January 2009 Archives

If you conducted a Google search between 9:30am and 10:25 am (EST) on Saturday, January 31st, you would have seen Google label all the search results as "This site may harm your computer." Google admitted it was a human mistake. How did it happen? Here is how Google explained it:

We maintain a list of such sites through both manual and automated methods. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to come up with criteria for maintaining this list, and to provide simple processes for webmasters to remove their site from the list.

We periodically update that list and released one such update to the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here's the human error), the URL of '/' was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and '/' expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file. Since we push these updates in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m., so the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes.

In the meantime, the whole internet went berserk. There were thousands of posts in forums across the web, asking what this was all about. Thousands of webmasters posted with concern that their site had malware or Google mistakenly marked their sites as having malware. For 40 minutes or so, the Internet world was feeling very vulnerable due to this mistake. We even have tons of coverage at Techmeme.

What is a bit comical, is receiving 85 comments within 30 minutes on a post I wrote a week ago named Your Site May Harm Your Computer? Get That Google Label Removed In Hours.

Here are just some of the many discussion forums discussing this, now resolved, issue:

• PLEASE READ: Your site might not have malware, Google Webmaster Help
• My site was remove using webmaster tools, Google Webmaster Help
• "This site may harm your computer" bug in search result!!!, DigitalPoint Forums
• Early April Fool's?, HighRankings Forums
• Google Glitch Marks all Sites "This site may harm your computer", WebmasterWorld
• Google Webmaster Error Now!!!!, DigitalPoint Forums
• Errors all over Google SERPS - This site may harm your computer, Sphinn
• You have Incentive Based ads.. Oh yes you do! - Search Engine Watch Forums, Search Engine Watch Forums

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

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: January 30, 2009"

I am still on that quasi vacation so, this will be a text recap, instead of the video recap. Next week, I hope to resume the videos, because I know how much you guys love looking at me.

This week, I covered over twenty-five threads, the topics I found most interesting were the following. Matt Cutts discussed how Google reacts to Google Bombs. Google also is testing favorite icons to the search results. Yahoo explained why they are doing auto-optimization for some advertisers. Google has a new display URL policy, which might be a big deal for some advertisers. Google's new did you mean feature seems to be here for good. People are seeing AdSense in AOL instant messenger. Google pushes the new interface to some AdWords advertisers. Google fixes SMS search. The click fraud rate is higher. Google helps parents catch their son looking at porn. Yahoo and Google celebrate New Years. Those were the highlights this week from the Search Engine Roundtable.

• Google Bomb Defusing Has Two Algorithms
• Google Testing Site Fav Icons in Search Results?
• Yahoo Now Calling Us Liars Regarding Their Auto-Optimization of Campaigns
• Google AdWords Requiring One Domain Per Ad Group?
• Google Confirms New Display URL Policy: One Domain Per Ad Group
• Google's Enhanced "Did You Mean" Now Default
• Is AOL Testing Google AdSense Ads in Messenger?
• Google Invites More Advertisers To Test Beta AdWords Interface
• Google Finally Confirms Fixing SMS Search
• Click Fraud Rate Reaches 17.1 Percent
• Google Helps Parents Catch Son Searching For Porn
• Chinese New Year At Yahoo.com & Google's Malaysia Site

Google Maps has very useful traffic data but it plots that traffic data using colors. For example, here is a screen capture of traffic new NYC:

But those that are severely colorblind are not able to see traffic data. One such person posted a complaint in Google Help Groups asking for an "alternative way" of displaying such data on Google Maps for those that are colorblind.

Interesting point, making Google Maps more accessible for the colorblind.

Forum discussion at Google Help Groups.

Update: In August 2009, Google has taken steps to help the colorblind see traffic on Google Maps.

On Sunday, we reported that Google will now be requiring one domain per ad group as part of their new display URL policy in the AdWords program. In short, what this means is that you cannot advertiser for rustybrick.com and seroundtable.com in the same AdWords ad group.

We were unable to confirm that this change is indeed going to happen until today. AdWordsAdvisor in that WebmasterWorld thread confirmed the change by saying:

I can confirm that there is a change coming up, the intent of which is to make sure users are sent to the site to which they expect to be sent.

That said, I am so far behind in general (which, by the way, also accounts for my less than sterling attendence in the forum the past week and more) that I am not yet up-to-speed on the details.

I will look into it and post again later. To set reasonable expectations, it is not likely to be earlier than late in the day tomorrow (Friday) - just looking at what I've got to get done before I can even start digging into it.

My apology for not having a concise answer, right now.

So if you are very interested in these details, I would visit WebmasterWorld again later today.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: On February 20, 2009, Google posted a blog post once again confirming this change and sharing that this will be going into affect the week of February 24, 2009.

We have confirmed reports that Google Reader's recommendation list feature stopped updating some time over the past day or so. The recommendation list is suppose to show you other blogs or feeds that you might be interested in, based on your current feed subscriptions at Google Reader.

In a Google Groups thread, one Google Reader user noticed that he/she stopped receiving recommendations. So he/she reported the issue, and Google confirmed the bug. Google said they hope to fix it in a day or so.

Roger from the Google Reader team said:

Thanks for reporting this. After a bit of investigating, we think we've found something that might be keeping some recommendations from updating. We're hoping to have this fixed by the end of the day. Please let us know if you're still having trouble after a few days.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Confirmed reports at a Google AdWords Help thread show that if you use the XML format for Google AdWords reports, you will be missing decimal values in the report.

The advertiser who reported this noticed the discrepancy when he generate duplicate reports, one in Excel format and one is XML format. The advertiser said:

When I generate reports in excel format, I get the right number for avg cpc with decimasl, and when I generate an xml format it gives me a different one without the decimal. e.g. In Excel it is avgcpc = 1.50 while in XML avgcpc= 1478393. I think there is a bug in the reports when converted to XML format.

AdWordsPro Stephen confirmed the issue and said he will follow up on why this is the case and let us know if it is a bug or a 'feature.'

Forum discussion at Google AdWords Help.

Back in November 2008, we reported Google was testing a new AdWords interface. It seems like we are getting more reports from blogs and WebmasterWorld that more advertisers are now able to see this new interface.

It is an opt in feature, where Google is asking some of their advertisers if they would like to participate in the new interface.

Tim Cohn posted some additional screen captures at his blog, taking you through some of the new features and sleeker designs and reports.

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: January 29, 2009"

An advertiser notes in a WebmasterWorld thread that Google's Learning Center module has an interesting piece of content, under the section 3D, Targeting/Keyword Targeting. It said:

Note: Partner sites don't recognize keyword matching options. Therefore, all keywords on these sites are treated as broad-matched keywords.

This means, that when AOL displays Google AdWords ads on AOL Search, they might not listen to if you want to only show an ad for blue shoes, as opposed to red shoes. As you can imagine, this really got many advertisers worried.

The original poster brought this to the attention of his Google representative, who told him, that note needs to be clarified. He basically said, match types do apply to the search network, including search partners, but does not include the content network.

So match type controls do not make a difference on the content network, but they do make a difference on the search network and search partners.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

For Google News publishers, getting high placement in Google News can be great. Most publishers would love to see prime time placement of their stories on the main Google News home page, but many settle for ranking well in Google News for news searchers.

One such publisher asked how can he help his articles see higher placement for news searches. The question was asked in a Google News Help thread and was answered by Google representative, Inabl.

Inbal linked this publisher to an article that discusses how ranking works at Google News, but added:

We work continuously to improve this grouping technology; your feedback can help us identify areas that need work. Please let us know if you have any suggestions for improvement.

The article isolated three areas for their Google News ranking algorithm. They include:

• Freshness of content
• Diversity of content
• Rich textual content which would help users searching for information to find your articles

Plus you need to factor in standard search engine friendly design and basic SEO principles.

Forum discussion at Google News Help.

Before starting, I am finding this very hard to believe. A fairly active member at DigitalPoint Forums, posted a thread linking to his blog, where he has a screen capture of Google AdSense showing up in place of the ad spots of AOL's Instant Messenger software.

Here is his screen capture from his blog:

I was going to dismiss this post completely, but then I looked at the members history at the forum. He has over 700 posts at the forum and has been an active member since February 2007. So it seems like this member has some history.

I am still very skeptical that this image was not 'photoshoped' to look this way.

So I will leave it at being extremely skeptical if this is a true screen capture or something that was made up. I simply do not know.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

It has now been a year since adCenterEU, the official Microsoft adCenter representative at WebmasterWorld, has posted at the forum. His last post can be found at a thread named Microsoft To Serve Ads On WSJ Digital Network where he said:

Thankyou pageoneresults!

Nice comments like that get us all fired up!

:-)

Cheers

adCenterEU

That was on January 29, 2008 at 12:12 pm (EST). Since then, not one peep from adCenterEU.

How about adCenterEU's US counterpart, adCenter411? Well, that representatives last post was on February 18, 2008 at 11:36 am in a thread named Is it posible to split test ads with adcenter.

So why aren't adCenter representatives still participating at WebmasterWorld? I know they have launched a major initiative to education at the adCenter Community, but should they ignore where they got their start? I hope not.

Forum discussion, well - it doesn't exist.

You know when you misspell something in Google, they show a "Did you mean" with the correct spelling. Historically, Google has told us that even though they put that Did you mean in red, people still ignore it. So a a month or so ago, they decided to test enhancing the Did you mean feature. The enhanced version showed the correct spelling for the two top results and the remainder of the results were for the wrong spelling.

Here is an example of a search for matt cuttz versus the correct spelling of matt cutts.

A WebmasterWorld thread took notice that this seems to always be the case now. Google seems to always be showing the new way of showing Did you mean results. Tedster added that he has been noticing an influx of "no results" found. Here is an example for a search on mesothmioma, which is correctly spelled mesothelioma.

The above example might be a bug in Google's spell checking software. Outside of the bug, it does seem like the enhanced version of Did you mean, is sticking around for a while.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

An interesting WebmasterWorld thread has several publishers claiming that they make more money with Google AdSense with their old, not updated sites, as compared to their larger, more updated and cleaner looking sites.

In the past, we did discuss how ugly sites earn more with AdSense and most agreed that this is true. But outdated, old sites are earning more than updated and fresh sites?

Here is a poll, which one makes you more money?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Click Forensics released their quarterly click fraud report. The click fraud rate increased 1.1 points from 16.0% in Q3 to 17.1% in Q4. Let me explain that not everyone agrees with these numbers and they are someone controversial in nature.

I normally do not cover these reports here, instead I post them at Search Engine Land, but this one is getting a lot of attention at WebmasterWorld. First, here are the key points:

- The overall industry average click fraud rate grew to 17.1% for Q4 2008. That’s up from 16.0% in Q3 2008 and from the 16.6% rate reported for Q4 2007.
- The average click fraud rate of PPC advertisements appearing on search engine content networks, including Google AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, was 28.2%. That’s up from the 27.1% rate reported for Q3 2008 and down slightly from the 28.3% rate reported for Q4 2007.
- Traffic from botnets was responsible for 31.4% of all click fraud traffic in Q4 2008. That’s up from the 27.6% rate reported for Q3 2008 and the 22.0% rate reported for Q4 2007.
- In Q4 2008, the greatest percentage of click fraud originating from countries outside the U.S. came from Canada (7.4 percent), Germany (3.0 percent) and China (2.3 percent).

Folks in the WebmasterWorld are taking both sides. Some are of the opinion that this is just going to get worse and others are of the opinion that these reports are false. The discussion may get somewhat heated, but the moderators at WebmasterWorld know how to keep things level headed.

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: January 28, 2009"

A content publisher asked about getting his publishing site included in Google News. In the Google News Help thread Googler, Inbal, said that you don't always need to have three digits in the URL to be in Google News.

In the past, there was a strong Google News requirement to have three digits in the URL. It was how Google's News spider worked. But now, with the addition of Google Sitemaps, you no longer need digits in the URL.

Inbal said:

The three-digit-number requirement is waived if you submit a Google News sitemap in order to alert our crawler to your news articles in your Blog. This tool will enable you to optimize the inclusion of your content without having to change the structure of your URLs. You can find more information about creating a News sitemap in our Publisher Help Center:

http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/topic.py?topic=11666.

Good news for new publishers looking to keep their URLs keyword specific. This isn't brand new, but it is relatively new to Google News.

Forum discussion at Google News Help

Discovery, a moderator at Search Engine Watch Forums asks if Google is using their political bias to show pro Obama search results versus negative Bush search results. Let me go on record here and say, I do not think Google is doing this, but many people do, this is why I am covering it.

His argument starts by saying that we know Google and their CEO are major supporters of Obama. This is no secret and we know we were concerned that this support would show a bias in Google. That being said, Discover shows two search results, but for misspellings of each President's name.

First, a search result for Barack Aboma, clearly misspelling the last name. Here are the positive or neutral results for this search term in Google. Plus they have a spelling correction at the top:

Second, a search result for George Busch, misspelling the last name as well. Here are negative results for this search term in Google. Plus it is missing a spelling suggestion:

Discovery wonders why Bush has such negative results while Obama has such positive results? Well, I think the clear answer is that many people in the US love Obama, while many people really dislike Bush. The search results show it, and so do the polls. But is there more going on?

Discovery puts it this way:

In history most powerful entities in a country have always been the media outlets. If you control the media or the main point of communications with the public you have a great deal of power. You can control mass opinion and behavior. If Google is the media source of the new age, can tinkering like this be their downfall?

I'll leave it at that and let the discussion continue at Search Engine Watch Forums.

This is not really SEO related but I found this thread at Google Webmaster Help funny. A parent comes on, asks if there are any other ways porn sites can come up in their Google Web History without having access to their computer.

In short, it appears the parents were away and their son went on their computer. The son then conducted a few adult related searches and clicked on to adult sites. The parent is asking if there is any way that this search history could be easily manipulated. In short, the parent wants to know if their son actually used their computer to look at porn.

The only way, that I know of, to add search history to Google is to conduct searches on Google while signed into that Google account. So if someone hacked into your account and conducted searches, then that might be possible. But typically, hackers won't want to get your son busted for looking for porn. The parent signed off:

This answers my question & I thank you for Google help.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Remember when Yahoo sent out notifications about updating their Yahoo Search Marketing terms of service, which basically gave them the right to "optimize" campaigns without consent or warning? There was a huge outcry for such activity, even though this was an issue back in June 2008. They even were bold enough to turn on the content network when the campaign manager specifically turned it off.

Just a couple hours ago, Yahoo wrote a blog post named The Truth about Account Optimizations. So, the title seems to imply that all the bloggers, including us, Andy Beal, Nathania Johnson and many many others are liars or very misinformed.

Yahoo said, although there was an outcry, they have seen great results. Here are those results, they said they improved:

• Since June 2008, we have optimized approximately 2% of all active accounts and created approximately 20,000 new ads.
• The acceptance rate of changes we have made is roughly 80%, which we believe indicates the changes have been helpful.
• The time needed to make optimization changes to accounts has been reduced from approximately ten days to one day.

Yahoo then goes through bullet points of the misconceptions we, bloggers, have been spewing about the program. Well, really - if you look at what they say, I don't think we, bloggers, are misinformed at all. You auto-opt in these advertisers, without notification that they are in this program. Then you tell us that you can "opt out," but they don't know they were in this program in the first place. You say you notify advertisers within 24 hours, but either the emails are caught by spam filters or most don't get these notifications. They said it is not designed for large advertisers who "actively manage their accounts," but yet - I know large advertisers who were hit by this, I guess "large" and "actively" are subjective terms. Yahoo said they would never switch on your content match if you turn it off, but we have reports that they did in fact do this (unconfirmed reports, to be fair).

I am not sure, I just think Yahoo could of handled this situation better. (1) They could have notified advertisers of a way to opt out of this, before it even was turned on. (2) They could have been quicker to respond to these issues. (3) They could have worked with us, the bloggers, as opposed to make us look like liars.

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums.

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

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: January 27, 2009"

Googlers, John Mueller and Susan Moskwa put together a very comprehensive Knol page on Google Webmaster Tools verification.

So if you are new to Google Webmaster Tools and you are about to verify your site with Google Webmaster Tools.

You can already see several revisions to this knol page, including one waiting in moderation by Cristina Wood.

Who cares? Well, besides for this being very comprehensive, you might want to investigate it for your own stuff. Matt Cutts of Google wrote Four Things You Need To Know About Knol, where one point was:

My personal conception of Knol is that when you want to write a quick article or put some information on the web, Knol is a great place to do it.

That being said, Knol launched in July of last year and is still trying to gain traction on Wikipedia and the likes.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

One of the most popular topics from searchers (not SEOs) in Google help groups are about removing content in Google's search results. As you can imagine, Google is not eager to remove content in any case, so they have set up specific rules in which they will remove content.

JohnMu of Google detailed which scenarios Google will remove search results from Google in a Google Webmaster Help thread. You can request removal of content in these following cases:

* The site owner has modified a page so that it no longer contains the information or image that concerns me.
* The site owner has removed a page/image or blocked it from being indexed by using robots.txt or meta tags.
* You've been unable to work with the site owner, but the information appearing in the search results is one of the following:
- Your social security or government ID number
- Your bank account or credit card number
- Your image of my handwritten signature
- Your full name or the name of your business appearing on an adult content site that's spamming Google's search results.

Google has a step by step walk through on removing content from Google. You can start that process over here.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

On January 8th, we reported major issues with Google SMS Search not working. Then again on January 15th, we asked if Google SMS is dead or not.

Well, not we finally have confirmed reports that Google SMS search has been fixed and is working.

A Google representative, Bret, said Google has "recently made some changes on our end to address this issue." Now, if you want to get sports scores via Google SMS search, it should now work. It only took about 20 days to get working again, but it is working according to many users in the thread.

I am personally unable to test it now, being that I am in Israel right now on vacation.

Forum discussion at Google Mobile Help.

Yesterday was the Chinese New Year and if you visited the main Yahoo.com site, you would have noticed a cute and animated logo for the day. Here is it, just in case you missed it.

But visiting Google.com did not show a logo for the day. Instead you needed to visit a localized version of Google, such as the Google Malaysia site. You would have noticed this logo:

Some are upset that Google did not put the logo on their main Google.com site, like Yahoo has done.

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

In October, we reported that both InsideAdWords & Microsoft adCenter are Twittering. But it now seems like more Google AdWords representatives have joined the Twitter bandwagon.

Both AdWordsPro Sarah & AdWordsPro Stephen are now on Twitter. You can follow them at:

• http://twitter.com/AdWordsProSarah
• http://twitter.com/AdWordsHelper

Sarah is Sarah and AdWordsHelper is Stephen. Welcome to Twitter guys!

Why should you care? Well, if you are an advertiser, you may be able to ask direct questions to these Googlers and you may be able to pick up new tricks and tips for your campaigns.

Oh and don't forget, this blog is on Twitter at http://twitter.com/seroundtable and I am personally at Twitter at http://twitter.com/rustybrick, so follow us as well.

Forum discussion at Google AdWords 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: January 26, 2009"

Over the weekend, many AdSense sites, were not serving up paid contextual ads. Instead, they were serving up what are called PSAs or Public Service Ads. They kind of look like this:

They do not earn publishers money.

A Google AdSense Help thread has confirmation from Google on this bug. AdSensePro Ashley said:

This issue has now been resolved. PSA ads on affected blogs should now be replaced with paying ads. Some publishers may experience a short delay before they see paying ads on their blogs.

It might have impacted just Blogger/Blogspot blogs. But it impacted many blogs for a short period of time. There were 45 responses to this small "crises." There was also discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

This was not the first time Google seemed to have an issue with serving up PSAs. We covered this issue back in 2004, twice. If you want to eliminate PSAs, you can try that also.

Forum discussion at Google AdSense Help and DigitalPoint Forums.

Two years ago today, Google launched an algorithm to defuse Googlebombs. It basically helped remove the miserable failure results at Google, amongst others. In May of 2007, we learned that the Googlebomb algorithm was not a live algorithm, meaning, it was run manually, as often as Google wanted.

Now, in Detecting Googlebombs by Googler, Matt Cutts, we learn there are two parts to the algorithm. Matt explains the first algorithm finds these Googlebombs and then lessens their impact in the Google search results. The second algorithm goes through the entire Google index to locate more of the detected Googlebombs and defuse those. Here is how Matt put it:

The short answer is that we do two different things — both of them algorithmic — to handle Googlebombs: detect Googlebombs and then mitigate their impact. The second algorithm (mitigating the impact of Googlebombs) is always running in our productionized systems. The first algorithm (detecting Googlebombs) has to process our entire web index, so in most typical cases we tend not to run that algorithm every single time we crawl new web data.

Matt explains that the "mitigating the impact of Googlebombs" is run all the time but the detection of Googlebombs is run every now and then and in 2008, they ran it "5-6 times."

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and at Sphinn.

Google has posted an announcement thread at Google Groups saying they hope they have fixed a bug that removed ownership status of some Google Group owners.

In short, Google Groups pushed out a new update that caused the removal of ownership in some instances. Google believes they have addressed the issue and returned ownership status to those impacted by this change. Google said:

We believe that we have identified all of the users who lost owner or manager rights as an indirect result of our error, and we have fixed those cases as best we could. In some cases, we don't have enough evidence to say that you should be an owner, and in those cases we've made you a manager; you can ask another group owner to promote you or follow up in the help forum. In either case, if you do not like the email address or the nickname that we used to resubscribe you to your group, you can change it by clicking on the "Edit my subscription" link in the group, and modifying as appropriate -- there's a little menu for email, and a field for nickname.

Those impacted by this issue had to have meet the following conditions:

• you have multiple email addresses associated with your account
• you attempted to log in while the bug was live
• you subscribe to or own groups under the different emails in (a)

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

A Google AdWords Help thread is a myth busting thread on the topic of blacklisting AdWords campaigns. Two Google representations confirm that Google will not blacklist or ban AdWords campaigns due to have a low or poor quality score.

One advertiser asked, "Can your account be "blacklisted" in regards to the Quality Score of the Landing Page?"

This might be considered a popular myth. Why? Well, if a campaign or keyword has a low quality score, it may feel like you have been blacklisted. But your ads won't show or your bids will skyrocket not due to being blacklisted but more due to having a poor quality score.

Both AdWords representatives gives more advice on how to improve your quality score in the thread.

Forum discussion at Google AdWords Help.

If you are noticing that your index count in Google Webmaster Tools in your Sitemaps section shows zero pages are indexed, then don't panic. Google has confirmed in a Google Webmaster Help thread that there may be a bug impacting some reporting for Sitemaps files.

JohnMu of Google said:

It looks like the "0" count may be a bug at the moment, so I wouldn't worry about it for now. I looked at your Sitemap file and some of the URLs are indexed. Because of that, I imagine that this is just a case where what you want indexed just doesn't completely match what Google wants indexed at the moment :-).

This is not the first time Google had a reporting glitch with Sitemaps. A few months ago, we reported a similar issue. I cannot express how many times we have reported issues with the reports at Google Webmaster Tools. So, whenever you see something really out of the norm, I would strongly recommend you not panic and wait.

Forum discussion Google Webmaster Help.

Brian Ussery posted screen captures of Google possibly adding favorite icons on the left hand side of the display URL in the search results. He posted a screen capture at Google Blogoscoped Forums and emailed me a few.

Here is a screen shot of a site command, which is the only way he was able to see the fav icons, for Matt Cutts' site.

Now, we are not sure if he has some Firefox extension that is making this happen or if it is something Google is testing. Brian is confident he doesn't have an extension on Firefox that would cause this. It also only shows when he does a site:www.domain.com command.

I heard some rumors about this a week or so ago, but passed on it, because I thought it was an extension. So, two reports, within a week - might imply it is a Google test. I cannot personally confirm this.

The images are hosted on Google. For example, if you look at google.com/s2/favicons?domain=seroundtable.com, you will see the favorite icon for this site. But this is used primarily for Google Profile icons. So maybe Google is now using this for search results? I am not sure.

Forum discussion at Google Blogoscoped Forums.

Update: This seems real, John from Google said in a Google Webmaster Help Thread:

We do a ton of tests every year, so I wouldn't be surprised to accidentally stumble across something like this :-).

That said, I'd be curious to hear of other changes in the search results pages that you guys would like to see. I don't really have anything to do with that, but it's always neat to see what kind of ideas you all would have. Do you think favicons make sense in search results? Do they help you to recognize a site that you like to go to?

A pulled WebmasterWorld thread has reports from some advertisers that Google is sending out notifications to them that they have changed their display URL policy again. This change is that you can have only one display URL domain in an ad group. So you can not have a display URL for www.seroundtable.com and www.rustybrick.com in the same ad group, according to this policy.

I have not seen confirmed reports of this email, but they are floating around the forums and blogs. Here is a copy of the email text:

In an effort to provide more relevant results and a higher quality experience for our users, we have made the decision to no longer allow multiple domains within a single ad group. Going forward, all display URLs within an ad group must be for the same top-level domain. Please note that this amendment to our policy applies to all advertisers, regardless of previous exceptions or acceptability of any campaigns. While we understand there are legitimate use-cases for multiple domains within one ad group, we ask that separate ad groups are created for any given domain.

For instructions on editing your display URL, please see https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6272&hl=en_US

Please know that we will not be retroactively disapproving ads until the end of February. Please aim to make the changes before then.

The WebmasterWorld is on hold, likely due to a copy and paste of an email. But it might be activated soon and we can get more of an idea on the legitimacy of these reports.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: We received confirmation that this will indeed be happening.

Update 2: On February 20, 2009, Google posted a blog post once again confirming this change and sharing that this will be going into affect the week of February 24, 2009.

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: January 22, 2009"

I am currently in Israel on a quasi vacation, so I need to skip the video part of this recap. If you are in Israel and want to meet up with me, I am heading to the Jerusalem Web Professionals meet up, this Wednesday night January 28th at 8pm (local time). It is at PresenTense Offices on 64 Emek Refa'im (1 Flight up above the Bridal Shop). You need to register either over here or on Facebook. Hope to see you there!

In terms of the recap, here are, what I feel, the most important topics of the past week. Google had a minor PageRank update that turned out to be from a canonical URL cleanup that Google was running, so the PageRank update was not real. Yahoo and Ask.com seemed to have updated as well. Google leaked site penalties through a Hyves trick. I covered Google's new "Preferred Sites" extension to SearchWiki. Also, Google and Microsoft announced earnings. Google Image search seemed to have updated. Google said the AdSense earnings were down due to cleaning up arbitrage sites. Google's new AdSense code may invalidate your web site's HTML. Google is late on paying some publishers. Inauguration day fell flat for many publishers. Google Blog Search may have issues indexing your content. Google did away with the iGoogle version for the iPhone. Google and Yahoo didn't have a special logo for Inauguration Day, but did have logos for Martin Luther Kind Day. Here are links to these stories:

• Google Toolbar PageRank Drops Over January '09 Weekend
• Yahoo Search & Ask.com January 2009 Search Updates?
• Google's Hyves PageRank Loophole? Check If Site Has Google Penalty
• SEOs Discuss Impact of Google's "Preferred Sites" Search Preference
• Google & Microsoft Announce Earnings
• Google Images January 2009 Update
• Google's SVP Rosenberg Said AdSense Revenue Down Due To Arbitrage Cleanup
• Google's New AdSense Code Might Invalidate Your HTML Code
• Google Confirms Not Paying Some AdSense Publishers
• Inauguration Day A Big Bust for Google Advertisers & Publishers
• Google Blog Search May Not Discover Your New Blog Posts
• Google Drops iPhone Optimized iGoogle: Users Revolt
• Google Won't Bring Back the iPhone Version of iGoogle
• Search Logos for Inauguration Day, Did Google & Yahoo Forget?
• Martin Luther King Day 2009: Logos from Google, Yahoo, Ask, Live, Dogpile & More

Hope to see you at the Jerusalem Tech Meetup, if you are here! Everyone have a wonderful weekend!

In the Google earnings call, that we reported earlier, Google's Senior Vice President, Johnathan Rosenberg, said on the earnings call:

AdSense revenue was weaker, though AdSense for content was strong. When it comes to AdSense for Search, we did a lot of arbitrage cleanup in Q3 and Q4.

This quote comes from a WebmasterWorld thread, and discusses the significance of such a statement.

Made for AdSense sites (MFAs are banking on arbitrage and Google promised to shut them down in May 2007. But stronger action appeared this past May. It seems like it has impacted Google's earnings.

In Q4 2007 Google earned 1.31 billion with AdSense (and that network), but in Q4 2008 Google earned 1.29 billion. Even in the third quarter, Google earned 1.33 billion. So there did seem to be a downturn recently in that area.

Some are using this statement to reduce their estimated tax payments in 2009.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google will label sites in their search results as harmful, when the site is believed to have malware on it. The last thing Google wants to do, is help an unsuspecting searcher land on a web page that can infect your computer. So Google takes a proactive approach to discovery and labeling malware results.

But sometimes, your site can be found to have malware. Malware can get on your site through being hacked or through third party code. If you find this label on your site, you need to remove the malware from your site and notify Google that it has been removed.

After it is removed, go to Google Webmaster Tools and there will be a place to request a review. Go through that process and then hopefully, within a few hours, that label will be removed.

Google has a detailed post on this at the Webmaster Central Blog. That post and in a recent thread at Google Webmaster Help, it says, it typically takes hours to remove the label, but can take as much as a day.

Webmasters are eager to have a Google malware label removed from their site and often ask how long a review of the site will take. Both the original scanning and the review process are fully automated. The systems analyze large portions of the internet, which is big place, so the review may not happen immediately. Ideally, the label will be removed within a few hours. At its longest, the process should take a day or so.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

A Google Webmaster Help discussion thread shows a good way to recover lost web pages using Google.

First, Googler, JohnMu, recommends you take down your website down immediately. He said, "do not let the server respond to any requests. This is important because otherwise the cached pages will be overwritten by whatever content you have online now."

Second, use the Warrick Tool, which will look at Internet Archive, Google, Live Search, and Yahoo for caches of your pages. John said, it typically takes a day or two to get your content.

Finally, when you have these files, you can restore with them.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help

In the past two days, Google and Microsoft have announced earnings. Google's announcement is over here and Microsoft's announcement is over here.

The market had time to react to Microsoft's announcement of cutting 5,000 jobs and a weak outlook on sales and products. Microsoft (MSFT) saw a 11.71% drop in their stock price based on that announcement. Google released their earnings report yesterday, after the market closed. It is hard to predict if their stock price will rise or fall but they are currently down 2.67% in the after market. Although Google's revenue was up 18%, they saw a 68% drop in fourth-quarter profit.

We have lots of discussion around the two announcements. Google discussion at WebmasterWorld,Microsoft job cuts discussion at WebmasterWorld and Microsoft earnings discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums. Plus respective coverage at Techmeme.

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: January 22, 2009"

A WebmasterWorld thread has a lot of discussion from Google AdSense publishers on how poor of a day they had on Inauguration Day.

Traffic and clicks and earnings were way down for most of these publishers on the day. It seems like very few web users were out and about using these sites.

So let me poll our audience, how did you do on Inauguration Day?

I know this site's traffic was pretty even, but I think that was because we wrote a post about the day.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

On Monday, we broke the news that Google dropped the iPhone version of iGoogle and it really really really update iPhone users. That being the case, I really thought Google would bring back the iPhone interface. It seems like I was wrong.

Google updated the Google Web Search Help thread saying that they want to keep one version of iGoogle mobile so they can concentrate "on a single version is that not all mobile browsers can handle the same content that the iPhone and Android can."

Here is the full post:

I want to let you know that the teams involved in this decision are aware of this thread and following along on the feedback. I'd like to address a few concerns I've seen posted:

The mobile version doesn't provide the same experience as the iPhone/Android version
We know there are some differences between the two versions -- in fact I've been using iGoogle on the iPhone since the day it launched. One of the trade offs we know we're making with concentrating on a single version is that not all mobile browsers can handle the same content that the iPhone and Android can. The mobile team does want to hear any ideas you've got for mobile features; you can submit them to their ideas page:
http://productideas.appspot.com/#16/e=cf

iGoogle on iPhone and Android
The Android users who've popped in here are right; we're also redirecting Android phones to the mobile interface. The goal here is to provide an iGoogle page that's optimized for speed and reliability; this change wasn't made to cater to Android users.

The iPhone/Android version is still available from a desktop computer
That's currently true; redirecting iPhone and Android users to the mobile iGoogle page was the first step in standardizing the experience. We're working on taking down the iPhone/Android version.

Some content has disappeared
If some of your content isn't there now, that's probably because it isn't compatible with the mobile interface (for you technical folks, that's anything in an IFRAME). You can learn about what content from your list does work from this article in our Help Center:
http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer=96016

Finally, if there's a Google service that you used to access on the iPhone version of iGoogle that isn't offered in the mobile version, we may have an optimized version available. To see the list of optimized services, visit Google.com on your iPhone or Android phone and tap the 'More' link at the top of the page.

This response clearly doesn't sit well with most iPhone users.

Forum discussion continued at Google Web Search Help.

I am now seeing early reports of a Google Image Search update via WebmasterWorld. The reports claim that Google has been adding new images to the image index and those images are now showing up in the search results.

That last Google Image Search update was in October and we see them every few months or so.

There is no word on if there was an update to the image filter. But we may see more reports coming in on that news soon. So, if you have been waiting for your new images to show up in Google, you may now be in luck.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Dozens of webmasters are reporting that their FeedBurner subscriber count numbers are dropping like flies, over night. There are dozens of threads on the topic, but the largest one is at Google Groups.

Some publishers are noticing drops from hundreds of subscribers to just a few subscribers. The biggest anomaly is TechCrunch, which is currently sporting zero subscribers, even Arrington twittered this.

I am sure this is just a temporary reporting glitch. It wouldn't be the first time. In October 2008 we saw a major reporting glitch and also in August 2008.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

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

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: January 21, 2009"

Let's say you wanted to drive from the zip code 10302 to 10308, which are both in Staten Island, New York. If you plugged that into Google Maps, Google would tell you, you have to be prepared for a three hour or more commute.

For some unknown reason, a bug in Google Maps, thinks the zip code 10308, which is owned by Staten Island, is in Schenectady, in upstate New York.

Adam from the Google Maps team confirmed the issue in a Google Maps Help forum thread. He said:

Turns out this bug is an artifact of a known issue we're working to resolve, so if you haven't reported this yet to Tele Atlas please don't expend the effort.

So, if you are driving to 10308, be careful when using Google Maps.

Forum discussion at Google Maps Help.

How often to do you hit yourself on the head and say, "why didn't I think of that?" That is how many felt when Patrick Sexton and David Mihm launched GetListed.org. GetListed.org is an incredibly useful and easy to use tool to quickly see how your local search listings play in the local search space.

Let me show you. First you enter in a business name and zip code. Then GetListed.org polls Google, Yahoo, Live and Best of the Web's local engines to see how your listings are doing in those engines. Here is a look at RustyBrick's local search reach:

Then you can drill down deeper to see a better overview:

Also, you can see a to do list, all your reviews and the details of your listing by those four engines. I suspect GetListed.org will continue to add more engines over time.

Matt McGee posted his review at Search Engine Land and the Sphinn discussion around the new tool is excellent. This tool is an excellent idea and I am glad it was created.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

A Google Groups thread has confirmed reports from Jeremy Hylton of Google, that Google blog search, in some cases, has issues finding and returning new blog posts in Google Blog Search.

Jeremy explained that earlier on, there was an issue with Google crawling certain blogs. But then at the end of December they fixed that issue. Now, it appears there is an issue with the same type of blogs, where Google is missing random new blog posts from those blogs.

Here is how Jeremy put it:

We are having some problems with your blog that we're still debugging. We have most of your recent posts in the index. At the moment, it looks like the two most recent ones are not getting returned. There was an earlier problem that caused us to stop crawling your blog entirely. We fixed that just before Christmas. I was just checking on your blog to confirm that the fix is working when I noticed that we're again missing a few posts. We'll definitely look into it.

I believe this all started in early November, when Google changed how they index blogs. In early December they vowed to fix it and then in late December, Christmas time, they thought they fixed the bulk of it. However, there are still issues that Google is aware of, including the issue mentioned above.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

There is an extremely large thread at Google AdSense Help group with publishers complaining that they have not received payment this month from Google.

Jennifer, a Google AdSense representative, confirmed that Google did not pay some publishers due to a bug of some sort. She said:

We've been monitoring this thread and I can confirm that we have an issue on our back end that is preventing some publishers from seeing payment holds on their accounts. We are working with the YouTube team to get this issue resolved as quickly as possible. In the meantime, we have been working to contact affected publishers individually. Thank you all for posting in the forum. The faster we can aggregate data on a possible bug, the faster we can fix it, and forum threads like this are hugely helpful in surfacing these issues.

We appreciate your patience, and I assure you that we hear you and are taking this issue seriously.

Jennifer makes it sound like this is just impacting YouTube partners, but I am not too sure about that.

Google is known to have made many mistakes paying publishers in the past.

Forum discussion at Google AdSense Help.

Marcus Tandler blogged about a discovery in a German SEO thread at my old time friend's forum named ABAKUS Forums (translated version over here), about a weird loophole that seems to allow you to check if a site is penalized or not, via the Google Toolbar.

Let me show you how it works. Here is an example.

(1) Open a browser that has the Google Toolbar installed, with a PageRank feature. Navigate to http://www.seo-radio.de/ (as an example) and see the PageRank value is a 5. Here is a screen capture:

(2) Change the URL to http://hyves.seo-radio.de/ and notice the PageRank value jumps up to a 7. Here is a screen capture:

Now, what is going on here. According to the consensus in the thread, there are three values you can get from doing this:

• PR7 = No Google Penalty
• PR4 = Google Penalty
• PR0 = Site Banned in Google

What would be Google's rational in having this loophole? I really don't know. How can this be overlooked by Google? I am not sure. But everyone is in agreement that this loophole will be gone, soon enough.

Forum discussion at Sphinn and ABAKUS 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: January 20, 2009"

I am not a heavy user of SEO tools or toolbars, but Aaron Wall's latest tool, he named The SEO Toolbar has received a ton of feedback and buzz from the SEM industry. The day it was released, which was some time last week, about a dozen or so SEO blogs wrote about it. Most people praised this toolbar as the only tool SEOs need.

This toolbar is jam packed with features including link data, directory information, competitive data, rank checking, keyword research, RSS reader, comparison tool and much much more. To see all the features, go to The SEO Toolbar.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Last week, I really gave it to Google hard with my post named Publishers Feeling Screwed By Google AdSense Competitive Ad Filter. In short, the complaints about the Google AdSense competitive ad filter not working had lingered on with no response from Google.

Google caught wind of the increased level of dissatisfaction from publishers and finally posted in the WebmasterWorld thread saying:

Sorry, guys. This one is entirely my bad. It's not that AdSense dropped the ball, it's that I dropped the ball.

We've been looking into it, but I haven't provided updates because I've been out of the country. I apologize for not giving you all a heads up.

I'm going to message a few of you privately to get more specifics if you don't mind providing them (for troubleshooting use only) so we can determine if there is an issue on our end.

One quick question for all of you: what method are you using to determine the destination URLs you're adding to your filter?

Okay, fine, so she/he is human and missed this thread. We forgive you. But what I find very interesting is the last line of the response. AdSenseAdvisor said:

What method are you using to determine the destination URLs you're adding to your filter?

To me, that implies that the issue is not necessarily with the competitive ad filter not working, but it not working as publishers think it should work. Publishers might be blocking URLs, thinking they are blocking a whole domain, when in fact, they are not. It seems to me, that this may be more of an issue of education then of bugs. Or maybe not?

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

Google Operating System wrote about a new personalization feature Google is testing, named Preferred Sites. How does it works? You go to your search preferences and enter in a list of domains or sub domains that you prefer. If Google finds a result from any of the sites listed in your preferred list, Google will bump up that listing to the top of the search results and label them as such.

Here is a screen capture from Google's preferred site help document.

This is not available to most people, but it is a limited test for some users. If you see the preferred site option in your Google search preferences page, that means you are in the test. Clearly, this is an extension of SearchWiki, which is now the default.

We have two threads discussing the impact this might have on SEOs. One thread is at Sphinn and the other is at WebmasterWorld. And this will impact SEOs just like any other personalization feature and similar to how SearchWiki will impact SEOs. In short, most searchers will be clueless to this preferred site preference, even if Google flashes it in front of their faces, like they do with Search Wiki. So we will see how much of an impact this makes being that (1) it is a test right now and (2) being that users might not know how to use it.

Forum discussion at Sphinn and WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread has a lot of discussion around the AdSense code not complying with the W3C validation requirements. Some webmasters want their pages to be 100% validate, and adding this code may ruin that.

I am told the piece that invalidates the HTML is:

id="cse-search-box"

There is no word from a Google representative on this issue, yet. But I suspect we should hear soon about this. I mean, the thread is pretty active and it should be an easy fix for Google, I would suspect.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

We have been covering the consequences of a site getting hacked from the SEO perspective, time and time again. See our hack tag for more articles on that. But it also may impact your Google AdWords campaign.

A AdWords Help thread has discussion that an advertiser noticed his campaigns were stopped and his account looked to be suspended.

An official Google representative, AdWordsPro Sarah, said the account was not suspended but rather "under review." Soon after the webmaster cleaned up the hack, Google reinstated the site both in the organic listings and the paid listings.

But between the time the hack hurt both the paid and free listings, it was a very helpless feeling for the site owner.

Forum discussion at AdWords Help.

Today is the day Barack Obama becomes the 44th President of the United States of America. It is Inauguration day and this one, is more hyped up then any other inauguration I have ever witnessed.

That being said, we have logos from AOL, Live.com, DogPile and yours truely - but nothing from Google, Yahoo or Ask.com. I find it particularly interesting that Google doesn't have a special logo, knowing that the Google executives are huge Obama supporters. In any event, here are the logos I currently see, maybe Google will have a logo a bit later on.

AOL's animated logo:

Live.com's background theme:

DogPile's awesome Barack cartoon:

And our special theme:

Forum discussion at the Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

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

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: January 19, 2009"

A year ago, Google released an optimized version of iGoogle for the iPhone. But recently, Google began redirecting iPhone users away from that optimized version, and to the standard mobile version of iGoogle.

The optimized version was located at http://google.com/ig/i and here is a screen capture from Google Operating System.

Now, users are redirected to http://google.com/m/ig/, which is the standard mobile version, it looks like this:

This seemed to start happening on Thursday, and since then, iPhone users have jumped into the Google Web Search forum revolting over the change. Paul from Google tried to calm users down by saying:

Hey everyone, I have an update for you. We've decided to direct iPhone users to the standard mobile iGoogle page. We've found that people hit iGoogle from lots of different phones -- we want to ensure you'll all see the same version.

Most or all of your existing content should translate over to the standard mobile version. The only exception would be any gadgets that aren't compatible with most mobile browsers.

We've got several articles in our Help Center about the mobile experience on iGoogle, which you can find in our Help Center.

But that just caused more discussion and anger towards Google. Just browsing through the really long thread, it seems like Google is getting a lot of backlash about this change. I have a feeling, they might consider putting things back to the optimized iPhone version, which means they have to maintain an iPhone version, along with the mobile version, web version and any other version they might have.

Who is to blame? I am not sure, Google made a big stink about optimized iPhone versions of their sites. Here is a video they released in June 2008 on this iGoogle for iPhone:

So, who is to blame for iPhone users not wanting to lose this page?

Forum discussion at Google Web Search.

The other day, we reported that Google began cutting jobs, offices and services. Part of that, was cutting the ability to do video uploads at Google Video.

A concerned Google Apps user asked a valid question. He asked in a Google Video Help thread, does this impact Google App Premium users. The answer was no, Google Apps Premier users still can upload videos, as part of the service. In fact, Google had to update their FAQs to clarify this.

A Google representative, Sapna, said:

Good question! We just added it to the FAQ page as well.

This move is not going to affect the video service of Google Apps - you will still be able to upload & share videos.

Hope that alleviates some confusion!

The FAQs have now been updated to say:

Does this change apply to Google Video for business, used by companies for private, secure video sharing?

No, it doesn't. Google Video for business is part of Google Apps Premier Edition, and it lets employees share video content with each other, like team updates and recordings of training sessions and guest speakers. Business users can continue to upload and share videos, and the service is actively being developed.

Forum discussion at Google Video Help.

SEMPO is running their yearly survey for in-house SEMs. They are asking all in-house SEMs to take the salary survey. The survey is available at this location and is available until February 20th, 2009.

The survey is 22 questions and should not take more then 10 minutes. It is also completely anonymous.

I am very interested in seeing how the recession may or may not impact SEM salaries and jobs. So if you have ten minutes, go take that survey.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Over the weekend, I noticed many reports from a wide array of search forums, where webmasters are noticing their PageRank scores drop in the Google Toolbar.

We have threads from WebmasterWorld, two from DigitalPoint Forums, and a Google Webmaster Help thread. All filled with complaints that their toolbar PageRank scores have dropped, many dropped to zero.

In addition, an update to the WebmasterWorld thread on the Google January 2009 changes was also noticed, where some are reporting shifts in the Google results. Here is one snippet from that thread that stands out to me:

Definitely a shift in whats in and whats out, i'm seeing some duplicate pages in the serp's indented duplicates at that, the first of these has a cache date of over a year and the indented results has a cache date of a few days.

Some of the pages that i witnessed drop out of there serp's on the 23rd Dec are suffering from this issue but not all, i'm assuming at the moment that this was the problem for those web pages, still seeing some funky page totals return for some very competitive search terms first page displaying 25 mil results return but if you dig deeper there are only 500 pages before the "omitted results" link comes up.

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

Textex at WebmasterWorld is reporting that he is seeing both an Ask.com update and a Yahoo Search update.

He first noticed Yahoo Search changes yesterday afternoon, saying "Seeing movement." He was then backed up by full member, Vimes, who said, "I'm seeing something not sure if I'd call it an update just yet, the sectors i look at there is a shuffle." So this may be the beginning of a Yahoo update or it might be some sector tweaks. We are due a Yahoo update, the last one we noticed was back in November 2008, since then, there have been no confirmed Yahoo Search updates. So having an update now, would not surprise me.

On the Ask.com front, there is a bit more discussion going on, being that the update was reported at WebmasterWorld a bit earlier. Textex called this update "a complete overhaul." Full member, robzilla, confirmed but cautioned that this update doesn't seem to be "an improvement" to their index. Soon later, they both noticed that clearing their cookies reset the "results reverted back" to their previous state. This implies that the results might be a test on some users. I did some of my own testing and the results do seem a bit better. Still not what I consider "fresh" results, but a bit better on the few dozen results I check to see quality. This cannot have anything to do with Ask.com's recent announcement on NASCAR, so I wonder what exactly is going on here?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld on both Ask.com update and Yahoo Search update.

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day and many of the search engines, including Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, Live.com, AOL, and others are remembering the day with special logos. Here is a collection of logos from the various search engines in 2009. For last year's collection, see over here.

Google:

Yahoo:

AOL:

DogPile:

Live.com:

Ask.com:

And us, at the Search Engine Roundtable:

Tomorrow is inauguration day, so expect a batch of additional logos for tomorrow.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

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

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: January 16, 2009"

In this week's recap, I discuss Yahoo's new CEO, Carol Bartz. I talk about how the recession is impacting Google. Google is testing out longer descriptions in the search results. Google Sitemaps gets credit for faster crawling and indexing. Google made a new Sitemap generator. Google is consistently showing search ads on image search. AdSense publishers had the optimization reports. The AdSense competitive ad filter doesn't work. Yahoo Publisher Network might be bust. Yahoo turns on the content network for some. If your Google Sitelinks disappear, do you freak out? I have screen captures of the new YouTube ads. Finally, I share the poll results, over 1,100, on Google's new favorite icon. That was this past week in search from the Search Engine Roundtable.

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:

• Carol Bartz To Take CEO Role At Yahoo, Decker On Out
• Google Starts Cutting Projects, Employees & Offices
• Google Showing Longer Descriptions For Longer Queries
• Survey Says: Google Sitemaps Gets Credit For Faster Indexing
• Google Creates Traffic Based Sitemaps Generator
• Google Now Consistently Showing Ads on Image Search?
• AdSense Publisher Find Optimization Reports To Be a Waste of Time
• Publishers Feeling Screwed By Google AdSense Competitive Ad Filter
• The End of Yahoo Publisher Network Nearing?
• Yahoo Search Marketing Now Turning On Content Network? Yahoo Says No
• Google Sitelinks Disappear? Should You Worry?
• Screen Captures: Promoting Videos at YouTube Through YouTube Ads
• Poll: Do You Like Google's 2009 Fav (Browser) Icon?

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

I am honestly surprised I have not seen more discussion around this topic in the forums recently. A couple days ago, I reported at Search Engine Land that Yahoo is shutting down Content Match in the UK, Germany and other locations outside of the US. The last day for advertisers outside of the US to bid on Content Match ads would be March 31st. That directly translates to less inventory for Yahoo to place in their Yahoo Publisher Network. Yes, the Google AdSense competitor.

Yahoo sent an email to their advertisers, saying:

As a valued client we are writing to give you advance notice of the closure of our Content Match product in Europe.

The decision to close Content Match underlines our commitment to focus on our Sponsored Search and Display business and to simplify our solutions to deliver a high ROI for our advertisers.

Content Match will close on 31 March 2009, after which the product will no longer be supported. All Advertisers should therefore opt out of the Content Match marketplace by this date. Your account manager will be happy to assist you.

So, Yahoo has decided to commit their focus to "sponsored search" and the "display business" and then do away with their contextual ads? Really? Is this just an international commitment or is it a company wide change?

Is Google going to be competitor free in the contextual space? I know, there are many small contextual ad networks, but the only ones that can really compete would be Yahoo and Microsoft. Microsoft's ContentAds are still in limited beta and currently have a long way to get up to par against Google. Many were not happy with Yahoo, but it was a great alternative.

Are these the signs of the end to Yahoo's Publisher Network?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Update: Yahoo emailed me to say that Content Match is only closing in Europe.

In late December, we reported that Google's AdSense Competitive Ad Filter stopped working for many publishers. Guess what, it is still not working for many of them and they are feeling very let down by Google. If you don't know what Google's competitive filter is, it basically gives publishers the functionality to block specific ads from appearing on their pages.

Successful AdSense publishers depend on the competitive filter to block out the MFAs and poor quality sites from displaying on their sites. But since late December, the filter stopped working for many. Here are some of the continued complaints in the WebmasterWorld thread:

I've managed to keep earnings up by constantly monitoring and blocking ads but my filter is filling up with garbage. Once it's full and my site visitors see nothing but crap ads and stop clicking, that's it, buh bye AdSense.

I'm with coach. This is pretty sad.

I let it go a few weeks to see what would happen- Sounded like ASA was all over it. I guess not. I tried blocking a few more today and they were already in the ad filter. Nothing can be done I guess.

I am surprised the ASA has become quiet over this. It is not as if he/she isn't aware of the problem.

Is it intentional? Is Google doing this to earn more money? They recently cut jobs and products, plus they have been spewing ads everywhere and anywhere. Time will tell.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The first week of January, when we wrote about the Major Google Search Results Changes, January 2009, I noticed the Google Sitelinks for this site, disappeared. Today, I noticed they are back. Today, also, many webmasters are noticing they have lost their sitelinks.

A WebmasterWorld thread has two webmasters noting that their Sitelinks disappeared both in the Google search results and in Google Webmaster Tools. They both are concerned and asked if they should be.

One noted his/her traffic is up 30% month over month and rankings seem to be steady. But still, he/she is concerned.

Personally, I was a bit taken back - but I did nothing. I decided to see what would happen with my traffic. I just checked my traffic now, and it is up from a week ago, but it is fairly level from a month ago. See, I forgot to even look to see if those Sitelinks had an impact and now they are back. But the smart thing would be to check in and see the impact on traffic and then maybe even rankings. I would be concerned until you see a negative impact over on that site. There can be many reasons why Google would temporarily drop the sitelinks for your site. Many of those reasons might be an issue on Google's side.

I agree with Tedster's comment in the thread:

Seeing Google traffic up by 30% is a very good thing. I would not have major concern about the loss of sitelinks if search traffic goes up (especially well-targeted search traffc), but certainly do keep a watch on the situation. It sounds rather odd, especially that potential sitelinks don't show in WMT. If you haven't made structural changes to your site, this might well be a Google bug.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Webmaster posted a thread at Google Webmaster Help groups asking why his description for his site shows porn related terms in the snippet. The clear answer was that his site was hacked.

The question was posed by a concern webmaster:

The description showing on google for etceteraonline.eu is for a porn site, the link works fine but the description is wrong and not contained on my site please help.

Several top contributors replied, showing that the site was hacked and had tons of porn content on it. Here is the first response by Aaron:

you had most likely been hacked.

i see the indexed content as well:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Aetceteraonline.eu+porn

Google has pulled the site a few hours ago, but you can see the concern this webmaster had that his site was showing up as a porn site in Google. Not only is it upsetting to the webmaster, it would also be very upsetting to the unsuspecting searcher. Plus, who knows if this site had malware that can infect one's computer.

These are one of the many reasons why Google acts so fast to remove hacked sites from the index. And we all know Google reincludes hacked sites after they are patched, fairly quickly.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Since 2005, we have reported signs of Google placing ads on their image search service. In May 2008, Google said they would run ads on image search and then signs of text ads on image search back in December. But it has really not stuck and people saw the ads on and off.

I think for the first time, we are now seeing ads for many queries in image search. Here are some examples of Google showing text ads in image search. I believe you can reproduce this yourself:

+ ipods:

+ computers:

+ ford mustang:

Many other keywords all seem to work, such as blood pressure, gloves, baskets and even seo or buy text ads.

The big question is, can advertisers opt out of showing their ads on Google images?

So it looks like they are now here to stay.

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: January 15, 2009"

About a week ago, we ran a poll asking Who's To Credit For Faster Indexing? The options included Google Sitemaps or FeedBurner, due to the topic we were discussing. The results are now in and the majority said, Google Sitemaps, in this case, gets the credit for increasing the indexing speed of these sites in Google.

Here are the results of the 80+ responses:

:: Google Sitemaps speeds up indexing said 49 respondents or 60.49%
:: FeedBurner speeds up indexing said 26 respondents or 32.1%
:: The remainder responded with "Other" but did not comment said 6 respondents or 7.41%

Forum discussion continued at Sphinn.

There have been more recent reports of Google showing longer descriptions (aka snippets) in the search results. We have reports from ThatsSEO.com, Holistic Search and SEMVironment.com with examples and screen captures. I was able to reproduce it for a search on fill empty cells with specific value openoffice.

A typical search shows a two line description or snippet:

But with the query above, you can get a three line description or snippet:

Or four line description or snippet:

Now, it seems like the longer your search query, the longer the snippet might get. But I have not fully tested this theory.

We have seen incredibly long Google descriptions in the past, plus we have seen Google test snippet size controls.

Forum discussion at Sphinn 1 and Sphinn 2.

Maps Guide Adam created a new thread in the new Google Maps Help discussion forum clarifying how Google's Tele Atlas maps distribution deal has helped improve Google Maps.

The two main points Adam made were:

(1) You can see blocks of addresses, notice in the embed map below around Baruch College, that there are numbers on the streets that show you the house numbers. So if you need to go to 153 East 25th street, you know where to go. Zoom in to see:

View Larger Map

(2) Roof top markers, so you now which building you are looking for. Zoom in to see:

View Larger Map

(4) Easier getting updates and sending update due to their shared data agreement.

Finally, you can submit feedback about the data to mapinsight.teleatlas.com/.

Forum discussion at Google Maps Help.

Seems like the economy is getting to everyone, including the all mighty and recession proof Google. In summary, Google has begun cutting out services they provide, they have cut 100 recruiters (i.e. less hiring) and they are closing offices, which might lead to 70 engineers losing their jobs.

Danny has a great article summing up the Google product and services slashes, which include Google dropping Google Video uploads, Google Catalog Search, Google Notebook, Jaiku and Dodgeball. Danny concludes, "neither products nor engineers seem to have a protected status, as Google goes into the grim economic times predicted for 2009."

On the job front, Google has laid off a 100 recruiters and is closing three offices; the ones in Austin, Texas; Trondheim, Norway; and Lulea, Sweden. That may lead to 70 engineers losing their jobs but Google promises to refill those positions, if those engineers cannot relocate to Google's headquarters. But clearly, dropping 100 internal recruiters will mean less hiring in 2009.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums, DigitalPoint Forums and Sphinn.

August 1st of 2007, Google dropped the supplemental tag from their search results. The main reason why they did this was because their supplemental index was fresher and deeper then it was when it first launched in 2003, plus, in my opinion, to reduce all the confusion is caused.

Google said back then:

The current system provides deeper and more continuous indexing. Additionally, we are indexing URLs with more parameters and are continuing to place fewer restrictions on the sites we crawl. As a result, Supplemental Results are fresher and more comprehensive than ever. We're also working towards showing more Supplemental Results by ensuring that every query is able to search the supplemental index, and expect to roll this out over the course of the summer.

Since then, there has not been much discussion around the supplemental results, due to it being out of sight, which makes it out of mind. But are SEOs and webmasters still confused and worried about this supplemental index?

A HighRankings Forum thread has discussion on that topic. It seems at least one person is still considered over this index. In fact, the SEO wants to know, which of her pages are in this index. Like I proposed when Google dropped the tag from the results, Google might want to consider adding a report to Google Webmaster Tools to aid the webmaster in knowing how many of their pages are in this index, this way they can work on getting them out.

Does it matter if those pages are out of the supplemental index? I think most SEOs would agree, yes, it matters. But now that we have our heads in the sand, we really don't know exactly how to improve those pages, outside of the "holistic" approach. :)

Here is a poll, are you still concerned about Google's supplemental index?

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

Just last week, we reported major issues with Google SMS not returning search results. It was fixed about two days later. But now I am seeing more reports of Google SMS issues, so I decided to try it out myself.

I sent three SMS messages to Google and now it is 10 minutes later, and still not a single response. Here is a picture:

Google has confirmed issues with specifically requesting sport scores from Google SMS. In a few Google Mobile Help discussion forums, we have confirmation from Google that there are issues with this request. You can find those threads here, here and here.

But there is a bigger problem, it seems like some people, including myself are simply not getting any response from Google's SMS search, at all. Like I showed in my screen capture above, not a "no results found" or any type of error message. Is it being blocked by the cell provider or is Google's SMS server down?

Forum discussion at Google Mobile Help.

Update: Over an hour later, I got a response from Google, the response didn't have any results, but at least it told me so. Note, that it should have results:

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: January 14, 2009"

The Google Webmaster Central blog announced the release of a new Google Sitemaps generator available at code.google.com/p/googlesitemapgenerator.

The new tool works differently then other sitemaps tools. The tool "finds new and modified URLs based on your webserver's traffic, its log files, or the files found on the server," said Google. Plus the tool will send pings to Google Blog Search for all new or modified URLs in the XML file.

It is pretty neat to use site traffic as a method of determining which pages to include in your Sitemap file.

Google's JohnMu said in a Google Webmaster Help thread that it runs on both Microsoft IIS and Linux Apache servers and:

While it's not for everyone (you need to have administrative access to the server for one), I think it's pretty cool :-).

Forum discusison at Google Webmaster Help.

A Google Webmaster Help thread reports that Google Webmaster Tools seems to be missing the feature to change the method you would like to verify you site with. Now, I personally don't remember what should or should not be on this screen, but reportedly, there should be a way to tell Google that you want to switch from the html file verification method to the meta tag verification method, or visa versa.

Here is a screen capture of what I currently see for one of my sites:

A top contributor at the group said, "There was an option there in Manage Site Verification not too long ago. Now it is not there. There must have been a page code update and a new one is pending?" So, I suspect he is right.

Hopefully the feature will come back shortly.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

I am sure by now, most of you heard the news that is buzzing all over the Internet. Carol Bartz Joins Yahoo as Chief Executive Officer is the headline of the Yahoo press release. Here is her impressive bio:

Carol Bartz, a veteran technology executive who was most recently Executive Chairman of Autodesk (NASDAQ: ADSK), has been named Chief Executive Officer and a member of the Board of Directors, effective immediately.

Prior to becoming Executive Chairman of Autodesk in 2006, Bartz, 60, led Autodesk as CEO for 14 years, transforming the company into a leader in computer-aided design software. During her tenure as CEO, revenues increased from less than $300 million to more than $1.5 billion, and the company's share price increased nearly ten-fold.

In addition to turning around Autodesk, Bartz's extensive executive experience includes hands-on responsibility for leading global operations, engineering, sales and marketing organizations for large technology and engineering companies including Sun Microsystems, Digital Equipment.

Susan Decker is out after a transitionary period. Greg Sterling has more on the news at Search Engine Land.

Yahoo's stock is up 1.74% in pre-market, but I think people are not sure what to do with the news. I think most like the decision, but they think it will be almost impossible to pull Yahoo out of this mess. Many are still hoping for a Microsoft deal, which was shot down time and time again by Jerry Yang. Jerry Yang will step down from his role as the CEO, which he announced a while back. Yang took the role of CEO in June 2007, and I think it is clear that he didn't do all that well.

Good luck to Bartz and Yahoo, I would hate to see such a nice company fail.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

There is an interesting paid search thread over at WebmasterWorld on the topic of using match types. For newbies, match types basically give you the ability to tell how specific or broad you want Google to match your keywords. So if you want Google to show your ad for the keyword phrase blue widget, and variations of it, like big widget that is blue, you use a specific match type. For more on how match types work, see this help document.

That being said, Google is now recommending that you do not list out multiple match types for keyword phrases. Typically, an advertiser might target several keywords, but be very specific on those keywords. So what Google seems to not want you to do these days is add all of the following to your keyword list, but instead decide to go all broad or all narrow.

Example:
'blue widget'
[blue widget]
[widget blue]
[big blue widgets]
and so on

Senior member, bcc1234, said he got word from Google that "they discourage the use of the same keyword with multiple match types." He explained, that "instead of triples of all keywords, they want advertisers to go from "broad" to "narrow" (in their words)." He thinks this makes sense, why?

It actually makes sense to some degree. But I'm guessing they are trying to cut down on the total number of keywords in their system. I imagine with millions of advertisers, and lots of them uploading hundreds of thousands of keywords in dozens of accounts, it really becomes a saleability issue.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I figured I take a different look at Matt's Give Google feedback on "noresults" pages. In short, Matt Cutts of Google wants you to submit feedback to Google on search results that lead to reviews, but those reviews don't actually have a review. For example, Matt McGee points out one example of this at Search Engine Land. A search for sd880is reviews returns a result that shows this:

That is what Matt said most people want Google to tackle in 2009 in terms of search spam. Personally, I dislike going to a page that should have reviews on a product and not find any reviews. So I do hope Google does clean up those results.

This is also perfect if you have a competitor in the retail business and they have a reviews section that contains products with no reviews. This might be able to help you. Or maybe not...

This whole topic touches on the very controversial topic of wether or not SEOs should report other SEOs or competitors to Google or other search engines. When we polled our audience in May 2008, we learned that Most SEOs Don't Report Competitors To Google. About 70% said they do not report competitors to Google. Why? Many reasons including pride, morals, community, low blow, the "us vs them" attitude, feeling your not good enough to beat your competitor, and so on.

Is this the same thing as reporting spam on your competitors? I am not sure. If you don't do SEO and your an active searcher who hates empty reviews, then help Google, help you. If not, then you need to make a decision.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

A senior member at WebmasterWorld who started posting in 2004, had his server hacked into. He realized this when Google put a temporary ban on his site from showing up in the Google search results. Google does this, because they want to protect searchers from landing on pages that might contain malware or other infectious programs.

The thread goes through the different stages a webmaster goes through when finding out their site has been hacked into. The stages would likely include:

• Confusion/Denial
• Anger
• Acceptance
• Guilt
• Action
• Embarrassment
• Reconsideration
• Response

I am not exactly sure if the stages would be in that order. But as you can see from the thread, it seems this webmaster went through some, if not all, of these stages. Confusion sets in when you learn that you may have been hacked, and you try to figure out how and what the implications are. Then you get angry at both the hacker for hacking you and Google for delisting you. Acceptance rolls in, when you accept the facts and decide to move on. Of course, many feel guilty that they were not able to prevent the hack in the first place. But you decide to take action to remove the bad stuff the hack generated. Then you immediately file a reconsideration request with Google. Then you look into the future and make changes to your current process and environment, to try to make sure it doesn't happen again.

This webmaster's site was delisted for "maybe 1-2 business days" said the webmaster. That is a very quick response time from Google acting on the reconsideration request. When I shared a story about one of my client's getting hacked and delist, Jennifer Convertibles Web Site Hacked & Delisted In Google.com, it also took just about two days for Google to reinclude the site.

Google has to protect the searcher at all costs. Even if the site is not infected with malware, it may be infected with links to help promote a page that does have malware on it. So it has to take action, and action quickly.

This goes well with Preventing Virtual Blight Video by Matt Cutts from the other day.

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: January 13, 2009"

In mid November I wrote about YouTube Sponsored Ads but back then it wasn't working for me. I recently had the opportunity to get a client up and running with YouTube ads, so I figured I walk you through the process.

(1) Login with under the account of the video owner and go to http://www.youtube.com/account.

(2) At the bottom, click on "Promote your Video with Sponsored Videos," which will take you to https://ads.youtube.com/.

(3) Click on the "Get Started" yellow button

(4) Select one of the videos you want to promote:

(5) Click "Next and I agree".

(6) Type in your ad copy (title with two line description). Then enter in keywords, followed by the daily budget and maximum bids.

(7) Then login using your AdWords or Google account or set up a new account.

(8) Review the ad, keywords, bids and geo-targeting and hit "Okay, Run my promotion!"

Note, MCC accounts do not work, hence why my first test did not work. But this campaign worked just fine. I am not waiting for the campaign to be reviewed and I should then be able to see data.

Here is what I see now in my dashboard:

Here is a detailed view of a specific campaign:

When I gather statistics, I may update this post.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

About a week ago, we ran a poll asking publishers how helpful they found the AdSense optimization reports, which they launched in April 2007.

The results are now in and we see that about 70% find them to be not helpful and likely a complete waste of their time and Google's time (which is automated).

Here is the breakdown of the 60+ votes:

:: AdSense optimization reports are not helpful said 43 respondents or 69.35%
:: AdSense optimization reports are somewhat helpful said 17 respondents or 27.42%
:: AdSense optimization reports are very helpful said 2 respondents or 3.23%

I guess you can't please them all. But while 70% say they are not helpful, only 3% find them to be very helpful. I guess we would like more votes, but I would guess most experienced publishers don't make changes based on those optimization reports.

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

Advertisers sometimes fret about each and every click they get on their search ads. Some clicks cost a few pennies, while others can go well over $10 or more per click. In these recessionary times, each click really matters. It shows, I have been seeing more threads about how is each click calculated more often now, then ever.

For example, one advertiser was worried that Google or their bots were clicking on his/her ads. He/She was worried that those clicks would deplete the budget and cost them more money to advertise.

To calm the anxiety, AdWordsPro replied to the AdWords Help thread and said:

To set your mind, you will not be charged for any click that comes from a Google IP address. This includes clicks from Google employees who manually review ads and site, etc.

Now, what about all those Googlers who work from home? I guess they are in the VPN.

Forum discussion at AdWords Help.

A newish patent application from Yahoo named Identifying excessively reciprocal links among web entities was filed on January 8, 2009. The patent inventors include Priyank Garg and Tim Converse of Yahoo, both well-known search engineers at Yahoo. Of course, we have an excellent and thorough explanation of that patent from Bill Slawski. We also have a write up from David Harry on the patent app.

Here is the abstract:

A method for identifying reciprocal links is provided. At a particular host, the set of hosts which link to the particular host and the set of hosts to which the particular host links are determined. The intersection and union of the two sets of hosts are also determined, and the sizes of the intersection and union are calculated. The concentration of reciprocal links at the particular host is calculated based on the sizes of the intersection and union. A ratio of the intersection size to the union size is used to determine the concentration of reciprocal links. The particular host's rank in a list of ranked search results may be changed as a result of identification of a high concentration of reciprocal links.

So I am not going to repeat the summaries of this patent app, for that, use the links above. There is a lot of discussion around it.

Threads at Sphinn, WebmasterWorld are starting to get their minds 'wet' with debate over the patent application. Of course, it is always important to remember that a patent or patent app does not mean a search engine is actually using the methods in the current algorithms, nor does it mean they are using it exactly like it is written in the patent.

Martinibuster adds a nice point in the Sphinn thread saying:

What's more interesting is the execution of how links are rewarded. Big difference between Yahoo and Google, with Google tending to favor the user experience and Yahoo seeming to focus on keeping spam out to the detriment of the search results.

Let's not forget that Google added the words excessive to their link schemes document a while back.

Forum discussion at Sphinn, WebmasterWorld.

About a week ago, we broke the news that Google AdWords has a voting tool to allow advertisers vote on the most important features they want added to Google AdWords. It has been a week and now that many votes are in. AdWordsPro Sarah posted the top two requests:

1. To be able to set different bids on Search Partners for my adwords campaigns!
2. Give advertisers more control over broad matches. Specifically, give them the option to turn off expanded broad matches. This could be a campaign level setting.

These two requests are great ideas, but if you want your idea to be on the list, head over to the AdWords Wish List and add or vote for your ideas.

This is a great way for Google to organize what they think advertisers really want and thus prioritize feature requests.

Forum discussion at AdWords Help group.

Construction. It is the one word commuters hate hearing. But it is everywhere and mapping providers, such as Google Maps, Yahoo Maps and MapQuest need to be aware of these construction zones in order to have up-to-date directions.

So what is the process of updating these zones, so that commuters have the proper driving directions? While I am not sure of that answer, I spotted two Google thread discussing two major construction zones.

The first Google Groups thread talks about construction closers on I-64/US Hwy 40 between I-710 and S. Kingshighway Blvd in St. Louis, Missouri. It is annoying for those that live there to have to manually change the starting routes to go around this zone, but it is also surprising for tourists to use the directions and then get stuck in a construction zone. That being said, the thread was initially created on December 31st and now, on January 13th, a Google representative said:

Just wanted to update you that this bug has been logged with both our team and with our map data vendor. However, I can't provide you with a specific time when this issue may be resolved.

So it appears that both Google needs to know about this, as well as their mapping vendor.

The second thread is similar, but talks about the 35W Bridge reopening, and thus should be a valid route for Google Maps directions. In this case, a Google representative said, "we're aware of this issue and working to update our data to reflect the operational status of this road segment."

Overall, it seems like Google does have some flexibility on their side to make mapping changes, in terms of directions, but it also seems they need to communicate those changes to their mapping vendors.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

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

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: January 12, 2009"

There is a webmaster at DigitalPoint Forums who is convinced that Google has penalized all his sites that were verified in his Google Webmaster Tools account.

This webmaster claimed his sites are clean and he complies with Google's terms of service. But they were all penalized soon after adding them to the same Google Webmaster Tools account. I find this all hard to believe.

It is possible that they were linking together in a weird fashion, but I am not sure - since I don't know the site's URLs. It is possible they were violating the terms of service. It is possible he accidently excluded the pages in his robots.txt. It is possible he had server issues. It is possible he spammed the heck out of his pages. I don't know.

But it is common sense, if you are doing anything borderline with Google. Please don't tie those sites to others via Webmaster Tools. Even more so, why are you verifying a site that is borderline spam with Google in the first place? To me, that seems like you are testing Google, teasing them to ban you. If that is what you like, then go for it.

Do you think Google does site wide webmaster tools account penalties? I guess this is an obvious question. Google sees spam, a human looks at it, it notices the site is verified in webmaster tools, then looks at all the other sites by the same account holder and sees the same type of spam on those sites. The Googler clicks the big red blinking button and bam - goodbye sites.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Discovery in a Search Engine Watch Forums thread reports that Microsoft adCenter now gives advertisers the basic feature of allowing advertisers to plug in custom dates into the reporting engine.

To see the custom date range option, go to the campaigns and at the top right of the report, click on "change." Here is a screen capture:

Then, it will open up to let you enter in a custom date range:

Discovery said, "Well it's one of those "features" you would expect to have because Google has had it for so long now. However, Adcenter just got this into their system."

I am sure advertisers will appreciate this small, but important addition.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

How many grams of CO2 does the average Google search consume? That was the hot topic of debate over the weekend. The UK's Times Online reported that scientists said a typical Google search consumes about 7g of CO2, which is equivalent to the "amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea."

But Google downright denies this. They said in a recent blog response named Powering a Google Search that the average query only consumes about 0.2 grams of CO2. Clearly, Google is not agreeing with these scientists, because those numbers are way different.

Google then takes the time to explain how Google is very proactive in green causes and explains how a Google search is very green.

The folks in the forums are not happy about this study, not happy at all. Even before Google's response, member lgn1 said, "Also, I suspect those numbers, 7 grams of CO2 per search are way out to lunch. Without power comsumption numbers from google, that physicist is just urinating in the wind."

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The past week has been a rough one for Yahoo, in terms of advertiser relations. First they emailed notifications of the terms and conditions, which got them in major hot water. Then even after the hot water, they had the nerve to make changes to advertiser's campaigns and keywords without permission or notification.

But it doesn't end there. Over the weekend, we are getting reports from WebmasterWorld from at least two different advertisers that Yahoo has turned on the advertiser's content network, even though the content network has been explicitly turned off by the advertiser in the master account settings. The interesting point is, that YahooPete, an official Yahoo representative said this should not be the case. Let me quote you:

I checked with the folks here who are managing the Account Optimization program, and they told me that turning Content Match on or off is not part of the program. So while I can’t say for sure why your settings might have changed, it wasn’t due to the optimization program.

As Zamboni pointed out, the “master setting” under the Administration tab in your account has the ultimate control over your account: If that account-level setting is set to “Off,” you should not receive any Content Match traffic in your entire account, no matter what the settings are at the campaign or ad group levels. We designed it this way to give advertisers more control of their tactic settings, so that certain campaigns could be set up solely for Content Match traffic, and others solely for Sponsored Search traffic.

But soon later, an advertiser claimed that this is not true. He said, "just a week or so back, I noticed that content was turned on for one of my campaigns even though content was set to off in "master setting"."

Now, it is hard to tell who is telling the truth and who is not. The bottom line, as we have been stressing throughout the week, is to make sure to check your accounts and make sure your ad dollars are being well spent.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the very popular chinese search engine, Baidu, will be testing a better labeling and differentiating the paid results from the organic results. The article said, "The company has begun testing a new model for advertising that will place paid advertisements on the right-hand side of its page."

Over at WebmasterWorld we have some conversation on the news.

One member feels like Baidu has nothing to lose. He said, "The revenue hit is what has/will prompt changes, not public pressure. Often times public pressure is good, it draws attention and generates income on its own, but when the dollars start to fade it's time to change. I wonder how much of a black eye will linger in a year, if any."

It is about time, like many of the members think. We will see if it lasts and if it will make a difference in Baidu's ad income.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Let us know in the poll bellow if you like Google's new favorite icon, the icon found in the browser bar on the left hand side of the domain name. The image below shows the three icons used, the one on the left most is the newest. The one in the middle is the one introduced in May 2008 and the one on the right is the original one.

Here is the poll, let us know which one you like the best of the three:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums and Google Blogoscoped Forums.

Update: Official word from Google Blog says this redesign was based on a contest they ran.

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: January 9, 2009"

We have paused our text based weekly recaps, in lieu of the video edition. As always, I will sum up in a paragraph the topics I discuss at greater length in the video and provide links to more details below. Do let us know how much you may miss the weekly text based recaps.

In this weeks recap, I go on a three-minute rant about Yahoo not only changing their policy giving them the right to make changes to advertiser's campaigns without permission or notice, but also actually doing so after the major outcry from our industry. I then discuss the new budget beta being tested by Google AdWords. I move into the SEO topic of getting your content crawling more quickly, through Sitemaps, FeedBurner and other methods. I discuss why the Sitemaps report may have less results than a site command. Did you know it may take three months to transfer PageRank from URL to URL - or is that just a toolbar delay? Have you experienced the SEO "honeymoon period." Most SEOs feel the PageRank data in Webmaster Tools is useless. Google Trends was attacked and it hurt. That was this past week in search from the Search Engine Roundtable.

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:

• Yahoo Updates Search Advertisers Terms & Conditions
• Yahoo Has The Nerve To Change Advertisers Campaigns After Outcry
• Google AdWords Testing "Timeframe" Budget Option
• Tips on How to Get Indexed Faster by Google, Yahoo, & Live Search
• Who's To Blame For Faster Indexing? Google Sitemaps or FeedBurner
• Why Does The Site Command Show More Indexed Pages Then Google's Sitemap Report?
• Case Study: Transferring Google PageRank With Redirects
• The Redesign SEO "Honeymoon Period"
• Poll: Most SEOs Say PageRank Data in Google Webmaster Tools is Useless
• Google Trends Attacked, Again: Targets Former World Trade Center Towers

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On Tuesday, we ran a poll asking if Google's PageRank data reports in Webmaster Tools useless or useful. The results are in and the majority of SEOs believe those reports are completely useless.

I am one to agree with the masses here, not because I don't think Google doesn't want to provide useful information here. But more because of the issues I have seen with the reports in Webmaster Tools over the years and how they often are simply wrong or outdated due to bugs or resource issues.

Here is a breakdown of the 131 responses:
:: PR data in WMT is Useless said 74 respondents or 56.49%
:: PR data in WMT is Not Helpful said 32 respondents or 24.43%
:: PR data in WMT is Somewhat Helpful said 19 respondents or 14.5%
:: PR data in WMT is Very Helpful said 4 respondents or 3.05%
:: Other category said 2 respondents or 1.53%

So there you have it, thanks for participating in the poll.

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

An SEOMoz post charts the positive impact having a Sitemap file can have on the speed of Google and Yahoo crawling and indexing your web pages.

The report seems pretty impressive and I myself feel that Sitemaps are important to have, for more sites. In fact, I recently added a Sitemap for this site, although, I really don't think it will help much with indexing this site any faster due to us being in Google News.

That being said, the Sphinn thread around this post has some quality discussion. I want to isolate one post from "IncrediBILL" who asks the question, is the Sitemap to credit for these sites getting indexed faster or is it FeedBurner?

Google acquired FeedBurner and FeedBurner is incredibly fast at picking up new content, specifically from WordPress blogs, which is what the study was done on. That being said, the report would have not shown an increase in speed to crawl if Sitemaps did not have anything to do with it. FeedBurner was a factor before the Sitemaps files were in place and they were a factor after the Sitemaps files were in place. So the only thing that really changed with this site (outside of Google changing variables, which they do often) is the Sitemaps addition.

So who would you credit for the faster indexing? Google's Sitemap protocol or FeedBurner? I'll poll it up:

Try not to use the "other" response. Yes, I know, I know.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread reports that folks are noticing that Yahoo Site Explorer has updated the link counts for the tool.

I do not typically track these numbers, but many do. So if you do, definitely take a look and see if you are doing any better.

Here is a screen capture of our most recent Yahoo Site Explorer link count:

The 250,000 value shows all links to seroundtable.com, excluding internal links, but to the entire domain. In contrast to Google Webmaster Tools, which only reports 175,408 links for this domain.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

David Harry has an excellent write up on the SEO implications of page segmentation. In short, the piece goes over how search engines can, and probably do, look at each web page and segment the page into components. For example, they can pull out the navigation, footer, ad blocks, and so on from the main body copy.

This concept is far from new, it goes way back and we even covered it back in mid-2004 with Block (Passage) Level Link Analysis by MSN. It just makes sense, why treat the ads on the page the same way one would treat the body content. That is the purpose behind Text Link Ads new product inLinks.

In any event, there is some good overall discussion around the topic at Sphinn. Fantomaster said:

This is developing into an extremely important aspect of state-of-the-art SEO that cannot be ignored with impunity. While it's anybody's guess (still) how much of this technology has already been implemented by the search engines, you can easily bet the farm that it'll happen rather sooner than later.

In any event, if this is a new concept to you, you may want to read up on it. If some search engines are not deploying this yet, then they likely will soon. It just makes logical sense.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

This week I reported how Yahoo notified advertisers of a change to their terms and conditions, which explicitly gave Yahoo legal rights to change advertisers campaigns and keywords without permission from the advertiser. In fact, this has been the case since June of last year, but it wasn't noticed by the masses until now.

This caused a major outcry by SEMs this week. Andy Beal felt embarrassed for Yahoo, that they would do this. Loren Baker kind of implied this a way for Yahoo to sneak money from advertisers, without them noticing. And back in June, I was really not happy with this change - who would be.

All in all, we did not hear a peep from Yahoo on the matter. I did not see a Yahoo representative come into a forum to respond. I did not receive a phone call or email from a Yahoo representative on the matter. Nothing from Yahoo, and I am a bit surprised by that.

To make things worse, Yahoo has the nerve to go into a Search Engine Watch moderator's advertiser's account and make changes without telling them. A Search Engine Watch Forums thread reports that Mel, a moderator who knows a heck of a lot on PPC, noticed that after all these reports, Yahoo changed his campaigns. Let me quote you:

I never received ANY communication that this had happened - no email, no call, no nothing. I found out about it when I logged in to YSM and saw a note in the YSM Dashboard saying that "new campaigns had been uploaded."

To make things worse, they made horrid changes to the account, including maxing up the bids to $1! Here are those changes:

• They upload an optimization into a new, active campaign, with new ad groups and keywords. They do not change current campaigns. Our client's campaign had a daily budget cap of $15 (not a huge deal, except that I don't want to spend $0.01 on something that I haven't seen or approved).
• The optimization for this particular client was awful - theme & ad copy was super generic, no features and benefits in the ad, looked like the work of someone in their first day at Yahoo. Keywords were even worse. Let's say the advertiser is a video rental store (not the real situation). Yahoo had them bidding on "buy videos" type keywords. WTF??
• Max bids were set at $1.00. Yikes.
• No tracking was appended to any of the URLs. We use a proprietary system with keyword-level URLs, and of course Yahoo is not privy to this information. So we have no way to see if the campaign was effective or not.

Back to the WebmasterWorld thread, one advertiser had to plead with Yahoo to promise not to make changes to his account. He described the process as very frustrating, here it is:

I called my rep and asked them to ensure that we would not have any changes made. At first, I was told that accounts could not be excluded. I raised a fuss and was told to submit an email request, to which I received a confirmation that no changes would be made to my account with my permission. Haven't seen any, so I guess they're following the rules.

The good news is that Mel, the moderator, said when she argued with his rep, the rep was very good about "opting" him out of this. She called his "Yahoo rep and she assured me we would be opted out of auto-optimization in the future." So get on the phone and call your rep as soon as possible.

Yahoo, seriously, how can you do this. It is one thing to change the terms and conditions for legal reasons, but to actually go in and make these changes?

No, this is not the first time we have heard rumors of Yahoo representatives "auto-optimizing" accounts, but to "auto-optimize" after the outcry, that just makes things a hundred times worse.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums.

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

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: January 8, 2009"

Matt Cutts has his annual post on tell him what Google's search quality team should tackle in 2009, to prevent web spam.

So far, Matt's post has 90 suggestions. So if you really hate web spam, go there, comment and let Matt know what you think. Matt said:

Based on your experiences, close your eyes and think about what area(s) you wish Google would work on. You probably want to think about it for a while without viewing other people’s comments, and I’m not going to mention any specific area that would bias you; I want people to independently consider what they think Google should work on to decrease webspam in the next six months to a year.

Once you’ve come up with the idea(s) that you think are most pressing, please add a constructive comment. I don’t want individual sites called out or much discussion; just chime in once with what you’d like to see Google work on in webspam.

Okay, so again, if you hate spam, go to Matt's post and comment.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

An interesting WebmasterWorld thread discusses the phenomenon of redesigning a site, with brand new URL structure, 301 redirecting the old URLs to the new, and seeing an almost immediate boost in rankings at Google.com. In fact, WebmasterWorld moderator, minnapple, has coined this phenomenon the "honeymoon period."

What he means by that is that sometimes, a well-liked site, will see an immediate boost in rankings at Google after redesigning and implementing many 301 redirects. Minnapple described the honeymoon period as lasting about 20 days, and it is possible things can go back to how they were, or possibly get worse.

Tedster said he has seen similar things:

This lines up with the results of a redesign I helped on - we saw the new urls take over seamlessly. I'd say this is a sign that you had things well handled technically, and that Google already liked the site a good bit. Please let us know if things start to wobble.

Have you experienced this Google redesign "Honeymoon Period" yourself?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

We have confirmed reports of Google beta testing a new AdWords budgeting option. The budgeting option is named "Timeframe" and gives advertisers the ability to budget by month or by day. The help document explains this a bit better.

The difference between monthly and daily is described as:

With a daily budget, lower traffic days may mean that your ads receive fewer impressions and have some budget leftover. We don't use this leftover budget, but we do attempt to compensate for the loss in traffic by serving impressions up to 20% over the daily budget on high traffic days. However, some high traffic days require budget flexibility beyond this amount.

With a monthly budget, we'll adjust your budget automatically each day to meet traffic demand while still respecting your budget for the calendar month. For example, if your ads often receive less traffic on non-business days during a month, we'll apply your unused budget to remaining business days to take traffic fluctuations into account.

AdWordsAdvisor, the official Google representative, at WebmasterWorld confirmed the new budgeting option, saying:

Sounds as if the one account has been made a part of a limited beta test, ppcbuyers. Not much I can add beyond that. :)

Are you seeing the option? Will you be giving it a try? Let us know.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

In the past few hours, I have seen two threads from the Google Mobile Help Forums reporting that these people were able to login with their password to Gmail, but for some reason, were taken to someone else's Gmail account.

Both reports came on the fourth of January, the first said:

There are times when I enter the gmail site on my cell phone, and before the sign-in page even appears, I have found myself to be automatically redirected to the inbox of a complete stranger, and I have access to their account. This has happened to me twice.

The second said:

I've experienced a problem lately: on occasion, I will open up my WAP browser and realise that it's not my email I'm viewing at all! It is the email of some random person. Sometimes, I can see the emails when I click on them and sometimes - seemingly randomly - I click on something (say, inbox) and it takes me right back to my own inbox.

A Google representative, Ethan from the mobile team, replied to both saying that they will touch base with these folks offline.

Thanks for letting us know. Someone on the team has contacted you via email to get some account-specific details.

As for your concerns about your own account, Gmail offers HTTPS -- an additional layer of security that will ensure your mail remains encrypted when it travels between your web browser and our servers.

I have not seen any other reports of this, outside of these two. But this does seem a bit scary to me. I hope they figure out the issue soon and fix it as soon as possible.

Forum discussion at Google Mobile Help.

Believe it or not, there are times where I want to find the latitude and longitude values of the location I am currently at or at an other location. I spotted a Google Mobile Help thread that goes through the steps on how to obtain the latitude and longitude using Google Maps. I found it interesting and I thought I document the process.

Step 1: Open up the Maps application on your iPhone and find the location you want to get the latitude and longitude for. Either your current location or scroll through the map or enter in the location by name.

Step 2: Click on the right bottom most button and then hit "Drop Pin."

Step 3: Drag the pin to where you want to find the latitude and longitude:

I picked an area that is under extreme turmoil right now, the border of Gaza:

Step 4: Click on the blue, right arrow, above the pin. That will bring up this screen:

Step 5: Click on the "Share location" button, which will open an email containing a link to Google Maps, coded by the longitude and latitude:

There you go, here is the link, if you are interested. It is at 31.466114/34.484749, which seems to be off from the border by a few miles.

Forum discussion at Google Mobile Help.

Google's SMS search is simply not returning results anymore. I am not sure how many people this is impacting, i.e. I have no idea how many people use Google SMS to search on their phones, but some have noticed it.

For example, here is me sending a text to 466453 and Google returning no results for either "Lakers" or "RustyBrick."

A Google Mobile Help thread has confirmation from a Google representative, Bret, that there is an issue. Bret from the Google Mobile team said:

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. I'm looking into the issue and I'll reply to this thread with any updates.

The issue was first reported last night.

Forum discussion at Google Mobile Help.

Update: It was still not working at 6:30am (EST) on 1/9, but at about 10:30am (EST), it started working again.

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: January 7, 2009"

Just a quick heads up that the Google team has posted a notification at Google Groups that the AdWords team will be conducting maintenance this Saturday.

Both the AdWords login console and the API will be offline between 10am and 2pm pacific time. Here is the message from Jeffrey Posnick, AdWords API Team:

We'll be performing routine system maintenance on Saturday, January 10 from approximately 10:00am to 2:00pm PST. You won't be able to access AdWords or the API during this time frame, but your ads will continue to run as normal.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks for tips on how he can get his site indexed and crawled faster by Google. The thing is, most, if not all, of these tips apply not to just Google, but any search engine, such as Yahoo, Live Search and others.

Here are some of the tips for faster indexing via the thread:

• Submit an XML Sitemap
• Have a clean navigation structure
• Get quality links
• Go hot on Digg or other social networking sites
• Make unique and helpful content
• Use social bookmarking
• Verify your sites with Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo Site Explorer and Live Webmaster Tools
• Remove Canonical domain issues

For more tips and discussion go to WebmasterWorld.

A Google Webmaster Help thread asks a very interesting question. Should a webmaster consider submitting a reinclusion request if the site is still ranking well in Google?

The question seems obvious. Why would you bother submitting a reinclusion request when you are ranking well. But in this case, it is not so cut and dry. This webmaster received a notification from Google that they are hiding text. The notification came about a year ago, and they didn't really care so much back then. Now that they are boosting their web efforts and revamping their site, they have removed the hidden text. They believe they have good rankings, but they wonder if submitting a reinclusion request will improve their rankings in Google.

Googler, Wysz, suggested that they play it safe and submit a reinclusion request in any case. He said:

Over time it's possible that we detected a violation of the webmaster guidelines was removed, but as Autocrat said, it's probably best to play it safe and let us know that you've made changes to your site to fix previous violations. Don't worry about any downsides to requesting reconsideration. We don't bite. :)

Just be upfront about what you did, when you did it and what you changed. Google doesn't "bite," at least according to Wysz. I am sure many folks would argue with the bite phrase. :)

Now, if your site is nice and white, sparkling clean, I would also suggest submitting the request. I don't see how it can hurt, unless you are hiding something or you are unaware of something that is wrong on your site.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

There is a nice old school SEO thread at HighRankings Forum on the old topic of ranking well for singular cases, when you are already ranking well for the plural version.

For example, you are in the tops of tops at Google for [buy widgets], but you want to rank well for [buy widget]. The thread goes over some SEO copywriting tips on how to help achieve your goal.

Ian McAnerin has a nice tip, let me quote it:

Here is a trick I've used (I don't know if it will help you, but it might help someone):

Original Links:

Gray Widgets | Blue Widgets | Brown Widgets
...this is fine if you are optimizing for the plural, but not helpful if you are optimizing for the singular. Just removing the "s" makes it sound/look funny. But you can fix a lot of plural singular issues by changing the sentence context:

I'm looking for a: Gray Widget | Blue Widget | Brown Widget

For the on page stuff, you can control how your content is written. It is not as simple as removing an S at the end of the phrase. You need to make sure to rewrite the content on the page to make sure it still reads logically and grammatically correct after removing the S.

The only issue is, then you may drop in your ranking for the plural keyword phrase. Personally, I have seen many cases where either the plural version brings in the conversions or the singular case brings in the conversions, but it typically is one or the other. Of course, both would bring in conversions, but in many cases, one version brings in the majority of those conversions. This is something you need to test and fine tune over time, like most of your SEO efforts.

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks why does the site command in Google not match up in the number of "indexed" URLs reported in Google Webmaster Tools. A very valid question, let me show you.

A simple site command in Google for site:www.seroundtable.com returns 17,500 results. So that means, Google has indexed approximately 17,500 pages from the www of this domain.

Now, if I login and check my Sitemap data for this site (yea, I finally created a Sitemap file), it shows about half of the indexed URLs. It says Google has indexed 8,813 URLs of the 9,086 I submitted.

For me, the answer is simple. I seem to only sending URLs of the individual blog posts here. So although I have about 9,000+ blog posts at this domain, I still have about twice as many pages on this site, due to the categories, date archives, tag landing pages and so on. Those pages are not included in my Sitemap file. So Google seems to only showing the indexed URLs of what I submitted. Of course, it is hard for me to validate that by just looking at the numbers.

What I found interesting is when I went to Yahoo's Site Explorer, Yahoo told me they h have indexed 16,498 of my pages, but crawled only 15,022 pages and thus know about 16,498 of my pages. I guess via linkage data, they can index more of my pages then they actually crawl?

In fact, Yahoo's numbers for a inurl:seroundtable.com command is almost on target to the numbers they report in Site Explorer, which is nice.

In regards to what is going on with Google... I am not sure if the results are accurate or not. Tedster at WebmasterWorld said:

I'm never surpised when Webmaster Tools information seems peculiar in some way - it happens a lot. Also note that site:example.com results are getting weirder and weirder, often omitting urls that definitely are in the index - sometimes with a simple site:example.com/directory/ query.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday, I was tipped off by a reader that the number two listing on Google Trends was this form of "ASCII art" ✈ ▌▌. At first, I thought it was an airplane landing on a runway strip. By I was wrong, it seemed to be an attack by a group of users, targeting Google Trends. They wanted to show an airplane flying into the former World Trade Center "Twin Towers." Yes, horrible!

Since posting, we have several comments at Search Engine Land. Danny notes that this potentially stemmed from a post at eBaum's World Forum.

In any event, this is not the first time Google Trends was targeted by hate. We saw a Swastika on Google Trends about six months ago. Then Google told us it was purely algorithmic, based on a spike of searches. This time, likely the same thing. I have a feeling that this is an issue that Google's Search Quality team can fix going forward, but the question is, are the resources there for it.

You can find more coverage of this story at Techmeme.

Forum discussion at Sphinn and DigitalPoint Forums.

A week ago, we reported that the Google Mobile team is using a new tool to track and monitor how popular feature requests are. Well, it seems like Google AdWords started their own similar tool, using Google Moderator.

A AdWords Help thread has AdWordsPro Sarah suggesting that one advertiser go to the "AdWords Wish List" at http://moderator.appspot.com/#15/e=de65&t=e52c and submit and vote of feature requests.

Looking at Google Moderator versus the Google Product Ideas site, it is the same thing, just with a custom URL. So, it seems like Google product lines are starting to migrate their feature request lists to Google Moderator, some getting custom URLs, so that users can vote on which ones they want to use.

It is a sort of Digg approach to feature requests, which I like.

Forum discussion at AdWords 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: January 6, 2009"

A WebmasterWorld thread asks just how accurate is the table in Google Webmaster Tools that shows the details of "Your page with the highest PageRank." It is found under "Statistics" and then under "Crawl stats" at the bottom of the page.

Here is a picture of mine:

Yes, no data available for December. In fact, I checked four sites really quickly, and they all said the same thing. Maybe it is a bug for me, or a temporary issue. But that is for another blog post.

Most SEOs that I know take very little stock into this report. It seems to be often outdated and often wrong. One webmaster said, "I think this information is nonsense." But other members think that if the report looks bad, then it is a sign of a penalty or a sign of an indexing issue.

Should webmasters take this report seriously? I am honestly not sure - my gut tells me no, they should not. I have too often seen the reports in Google Webmaster Tools to be flat out wrong, due to many reasons.

What do you think? Take the poll:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Frank Watson posted a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums asking members what they feel Google's top achievements of 2008 were.

Here are some of the responses from the thread:

• Google, swooping in to muck up any and all Yahoo/MSN talks with very little effort was impressive. They didnt even dirty their hands.
• Not related to search but I think it's pretty cool that they invested in esolar and brightsource. These are startup electric power companies that are using concentrated solar energy instead of coal to run steam turbine generator plants.
• But maybe the most notable might be Chrome; the introduction of the long rumored and awaited browser that was long denied being in development and that hasn't exactly taken the world by storm as of yet. I have to wonder what's coming in along behind it.
• VentureBeat's Android netbooks on their way, likely by 2010 article.
• The G1 hasn't really taken off here in the UK like the iPhone has, or it would get a close first vote!
• Beu gave a dozen or so including Google Sites, Website Optimizer, Friend Connect, iPhone Search, Flash support, 1 Trillion unique URLs, Fighter Jet, G1, SearchWiki

I personally wrote about my feelings on 2008, including a lot of Google topics, in my five years of writing at the Search Engine Roundtable. But if Matt Cutts can post that slide set where he goes through all the products and things he loves that Google released in the past year (which he normally does at PubCon and other conferences), that would be cool.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Google AdSense began testing AdSense optimization reports about two years ago. They officially released in in April 2007 and publishers were eager to get tips from Google. We then began noticing that the tips were not only repetitive and automated but also sometimes offering wrong tips all together.

So, now two years later, I ask you via a poll, are these optimization reports useful or helpful to you in any way?

Please take the poll, tell your publisher friends to take the poll and I'll publish the results within 30-days.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Last night, Yahoo sent out an email to their Search Marketing advertisers, notifying them that they have updated the terms and conditions. So I compared the current version to the archived version to see what significant changes have been made.

Here is a list of changes that I found, I may have missed some, but I think I got the major items.

(1) Removed "Overture" from the document. Yahoo bought Overture back in 2003.
(2) Removed clause "use any Program in connection with any ultrahazardous activity, or any other activity for which its failure might result in serious property damage, serious bodily injury, or death, nor."
(3) Removed a clause but moved a dedicated section to this API stuff: "In connection with a Program, if you have been granted API Access or you have been provided Analytics, you agree to be bound by the API Access & Analytics Program Terms, below."
(4) Removed clause "provided, however, that you may display different content to different users so long as it is relevant to the Selected Ad Groups and ads), and"
(5) Some changes to the localized legalize in 12.
(6) Added "Upon termination of these Analytics Program Terms or the Program Terms of the Program for which you have been provided Analytics, (i) you must promptly remove or have removed the Analytics from your website(s) and all items under your possession, custody, and/or control, and (ii) Section 2(i), above, will survive."
(7) Added "For dynamically priced campaigns, we may adjust the location of, and price for, your ads in an effort to meet your target goals (e.g., CPC, CPA, or CPL)."
(8) Added "OPTIMIZATION. In the U.S. only, for those advertisers not bound by an Insertion Order, we may help you optimize your account(s). Accordingly, you expressly agree that we may also: (i) create ads, (ii) add and/or remove keywords, and/or (iii) optimize your account(s). We will notify you via email of such changes made to your account(s), and can also include a spreadsheet of such changes upon your written request. If you would like any of such changes reversed, please reply to such email within 14 days of the change(s), and we will make commercially reasonable efforts to reverse the change(s) you specifically identify. Notwithstanding the foregoing, you remain responsible for all changes made to your account(s), including all click charges incurred prior to any reversions being made. It is your responsibility to monitor your account(s) and to ensure that your account settings are consistent with your business objectives."
(9) Added "Product Submit Program only: “Categories” and “Subcategories” mean the product categories you select and that we may map to your ads based on your ads themselves and/or the websites to which the ads link. We may re-categorize any incorrectly categorized ads (as determined by us) at any time."
(10) Removed "In addition to any applicable service fees, you will pay for all clicks on your ads, provided that we may bill you a minimum monthly charge of $200 per Program. Product Submit Program & Travel Submit Program only: Ads will be categorized into the appropriate category either by you or by us, provided that we reserve the right at any time to categorize or re-categorize any uncategorized or incorrectly categorized ads (as determined by us in our discretion)."
(11) Added "Travel Submit Program only: If you or the Feed Provider submit Information, ads, or any portion thereof that do not comply with our requirements (including a failure to update the applicable Information) or are otherwise unacceptable, we may continue to use existing ads and Information."

There were other changes, but these are the ones that caught my attention.

Note, not all of this is that shocking. We did cover about six-months ago one of these document changes. I wrote, Yahoo Can Legally Create or Change Your Search Ads & Bill You For It, yea - it is true.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

An older WebmasterWorld thread has been updated to share the time frame it took this webmaster to transfer his Google PageRank scores from old URLs to new URLs.

In summary, he set up a new URL structure (possibly a new domain, but that is not so clear). He redirected his old URLs to the new URLs. He then noticed his PageRank was gone, completely. So he got nervous. The folks in the thread suggested he relax and wait it out and ultimately, it worked out.

Here is the timeline:

• October 2nd - Site migration and 301's implemented
• October 10th - Week or so later lost all PR on new URLs (all to PR N/A)
• October 30th - Month later, PR N/A now changed to PR0
• December 29th - 3 months after 301 redirects back to original URL PR

So from start to finish, it seems like it took three months for the toolbar PageRank to transfer over.

How does this help any of you? Well, it really doesn't, outside of having something to point a client of your to. What I mean by that is that although the Toolbar PageRank didn't appear in the new URLs for three months, it likely had PageRank internally but not yet visible in the toolbar. I am sure the traffic from Google took less than three months to get to where it was.

In addition, these numbers will vary from site to site, depending on many factors. Those factors include, but are not limited to, size of the site, when the move was made, number of redirects, how popular the site was originally, if you use Sitemap files, and many more factors.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

You don't hear the word "penalty" come up much when you are talking about Google's AdWords program. I hear it all the time with Google's web search algorithm, but rarely when it comes to Google's AdWords quality score algorithm.

In a AdWords Help thread a Google representative actually used the term penalty, to describe why a person has a low quality score.

The advertiser asked why his Quality Score is so low, in which AdWordsPro Sarah replied, "the bad news is your page is probably being penalized for the redirect." She goes on to explain how the redirects are "misleading," and recommends that instead of using a redirect, he/she should create his/her "own unique content" that adds value to the affiliate product that is being promoted.

It is funny, because the last time we used the word "penalty" with AdWords was when it came with the affiliate business.

Forum discussion at AdWords Help.

Update: Sarah from Google did update the thread to explain redirects can be used professionally. But still interesting that redirects can cause a penalty when used wrong.

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: January 5, 2009"

Sometimes I seriously wonder where some of these SEO theories come from. One that caught my eye this week was found in a Google Webmaster Help thread, asking if it can hurt your SEO efforts if you do not alphabetize your META tags.

The thread creator wrote:

Can anyone tell me if it hurts indexing sites that the meta tags have been alphabetized?

But my editor tends to alphabetize them.

This webmaster asked a valid question. Since his web editor went through the trouble of making the tags in alphabetical order, should he do the same manually? The answer is no, it doesn't help in any way.

ZydoSEO replied to the thread, in which a Googler confirmed, saying:

The meta tags can appear in any order as long as they are contained inside the <head> element. It is not a problem to alphabetize them from Google's perspective... Only possibly from your perspective since time could probably be better spent doing something other than alphabetizing HTML elements.

In any event, I thought it would be fun to share this with many of the readers here.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Ever since Universal Search hit Google, we have been noticing flavors of video thumbnails and static images left aligned on the Google search results. A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion around this latest format and some are happy with it, while others are not.

Here is a picture of a subset of a Google search results:

You tell me, which one will catch your eye first? Likely the one with the image next to it on the right. So, this can be a great way to get your search results more exposure, and a higher click through rate, which might result in a higher conversion rate for your site. At the same time, if you are the listing above the one with the image, you are likely to see a drop in CTR, due to the result directly below. So this can help some webmasters, while hurt others.

Here is a poll on this topic, would love to see the responses:

Clearly, adding videos and images to your site, will help you gain the exposure over your competitors. The WebmasterWorld thread discusses various methods on how to get these images near your search result.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Google Webmaster Help points out that Google handles most date formats in US format. So if a site has a date in the format of 04/06/2007, Google will read that as April 6, 2007, but in UK format, it might be known as June 4, 2007.

Here is a screen capture of one such result:

And here is the date on the actual page:

You can see more details on this at Google Webmaster Help, where Googler, JohnMu said he will pass this information on to the right people.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help,.

Remember a few months back when Google published their internal SEO guide? Well, Michael Gray asked if Social Media links is an easy way to SEO death row.

Michael pointed out that on page twenty of the guide, under the "Good practices for promoting your website" section Google writes you should avoid:

involving your site in schemes where your content is artificially promoted to the top of these services

Michael feels we will soon see a tool in Webmaster Central named "How to report social media spam."

Of course, social media and SEO go very well together. But like anything that works well with SEO, it does get abused. The question is, is Michael right here? Do we have something to worry about?

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

A few months ago, Google opened up new interactive discussion areas to help improve Google's communication between Google and the people who use Google's products and services. In fact, the Google Webmaster Help area moved over a month ago today.

Everyone was excited to see a quicker, more efficient and more responsive area to get answers to their questions. The only issue is that many folks are posting questions and their questions are not being seen. A Google Webmaster Help post shares this issue, in short, if you post a question, you need to reply to your post, to make sure it is visible to others. It seems like a temporary bug, but even if it is, who in their right mind will post a question and then reply to their question - it just isn't a logical thing to do.

Googler, JohnMu, said "FWIW You can also just add an update to your question -- that works without having to post a reply to yourself. The team is aware of this issue and I assume it will be addressed with the next update."

They have actually posted an announcement:

Due to an issue in the forum software, some posts here may not show up for everyone until a reply has been posted. To be sure that your thread is visible, feel free to post an empty reply to your own thread.

I hope they get this fixed soon.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Update: This was resolved on January 6th in the afternoon.

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: January 2, 2009"

In this week's recap, I wish our readers and viewers a happy, healthy and prosperous 2009. Google updated the toolbar PageRank scores, but it seems like the search results both here and internationally were updated also. Live Search is using MSNBOT-Media to crawl JavaScript files. Google got hit with wildcard domain issues. Google Alerts is trigger happy. Google shows a did you mean answer for a child day care service, leading to a porn site. Google's strict image search option shows more porn than the moderate search. Danny Sullivan slaps Microsoft on their search initiatives. Microsoft's Content Ads program is doing poorly. Google AdSense is offending overweight people. Happy 2009 everyone!

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 '09 New Years From Search Industry: Logos from Google, Yahoo, AOL, Live, Ask & Others
• Google Confirms PageRank Update (New Years 2009)
• Major Google Search Results Changes, January 2009
• Google International Results Excessively 'Yo-Yoing'?
• Live Search Begins Crawling JavaScript with MSNBot-Media
• Google's Wildcard Subdomain Handling Issues?
• Google Alerts Sending Out False Alerts?
• Search For Child Day Care Site & Google Suggests Porn Site
• Google's Strict Image Search Less Strict Than Moderate Option
• Danny Sullivan Gives Microsoft The Hard Truth
• MSN adCenter's Content Ads Showing Horrible Click Through Rates?
• Google AdSense Now Pushing Fat Ads: Is this Offensive?

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

This is my last SearchBuzz RoundUp post for awhile, so enjoy it while you have a chance. This week, we rang in 2009. What happened?

Happy New Years '09
Very cool search engine logos have been posted this year. Google had a cool 2009 logo that still somewhat resembled "Google." Even Cre8site, Bruce Clay, and Baidu had cool logos.

Google's Results Run Wild
Google had a PageRank update this week, and then we saw some major changes in the SERPs. In fact, on the international side, the results are very odd to those familiar with the usual rankings.

Microsoft Crawls Through Javascript
Microsoft is taking a clue and is using the MSNBot-Media crawler to get the data behind Javascript. This is good and innovative -- and since Google has been doing it for awhile, it's about time the other search engines did the same.

Google's Wildcard Domain Bug
An interesting observation with a wildcard domain was spotted this week. I'm able to replicate it on my end too. I wish I had a site like that with all page 1 results. Just kidding. ;)

Google Alerts Accuracy Report
There have been reports of Google Alerts sending out irrelevant alerts to individuals subscribed to them. I've seen something similar but not 100% and it's related to the blogroll issue we reported earlier. Fun.

Google Is Not Kid Friendly
Don't search for child day care centers on Google. The search term for the particular search in question is so rare (and "misspelled") that Google recommends a porn site in the "Did You Mean?" column. Well, I guess I was wrong when I said that people don't primarily use Google to search for kinky stuff. Sheesh, people.

On that note, Google's "strict" image searching is not strict at all. Don't look if you don't like nude images with your breakfast.

Microsoft: Not So Good
This week, Danny Sullivan smacked Microsoft with some advice they should actually take seriously. Unfortunately for my friends in the Live Search team who really ROCK, it is evident that the higher-ups don't care. And that is sad -- and that's why Microsoft deserved everything it got from Danny.

On another note, Microsoft ContentAds are getting bad CTR. Then again, the information is now private and I'm hearing that ads are performing badly across the board.

Fat People Should Slim Down
...at least according to Google's AdSense ads. People are spotting more and more ads targeting fat people and some are finding it offensive. Are you?

Have a nice 2009 all!