or 8.16%
:: On 5 - 10 Pages said 8 respondents or 8.16%
:: In Last Paragraph of Context said 7 respondents or 7.14%
:: On Links Page said 2 respondents or 2.04%
:: Footer said 1 respondents or 1.02%

Then we had two "other" responses, one saying "any link" at all is great and the other said "content of page."

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

No one likes it when they get malware on their computers due to an infected site. So that is why Google tries to warn searchers when a site may have malware on it. But Google tries to be as specific as possible, when it comes to malware warnings.

In fact, when possible, Google will report malware issues on subdomains or subfolders only and leave the root domain alone. JohnMu of Google said in a Google Webmaster Help discussion thread:

We try to keep malware labels as specific as possible based on our data. If we can see that it's limited to a specific subdomain, we'll do that. If we can recognize that it's limited to a specific subdirectory, even better. The general problem is that it's often not trivial to find the most specific part of a site that is affected by malware - and with CMSs as they are there's often no clear folder-type structure that we can work with.

That is why a specific blogspot.com blog can be reported as having malware, whereas the main domain will be safe.

Safe Browsing Diagnostic page for blogspot.com

What is the current listing status for blogspot.com?
This site is not currently listed as suspicious.

Part of this site was listed for suspicious activity 227 time(s) over the past 90 days.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

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: December 22, 2008"

Search Engine Land has a new look as of this morning. The new look really makes the site look more "news" oriented. Stories are no longer in chronological order all the time. We (I am the news editor) have the ability to control which sections the content shows up and for how long. This is great flexibility that Danny, Greg, Matt and the rest of the team will use.

In addition, my favorite feature is that readers can comment directly at Search Engine Land. This way, if you hate what I wrote, you can blast me right there. Instead of having to submit the story to Sphinn, or sending me hate mail. This should make for good times.

There is also a new premium membership, which I recommend you sign up for. You get a lot in return and it is your way at giving back to the community. I personally do this at many sites, including WebmasterWorld and SEOmoz, amongst others.

Huge kudos to the team who worked for months and months to get the new design, features and format live. It totally is impressive and makes me want to redo the Search Engine Roundtable - which would mean scrap Movable Type for a custom built CMS (I will never go with WordPress).

Anyway, I hope you like the new features - I sure do!

Forum discussion on the new design and features at Sphinn.

Last night, those of us who celebrated Chanukah lit the first candle. This means it's holiday season officially! Google is also building momentum with their holiday festivities with two new images:

And given that there are 8 days of Chanukah, we're doing something special at Search Engine Roundtable. Every night around the time the Daily Search Rountup comes out, we'll have a new theme. Here's our first logo which is live until later this afternoon:

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums and Cre8asite Forums.

The Official Google Blog announced on Friday that a new option is available for searchers: the ability to search for images by a specific style. For example, line art is obviously not the same as a photograph -- and now Google can distinguish this for you.

Here's a screenshot. Click for a larger size:

As you can tell, you can now drill down to news content, faces, clip art, line art, and photo content.

I like. Do you?

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

On Friday, a number of Google AdSense publishers reported that AdSense was down. The cause was unknown and Google officially never actually volunteered more information about it.

Google AdWordsAdvisor was able to provide the publishers with information -- mostly ensuring them that Google was prioritizing the issue -- but there is no further information on behalf of Google's actual AdSense team.

AdWordsAdvisor does say, though, on a completely side point, that "In the AdWords side of the world, though, the stats that advertisers see in their account are delayed by up to three hours as a matter of course, under normal circumstances." We're not entirely sure how this factors into reporting on Google AdSense's side, but this is interesting information regardless.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

In response to an upset webmaster's post in the Google Webmaster Help forums, Googler JohnMu wrote down four things that some people suspect Google of doing, which he says he has never seen since working at Google. These include:

1. Googlers changing crawling, indexing or ranking of content they don't agree with. As a data point, check the search results for http://www.google.com/search?q=jew as well as the explanation at http://www.google.com/explanation.html.
2. Large companies being able to encourage Google to change crawling, indexing or ranking of a site they don't like. Yes, they contact us, but no, they don't get any results.
3. A site being damaged with regards to crawling, indexing or ranking, by someone else on the outside. I've seen sites run into troubles for getting hacked, but I've never seen them run into trouble because of something someone other than the owner did outside of the site.
4. A spam report being taken seriously if the site itself was abiding our Webmaster Guidelines. 42,000 spam reports wouldn't change a thing, regardless of who filed them, if the site is compliant.

Do I believe John here? Yes, 100%. Do I think Google has ever done any of these without John knowing about it? I think it is possible. To be fair, John does add:

Obviously, any of these things could theoretically happen, but I haven't seen it happen, and I don't believe it's something a webmaster has to worry about. If it ever became obvious to Googlers that one of these things happened, it would be resolved immediately -- so if you feel that it has happened, please take the time to submit a spamreport with the details. We take these reports very seriously.

Do you think Google is 100% honest about these topics?

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Google recently optimized for the hundredth time, the Google Search experience on the iPhone and also Android. But it seems like ever since the upgrade, many iPhone and iPod Touch users are having issues searching at Google on mobile Safari.

A Google Mobile Help discussion thread has bug reports from several iPhone/iPod Touch users complaining they can no longer conduct searches in Safari on Google.

Rebooting the devices did not help.. Supposedly, some users have noticed a JavaScript bug on line 21. The error is "TypeError: undefined value".

I tried this on my iPhone and it worked fine for me. So hopefully it is now fixed.

Forum discussion at Google Mobile Help.

Over the weekend, I have noticed several threads mentioning updates to Google's Toolbar PageRank scores. The reports are not as widespread as a typical Toolbar PageRank update warrants, which leads me to ask, is this a true Toolbar PageRank update or did Google conduct a Toolbar PageRank penalty for sites not playing nice with their terms of service?

Necessary Disclaimer: Google Toolbar PageRank is a visual indicator that has no direct impact on ranking well at Google. The Toolbar PageRank is often months outdated and can be very confusing to new SEOs on how it matters. So just be warned.

We have threads at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums and Google Webmaster Help all discussing updates to Toolbar PageRank.

Our last coverage of such an update was in the first week of October, which was a possible rollback of the Google Rosh Hashanah 5769 PageRank Update. Since then, it has been pretty quiet on the Toolbar PageRank front.

Last week, Google did update the link reports in Google Webmaster Tools.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums and Google Webmaster Help.

In early November, I reported an issue with Google Blog Search scanning blogrolls, which was then confirmed later on. The confirmation told us that Google would fix the issue, where Google Blog Search would continue to index and use more than just what RSS feed, but would try to exclude blogrolls and navigational elements of the blog.

The issue was, if you conducted a link command in blog search, such as link:www.seroundtable.com (which I do all the time to find new posts commenting on posts I write here), Google Blog Search started to show blog posts not mentioning your posts. Why? Cause many blogs out there have this blog on their blogroll and Google considered that post to have a link within their post, but all it was, was a link in the Blogroll.

Since then, Google Blog Search has really made big improvements in this area. I have witnessed it first hand. But it is not perfect and Google knows that. Google is asking for examples of issues with the link command in Blog Search in the Google Groups area. So if you see issues, go to Google Groups and let Google know.

What has Google changed specifically? Jeremy Hylton of Google Blogsearch said:

The basic approach is to analyze each blog to look for text and markup that is common to all of the posts. Usually, these comment elements include the blogroll, any navigational elements, and other parts of the page that aren't part of the post. This approach works well for a lot of blogs, but we're continuing to improve the algorithm. The search results should ignore matches that only come from these common elements. The indexing change to implement it is deployed almost everywhere now.

How is that for transparency?

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

As the year rounds out, the search news gets a little more lax, but we still have plenty to talk about. I started off talking about how the white hats and black hats in the industry are seeing more eye to eye, of course, excluding those that hack sites. Live Search updated this week. Google is testing pagelinks, reviews, enhanced spelling and ads in search suggestions. How do Google data points work in the search results? And why do some Sitelinks get cut off? YouTube videos are now in Google Maps. Yahoo wil drop log data after 90 days. Google released AdWords Editor 7.0, with some bugs. Relevancy in AdSense is leading to offensive ads, while Google sends out offensive holiday cards? Cuil is allegedly doing comment spam but they deny it. SEOs say the ALT attribute improves search rankings.

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:

• Are SEO Blackhats Turning White or Is The Industry Melting?
• Live Search December 2008 Holiday Update?
• Google Tests Pagelinks, Reviews in SERPs, and Enhances Spelling Correction
• Ads to be Integrated into Google Search Suggestions
• Google's Post Count: Not Too Accurate
• Google Sitelinks Being Cut Off?
• YouTube Finally Makes Its Way to Google Maps
• Yahoo to Retain 90 Days of Search History
• Google Quietly Released AdWords Editor 7.0
• Google's AdWords Editor 7.0 Has Automated Backup Bug
• Offensive Google AdSense Ads Showing Up On Publisher Sites
• Google AdSense Sending Out Scary Christmas E-Cards?
• Cuil Says it's Not Cool to Comment Spam
• Poll: SEOs Say Alt Attribute Does Improve Search Rankings

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: December 19, 2008"

It's almost the holidays! PARTAY! But until then, I have a recap for ya without any special frills. This week, we have some reports from SES Chicago, some news from Google, Yahoo's 90 day data retention policy, and then some. Keep reading for more.

Blackhats = Whitehats
After SES Chicago last week, Doug Heil is starting to see more like a black hat (or so he's changed his vision from 4 years ago when he may have thought differently about buying paid organic links). Today, he calls that paid advertising. He also considers some very well known blackhats in this industry "whitehat." Are the lines blurring? Maybe with the big players, we suspect, but there are definitely other blackhats out there who will practice until they realize that their strategies are not going to last.

Microsoft Live Search Update
There's really nothing to see here, but there was a Live search update that let a lot of spam on the top of the SERPs. This is why Microsoft isn't really getting that search share it wants, I suppose.

Google's Enhancements
Google will soon be sporting page enhancements, such a pagelinks (contrary to sitelinks, they link to your internal anchor text on one single page), reviews, and spelling correction (misspelled options plus the rightly-spelled option). Perhaps more worrisome is the fact that Google wants to add ads to Search Suggest. Ugh.

On the other hand, we're still wondering about the post counts we see in the SERPs and how inaccurate they seem. JohnMu, we're counting on you to help us figure this out.

Finally, some sitelink URLs are cut off and some people want to know why. In these particular instances, it seems to be related to a period in anchor text (or title tag). Apparently Google thinks that's the end of a sentence even though it refers to ASP.NET or VB.NET. Whoops.

Watch Your Videos on Google Maps
Cool stuff for videophiles: find more about a specific geographic region using Google Maps now via YouTube. You can now get a lot more information about a specific region with Google Maps's integration of YouTube. Search for something famous and look at what Google/YouTube offer you. Cool stuff.

[On a separate note, yesterday I realized that YouTube gets way too much attention and Google property GrandCentral is languishing. How about Google think about these other awesome properties that really can have potential? Or maybe Google can let someone who wants to invest their time in the property take the reigns on it instead. Please?]

Yahoo's 90 Day Data Retention Plan
Yahoo has decided to retain data for 90 days which is way shorter than other search engines. This will put pressure on Google, perhaps, but I don't think people will switch to any specific search engine for a data retention reason. Surprisingly, nobody is buzzing about it like they were last year.

Google AdWords Editor 7.0
Google took advantage of a holiday month to release AdWords Editor 7.0 but it doesn't come without bugs. That might be why nobody is really talking about the new release -- 6.5's release was announced, a lot of people downloaded it, and it was also laden with major bugs.

Google AdSense Not Faring Well Lately
There are two negative reports about Google AdSense lately. The first is that Google AdSense is targeting the wrong ads to sites -- including children's sites -- and people are pulling out of the program. The second is that the Google AdSense team is supposedly sending out holiday cards that look no more fishy than spam. Nobody wants to even come close to the emails. I'm not sure what's happening there but Google's desire not to embrace publishers because they appear to need money is starting to upset people a lot.

Cuil is Not Comment Spamming
Cuil says that they are not spamming your blog comments but some people believe that they may have hired someone to do their dirty work. In fact, why would anyone go such lengths to make the search engine look so bad (unless, of course, they WERE hired?) I don't know, but something smells fishy.

Does the ALT Attribute Improve Search Rankings? YES
We polled you and you said that the ALT attribute improves rankings. Well, 20% of you didn't agree with that, but the rest of you did. I'd love to know if either side has empirical evidence for backup.

That's all. So much for holiday cheer this week. Maybe next week. :)

Michael Gray has written a great piece at Search Engine Land on how stories promoted in a social media site have actually translated to higher rankings. He takes a bunch of unpopular domains (e.g. not Forbes, Jalopnik, or other known car sites) and shows how their rankings have improved after the particular stories have been submitted to a site like Digg. Then he looks at the keyword rankings for each of these stories. It becomes obvious that social media is an alternative to link building but that it's imperative to use your keywords that you want for ranking in the Digg submission.

Of course, there are links to be gained, but there's obviously a lot more -- direct sales, awareness, and then some.

So why is it that you haven't tried social media marketing yet?

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

If you get a really high ranking on Google, should you see less traffic? A WebmasterWorld user says that he's getting much higher rankings than before (increases to the first page from page 11) and he's still not getting a traffic boost ("I'm now getting traffic from hundreds more great keyphrases -- but the total traffic at the end of the day is the same as it has been for the past three months.") The thought is that Google is not giving him that boost (but why?)

Some say that this is because even great rankings for very popular keywords do not necessarily bring great traffic. The user argues that his popular keywords ARE bringing him traffic (and they are GREAT keywords), but he's still not sure. The suspicion lies in a correlation between Google AdWords and organic results, but there's absolutely no relationship between the two.

It's still an open ended question. My thought would be to have a good look at analytics and compare the before-after results of the rankings change.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

The Searchlight Digital blog has a detailed analysis of three weeks of Sphinn frontpage success. The analysis takes a look at the top contributor and the categories in which the stories became popular.

From looking at that data, the conclusion (besides being a power user) is obvious:

If you want to kick ass on Sphinn, there are specific topics you should be writing on, namely SEO, social media and Google.

Well, that may be true, but the Sphinn discussion says that the other sections (e.g. Usability) have less submissions overall so there's a higher percent change that the usability stories will frontpage versus a SEO submission (among submissions in the same category). At the same time, those topics don't have submissions in them because there's a lot less interest compared to more general topics.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

A few weeks ago I ran a poll asking does the alt tag improve rankings in search engines. We have now received over a hundred responses from our readers, who I assume are mostly SEOs.

About 80% said, yes, using an alternative attribute on images does indeed help improve rankings. While about 20% said it does not.

Here is the breakdown:
:: Alt Tag improves rankings said 86 respondents or 79.63%
:: Alt Tag does NOT improve rankings said 22 respondents or 20.37%

With most these polls, sometimes people look too much into the question. I am surprised about 20% said no.

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

John Honeck asked in a Google Webmaster Help thread how much more valuable is a number one ranking in Google, when compared to the likes of Yahoo.

He asked it in the form of, "Is being #1 in yahoo as good as being #50 in Google? #100, or?" But let me place a poll below and ask you it in a different format.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

So, we all know Google AdSense is cutting off holiday gifts this year. There were many insulted publishers. So, I figured Google would at least send out e-cards before the holidays. And some are now receiving these e-cards.

But those receiving the e-cards are afraid they are sent by spammers. In fact, one AdSense publisher said, "it looks like spam, what are they thinking?" Another said that he will "just delete instead of download" the email. Here is what the email said, and it came from the Google Sydney team:

Dear {this bit was blank},

You have just received a message from Google AdSense Team at Visual Jazz.

To view your message, please visit the following address: {redacted, but the domain included a subdomain 'marketing' and a domain appropriate to the company name above, followed by a long alphanumeric pagename}

To unsubscribe, reply to this email and change the subject to be: unsubscribe

E-cards can be done very nicely or they can be done not so nicely. It is sad to see the beloved Google getting so much bad karma towards them over the holiday season.

I did receive an e-card from a good PR person at Yahoo, it looked like this and led to here.

Hope to hear more happy news next week.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Google Webmaster Help thread asks, can Google read links in Flash files or JavaScript? The simple answer is yes, they can. But it is not that simple.

Some people want to know the answer to this question because they want to know if their content will be indexed or not. Some want the links in those files to be found, while some don't. In fact, years ago, if you did not want a search engine to crawl a link, typically a duplicate content page, you would use JavaScript. Now, you are no longer safe, you must nofollow the link or noindex those duplicate pages or take other action.

The thing is, Google won't always crawl links in JavaScript or Flash either. So if you want your links to be found, be safe and put them in standard html format. But if you don't want your links to be found, putting them in JavaScript or Flash won't guarantee that.

Top contributor, Webado said:

1) don't rely on discovery of text and links in flash or javascript - ensure proper html content and navigation are available as well.

2) don't rely on Google NOT discovering text and links in flash or javascript either if you don't want them to. Ensure robots are clearly disallowed from all such content, otherwise they can be really nosy :)

JohnMu of Google confirmed that post.

As you can see, in this case, your damned if you do and damned if you don't.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

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: December 18, 2008"

Yesterday, the blogsophere was abuzz with news that Yahoo will be retaining data for 90 days. At Search Engine Land, Barry explains that "[t]he data policy is not just inclusive of their search data but also their page views, page clicks, ad views and ad clicks."

The industry has been pretty quiet about anonymizing data since June 2007. But this new announcement, which shortens the length of data retention by more than a year compared to other engines, is a bit eye-opening. It's also perceived as a great move on behalf of Yahoo and one that will put pressure on Google to do the same thing.

Well, it's a great move on behalf of Yahoo if they actually remove all query information after 3 months (and not just IP information). After all, I can't help but think about Thelma Arnold who was identified by her search behavior and not her actual IP location.

What, then, is Yahoo retaining after 90 days and what is Yahoo scrapping? We don't know. Do you?

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld. More blog discussion is on Techmeme.

If you're hosting your blog on wordpress.com and are embedding video in your blog post, don't expect for it to show up in Google Reader.

That's what Google employees confirm in a Google Groups thread. According to Mihai, a Google rep, there's a whitelist that sites need to be added to in order for their embedded videos to actually play within Google Reader.

So in case you were wondering, apparently you need to request to be whitelisted. The policy isn't exactly clear on how you get your site added to the whitelist, nor is it indicated whether this whitelist is publicly accessible. I suppose that just means that you need to be on top of Google Groups (for now) in order for Google to consider your site whitelisted.

(Surely, there's got to be a better way...)

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

Is Cuil, the new search engine that seems to have lost momentum, trying to bring brand awareness back to the forefront by adding spam comments to blogs? That's what I'd say -- after all, they spammed my blog:

And that's also what forum members have caught. A Sphinn submission points to a blog post where it's obvious that I'm not the only one who was a victim of the Cuil spam. Even WebmasterWorld forum members are a bit shocked.

On my flickr screenshot (click the image above for the link), Brad from Cuil writes the following:

Hey Tamar, it actually isn't us (Cuil) posting the spam. We are as against spamming as you. We'll be doing a blog post later today to clear things up.

And just as promised, the Cuil team has written a blog post to publicly inform the community that it's not them either.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and Sphinn.

I found a fun but serious SEO mistake in a Google Webmaster Help thread that I wanted to share with you all. But I felt it would be fun, if you had the time, to share at least one of your funny, but deadly, SEO mistakes - that you have seen first hand, in the comment section below.

The mistake documented in the thread was that someone was not sure why his Webmaster Tools account was showing the status of "network unreachable" for many of his URLs. JohnMu from Google looked into the issue to explain that although you and I (ordinary users) can see those URLs, for some reason, GoogleBot was being shown a 500 error page. The way John was able to reproduce that was by simply changing his browser's useragent to the same useragent GoogleBot uses, "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)". Then he surfed to the page to be presented with the 500 error.

This is a deadly but sad mistake. Normally people will go out of their way to serve up better optimized pages for GoogleBot. But to serve up error pages to GoogleBot, while serving up your beautiful content only to your users - well, that is kinda anti-SEO. This webmaster's issue had to do with a problem with ASP.net's URL rewriting system he was using and how he set it up.

Your turn, share a quick story below of a funny SEO mistake you have seen.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Yesterday, we reported that Google Quietly Released AdWords Editor 7.0. We thought they did it quietly for a reason, but it turned out - they blogged about it soon after and people began installing it. I was hoping they wouldn't announce it fully until they worked out the kinks.

Now I see a post from AdWordsAdvisor in that WebmasterWorld thread announcing a bug with the automated backup feature. Let me quote you:

We've discovered an issue with the automatic backup feature in version 7.0 (the 'Backup then Update' option in the upgrade prompt). If you have unposted changes and comments, and you haven't yet installed the new version, please back up your changes by exporting an archive before upgrading. You can see detailed instructions for manual backup, as well as what to do if you've already installed version 7.0, in the Help Center: http://www.google.com/support/adwordseditor/bin/answer.py?answer=134497

So, if you downloaded it, be careful and read the quote above.

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

It has been a while since I posted a link update post, based on Google updating their webmaster tools report. One of the reasons for this is because there has been a two to three month bug, where Google has not updated the report with new links. Google has not confirmed via a Google Webmaster Help thread that the reports are now being updated with the latest linkage data.

We typically provide a grid of our top linked to pages from this report, so here it is:

Now, the links report doesn't seem all that logical to me. But it is possible, who knows. It might also be that the link report is still going through the process of updating.

For the past updates see:

• June 2008 Google Linkage Data
• Google Webmaster Tools Link Update More Frequent?
• October 2007 Google Linkage Data
• September 2007 Google Linkage Data
• August 2007 Google Linkage Data
• July 2007 Google Linkage Data
• June 2007 Google Linkage Data
• April 2007 Google Linkage Data
• March 2007 Google Linkage Data
• February 2007 Google Linkage Data

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help and DigitalPoint Forums.

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

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: December 17, 2008"

A WebmasterWorld forum member who runs Google AdSense on his travel site was a bit appalled when he saw that the ads being run are of nude Asian women. He has no idea how those ads got there and is extremely disgusted that the ad was placed on his site which now makes him guilty by association.

In fact, it's causing this publisher to consider removing Google AdSense from his site altogether. The ad borders on illegality, he suspects.

It's not the first time. Another person who ran Google AdSense on a children's website discovered adult and teen gay chatroom ads on their site. When the parents complained to the publisher, the publisher claimed that it was Google's responsibility. At the end of the day, though, the parents said they'd stop visiting the website -- and that ultimately means that the publisher is really at fault. What did this publisher do? Let's put it this way: they're not using Google AdSense anymore.

The specific ads for the Asian women are likely to be just some overseas bridal program (you know, like Russian Brides). Still, the targeting is offensive and this is something Google should consider filtering further. Again, by association, the publisher gets held responsible and Google is bound to lose revenue when the publisher pulls out of the AdSense program.

AdSenseAdvisor is on the ball and is looking into it.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

In case you haven't noticed, the Google Webmaster Help forum has moved over to the new layout. Now, things are just a tad more confusing and people are wondering what inspired Google to make the changes they have implemented. In a specific Google Groups thread, a forum member asks what Levels mean (notice in the screenshot I've included that he's designated as "Level 3"). So -- what exactly is it?

Susan Moskwa responds to the frustrated user (and explains, I suppose, why I will never see a nice blue "G" to indicate Google employees):

Apparently in the old help forum, users who were offered advice by non-Googlers would respond to the effect of "Who are you to give me advice?" which deterred regular forum contributors (who still knew what they were talking about) from contributing solid and helpful advice. (Unfortunately, I still want the G to denote Googlers as such, but I digress...)

So what are Levels, then, exactly? Levels are awarded to individuals who offer the best and most valuable answer to the community.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

If you've ever noticed on specific searches, Google gives you a post count and estimates the number of authors of posts in the snippet like the screenshot below indicates:

But if you ask me, the number there is entirely inaccurate. The question: where does Google get these numbers and how does it calculate them?

That is the question being asked in a Google Webmaster Help thread, where Googler JohnMu promised to look into it. John said:

I'll check up on that & let you all know what I find out :)

When John updates the thread, we will let you know what he says.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

For you big AdWords API users, you should know there that on the 19th, Google is pushing out a data refresh for the Sandbox and that there are continued Sandbox issues and bugs.

1. Sandbox Database Refresh is to take place this Friday, December 19th. Jeff Posnick from the AdWords API Team said, "the normal monthly Sandbox database refresh is planned for this Friday, December 19." He added that you should expect "brief downtime" followed by "campaign and account data will be cleared out."
2. Sandbox Accessibility Issues are still occurring. Jeff explained Google released a patch to the "account login code" on December 16th. He hopes this fixes the issues people have been noticing. So far, there are no confirmed reports that the patch has fixed the issue.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Google Blogoscoped reported that Google has finally introduced YouTube videos into Google Maps as an additional layer. You can now view videos, in addition to the photos or wikipedia layers in Google Maps. Here is a screen capture of the "More" button, from where you can activate the video layer:

For example, if you go to Times Square NYC, you will find many videos that have been adding to Google Maps, presumably by geocoding the videos in YouTube as belong to a certain area. Here is one video:

So how would you help get your videos to show up in Google Maps? Well, when you upload a YouTube video, make sure to click on the "Date and Map Options" and then in the search box, enter in the location and set it. Here is a screen shot illustrating:

In the past, you were able to add videos to local business listings, but this is a whole new level.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

I don't believe I have seen any announcement around the fact that Google has released version 7.0 of the AdWords Editor, but they have.

The release notes document many of the changes, including:

• First page bid estimates: AdWords Editor now uses first page bid estimates for your keywords. Minimum cost-per-click (CPC) bids are no longer used.
• Keyword Quality Score: The Keywords tab now displays the Quality Score for your keywords.
• Keyword Opportunities locale: Tailor your keyword suggestions to a particular language and location by changing your Keyword Opportunities locale.
• Campaign targeting in the data view: You can view your targeting settings in the new 'Language' and 'Location' columns on the Campaigns tab. These columns are hidden by default, but you can select them with the column chooser.
• Send feedback to Google: Help us improve AdWords Editor by enabling usage tracking in your AdWords Editor settings (Tools menu > Settings).
• The 'Volume' column on the Keyword expansion tab of the Keyword Opportunities tool now shows absolute numbers (traffic for the last month) instead of scaled values.
• The Keyword Opportunities tool isn't available for draft accounts.

Why so hush hush about the 7.0 release? Well, possibly because the 6.5 AdWords editor was plagued with issues that didn't get resolved until two weeks later. So maybe a quiet release will get early adopters to update, submit bugs and give Google a better chance at fixing 7.0 before more people download it. Or maybe they will announce the update today and I am wrong.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: There is a bug with the automated backup feature, so beware.

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: December 16, 2008"

Last week was the SES Chicago show, we were unable to make it, but I am hearing a lot of buzz about it from the community. As someone who has been reporting on the industry for over five years now, I found one topic pretty interesting.

It seems like either SEO "blackhats" are becoming more "whitehat" or that we are all starting to understand each other a lot better or maybe, the line has blurred more over the years. What makes me say this now?

Well, besides for many folks, including (I am 99% sure) Matt Cutts of Google claiming that more and more blackhats are learning that its best to go whitehat - we have a post from the whitest of whitehats, Doug Heil. Now, if you don't know Doug, Doug has been in the industry for a really long time - he has always been on the extreme whitehat side. So much so, he has taken stances against certain conferences, forums and individuals in the industry.

Doug, for the first time (I believe), attended and spoke at the Search Engine Strategies show. In fact, he spoke on a panel named Black Hat, White Hat & the Best Kept Secrets to Search. Now, he spoke on the panel with Richard Zwicky, Eric Enge, Todd Friesen, and David Naylor. I assume Todd and David were the blackhats and Richard and Eric were the whitehats. Now, for Doug to agree to sit down on a panel at an SES with blackhats is major. But it is even more major how Doug described his experience at his forums, I Help You Forums and Search Engine Watch Forums.

He outed Todd as a whitehat:

Todd Friesen; This dude rocks. He tries his best to maintain the blackhat image, but trust me; after having quite a few talks with him, he's nothing but pure BS and totally whitehat. That's right; whitehat. You've been outed Todd. I think he understands my definition of cloaking now as well.

Actually; Todd (oilman) has been a whitehat for a very long time. I simply confirmed my own thoughts last week about it. Yes; he buys links, but buys them for large .com's with lots of quality incoming links. That's a big difference from the small to medium who are buying those links. If Todd buys 5 links for someone like amazon.com, I call that buying paid advertising. NO risk at all.

And claimed that David Naylor will soon be a whitehat:

Dave is really nothing but a teddybear. He's a blackhat, but I think I can sway him to the other side eventually.

Naylor? He will be a whitehat in due time. He's not much a blackhat anyhoo.

Really good stuff, in fact - he is now open to communication with "blackhats," which is a wonderful thing.

But you see, Doug also seems to imply that certain link buys and certain forms of redirection are not considered blackhat. I do not know if Doug always felt this way, but for some reason - I think 4 years ago, he would not have found buying links "for someone like amazon.com" as "buying paid advertising." Nor would I have thought he would be okay with any form of "content delivery" in any way.

So what has happened over the years? I think the most important thing is that Google is more detailed about what is allowed and what is not allowed. Clearly there are forms of content delivery and redirection that is allowed. But four years ago, that was a mystery. Link buys, well - Doug's comments surprised me.

In any event, I am really happy to see a more open dialog between the whitehat side of things and the blackhat side of things. Now if we can get Doug to sit down with Ralph Tegtmeier (a.k.a. Fantomaster) at SES London. :)

Forum discussion at I Help You Forums and Search Engine Watch Forums.

I am a huge fan of Google Sitelinks for a lot of reasons. But what do you do when the Sitelinks Google is displaying for your site is wrong? The manage Sitelinks feature doesn't give you too many options, outside of removing them. So what do you do?

First place to go would be the Google Webmaster Help discussion forums and post a thread like this guy did. In short, his site is showing Sitelinks for a search on developer fusion. You will notice that Google is cutting off the Sitelinks, so that they don't really make full sense.

Here is a screen capture showing how "Convert C# to VB.NET" ends up being "Convert C# to" and sections that start with "ASP.NET" end up just being "ASP." Why is this happening, it appears to be related to the period.

Googler, Susan Moskwa said, "I've passed your feedback along to the sitelinks team to look into." She then suggests that this webmaster wait it out and see what happens after the next Sitelink update.

John, a top contributor in the forum, gives a pretty good piece of advice. He said, why not try to "escaping them," "as in using . instead of "."" That might help Google understand they are the same phrase or maybe not. The webmaster said he might give that a try.

Manipulating and managing your Sitelinks is not an exact science. Experimentation is often necessary but at the same time, scary to play around with. Documenting these types of threads, may help SEOs figure out ways to best manage their Sitelinks.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

If you are a Blackberry Storm mobile user on the Verizon Wireless network and want to fully utilize Google Maps, you may be out of luck. Tom from the Google Maps team said in a Google Mobile Forum thread that Google Maps is not able to use the Verizon Wireless GPS feature at this current time.

Tom does explain that they are able to locate your location through cell phone towers or wifi networks, but the accuracy is clearly not as good as it would be, if it was able to utilize the GPS service. Tom said:

I wanted to provide a little background for people with Verizon Wireless devices who aren't able to use their device's internal GPS with Google Maps for mobile. Access to GPS data on Verizon devices is restricted to certain applications. At this time, Google Maps for mobile isn't included in that list. However, two other methods of determining your location, Cell ID and Wifi access points, can be used to pinpoint your place on the map.

The problem is, most of the folks in the thread don't buy what Tom is saying. They are confident that Verizon Wireless's GPS feature is unlocked. They think Tom is talking about something else. They think it is just an excuse and Google is buying time to release an update to the program.

So, is Verizon blocking Google from using the GPS feature on the Blackberry Storm or is Google looking for an excuse?

Forum discussion at Google Mobile Forum.

It appears that Google is looking for new ways to enhance (erm, monetize?) Search Suggest. Danny Sullivan notes at Search Engine Land that some users are spotting Google AdWords ads within Search Suggest, as seen below:

Search Suggest is also apparently expanding news results and more.

In terms of ads, though, Danny notes that the placement (top?) is questionable. What happens if someone accidentally clicks on that ad? It's easy for someone to slip up when using a drop-down box. I'm sure you've done it before.

That concern is echoed in Sphinn by advertisers. Here's one good comment:

As an advertiser, I kinda don't like those ads in the suggest box, especially the one at the top. It's just asking for errants clicks or someone thinking it will return a search result. I want my ad clicks to be as qualified and deliberate as possible.

Someone else adds that those ads probably "convert like [censored]." And he's probably right.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Danny Sullivan notes at Search Engine Land that there are a number of Google search engine enhancements that we may start to see very soon. They include reviews seen within the SERPs, pagelinks (a term he coined), and better spell correction and are illustrated below.

The Search Engine Land post explains these in detail, but I'll give you the background.

The image below indicates that you can now see more information about business listings, including reviews:

The next feature you may see is something that Danny calls pagelinks. Like sitelinks, popular portions of a web page are appropriately linked.

You need to actually have internal anchor text within the page though to get this "Jump to" pagelink feature.

The final that Danny writes about is how Google is now to handle auto spellcheck. Instead of just showing "did you mean XXXX?", you get results for the correct spelling *and* the misspelled query as seen below:

Looks pretty impressive. It'll be most important for SEMs to start looking at how to work with reviews, but I think that pagelinks would also be important here too.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

There's a Google Groups thread that is discussing the ways webmasters can tell that their site is penalized by Google.

In case you wanted to cover all your bases, you might want to try the tactics that they suggest you look at:

One person suggests that you will *only* find your site listed when you do a site:domain.com search (rather than searching for the homepae). Another says you won't see it when you do a site:domain.com search either. And another helpful hint:

If aboutus.org outranks you for your domain name, you've got problems and it probably has something to do with links, how you manipulated them, got them, or distributed them.

It's always helpful to check Google Webmaster Tools for any error messages. A user named John adds that Google will notify you of small infractions like hidden text. Not all issues are reported in Webmaster Tools.

Forum discussion continues 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: December 15, 2008"

If you had no regard for your website and wanted it to be penalized or not ranked well, what would you do to make that happen? A WebmasterWorld thread discusses the potential issues that may relate to penalties, and I've turned that discussion into a "what kind of tactics can get your site penalized?" (or "how do I deoptimize my website?")

You can cause problems by considering the following:

1. Have high and unnatural keyword densities
2. Overuse of meta tags
3. Repetitive use of keywords in navigation and linking
4. Removal of non-site external links from within a site (or by adding nofollow to all external links)
5. Having too many reciprocal links

But this is probably just the tip of the iceberg. What could you add to this list?

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

In a Google Groups thread, AdWordsPro Sarah offers some nice optimization tips for mobile users. She acknowledges that they shouldn't be ignored; there are 405 million mobile users worldwide, she says.

If you want a business presence in the mobile realm, you can create a business page for mobile ads.

Additionally, for your Google AdWords campaign, make the following considerations: your website should be mobile friendly (or have a mobile friendly website available for mobile users only). Your keywords should be 1-3 words, broad match, with general terms. You can use geo-modifiers for local businesses.

The ad text should be short and compelling (18 characters) and the text itself should also be 18 characters. You can use text speak (e.g. CUL8R).

Google also has a mobile FAQ for more insights.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

Last year, we wrote about how Google is to perceive subdomains. Matt Cutts wrote back then that in some circumstances, subdomains will be treated like subfolders. He goes into more detail on his blog. In the post, he explains that sometimes people have performed long tail searches and gotten too many results from a single domain and its subdomains and Google has made it more difficult for that to occur.

The issue was relatively silent for a year, but now people are starting to ask questions. On a WebmasterWorld thread, tedster says that "A legitimate subdomain today often gets treated as something of a hybrid between a totally different domain and a part of the main domain."

On the other hand, there's a DigitalPoint Forums thread that disputes the weak relationship:

I've actually learned first hand that Google started treating subdomains as directories (happened months ago). I had some websites on subdomains where the main domain had 0 links. The websites were doing well until one day when they fell drastically. I then started to build links to the main domain and within 2 months the subdomains were also stronger than ever. The stronger the domain is - the stronger the subdomain is.

That said, there's confusion yet again.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

No one likes malware; web surfers, searchers, webmasters, and so on. But malware can hurt a lot when your search result in Google is labeled as not being safe due to malware. No one will click on your result, for good reason.

Often, malware gets onto a site though some type of security breech. Hackers take advantage of those loop holes and then place malware on your site, that may infect your visitors. So Google (and other search engines) try their best to keep people away from your sites, if they believe your site has been infected with malware.

That being said, if you are able to remove the issue from your site and your site is malware free - you can remove that message in the Google search results within 24 hours.

A Google Webmaster Help thread has JohnMu of Google saying, "automatic reviews generally take about a day until everything is cleared up (warnings everywhere); there are situations where they take much less time and there are times when they take a bit more."

For more on this, check out Google's blog post on this matter.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Google cranks up the Consensus Engine by Andrew Orlowski at The Register completely took Marissa Mayer's comments out of context when he wrote in his introductory line:

Google this week admitted that its staff will pick and choose what appears in its search results. It's a historic statement - and nobody has yet grasped its significance.

Marissa did not admit that. She said at a LeWeb conference in Paris that Google may look at SearchWiki data and use that data to influence the search results. Specifically, if "thousands of people" remove a result using SearchWiki, then Google might take notice. She did not say if Google would have Google staff "pick and choose" search results. I, as others, assumed that any SearchWiki changes to the core index would be done algorithmically, not by hand.

To say Google "staff will pick and choose what appears in its search results" is a "historic statement" is false. Because, (1) Google did not say this and (2) many speculate there is human involvement in the Google index, to some extent. Google has been open about their human evaluators in the past and there has always been rumors of Google picking the top results for the most important categories. This might just add to those rumors, but it is not an admission.

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

I am seeing reports at WebmasterWorld of a possible Microsoft update to Live Search.

Senior member, bwnbwn, said it looks like Microsoft is jumping back and forth between two indexes. He said:

It looks to me that there are 2 data centers the serps and they are rotating in and out. One data center is presenting much better serps the other may be a way microsoft is working on the bot and is throwing the spammy one.

Others are not happy with the update, complaining that there is too much search spam at the top.

The last possibly update was in early October. Some suspect this update might have something to do with the new MSNBot Microsoft just started testing.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I rant about Google's expansion of their AdSense for Domains product. I also go off about making liquor ads acceptable but not allowing horse racing ads. In the future SearchWiki will impact rankings and click data might be already influencing rankings. Google banned themselves on Thursday. Yahoo is having 301 handling issues. Google is giving Analytics/AdSense integration and links on blogroll. Google serves AdSense via DoubleClick. You can block US visitors and not GoogleBot, and slow GoogleBot down with 503s. Google Zeitgeist loves Sarah Palin.

Make sure to subscribe to our video feed or subscribe directly on iTunes to be notified of these updates and download the video in the background. Here is the YouTube version of the feed (note: If YouTube shows a video not found message, just refresh the page and play it again, it is a YouTube bug):

For the original iTunes version, click here

Some Of The Topics Discussed:

• Google's Economic Worry #442: AdSense for Domains Expanded
• Google Further Encourages Drunken Behavior, Lets Advertisers Bid on Alcohol
• Google AdWords Bans Horse Racing Ads But Allows Hard Liqueur?
• Use SearchWiki To Rank Your Web Site Higher in Google
• Click Data Used in Google Rankings? Google Kind Of Comments
• Google Bans Itself For A Few Minutes?
• Yahoo Search Fixing 301 Redirect Issues Already?
• Yahoo Search Still Not Listening to 301 Redirects
• Want Google AdSense Integration in Google Analytics? Here is How
• Want to Get on the AdWords Discussion Blogroll?
• Google Now Serving & Tracking AdSense Ads Via DoubleClick?
• How Can You Block US Visitors But Not Block GoogleBot?
• Stop GoogleBot From Indexing You At Busy Times
• Google Zeitgeist: Sarah Palin is Most Popular for 2008 on Google

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: December 12, 2008"

I can't believe that there are less than 3 weeks till 2009. Insane, right?! I think so.

Google Expands AdSense for Domains = TEH SUCK
People are really pissed that Google is expanding AdSense for domains which is coming at a cost -- poor quality and lots of money. Google is starting to look like a greedy company who doesn't give a damn about its community members. This can't be good.

Google's Economic Woes Still Seen in Alcohol Biddin but Why do they DisallowHorse Racing?
To expand on the greedy mentality of the search giant, we see that Google lets you bid on hard liquor nowadays. Do you want a loan, Google?

But at the same time, Google is disallowing horse racing ads from running because they're a "poor match for AdWords." Really? Or is there something else that Google isn't telling us?

SearchWiki and Click Data May Be Counted
Google is obviously going to be mum on the real answers to their ranking algorithm, but click data may be used, or perhaps we really don't know. However, Marissa Mayer suggests that SearchWiki data may be used for rankings in the future -- that is, if thousands of people vote down a site that sucks, I guess.

Google Bans Itself?
Last night, numerous Google searches were not bringing up Google results. The thought is that Google may have banned itself for a short period of time. We're waiting for a Google representative to comment. In the meantime, I think it's cool!

Yahoo Fixes 301 Redirects
It is unfortunate to spend so much time on 301 redirects and then find out that Yahoo search forgot to acknowledge them. However, a day later, we reported to you that it was a temporary inconvenience.

Google AdSense and AdWords Goodies
Well, Google isn't the bad guy completely this week. Google is accepting applications to get AdSense integration in Google Analytics, though I ask why they need applications and can't just integrate it. I think it's because they are rolling it out to everyone later on, but it still confuses me.

Google is also considering an official AdWords forum blogroll and you can get your site added on it if you participate in the forum discussion. Come on, we want more votes for SERoundtable!

Google Tracking Ads via DoubleClick
Google's DoubleClick acquisition is finally materializing to something, I suppose, with the DoubleClick ad tracking that we're observing. It's also possible that this impacted earnings this past weekend, but we're not 100% sure.

Googlebot, Go AWAY -- and Come Back Later
Googlebot lives in the US. So do millions of internet surfers. How do you block US surfers and allow Googlebot in so that those foreign visitors can find you (but of course, not the US guys?) Some sites do need this! It's suggested that you implement a "JavaScript-based interstitial that verifies the IP address and otherwise blocks access to your site."

And what if your site is too busy for Googlebot? Return a 503 code so that it doesn't come to you during those times.

Google's Zeitgeist Released
Facebook login is #3 in Google's Zeitgeist 2008, which is beyond me. Sarah Palin though -- she's #1. I can't question that one. In any event, Google finally released their most popular searches this year. Are you surprised?

I finally switched over to Google Reader from Bloglines after it failed me for 2 days in October. I have a few gripes of my own and wonder if Google will ever address them. For example, I don't understand why there's an incredibly annoying amount of whitespace on the right side of RSS feeds -- Google's decision to wrap text in the way that it does is, erm, annoying.

Another problem I don't like is that Google Reader can't tell me exactly how many feed items I am behind on if there are more than 1000 unread items. I have to say that I liked Bloglines telling me when I had 4342 unread items. 1000+ could mean 10000. Seriously.

A third problem I have is that I'd like to change the text of Google Reader instead of using the old school Arial. In the meantime, I'm hacking userChrome.css in Firefox, but I really shouldn't have to.

Other users are observing other issues with Google Reader, and believe it or not, I've experienced them also (but then again, if you're a Google Reader user, you probably have too). Sometimes, Google Reader says that a specific feed has one unread item. However, you may then enter that feed and find out that there are no unread items at all. It's misleading to say the least. Google Reader Guide says that "we've noticed that unread counts can get thrown off as
result of tagging items from feeds you aren't actually subscribed to or by subscribing to another user's shared items feeds multiple times." Neither of these impact me, but I do see this happen ever so often. My solution is to "mark as read" and then usually it goes away. The key word here is "usually."

In any event, Google Reader Guide seems to be aware of this issue as it's still impacting a number of individuals.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

The Inside AdSense blog made a big announcement yesterday saying that AdSense for Domains, the much controversial feature set that has been offered for several years to a select group of publishers, has been open to all publishers.

We suspect that this has something to do with Google's fear of the economy -- lately, with Google allowing bidding on hard liquor and beer, they certainly are becoming more lax in terms of what they can do to make a quick buck. (Some suspect that firearm ads are around the corner.) Barry highlights the various monetization opportunities that Google has become more open with, and it is obvious that Google really is trying to capitalize on a poor economy.

But he's not happy about this. With AdSense for Domains, you have a serious issue with quality. When it was just open to a few people, you found reports that people lost $20k+ to garbage traffic. The problem is that Google is indexing these domains that are severely lacking in content and are putting it under the "we want to make this a great searching experience." Some people can see through the facade and think that Google is trying to make it a great moneymaking experience instead. After all, a search drives an unsuspecting visitor to a domain with bad content but possibly relevant ads and they click on those ads, thereby making Google some serious dough if done repeatedly. One member calls this action "degrad[ing] the value of the internet."

If Google would do the right thing, it's that they'd remove these domains from searches. But chances are they really are greedy for some money. Unfortunately that's at a lot of poorer people's expense.

You better also hope that some good domains don't get taken so that publishers can make a quick buck too, but chances are we're too late for that.

As so many people say in the WebmasterWorld thread, this is Google's way of polluting the internet. This is Google's way of ignoring real concerns and introducing more problems. And people still wonder when and if Google will heed the AdSense requests made by publishers. With this low blow, we suppose not.

More sentiment follows:

Thank you, Google, for further polluting the web. Thank you, Google, for making domain names even further unavailable for real development. Thank you, Google, for strangling the online world. Thank you, Google, for not listening to us. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

This means that there will be more junk domains to block from my AdWords campaigns. (And I'm already blocking more than 400 useless, junk domains.)

Google tries hard to hear what we, the publishers, want. Yet in the background planned the biggest kick in the guts that I have seen for a long time. It makes a mockery of everything here.

So, Google, what do you say for yourself?

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A Google Webmaster Help thread has a member upset that Google is crawling his site during times when his server is overloaded. Is there a way to tell GoogleBot to stay away during these times?

JohnMu of Google said, yes there is. John explains that you can use a 503 status code to tell GoogleBot to come back later. The thing is, you would need to just server this status code to spiders and not your visitors - and that might get a bit sticky. Let me quote John:

One thing you can do is to encourage Googlebot (and other crawlers) to not visit your site at busy times by returning a 503 HTTP result code. This tells us that you currently can't serve the content, but that we should come back at some later time. The difficulty would be to recognize search engine crawlers and to only serve this result code when the server is actually under load - but it might be worth following up on if your server resources are limited.

John in the past recommended using the 503 during site downtime and site maintenance, so that Google doesn't think your site went bye-bye. The 503 will simply tell the spider to check back later and that your site is fine, but only temporarily not available.

Now, automating this at specific times or during specific CPU utilization patterns might be fun for coders. You can set up logic to say, serve GoogleBot or other spiders a 503 status code when it is between the hours of X and Y or when the server's CPU load is above Z. The only issue is, would this be considered a form of cloaking or not showing the search spider what the visitor sees? A bit of a gray area.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Google has recently allowed advertisers to place AdWords ads for hard liquors, beer, and even gambling ads in the UK, but has now banned ads for the keyword phrase, [horse racing].

A WebmasterWorld thread says this ban is brand new. He has had ads for that keyword phrase for a long time and now Google is telling him that these ads are not a "good match for AdWords". Even if you sell sporting goods for horse racing, or horse racing toys or anything not related to the gambling side, you cannot bid on the term [horse racing] (you can bid on [horse racing toys]).

Senior member, woop01 said:

We have been told by an Adwords rep that now horse racing and horse racing related activities are no longer considered a "good match for Adwords". I'm not talking about the wagering aspect of horse racing, the entire sport of horse racing.

We spent an afternoon removing any of the very minor references to wagering on a horse racing site that had been advertising with Adwords for years. Unfortunately, it was only after we did it that the rep then said that horse racing in general is the problem.

I find the whole thing fairly interesting.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google has been rolling out integration of your AdSense data in Google Analytics since October, but many publishers still wish they had it. If you do not have it yet, you can now get it.

AdSenseAdvisor posted a WebmasterWorld thread said you can get it by going to the Inside AdSense Blog and reading the top. The top basically says:

Want to integrate your AdSense account with Google Analytics? Improved reporting was on publisher wish lists this year, so we're spreading the reporting cheer this holiday season. Fill out our interest form, and we may be able to enable the feature earlier for you.

So if you want your AdSense integrated in Analytics, quickly go to the interest form and fill it out. It will then add your name to the list and you should get it soon.

AdSenseAdvisor said this is a Happy Holidays present to publishers. So take it while you can!

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Last night I was noticing Twitters and some blog posts, as well as a DigitalPoint Forums thread that asked why did Google ban themselves. In short, a search for [google], [analytics], [adwords], [adsense], [google adwords], and so on, did not return the main Google.com result. So a search for [adwords] would not return http://adwords.google.com/ like it normally would.

Matt Cutts of Google even Twittered that he saw the issue and then soon after it was fixed, magically. ClickZ has captured images of the issue, I tried last night, and I did not see it myself but it did happen.

I have emailed Matt to try to learn what happened, if I find out, Ill update this post.

In any event, this is not the first time Google has been perceived to ban themselves. We covered a time in March 2005 and then again in July 2004.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Update: Here is a statement from Google:

Unfortunately, for a short period of time yesterday, we experienced an issue where our search engine wasn't returning some pages hosted on google.com in users' search results. We've since fixed this problem, and users can now find all Google-specific sites they are searching for. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

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: December 11, 2008"

We featured the popular searches for 2008 from Ask, Google Product Search, and Yahoo. But now, we get the official word on Google's front-facing search engine of the most popular terms. The 2008 Google Zeitgeist reveals the most popular terms:

1. sarah palin
2. beijing 2008
3. facebook login
4. tuenti
5. heath ledger
6. obama
7. nasza klasa
8. wer kennt wen
9. euro 2008
10. jonas brothers

The first thing that looked out of place was #3. I'm apparently not alone with that mindset. Why would so many people be searching for Facebook login?

In any event, here you go. These are Google's most popular searches.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

In a Google Groups thread, AdWordsPro Sarah has asked us what our favorite bid management tools are. There are a two different tools represented thus far, and it's interesting to see what you've got to add.

One user acknowledges that he likes Google's tools (which fortunately are free).

Another is using SearchRev.

I'm going to mention that I saw a demo for Acquisio's tool back at SMX East, I think, and it looked mighty fine. (I don't use any tool right now since I don't really do PPC regularly, but if I had to pick something, this would be it.)

What tools do you use?

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

In a Google Groups thread, JohnMu has asked the Google Webmaster Help community for some help. On behalf of one of his colleagues who is performing a case study, he's looking to gather some intelligence from the very nice people out there who are willing to participate. Here's the request:

I'm looking to personally work with a selection of organisations willing to work with me on a project using Google Website Optimizer to try to increase conversions on their website. In exchange for my time and the insights gained from using Google Website Optimizer, Google would gain the right to present the project publicly as a case study for the promotion of Google Website Optimizer / Google Analytics.

If you're interested in participating, there's a Google Spreadsheet to fill out first.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

While Google's financial future is uncertain lately (or they've been conveying it by laying off their contractors or cancelling holiday gifts out of an "inappropriate gesture"), it seems that some content producers are making all the money. I suppose those who are laid off are really enjoying their freedom by visiting sites like YouTube. The New York Times reports that some video producers are raking in some serious dough using the social video sharing site. Individuals have been able to successfully gain followers -- 100 million views on videos -- and make six figure incomes.

While not all people are happy about this progression, I think it's great that there are ways to capitalize on entertainment. Everyone needs to smile every so often.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday, we reported that Feedburner is not recording Bloglines subscribers. The funny thing is that this was acknowledged on December 6th. It's December 11th and there is absolutely no fix in sight.

As you can tell by the image on the right (which reflects an RSS feed of mine), subscriber counts have been down for a week. And for whatever reason, Google is not fixing the Bloglines issue.

Or maybe they tried. But at the same time, "when you fix a bug, you introduce a new one." Apparently, they're breaking other counts along the way. Today, I noticed that my other blog has a subscriber count of 0, which is completely different than yesterday's subscriber count (of more than 0, of course!)

(Or maybe they aren't, because my Bloglines number is still down on one RSS feed and I have a 0 subscriber count on another feed of mine.)

It seems that Google's Feedburner team needs to get its act together. But hey, that's just me -- and the percentage of people who have been affected for a week now.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

I think I am missing something, but a bunch of well known members at WebmasterWorld are participating in a thread named "Where do you want your link?" The thread asks, where in a specific page's layout, would you optimally want a link?

We have moderators including martinibuster and jdMorgan replying, as well as senior members pageoneresults, wheel, ken_b, adamnichols45 and others participating. Honestly, I think I might be missing something - but i'll play along.

Here is a poll (check all that apply):

To me, the answer seems obvious, but I guess the bulk of the goodies are in the discussion around the question as to "why" for each.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Google Webmaster Help thread discusses a unique issue to a few niche sites that have no choice but to block all users from the United States while also wanting to allow GoogleBot to access the site.

Since GoogleBot lives in the US, blocking US based IP addresses, would likely also block GoogleBot. That would result in Google not indexing your site and you not ranking well in Google for the country you are targeting.

Googler, JohnMu, shares one acceptable way to block US based users but at the same time, allow GoogleBot to access your site. I assume this is not considered JavaScript cloaking, cause John said you can use it.

One potential solution would be to use a JavaScript-based interstitial that verifies the IP address and otherwise blocks access to your site. I assume you have to use JavaScript within your site, correct? If so, there would be no simple way for a user to selectively block the JavaScript interstitial and allow the JavaScript casino content. Assuming the JavaScript is in an external file that is disalllowed through your robots.txt file, Googlebot would not be able to view the interstitial and would be able to crawl the site normally.

This solution isn't necessarily new, but it is the first time I have seen a Googler suggest it in a forum.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

A AdSense Help thread has confirmed reports from Google that some (not many) publishers may have had a hold on their account for about four months due to a bug. That means, these publishers were not paid for around four months due to an issue with a specific feature of the site.

As explained by Ashley from Google:

A small number of publishers have experienced this issue, whereby their account is on phone verification hold, but they cannot see the hold in their account. However, please be assured that the issue has been resolved on your account, and a payment for your earnings up to the end of November will be issued to you at the end of this month.

It is nice that Google will be paying out what is due to this publisher, but a four month delay and nothing extra for that?

Forum discussion at AdSense Help.

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: December 10, 2008"

It appears there have been recent complaints at the Google Groups discussion area that FeedBurner stats are way down for many folks.

Last night, Google, the owner of FeedBurner, confirmed that there is an issue with Bloglines tracking, saying:

We have seen many reports that Bloglines subscribers are not currently being tracked. We are making adjustments to restore Bloglines as a subscriber source and will update this issue once it's resolved. (Please note that any subscribers on Bloglines are still receiving your feed updates; they just aren't being reflected in your stats at this time.)

A Googler updated that document and said it has been an issue since about December 6th. Since Bloglines is a fairly popular reader, your FeedBurner stats may be way off.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Barry reports at Search Engine Land that Marissa Mayer spoke at LeWeb in Paris about SearchWiki and said that it's possible that the tool may be used in the future for ranking purposes. Barry refers to the TechCrunch coverage that says that Marissa also acknowledges that SearchWiki will soon be able to be turned off (think early 2009), but more importantly in our space, that if "thousands" of people remove a page using SearchWiki, Google may respond in kind by removing the offending result.

Less than an hour ago, Barry submitted this story to Sphinn and there already is commentary about how this obvious gaming can be dangerous. To be honest, I'm still of the opinion that users should have had the opportunity to turn on SearchWiki and not the other way around. I feel that there will be loopholes we've yet to explore.

Meanwhile, in a post Barry made today on click data being used for rankings, a related subject matter, JohnMu says that Google won't rerank based on user activity because of the potential to abuse behaviors that may impact Google's ranking algorithms. Or maybe there's more to the statement that meets the eye.

This all leads me to believe that if Google actually does acknowledge that people can rerank results, people can outsmart Google. There are a number of tools available that already harness the power of the collective with incentives. Most recently, Amazon launched its Mechanical Turk to enable people to get paid to do things using their computers. And of course, we can't forget about sites that pay you to vote on social media news stories -- they could just expand their services to help with reranking in Google. A market owner who really wants his competition to be ranked lower could totally employ these services if he's desperate, could he not?

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

SEM Insights posts results of a survey that included 254 SEM professionals on all levels. Who are our SEM colleagues? How many years of experience do they have? What is their job title and income?

After tallying all the results, it seems that the majority of respondents have the following in common:
* They have beginner knowledge of SEO (1-2 years) - 19%
* Their title is best represented as "search director" - 19%
* Most are making less than $50k/year - 35%
* The majority's highest level of education is Bachelor's Degree - 48%
* Most feel that title tag is the the most important SEO element - 51%
* Most believe that the biggest challenge facing SEOs today from a sales perspective is lack of mainstream knowledge - 41%
* Most believe that the biggest challenge facing SEOs today from a deliverables perspective is undefined expectations - 46%

And there's more. The survey is divided into other categories, including SEO at work, search conferences (83% think it's important to attend them!), SEM and Affiliate Marketing, and the future of SEM. I wouldn't do the survey justice by reposting all the results, so I've given you just a small amount of what you can see if you hop on over to the survey results.

The one question I have which I pose in the Sphinn discussion is: why are there so many beginner level SEOs? Do they end up moving to other careers after 1-2 years? (Or is SEO just such a new field that they are just learning about it and are still in the beginning stages?)

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

The Inside AdWords blog mentions that Google is now empowering advertisers to target their normal "desktop" ads to users on the iPhone, the T-Mobile G1, and other mobile devices with full-fledged web browsers. We acknowledged late last month that you can target ads to different platforms (be it a desktop/laptop computer or a mobile device with full Internet browsers), and now it's been officially confirmed by Google:

Amanda Kelly of Google says:

This new option will now allow you to display your ads specifically on these devices, create exclusive campaigns for them, and get separate performance reporting. We hope this option will help you more effectively reach your audience with the right message at the right time.

This all seems promising, but I think that a few people are suspicious about the same functionality. It may be best for Google to focus on geotargeting better to users with mobile devices and offering services that empower advertisers to leverage this traffic.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

In our continued coverage of the a WebmasterWorld thread started by senior member CainIV, we learn two more things. These two items are likely obvious to most, but have been confirmed (at least to CainIV) that they are true based on his experiments.

1. Changes to navigation links can have a serious impact on a site's ranking in Google. CainIV said, "there are certainly nav and footer link thresholds that cause a website - even a website into the top 5 - to spin out and down to pages 5 and 6 in ranking."
2. Navigation links are treated differently then links within the content. CainIV said, "Google appears to handle thresholds from links within content different than those within nav or footer sections - this is to say, that content links have a fuzzier 'trust' logic about them, and I could more links to content, faster and more focused on the primary keyword pointed at the root url without the same threshold being crossed."

Like I said and like CainIV said in the thread, this is likely all assumed already but can't hurt to validate it.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The question over Google using click data, such as how many people click on your site from a Google result, how many people click click the back button and so on, as it relates to ranking web pages in Google - is nothing new. We discussed it at least three times.

But this time we have a small and obscure comment from a Google representative on the matter. A Google Webmaster Help thread has a comment from Googler, JohnMu, not saying much on it, but you tell me what he means:

I can tell you for sure that anyone visiting your site a few dozen times and hitting the back button on their browser is not going to impact your site's crawling, indexing, or ranking at Google. That wouldn't make much sense and would be too easy to abuse :-).

So, John here clearly talks about "hitting the back button on their browser." He goes on to say that it won't "impact your site's crawling, indexing, or ranking at Google," if done a "few dozen times." Now, it is not clear if it is done a few hundred thousand times if it will make a difference or not. I don't think we can use this as a confirmation from Google based on this statement on if Google uses this data in their ranking algorithm or not. But who knows.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Google has a cache, basically, the cache allows you to look at pages as Google crawled them. The question is, at least in a Google Webmaster Help thread, is the Google cache storing everything locally at Google?

John, a top contributor, said that Google stores web pages locally, but all other documents are not stored locally. So that means, if you pull down a web page, but Google cached it, the web page will likely still come up in the cache. However, if Google indexed a PDF or Word doc, and you pulled it down, the cache result will likely not load.

John said:

Only if the .doc page was still their server. Google only has a snapshot of the HTML on the particular page, everything else resides on the on the web as is (images, external css, targets of links).

Do note that John is not an official Google representative and I was not able to quickly find supporting documents in Google's help section on this. Of course, you can use the noarchive meta tag to ask Google not to cache your pages, more on that over here.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Yesterday I got upset that Yahoo Search Still Not Listening to 301 Redirects. Sometime yesterday afternoon, we were getting reports that this is now resolved.

An updated WebmasterWorld thread has the individual upset with how was handling those redirects in the past saying things are now looking better. Here is his post:

This seems to be clearing up on its own.

I no longer see the non-canonical URL in the links of Yahoo search results; The link in the SERPs is now correct. However, I do still see a non-canonical home page listing in Yahoo Site Explorer when "Show pages from: Only this domain" is selected.

I am happy to see this resolved or being fixed.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: December 9, 2008"

Disclaimer: Like the previous post on this subject matter, this is a title only that is intended to attract attention and nothing but. (In case you're wondering who the author of this post is, she likes social media and these are the types of headlines that raise your eyebrows. Am I wrong?)

We're learning that Google is leaning toward the left in terms of the kinds of ads they are now allowing: the Inside AdWords blog says that Google is now allowing the promotion of hard alcohol and liquor via Google AdWords.

That's not without clause, though. Google requires all advertisers to feature information about the liquor/alcohol.

To comply with the updated hard alcohol and liqueurs policy, advertisers must promote the information about hard alcohol and liqueurs that their websites contain, such as recipes and brand messages. Ads that directly promote the sale of hard alcohol and liqueurs are still not permissible through our program. In contrast, advertisements for beer may directly promote its sale.

The timing, naturally, is good for the holidays -- especially since it's almost New Years -- so if you're able to promote the brands of hard alcohol and liquor and can comply with Google's guidelines, you may want to focus your advertisements on the 2009 festivities.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Watch Forums.

In a report by ZDNet, Microsoft and Dell have arrived at an agreement that new Dell computers will be shipped with the Live search bar preinstalled -- instead of Google's.

This is really big news for Microsoft (and as one suggests, even for Google shareholders). Having a preinstalled brand is a big deal, and with Microsoft being the preinstalled brand, this is huge for them.

It's possible, though, that this implementation (which hasn't been confirmed by Microsoft OR Dell), may be a problem in Europe.

The (potential) problem for DELL and Microsoft is that in the EU at least it's illegal to use a (de-facto) monopoly to gain market advantage in other areas.

But while Microsoft isn't a monopoly in terms of search, perhaps that won't necessarily be an issue. Of course, we'll see how this plays out when the companies confirm the partnership.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

This is crazy already, we reported this time and time again. Yahoo Search is not always listening to a simple 301 redirect. We reported this in September and the issue continued to linger on month to month. In fact, many sites are suffering from good rankings in Yahoo, because of this canonical domain issue.

A new thread at WebmasterWorld shows the frustration. Two very senior members discuss the issue, saying they both have 301 redirects from the non www version to the www version. Because Yahoo indexed both, the site will likely be delisted from the index, according to one senior member.

Moderator jdMorgan, is the one having the issue now. He explained:

I just found out that Yahoo! has indexed a non-canonical version of one of my domains, despite the fact that this non-canonical domain has been 301-redirected to the canonical domain since inception.

So, despite a 301 redirect from example.com to www.example.com that actually predates the DNS going live ten years ago, Slurp has "inferred" this non-www domain and is now showing it and linking to it in their search result.

One member spoke to a Yahoo rep at a recent conference and the Yahoo rep told him he would look into it. I guess, he has not had the time yet.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: This seems to be being resolved, see the update here.

Remember Yahoo's Google AdSense killer? Yea, the Yahoo Publisher Network, or commonly known as YPN. Haven't heard about that service in a long time? That is correct.

The last time we posted anything about it was on October 13th and it was titled Yahoo Improves Publisher Network Relevancy. It was basically a Yahoo rep going around to the various forums announcing that Yahoo has improved the relevancy of the product.

Since then, not one peep from us on Yahoo's Publisher Network. Why? Well, as you know, we cover forum buzz and since the forums are hush on the topic, we remain hush.

The last post at WebmasterWorld's YPN Forum was on October 24th. Someone just created a thread today at WebmasterWorld asking if YPN is dead. His reasoning?

This board doesn't seem to be getting any activity these days. Is YPN dead for publishers around here?

No one will argue, or no one has argued - at least yet.

Sad to see no news, at all, on YPN for this long - but I guess this is the new reality of Yahoo?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

For many many cases, when people are having issues with their site's doing well in the search engines - they sometimes overlook the obvious. I cannot tell you how many times I have seen or heard that webmasters are complaining their sites are not in the search indexes, but at the same time, their robots.txt command or meta tags are telling the search engine not to crawl.

For example, a Google Webmaster Help thread shows this exact issue.

Webmaster complains they are not in the index, "This seems to be such an area of voodoo for me - so frustrating!, said this webmaster. In response, a webmaster helper, John, said, "You've got:
<meta name='robots' content='noindex,nofollow' />."

The webmaster's response, is all to common:

Oh my gosh! I totally forgot about that option in WordPress - thanks for finding it!

Don't overlook the obvious.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Yesterday we reported there were issues with verifying your site in Google Webmaster Tools. The issues were around using the META tag verification, but that is now resolved, as of yesterday evening.

Googler, Susan Moskwa said in the Google Webmaster Help thread:

We're rolling out a fix for the meta verification issue right now, so this issue should be resolved. Please give it a bit of time to roll out fully, and then if you're still getting the "We've detected that your verification file returns a status of 404 (Not found) in the header" error when trying to verify by meta tag, please post back here.

If you're getting any other type of verification error, please search the forum for an answer, and start a new thread if your issue hasn't been answered/resolved.

Soon later, webmasters began to report that it was now working. In fact, the person who initially reported the error said:

I think I was the originator of this thread - and this is just to say that Meta tag verification worked OK for me this morning.

Thanks to Google for fixing the problem.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

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: December 8, 2008"

For the last few months, we've been reporting Google SERP changes as has been observed by the WebmasterWorld community. We haven't been able to locate a list of archived threads, though -- until now.

Tedster has shared a list of WebmasterWorld Google SERP changes posts. The cycle begins in December 2006 and has continued pretty tremendously through today.

If Google history is an area you'd like to explore, be sure to check out the archives and feel some nostalgia.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Many webmasters have been complaining this past weekend about poor income earnings on Google AdSense. The mentality is that there are "terrible stats" and that the earnings are "ridiculous." Complaints range from "maybe the AdSense era is finished for me" and "soon, I'll be owing Google money from the poor return." And the timing is suspicious because we are in the midst of a holiday shopping period--regardless of the economy, earnings shouldn't be so low.

One individual has expressed sentiment that the Internet is a fad that's wearing off. That thought is repeated from a user who says that his behavior has definitely changed from when he started surfing in the beginning.

The world economy is bad, the net is maturing, people are out Christmas shopping, and my main sites cater to unnecessary travel - a real luxury at the moment that many will not even be thinking about.

I'm not over optimistic about 2009 either but think that things will start to get better in 2010.

On the other hand, maybe there's no economic correlation at all to this issue. It was suspected that maintenance may be the reason for poor earnings. n Barry's post about AdSense ads being served through DoubleClick tracking, it's thought that the maintenance was related to DoubleClick and hence the AdSense earnings are down. Maybe this is related to the new tracking tools DoubleClick can give advertisers -- or maybe not. This is not suggested in the particular thread I highlighted but it is mentioned in another WebmasterWorld thread.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

AdWordsPro Sarah is asking forum members about their favorite blogs. There's no end game yet, but it was proposed that if there are enough relevant blogs, it's possible to get a "forum blogroll." Wouldn't that be cool?

So, what blogs on paid search do you read? So far, we have a nice list of well-known blogs and others. And of course, we have our own Google AdWords category which definitely fits the bill -- and is specific to Google AdWords and not just paid search (though as you know as a regular reader, we cover that aspect too!)

If you're looking for some paid search blogs or want to contribute your own blog or a favorite to the mix, be sure to contribute to the discussion at Google Groups.

A Google Webmaster Help thread shares a sad story of one person who built up a site on a members.aol.com hosted service. Recently shut down their AOL Hometown, which is the host space for these sites and this person's site is archived locally, but the domain is gone forever.

What can he/she do to get Google and the other search engines to recognize that the old domain is now pointing to the new domain? In this case, not much. Since this person doesn't have the ability or control to set up a 301 redirect from the old domain to the new domain, there is currently no automated way for a search engine to know the domain name has moved.

JohnMu of Google shared the bad news but explained that he/she can go through the process of reaching out to those who use to link to the site and tell them it moved somewhere else. John said:

Alas, once the old hosting is no longer available, there's not much that can be done. Since you cannot redirect from the old URLs to the new ones, the best thing that you can do is to contact the people who have linked to your old site and ask them to change the link to your new one. This might also have a slightly additional effect in that people may promote your content for you after being nodded in your direction again :-).

This is just one more reason not to host on a free hosting service. In addition, it goes well with our early post today on domain names, in where if Google had a way to tell them in Webmaster Tools if a site was moved, maybe via a meta tag verification process, it could have saved these people.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

The topic of does domain registration impact your search engine rankings is nothing new. We have covered this topic here at least a handful of times, especially since Google became a registrar. But a new WebmasterWorld thread has several case studies from SEOs on the topic.

It all started when senior WebmasterWorld member, SEOPTI, said that he forgot to use private whois information when renewing his domain. His domain name went under the real information and then soon after he said, Google devalued his incoming links by 80% or more.

As you might imagine, many are skeptical. Another senior member, wyweb, said:

I removed privacy protection from 6 or 7 domains last summer, all with 5 and 6 PR. There has been absolutely no change in either PR or traffic levels.

Senior member, CainIV, said something similar:

Personally, some of my domains are protected and some are not. I did not notice a ranking change when switching to privacy, however, none have ever reverted.

Forum administrator, Tedster, said:

I have a client who changed the legal ownership of the domain (and business) twice within the past year. No changes in the SERPs followed on either time.

Other clients in the past have purchased other online businesses, changed the domain's Whois to reflect that, and also seen no ranking changes. Based on that, I'm thinking this is not an open-and-shut case of Whois changes influencing ranking.

Seems like this isn't as clear cut as we would like. Google might or might not reset the domain based on probably several variables.

Past articles on domain registration and SEO:

• Google is a Domain Name Registrar
• Google Can Not Use Registry Data As Thought
• Theories on Advanced Link Mapping with Google Registrar
• Google Admits to Improve Search Quality with Registrar Data
• Changing Domain Name Ownership Whois Information & Google Search Ranking Impact
• The "Google Certified Domain Change" Proposal
• Really, Does Google Use Whois Registrar Data to Rank Sites? Can They?
• Does Registering A Domain Name for 10 Years Help Search Ranking?
• Impact of Changing Registrar Data on Search Rankings

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: It seems Google has gone on the record saying domain registration length does not impact rankings.

Some of the Google AdSense ads have recently been served and tracked via DoubleClick. Here is a picture of me with my mouse over a Google AdSense ad from my personal blog. As you can see, the tracking URL is http://googleads.g.doubleclick.net/pagead/iclk?.

We know Google was planning on using DoubleClick cookie tracking as part of them acquiring DoubleClick. So maybe this is part of this integration?

I am not the only one seeing this. A few publishers are noticing this and commenting on this at WebmasterWorld. Some suspect it has to do with the poor earnings people noticed over the weekend, which we will be writing about within the next hour or so.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

JohnMu at Google has posted a thread announcement at Google Webmaster Help discussions stating there is an issue with some folks who might be trying to verify their sites with Google Webmaster Tools. Specifically, if you are trying to use the meta-tag verification method, you may currently be unable to verify your site with webmaster tools.

Dozens of reports came into the forum on Friday. So John posted an official thread and wrote:

It seems that some users have run into issues regarding meta tag verification of new sites in Webmaster Tools. We're looking into the issue and hope to have a solution as soon as possible. In the meantime, you might want to try file-based verification to see if it works better on your site.

Thanks for your patience, I'll post back when I know more!

There has currently not been an update that confirms things are working again.

Hopefully, you are not impacted.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Update: This is now resolved.

Google got me angry when they called gift giving at this time, "inappropriate." It is hard time, but SEMs stick together. Google updated webmaster tools with enhanced features. Google fixed an IFrame spam classifier bug. Google Blog Search's link command should be fixed now. Google Webmaster Help moved. Google is testing text ads on image search. Google AdSense is spammy around the holiday season. Google, Yahoo and Ask.com released their most popular searches for 2008. Friday was Day of the Ninja and we had a theme.

Make sure to subscribe to our video feed or subscribe directly on iTunes to be notified of these updates and download the video in the background. Here is the YouTube version of the feed (note: If YouTube shows a video not found message, just refresh the page and play it again, it is a YouTube bug):

For the original iTunes version, click here

Some Of The Topics Discussed:

• Google Gets Cheap: Cancels '08 Holiday Gifts To Advertisers/Publishers
• Google Begins Sending Out 2009 Holiday Gifts: Mug, Shirt & Pen
• The Warmth of the SEM Industry During Hard Times
• Google Updates Webmaster Tools & Crawl Rate Controls
• Google Fixes Spam Algorithm Classifier For IFrames
• Google Blog Search To Fix Blogroll Issue
• Google Webmaster Help Finds A New Home
• Google Testing Multiple Text Ads On Image Search
• Google AdSense Ads Getting Spammy Before Holiday Season?
• Most Popular Searches on Google, Ask, and Yahoo for 2008 Revealed
• Ninja Day at SERoundtable

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: December 5, 2008"

Welcome to December, where all your holiday wishes should come true. Hopefully you're finally recovered from last week's turkey (though if it were up to me, I'd have some more. Too bad I didn't eat at home!) And hopefully you also gained some money during Cyber Monday if you're an advertiser (or got a great deal if you're just a smart shopper). Now that it's Friday, check out this week's news in search:

Google: Cheapskates
I'm in 100% agreement with Barry that Google is stingy and obnoxious about not sending their advertisers -- those who made Google millions of dollars -- tokens of appreciation for the holiday season. How about you realize that their contributions are valuable and reward them in kind? Chances are Google is making a lot more than any individual advertiser, and I'm sure they'd appreciate the goodwill from Google. Heck, I know they would.

Meanwhile, Some People are Lucky
Google may have canceled gifts for most advertisers, but some got Google gifts. Doesn't that make you even more jealous that Google only seems to care about a subset of you? Seriously.

At Least the SEM Industry Cares for its Own
Let's face it, this economy sucks. A lot of people are being affected and a lot of people are just being cautious even though there's probably nothing to worry about. A layoff as reported in the industry turned into a support forum for those who have been similarly impacted. It's nice that people care about others in this industry.

Have You Seen Google's Webmaster Tools Today?
Google has updated its Webmaster Tools with some consolidated settings and more control over your crawl rate. We have some screenshots in case you're too lazy to log into Webmaster Tools yourself, but you might want to check it out. It's cool. Promise. (It doesn't replace lost holiday gifts, though.)

Google Fixes iFrame Spam Classifier
Matt Cutts acknowledged earlier this week that Google had a bug when classifying iFrames as spam. The cool part is that it's fixed. The cooler part is that Barry found this in a Google Groups thread. I don't blame him when he says that he loves finding gems deep in forum discussion; that's why it's fun to check out forums. Of course, it's also fun to check out our reporting of the forum discussion on Search Engine Roundtable.

Google Blog Search to Fix Blogroll Links
It was reported earlier that the Google was indexing content that wasn't part of blog posts, like a blogroll. Google has said that they'll remove this content. It's not happening immediately, but it's on the company's radar.

Google Webmaster Help Group Moves to New Forum
It's about time, but the Google Webmaster Help Group has finally moved over to the new format Google Groups forums. Now it'll be even harder for Barry to track who is writing on which threads! Guys, give us back the blue G for Google representation and let us track our favorite forum members. Please? I asked more than once already. :)

Cyber Monday Rocked!
Any Google AdSense publisher or Google AdWords advertiser seemed to have fared well this Cyber Monday. Lots of clicks, better Quality Scores -- what more can you ask for?

Google Monetizes Image Search
Google is testing ads on image search, it's reported. I noticed Michael Gray blog about it. It's ugly. But hey, it's what Google does to make money for your holiday gifts. Oh wait.

Google Contractors Fired, Results Get Spammy
After it was determined that Google got rid of 10k contractors, ironically (but probably not related) we're noticing that Google AdSense ads are pretty spammy lately. I wonder if there's less manpower, or maybe the issue is that there's less motivation.

I HATE SEARCHWIKI
We had a poll asking how interested you were in Google's SearchIcky application. It turns out that most of you hate SearchWiki. Almost 83% of you don't want it. So hey, when is Google going to make it optional and something we can turn on? Matt Cutts, you there?

Popular Searches for 2008 Revealed Across Three Engines
Google, Yahoo, and Ask revealed some of their top search terms for 2008. I thought that Google's Product Search data was most significant. It's cool to see that everyone wants gadgets. I'm not surprised; it's what I'd have searched for too!

Today is Ninja Day
Most ninjas think in black. Search Engine Roundtable thinks in black on a yellow background. We're celebrating the Day of the Ninja today, so be sure to do something stealthy like a ninja. K?

Speaking of which, do you think the pirates can beat the ninjas?

Since the end of July, there's been a vacancy at Microsoft as Kevin Johnson moved on from the company. The New York Times reports that Johnson's vacancy is finally filled: Qi Lu, a former Yahoo executive, has taken the position.

In selecting Mr. Lu, who will become president of the money-losing online services group in January, Microsoft chose an executive with deep technical knowledge over others with more advertising and media experience. He will be leading the company’s challenge to Google, which dominates the search and online advertising businesses.

Suspicions with hiring technologist Lu have to do with Microsoft wanting to be more like Google. Maybe they're right.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

We reported on November 5th that Google and Yahoo ended their ad agreement. We only knew what the Google Blog (and other news outlets) told us: the government didn't seem too happy about the agreement and advertisers were concerned.

In the past 24 hours, though, it's come to light that there was a lot more than just a "governmental concern." The truth of the matter is that the United States Department of Justice was "three hours away" from filing an antitrust lawsuit against Google, according to CNET.

Now what? Well, Google's decision to pull away was "shrewd." And they think it's smart that Google pulled out, whereas Microsoft's past history shows that they wouldn't back down.

MS rarely back down. Thats why they got such a bad reputation- they were swallowing a multi-million (dollar/pound/euro- take your pick) DAILY fine about publishing "complete and accurate technical specifications" and still fighting.

G still enjoys public affection. It would be seriously bad for them to lose this publically annointed halo. MS never cared what people thought of them- as long as people BOUGHT their product, by hook or by crook

At the same time, though, some wonder why there was a concern about monopolies anyhow. After all, Google and Yahoo are considered competitors.

At the same time, there's a problem with the government's approach, according to one individual.

If the government knew anything about running a business, they wouldn't be operating with a close to $1 trillion annual deficit.

(In comparison, Google is doing a lot better.)

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and Sphinn.

Google has made two changes to Webmaster Tools. The first is they consolidated your settings into a single page for a site and the second is they are now giving more control over your crawl rate.

There is a new "Settings" link on the left hand side of a site profile in webmaster tools. That settings section gives you the ability to manage a site's geographic target, preferred domain, enhanced image search preference and your crawl rate control. Note, some of these settings expire after 90-days. Here is a picture:

The second enhancement is the ability to allow Google to decide how to fast or slow crawl your site, or to give you those options. The screen capture pretty much explains it:

This is one of those settings that set back after 90-days. So keep checking it if you make a change.

There are some webmasters who are not allowed to change the setting. They are told Google has set their rate and they cannot do anything about it. There is discussion about this notification at Google Webmaster Help and DigitalPoint Forums. But why can't they change it? One suspects the site is hosted at Blogger or a free hosting site, but JohnMu of Google wrote:

You usually won't have to fiddle with those settings, which is why they aren't available to all sites. We usually work out how much we can (and want to) crawl automatically. I would generally only change these settings if we're crawling your site too hard (and slowing down your server).

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help and DigitalPoint Forums.

It is now official! Google Webmaster Helps Groups has officially closed yesterday and they have opened up a new discussions area at Google Webmaster Help.

Susan from Google explained that the archives at the old group "will remain read-only, but no new posts will be accepted."

So go to the new introduction thread and say hello to the new group! Currently, the following Googler's are signed up:

• Matt Cutts
• John Mueller
• Susan Moskwa
• SagarK

Vanessa Fox posted the history of Google Webmaster help at Search Engine Land.

I will do my best to continue tracking these discussions, but there are some additional difficulties being worked out. Those details can be found in this thread if you are interested. Until then, I will do my best to bring you the best threads from this group!

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

A WebmasterWorld member is surprised Google is allowing ads with the titles "Blackhat SEO" to show up in AdWords ads for searches on seo.

Here is a screen capture I took yesterday, but it is still showing up today.

The member asked if there is something that can be done. One member replied that you can notify Google about this at