March 2009 Archives

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

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: March 31, 2009"

An Introduction to Log File Analysis for SEOs & Webmasters from Eric Lander is a must read for all SEOs out there. He says that if you are not looking at your raw log files, you are missing out on things, even if you have the best web analytics software. Eric goes through the various key metrics in the log files that are key in your log file analysis process.

A Sphinn thread has extremely positive discussion around the article. I wish I had more time this morning to share my thoughts, but the article is great and the discussion makes it even better.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

There are several complaints in a Google Web Search Help thread that users cannot upload their own iGoogle custom themes. iGoogle allows users to pick a theme from a set of pre-made templates or upload their own theme for their iGoogle home page.

It seems like several people are having issues uploading their own theme.

Google employee, Jem, has been trying to help these users figure out the issue. But for a few days now, Jem seems to be at a loss.

For now, people are sharing the images they want to use for their custom theme and hopefully, Jem will be able to figure it out.

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

The Google AdSense blog announced that they will be adding additional email preferences to the account page. Here is a picture of the new preferences page:

I personally do not see these new preferences under the contact preferences page, but I guess it will show up for me shortly.

In a WebmasterWorld thread, AdsenseAdvisor said:

These new email notification preferences were created in response to feedback from you guys that we haven't been giving you enough opportunities to hear from us. Until now, you've all been limited in the kinds and formats of information you could sign up to receive by email, so we wanted to give you more options and better control over the email offers you get from us.

If you sign up for all the new categories, you'll be eligible for all kinds of great stuff that I probably shouldn't give too many details on yet.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I deal with many start up companies, in my line of work and I have noticed these start ups have been struggling raising capital for their ideas since the recession began.

Google just announced the launch of Google Ventures. Google Ventures is Google's new venture capital fund. Google said:

Economically, times are tough, but great ideas come when they will. If anything, we think the current downturn is an ideal time to invest in nascent companies that have the chance to be the "next big thing," and we'll be working hard to find them. If you think you have the next big idea, or if you just want to to learn more, please see our website at www.google.com/ventures.

Will it be easy for Google to give you venture capital money? I doubt it. But it is nice to see them making this arm more official.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There is a very long thread at Google AdSense Help discussions where publishers are accusing Google of taking a larger piece of the ad revenue share. Typically, when someone clicks on an AdSense ad, Google takes some of that revenue, while giving the remainder of the revenue to the publisher.

Some are suggesting that since a couple days ago, Google began taking as much as 90% of the revenue split. There are over 120 posts in the Google AdSense Help, with complaints.

Some suspect it might be a lingering issue from the high impression counts AdSense was reporting, but many don't think it is related.

There is no word from Google on the issue right now. We will continue to monitor things and keep you all posted.

Forum discussion at Google AdSense Help.

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

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

It has been about a month since the February Yahoo Search update and we are now seeing reports of a new update.

Threads at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums have a lot of discussion around the changes at Yahoo. Like usual, Yahoo has not yet posted a "weather report", but I bet they will today or tomorrow.

There are some pretty heavy fluctuations in the Yahoo Search results and some are still update with how Yahoo is handling redirects. Outside of that, I hope you all have benefited from this update.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

A Google Analytics Help thread has confirmation from a Googler that your Analytics data will remain in your account for at least the past 25 months.

Anna from the Google Analytics team said, "data is stored for at least 25 months," when using Google Analytics.

After that, I guess you should export the data and save it locally. Is 25 months enough for you? Personally, I am not too sure. Here is a poll, let me know what you think:

Forum discussion at Google Analytics Help.

Some very watchful DigitalPoint Forums members noticed that Google updated the Google AdSense home page. Here is the before and after.

Before there was more color in that box on the left:

Now, the box on the left is mostly blue:

Notice the difference? Yea, pretty small, but we noticed.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

As a way to promote Microsoft's search technology, in November 2006, Microsoft launched Ms. Dewey, a Flash based search interface which answered your queries in a witty and sarcastic manner. Sadly, as Kim reports, msdewey.com no longer is live, in fact, the domain name is set to expire in November of this year.

The irony of this is that when Ask dropped Jeeves, I joked that Dewey was the new Jeeves character in the search field. Then, in October 2008, we noticed that Jeeves became a porn star when he let his domain expire and an adult site took it over. Now, the comical part is that the woman who played the character of Ms. Dewey has history in the adult film business.

I find that pretty funny - not sure if you will.

In any event, Ms. Dewey, the beloved and witty search character Microsoft employed, is now no longer active. No word from Microsoft on this matter yet.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

A week ago today, we reported how AdSense publishers were not happy with video unit payouts. In fact, they were extremely upset with how little the earnings were for displaying rich media on their sites.

Friday, Google announced that they are "sunsetting" (dropping) the video ad units. Google said:

After reviewing our AdSense video units feature, which allows you to show YouTube content and ads on your pages, we've found that it hasn't had the impact we had hoped for. As a result, we've decided to retire this feature at the end of April so we can focus our resources on other opportunities to help publishers earn from their sites.

Google recommends that you begin removing the video unit boxes from your pages. Today, the video unit option is not available to new publishers.

There are three forums discussing this now, two with official Google representatives responding to questions.

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

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

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

I am in Israel now, so I am skipping the video this week. Here is the text based version of the weekly recap. Google seems to be pushing more search options on searchers through something being called Google Search Wheel. Google also added more search refinements and detailed (longer) snippets to Google web search. Google Blog Search finally pushed out their algorithm update for blogroll detectors. 23% of publishers say more than 75% of their income comes from Google AdSense. AdSense had major issues with double serving ads, which results in a reporting spike and a fix from Google. Did you know unpausing deleted campaigns can reactivate them in AdWords? Advertisers, publishers and affiliates are afraid over a new proposed bill that can tax more retailers. Google mobile has a big issue. iGoogle continues to sign people out. Did you know you can get Google to remove porn for Google Suggest? That was this week at the Search Engine Roundtable.

• Google Pushing More Search Options On Searchers?
• Google Adds More Search Refinements & Detailed Snippets
• Google Releases Major Blog Search Blogroll Algorithm Update
• 23% of Google AdSense Publishers Say 75% of Their Income Comes From Google
• Google AdSense Reporting Off Again: Impressions High & CTR Low
• Google Fixes AdSense Impression Glitch
• Unpausing Google AdWords Campaigns Can Activate Deleted Campaigns
• Advertisers, Publishers & Affiliates Scared Over Proposes California Tax Law
• Mobile Google Not Working For Many
• iGoogle Signing You Out?
• How To Remove Google Porn Suggestions

Next week, I am back with the video recaps.

The much awaited update to the Google Blog Search blogroll detector algorithm has finally been pushed through.

An updated Google Groups thread has Googler, Jeremy Hylton saying:

We have launched a ranking change that reduces the number of results that are returned because of blogroll matches. There are still problems to work out, but this change appears to be a big improvement over our earlier fix. We had originally planned to launch an experiment for link: queries, but decide more recently to release this change first. We are still working on the link: change and expect to have that ready in a few more weeks.

We did expect to see an update for how Google Blog Search responds to the link query, but as Jeremy said, that won't be released yet for the next few weeks. But the blogroll matching detector, which matches for keywords in the blogroll sections of sites, should no longer return results for those keywords.

Why does this matter? Well, lets say you are like me and you track who links or mentions you via Google Blog Search. If someone has the Search Engine Roundtable in the blogroll, and the do a daily blog post, even if that blog post doesn't mention the Search Engine Roundtable, blog search would show that new blog post as a match. Why? Because it is in the blogroll and Google thinks it is part of the content of the blog post. Google said they fixed this issue but they do want feedback at the Google Groups thread.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

February 3rd, we reported Google Won't Let Some Searchers Turn Off "Safe Search" Filter, well, almost two months later, the issue is still not resolved. In fact, Google cannot find any issue.

The other day, Googler Skylar said he was unable to find any issue. He said in the Google Web Search Help thread:

Thanks everyone for providing information about your computers and browsers. I’ve been passing these details along to the rest of the team to check on SafeSearch filtering. We're currently unable to find errors with SafeSearch filtering. It is likely that a corrupt cookie, a third-party add-on, or an anti-virus program could be interfering with your preferences. I recommend giving the "Preferences aren't sticking" help article a try to make your preferences stick. In the meantime, I understand that it is frustrating when your preferences don't stick, and I'm sorry for any inconvenience you're experiencing.

But this does not explain why hundreds of searchers are still having this issue.

Forum discussion continued at Google Web Search Help.

Yesterday we reported that AdSense impressions were double reporting. Well it turned out to be more than just a reporting error. Google was double or triple serving the same ads on the same site, which is not something they should have been doing. In any event, Google has announced they fixed the issue:

If you're displaying multiple ad units on your pages, you may have noticed that your pageviews were higher than normal for part of yesterday and today. Our engineers identified a bug which prevented ad units from detecting other units on the same page. As a result, our system logged a pageview for each ad unit that was loaded on a page, instead of a pageview for each page containing ads. In some cases, this also may have caused specific ads to appear in multiple ad units on the same page.

Please be assured that ad unit impressions were still logged correctly and ads were still displayed on your pages, so you were properly credited for all earnings generated from your ads. We've resolved the issue, and although you won't see the pageview count in your reports retroactively changed, your pageview tracking is now back to normal.

But like I said, some ads were double or triple served on the same page.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Google AdSense Help.

A HighRankings Forum thread asks an interesting question. If I add links to my web page and nofollow them, does Google still read the anchor text of the link and use that in part of how they determine what my page is contextual about.

For example, if I link to Search Engine Land as follows; <a href="http://searchengineland.com/" rel="nofollow">Search News</a> would Google or any other main search engine, take the words "search news" and place that text as being relevant to what this page is about? We know Google won't pass the link value of that link to Search Engine Land, but do we know if Google ignores that text completely?

Has anyone done any tests on this yet? If not, anyone want to try?

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

Google announced they are now offering access providers, such as hosting companies, the ability to easily give their customers access to Google's Webmaster Tools, AdSense, Custom Search, and Site Search. These access providers can sign up at http://www.google.com/webmasters/provider/.

Today, we're releasing Google Services for Websites, a few more tools that your hosting company can now enable to help you improve your website. This expanded program includes Webmaster Tools, AdSense, Custom Search, and Site Search, making it easier to drive traffic to your site, monetize your site through the Google ad network, and add various search capabilities to help your visitors find information on your site faster.

We have some discussion around this announcement at WebmasterWorld. WebmasterWorld admin, tedster, said:

Seems like a savvy, and potentially revenue-increasing move. Note that the web host needs to participate for this program to be available: "...a few more tools that your hosting company can now enable to help you improve your website."

The Custom Search Engine is one service that might be a real boon. A CSE is not all that easy for the non-technical site owner to set up right now, and if this service makes it easier, that's a good thing.

Google has been piloting this type of services to some web hosts in the past. Expanding it to any web host and access provider is a no brainer for Google.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Almost two months ago, we asked, Should Google Search Suggestions Show Adult Suggestions? In short, Google, on occasion, showed search suggestion for porn/adult related phrases, as you typed your query. The example I gave then, was when you typed "you," Google would offer a suggestion to youpron which is an adult site. Here is the before picture:

A new Google Web Search Help thread shows that Google listens and does remove porn/adult keyword suggestions from that list. The case in that thread was for when you search for [hvernig] Google offered a suggestion [hvernig á að totta] which in Icelandic means "how to give a blowjob."

Googler, Skylar, said last night that it has been removed. He said:

The inappropriate suggestion will no longer appear when someone types "hvernig" in the search box. Thanks again for sharing your feedback about this query suggestion so that we can improve Google Suggest.

So I decided to check the [you] query and it was gone also:

So how do you remove porn suggestions from Google? Post your complaint in the web search forums.

Forum discussion at Google Web Search 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: March 26, 2009"

We all know that Google ignores the META keywords tag on pages, or at least that is what we believe and what we are told. This does not mean Google ignores other meta tags, such as the meta description, but they do ignore the keywords meta tag.

A recent Google Webmaster Help thread has some confusing information from JohnMu, a Googler.

John said:

One problem I see when looking at your site's meta tags at the moment is that they're all included in your "keywords" meta tag - they're not separate meta tags.

That said, I think you can safely remove all of these meta tags. Google doesn't need them and they can be confusing the way you have them now.

If you look at the thread, we can see that the keywords used in the meta keywords is a bit overboard, to say the least. However, if Google completely ignores the tag, why would it "be confusing." Is it confusing for GoogleBot? Is it confusing for other search engines that might use it? Is it confusing the the searcher who doesn't view the source code of the page?

You see why I am struggling with this post? I know we can't always sit there and analyze the words of Googlers. But sometimes we do and we scratch our heads.

I will ping JohnMu and ask him to comment and clarify. I am sure I am just looking into this a bit too much.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Update: So I John commented and I decided to take a closer look at the site he commented about. What I found was the meta tags coded as HTML entities, which really is incredibly weird and likely does not work for Google or any bot. Here is a picture of the code, where I highlighted the core issue, as I understand it:

So John's comment does make more sense now.

Feels like at least once a week, I write about how Google AdSense has reporting issues. Today, I spotted a WebmasterWorld thread that has dozens of AdSense publishers complaining that the reports seem off again.

Specifically, the issues are as follows:

• Impressions are twice the normal expected amount
• Click through rates are about half of the normal expected amount
• Earnings are (obviously) on target with what is expected

In summary, many publishers are noticing high numbers in impression reporting, but lower in the actual click through rate, which leads to the same earning reports as they historically see.

AdSenseAdvisor said a few hours ago:

I'm happy to look into this, but please forgive me if it takes some time (it's pretty late in California right now).

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: This is now fixed but ads were double or tripled served in some cases.

A HighRankings Forum thread asks how does one distinguish between a good and bad web directory. Web directories are often the first step for many link building campaigns. The obvious directories that come to mind to submit to are dmoz.org and Yahoo's directory. But many people like Best of the Web as well.

The question is, how does an SEO or webmaster know which directories are quality and which are not. This gets more important when you are submitting to niche directories.

Here are just some points, off the top of my head, to look for when evaluating a directory.

• Age of directory
• Is the directory indexed
• Is your listing category in the directory indexed
• Number of links to the directory
• Domain age of directory
• Does directory require a link back
• PageRank of directory's home page
• PageRank of the category of your listing in your directory
• Design of directory
• How large is the directory

Again, these are just the things that came to my mind as I wrote this post. If you have more to add, please do.

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

A Sphinn thread reports that in some cases, unpausing a campaigns in an AdWords account can even activate campaigns that have been deleted.

Gab Goldberg summarized the story, saying:

Google AdWords ripped off this firm for $3200! When they restarted paused campaigns by clicking 'resume all,' Google also resumed deleted campaigns, with all adgroups and ads deleted too!

Several AdWords advertisers said they have seen this happen to them in the past. It just sounds like a major bug to me and I don't see how this can go unnoticed for too long. As AdWords accounts age, some campaigns must be deleted. Often campaigns are paused for one reason or another and when they are unpaused, you can risk being charged for deleted campaigns as well.

This seems like a serious concern to me.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

There is a long thread of upset iPhone, G1 and mobile users at Google Mobile Help discussions. It seems like many users who try to access Google.com on their iPhone or G1 are being presented with errors.

The first report came in on the 23rd, saying "I get the following error message: "error to use eval to parse history info json string!" But many other users are complaining as well. This is not only impacting iPhone users, but also G1 users and likely users of Google Mobile on any mobile device.

iPhone users can manually fix the issue by going to Settings, then Safari, and then click on Clear History, Clear Cache, Clear Cookies.

Googler, Bret, said:

Thanks for the feedback guys. We're looking into this issue. I'll post any updates I have to this thread.

Hopefully this gets resolved soon.

Forum discussion at Google Mobile Help.

We know Google is on Twitter, so is AdWords and we know at least two AdWords reps are also. Yesterday, AdSense joined Twitter @adsense. The way AdSense joined was in Google style, the first Tweet was:

Ads by 47 6F 6F 6F 6F 6F 6F 6F 67 6C 65

What does that mean? Well, if you use an Hex/ASCII converter and plug in 47:6F:6F:6F:6F:6F:6F:6F:67:6C:65 it translates it to "Gooooooogle." As you see on many Google AdSense ads, they have a line that reads "Ads by Gooooooogle."

The Inside AdSense blog officially announced the new Twitter account. So feel free to follow it on Twitter and while you are at it, follow @seroundtable and @rustybrick.

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: March 25, 2009"

The Google Blog announced Google has added additional search refinements and detailed snippets. Here is part of the announcement:

More and better search refinements
Starting today, we're deploying a new technology that can better understand associations and concepts related to your search, and one of its first applications lets us offer you even more useful related searches (the terms found at the bottom, and sometimes at the top, of the search results page).

Longer snippets

When you enter a longer query, with more than three words, regular-length snippets may not give you enough information and context. In these situations, we now increase the number of lines in the snippet to provide more information and show more of the words you typed in the context of the page. Below are a couple of examples.

We noticed Google testing long snippets at least twice and also an option to control snippet size.

Do you like it?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion around the topics of building links from foreign web sites, in different languages.

For example, if I run a web site that is in English, focused for US users - what happens if I get some links from sites hosted in Israel, with Hebrew anchor text, linking to my English web site?

The obvious answer is that these types of links are not considered spam or low quality, simply because of the site's origin. If a foreign site is linking to yours out of relevance, then it is fine. If you go ahead and buy thousands of links on foreign publisher web sites, then that might lead to other issues.

In fact, when you want to rank well in localized versions of Google, it is recommended to not only publish a localized version of the site using the country's TLD, but also to acquire links from sites sharing the localized view and on the localized TLD.

Would acquiring "foreign" links to your USA English based site help you rank in both Google USA and Google localized? Maybe but it might not be the optimal way to go about your country specific SEO.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

AdSenseAdvisor said in a WebmasterWorld thread that having more ads on the page will lead to higher revenues per impression.

This may be obvious, that showing more ads, will lead in more revenues per page view, but not for all publishers. Some are of the belief that showing less ads increases the value of each click and then might lead to more revenue per impression.

It is nice to see that a Google representative has went on record as saying that this is generally the case.

I assume many of you disagree, if so, why?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread posted a screen shot of an unusual Google AdSense ad. Here is a picture of the ad:

Matt Cutts is the head of Google's web spam team. I am not sure how many sales this type of banner would lead to, since those who are looking for SEO services, may not know Matt. But it might lead to conversion for those prospects that do their homework.

In any event, this was a funny thread to spot.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Marty from the aimClear blog emailed me a screen shot yesterday morning, which looked like Google experimental search results. I then spotted a WebmasterWorld thread that discusses the same thing Marty emailed me.

There is a new link in the Google results that says "Show Options." When clicked, it opens up other grouping options. Robert, a WebmasterWorld admin also sees it and he describes the options as:

The main groupings select among...

- types of results (All results, Recent, Videos, Forums, Reviews)...
- time of results (with options between Anytime and the past year)...
- different types of what I'd call snippet displays (with options including standard or longer snippets, and snippets including image thumbnails)...
- and different views (including Standard, Wonder wheel, Timeline, and Search Suggestions)

Here is a screen capture:

When I try to search for the query that they spotted this with, I get a message from Google that reads:

The option you have selected is currently unavailable.

Is this a form of experimental search being forced on searchers?

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: March 24, 2009"

Last week, I ran a poll asking if Google AdSense made up most of your income. The 129 responses are in and I wanted to share them with you. It seems like 47% of those that make money will AdSense say Google makes up more than 25% of their income. 53% said Google makes up less than 25% of their income. Here is the breakdown:

:: Less Than 25% of My Income said 58 respondents or 45%
:: Over 75% of My Income said 25 respondents or 19%
:: Not Applicable To Me said 20 respondents or 16%
:: Over 50% of My Income said 14 respondents or 11%
:: Over 25% of My Income said 12 respondents or 9%

Is it possible that 23% of publishers make 75% or more of their income with Google? The 23% is when you take out the "Not Applicable to Me" results, since they likely are not AdSense publishers.

Forum discussion continued at DigitalPoint Forums.

A HighRankings Forum thread asks a question that likely applies to most professions on the web, what does one do when a client messes up your portfolio. For example, you provide SEO copywriting services and that content is used on client X's web site. Then a few months later, the client updates the content here and there and forgets to consult you for those changes. Now, when you want to show your work to future prospects, they are reviewing work that has been mangled by your client.

The same issue applies to when clients make design changes to web sites or when they make SEO changes in terms of title tags, content, and even link building. This can apply to other industries, including even building homes.

The big question is, how do you keep your portfolio in order?

The simple answer is to screen capture the work you have done. A local Wayback Machine, if you will. There is nothing wrong in taking a local copy down of the web site and using that to demo to prospects. In addition, it is always good to have a local copy, that you can use for staging the changes you made to the site, before uploading those changes to production.

Personally, I typically demo sites we built to prospects on our test servers. Why? (1) The content is sometimes cleaner. (2) I can safely make changes to the site without impacting the live site. (3) I don't run the risk of sharing real information and intellectual property with potential competitors.

Do you run into this issue?

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

Last week, Yahoo announced enhancements to their search marketing platform. Part of that announcement was that they added the day parting option, giving advertisers the ability to say they want to show their ads on specific days and different times or even increase their bids at different times.

The one option Yahoo has added that the other engines do not have, is that they give you the ability to specify if you would like the day parting settings to be based on your time zone or the searcher's time zone. I was fairly confident that Google set it based on you (the advertiser's) time zone.

I confirmed that today by asking that question in a Google AdWords Help thread. The response lead me to a answer at Google help that read:

Ad scheduling for your AdWords campaigns is based on the time zone you have set for your account. Your ad will appear during the hours shown in your account -- not in the time zone of the regions you have targeted.

For example: Assume your account time zone is set for Amsterdam, but your ads are targeted to Bangkok, six hours ahead. When you schedule your ads to run from 1:00 until 3:00 pm, the ads will run from 1:00 until 3:00 pm Amsterdam time. That means that in Bangkok, six hours ahead, they will be running from 7:00 until 9:00 pm.

So there you have it. Even features such as day parting can get very granular in its targeting options. Google doesn't give you the detailed level of control Yahoo gives you, but do advertisers need it?

Here is a poll, let us know what you think:

Forum discussion at Google AdWords Help.

Yesterday we reported that there was an Google AdWords API Usage Reporting Glitch. In short, Google wasn't telling AdWords API users how many API calls they were making, and since Google charges some advertisers for API calls, it can become an issue.

Google confirmed the issue in a Google Groups thread. Jeff Posnick from AdWords API Team said the issue is now resolved but there was an hour of API call usage Google seemed to have lost. Due to the data loss, Google cannot charge for that usage. Here is what Jeff said:

To update the thread: there was an issue that prevented AdWords API usage information from being updated following the scheduled downtime on March 14. For a few days after there was a backlog of usage info, and both the display in the AdWords web interface and the count returned via the InfoService was out of date. The engineering team believes that this issue is resolved now, and that the underlying circumstances leading to it should not recur.

They did identify a window of about an hour on March 14 for which they were not able to retrieve usage information, and any calls made during that window of time will not incur any charges (nor will they be reflected in the InfoService or the web interface's usage count). However, this window took place during the scheduled downtime, so there should have been only a small amount of traffic that got through during that time.

This likely only impacts a smaller percentage of our readers, but this seemed interesting enough to post about.

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: March 23, 2009"

There are two different threads at WebmasterWorld that show publishers, advertisers and affiliate's concern over a new proposed tax law in California.

The law, as understood in the thread, would potentially tax any seller who using AdWords to market their product or service. Moderator, incrediBILL, explained:

The conclusion I drew after reading the law is that since AdSense directly refers customers via links, as do the AdWords ads showing in the SERPs, it's therefore theoretically possible that anyone using Google as an advertising vehicle could be subject to CA tax.

If people advertising in Google are suddenly subject to collecting and paying CA tax then people will most likely stop advertising on Google.

You can see the details about this tax proposal named AB178 and the hearing won't be until April 13, 2009.

Some are very skeptical over the bill and they are not worried too much about how it might impact them.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: 5 Star Affiliate Blog has very good coverage of this concern. Well worth a read.

Over a year ago, almost two years ago, there were rumors that Google would treat underscores in the URL the same way they treat hyphens in the URL, as word separators. Matt Cutts squashed the rumor back then, suggesting that Google was not treating them the same.

Historically, underscores (i.e. domain.com/file_name.html) was treated as a single word (i.e. filename) and hyphens (i.e. domain.com/file-name.html) was treated as two words (i.e. file name).

A new WebmasterWorld thread asks more questions on that. Senior member, internetheaven, noticed, and I quote:

I have a URl: www.example.com/folder/file_name.htm

and if you search for:

allinurl: file site:example.com

or

allinurl: name site:example.com

you get 0 results. Whereas if you search for:

allinurl: file_name site:example.com

the page shows up in the results fine.

I thought underscores were the same as hyphens these days?

Well, they are not the same these days, and that might be proof. Technically, I do see results that do match on sites I tested for these types of queries. What I mean is that Google will still highlight and display results for a keyword that is in part of the underscored URL. I am not sure why it did not show up for this member. Maybe it is something happening at Google.com and since I am currently in Israel, I am getting a different data set.

Receptional, WebmasterWorld moderator, explained:

In certain cases, Google may figure out that underscore is being used as a word separator (similar to the process for conjoined words). But an underscore is not a word separator - treating it as such would at a minimum cause a lot of developers to be frustrated when using Google, as many function names etc. use underscores.

Underscores and hyphens have never been treated the same - if you want a guaranteed word separator in a URL, always use a hyphen.

For now, until we hear from Matt on a change in underscores and hyphens, Google treats them differently.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Personalized search and personalized home pages can be great for most users. The only issue is that you need to be signed in, most of the time, to get personalized results from Google. And if you love those personalized results and home page from iGoogle, being automatically signed out without requesting to be signed out, can be a bit frustrating.

Over the past week, I have seen dozens of threads pop out in several Google forums on the topic of Google automatically signing them out of iGoogle. I ignored it as being a recent security patch that deleted cookies and thought it would be resolved soon.

Google recently posted an announcement on this exact issue, saying:

Several users have reported that they're getting signed out of iGoogle several times each day. This is not the way it's supposed to work, and we're investigating the issue on our end.

If you're affected by this problem, please first check to make sure this isn't a problem with your computer or network; instructions for checking are located in this Help Center article. Once you've eliminated those possibilities, if you'd like to discuss this further please post in this thread.

So if you are also being signed out from Google, don't feel left alone.

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

There are two threads at Google AdSense Help discussions with AdSense publishers who are simply not happy with the earnings they have been reported to receive from their YouTube content.

Let me quote you some upset publishers:

My revenue is down more than 50%. There were people who were expecting to earn $200 in January and instead earned $80. I was expecting $1000-$2000 and earned a little over $80.

Received my report. 1/5th of my Content Host earning. Shame.

63. Wow. Just as we're writing about it, the amount posted. And it ain't pretty. I had $67 in Content Host earnings (63,600 views/1000 clicks) and only $17 in YouTube earnings... sheesh, that sure wasn't worth the wait!

Some feel ripped off by Google while others feel that there may be a glitch in the system. But one publisher recommends "patience," explaining:

Settle down guys. The Partner program is definitely not a "get rich quick' program. Part of the low revenue is the economy and the other part might be the simple fact that an advertiser does not want to pay a lot to run ads on your videos.

I have seen my YT amount drop to 1/20th or so what I would expect but content host amount is going up and that is fine with me.

Forum discussion at Google AdSense Help.

There are reports in the Google AdWords API Google Groups that the Google AdWords API is reporting inaccurate data from the usage tool.

First reports came in on March 19th, where an AdWords API user said:

We have just rolled out an application using API and the Unit Usage from 3 days ago is not showing up. It says on the page where this is viewed that it is updated daily. Anyone know whats going on there? Have we not been charged?

In short, Google charges for certain level of usage for the API. AdWords API users keep track of their usage reporting to stay on top of costs. The usage reporting seems to not be updating correctly and costs are hard to control without that reporting.

Jeff Posnick from the Google AdWords API Team said:

I have a bug open with the engineering team to determine whether there was some underlying problem that prevented the display in the web interface from being updated. Hopefully if there is a problem we can get it resolved so that no further confusion ensues.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Today's Search Video I talk quickly about the logos for the first day of Spring, and also St. Patrick's day logos. Google finally spoke about the AJAX pages. Yahoo added features to search marketing product. Google AdWords tests favorite icons. AdWords keyword tool has a bug. Yahoo Directory might be free. I offered three link building tips. I also gave two SEO tips. Don't fall for a potential Google money scam. SEOs are split on need to specialize. I won't be at SES NY and no video next week. That is what we covered this week at 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:

For the original iTunes version, click here or to see the YouTube version in higher quality, click play at hit "HQ."

Some Of The Topics Discussed:

• Happy First Day of Spring :: Logos From Google & Others
• 2009 St. Patrick's Day Search Logos
• Google Fesses Up To AJAX Search Results Test
• Yahoo Adds Day Parting, Bid Adjustments, Enhanced Geo Targeting But No One Cares
• Google Aggressively Testing Favicons In AdWords Ads
• Google Confirms Keyword Tool Issue is a Bug
• Yahoo Directory Renewals Going Completely Free?
• Offer Customers a Discount in Exchange for a Link?
• Can't Get That Golden Link? Go After a Link Off the Golden Link
• Getting Links From Professors & College Students
• Australians Can Be Fined $11,000 Per Day For Linking Out
• 404 Pages Should Not Return 200 Status Codes
• Using Multiple Header Tags for SEO
• Scam: Google Money System or Google Kit
• SEO's Split on Importance of Specialization in Industry Sectors
• SES NY Coverage Note: Won't Be Any Here

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

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

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: March 20, 2009"

There is an excellent WebmasterWorld on the topic of getting a "second tier link," as opposed to the link you really want. Wheel, the moderator of the forum, posted that it is not always easy or possible to get the .gov, .edu or aged link that all link builders dream about. When you efforts fail, why not go after those that have links from those "golden link" pages?

Wheel explained:

What I'll do is try to get links from second tier sites. Say I want a find a page on a .gov site that has a list of links. I'd like to be on that page, but I can't get a link. What I'll do is look at all the sites that are linked to from that page and try and get a link from them. I'll still get whatever good comes from that .gov link, just diluted and flowed through another site.

They are not the cream of the crop links, but they are still very valuable. The process is pretty simple:

(1) Discover golden link pages
(2) Request links from those pages
(3) Move on
(4) Click on links from the golden link pages
(5) Request links from those new pages
(6) Rinse and Repeat

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There is an old WebmasterWorld thread on the topic of how many header tags (i.e. H1, H2) you should have on a page and how you should use it. The thread was revived yesterday when Matt Cutts of Google answered a question on that topic on video. Here is the video:

So there you have it. Don't wrap all your content in the H1 tag. You can use it multiple times on a page but use it for page heading above paragraphs of content. Don't over do it.

WebmasterWorld's Tedster disagreed a bit with Matt, he said:

Even though Matt say s it's "OK" to use more than one, I'm still a big fan of using only one H1 element. If it seems like two are really required, I almost always make that content into two pages. Or if the content is too thin to support two pages resonably, I'll figure out a single over-arching headline that can be the H1 to support multiple H2 tags.

I find that approach also "packages" the semantic signals more effectively. That's kind of the way I understand websites, pages, and even code. They are all ways of "packaging" data and information, and we are all packagers.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There are way too many sites out there that have their "Page Not Found" web pages return a 200 header status code, instead of a 404 code or a 301. The issue with showing a 200 code to spiders or others is that it means that your page that no longer exists, technically does exist. If you return a 404, it technically means the page does not exist. If you return a 301, then you say that page has been moved.

A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion around the topic of serving up a 200 status code on these not found pages. Tedster, WebmasterWorld administration, said "over time, can destroy your site's rankings. You are essentially telling Google to index the same content for an infinite number of URLs."

I'll be honest, some of our coders here set up the "Not Found" pages are 200. I then get upset and we fix it. I got really upset on Tuesday, where I made our senior developer write a script to go through all our web sites (hundreds of them) and check to see if any 404 pages returned a status code other than a 404 or 301. We found about four sites that did and we fixed all of them.

Writing a scrip that goes through your sites on a scheduled basis and checks for this type of issue might be a good idea, if you have many sites to manage. Server configurations change over time, you make changes to sites, and you add new sites. People are human and they forget to do a thing or two, here and there. So stop being human (kidding) and set up a program that checks this stuff automatically.

Why? Well, it can come back to bite you later.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Today is the first day of spring and Google, Live.com, AOL, FriendFeed and others have special logos and themes live on their home pages today. It is also Nowruz, the beginning of the Iranian year and is a secular holiday - FriendFeed's logo is around that. Also, March Madness is this week, so we have a logo from DogPile for NCAA basketball. Only major search engine missing a logo today is Yahoo.

Let's start with Spring logos:

Google:

Now, there is something you may have missed, as Kalena Jordan found, Google New Zealand accidently linked the result to the "First Day of Fall" and not the "First Day of Autumn." It seems to have been corrected now, but it is not Fall in New Zealand, it is now Autumn.

AOL (animated):

Live.com has a theme with spring related "hot spots:"

Search Engine Roundtable's theme:

FriendFeed has the Nowruz logo:

DogPile has a March Madness logo:

Forum discussion on the Google New Zealand slip up at Sphinn and other logos 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: March 19, 2009"

YouTube has added new statistics to YouTube Insights, the YouTube video analytics. I wrote about YouTube Insights when it first launched a year ago. Today, they added features to tell you how engaged your viewers are, i.e. do they like your videos?

YouTube added a new tab named "community" clicking on that tab brings up the "User Engagement" stats. It looks like this for my account:

You can also break the community stats down by "ratings":

Or by "comments":

Or "favorites":

These are welcome features for me, being that I produce a weekly search video that you all subscribe to, right?

Forum discussion at YouTube Help.

Search Engine Strategies New York is next week but I have sad news for some of you, we won't be covering the conference. We have "live blogged" SES conferences since 2003, including the past five years of SES NY, with SES NY '04, SES NY '05, SES NY '06, SES NY '07, and SES NY '08. But this year, I won't be here, the New York Israeli Consulate invited me on a Blogger Delegation to Israel and I can't pass up this opportunity.

But don't worry, there have been several blogs that also started covering these conferences. Bruce Clay posted their live blogging schedule of SES New York and I would expect to see coverage from Lisa Barone at OutSpokenMedia.com.

I am sorry for not being able to do the coverage this year, but I hope to continue the live blogging of search conferences going forward.

If you will be at SES NY, you 100% want to support the IM Charity Party, it is a great cause. Even if you are not going, you can donate some money to the charity.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Google started showing search refinements in mid 2006. Later on that year, they cleaned up those refinements and they began showing up a lot for medical searches and for those that participated in the Google Coop solution.

But now, a WebmasterWorld thread reports that Google is showing less and less refinements these days, then they have in the past. In fact, searches that worked in the past to trigger then, don't all work. One example is clinical trials, and also site:www.seroundtable.com florida does not work. You can see that it does work if you force the more condition to be added to the search parameter.

Google frequently changes how the search results interact with searchers. Maybe the refinements were not used all that much or maybe they confused searchers. Or maybe them not showing up as often, recently, might be a bug? We don't know.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

One of the most challenging jobs for e-commerce sites is to get people to link to them. Over the years, we have posted many link building tips but we never posted about this one. Why don't e-commerce sites offer a promotion to customers to get a percentage off their order, if they write a blog post or link to their site.

In fact, I have seen this offered on several sites throughout the year. Personally, I never took advantage of the offer, which honestly surprises me. I blog a heck of a lot, not just on search engines, but on anything, and I never took advantage of the offer. In any event, some sites do this and have been doing it for years.

An excellent HighRankings Forum thread asks if offering this type of discount, in exchange for a link, would be considered link buying and thus against Google's terms of service?

Moderator, Bob Gladstein said that it doesn't make sense to make the offer to everyone and anyone. You don't want links from an electronic store if you site sells shoes. Or do you?

Moderator, Randy said he sees it a lot and when he sees it, he loses respect for that site and will never do business with them again. Wow, strong words, let me quote him:

It's caused me to lose respect and trust for those who offered me such Discount For Link deals. Not only have I never taken any of them up on the deal, as a general rule I never do business with them again. Not because the original thing I ordered wasn't in good condition or that I've had any problem with my original order. But because I've lost respect for them. They're offer has caused me to lose trust and good will that they'd already built with me that caused me to order from them the first time.

Jill Whalen, owner of HighRankings, disagrees with both Bob and Randy, she said "I think it's a great idea."

Honestly, I think the best bet is to write the post after you get the product and then they give you a discount on the next order or give you a credit on your previous purchase. This way you can give an honest review of the product you bought and discuss the customer service and if you liked it or not.

Technically, a discount on a purchase is money and it may be seen as "link buying," but it is a stretch, in my opinion.

Do you think offering a discount in exchange for a link is considered link buying? Take our poll:

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

We have a lot of Google AdSense publishers that read this site and I wanted to run a quick poll asking you guys, what percent of your income is from Google AdSense. The poll is completely anonymous and if you have a 20 seconds, please take the poll.

As you can see, I broke the figures out in a very generic fashion, to keep it simple. Please take the poll and have your publisher friends and colleagues taking the poll. I will publish the results for everyone to see.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Yesterday, for the second time this month, we reported that Google's Keyword Tool Getting To Broad. I guess it is the time of the month where SEMs do their keyword research because many more threads popped up on this issue over the passed few days.

The official Google AdWords representative updated several threads complaining about the issue saying it is a bug. The representative said:

A bit of asking around tells me that what is being reported here is a technical issues known to the engineering folks, and not an intentional change.

As you will probably imagine, Engineering aims to resolve things as quickly as possible.

I am sorry to say that I don't have an estimated time-to-resolution - and I will exercise my better judgment and not even guess. I will, however, happily update this thread a couple of hours after I've heard that it is resolved.

In the meantime, please accept both my apology for the inconvenience, and my thanks in advance for your patience.

Forum discussion continued at Google AdWords Help, WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums.

Update: Hours later, some are reporting seeing the keyword tool looking better. AdWords representative updated the thread saying:

To set reasonable expectations, though, I hear some finishing touches will take through early-to-mid next week. So if anyone sees anything thing odd, hang in there.

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: March 18, 2009"

Two days ago, I asked our readers to vote on how important it is for an SEO to specialize within a specific industry. For example, you have doctors who only work with kids (pediatricians) or doctors who specialize on the brain (neurologists). You also have web developers who specialize in industries as well. I asked if SEOs should specialize and with over a hundred votes in already, I can tell you, SEOs are split on the decision.

I asked "Should SEOs Specialize in Industry Sectors?" and 50% said "no," while 47% said "yes." The other responses were mostly "yes" but iffy on that response.

The pie chart above shows the results.

Personally, I think there is a lot of knowledge to gain by focusing on an industry or two. Learning the history, the keywords, the way the industry works and how the trends impact Google's search results, can give you an edge. But yet, not SEOs can specialize nor do they want to, due to boredom. In addition, SEOs can be missing knowledge by focusing on a specific industry.

Remember Yahoo's Tim Mayer's famous SEO quote?

You don't bring a sword to a gun fight

He said that when talking about a specific industry that uses very dark techniques to rank well. Tactics from industry to industry differ in some search engines and specialization does make a difference in some cases.

Forum discussion continued at Sphinn.

In a Google Webmaster Help thread, Googler, JohnMu, might be stating the obvious, but it is always good hearing it from someone who is in the know.

JohnMu, answered a question about links, but in his answer, he confirmed that even with or without sever header responses (301s, 404s, etc.) Google will typically treat the home page of a site, i.e. /, the same if it were / or /index.html and likely index.php or any other extension.

John said:

Given that generally URLs like "/" and "/index.html" are the same, we tend to treat them the same (unless there's a good reason not to do so -- say when there is unique content on them).

Clearly, if the pages look different and have different content, Google will notice and likely treat them differently. It is still good practice to 301 redirect the canonical URLs to a single URL, but most webmasters have no clue about these issues and Google has to be smart enough to figure these issues out themselves. In most cases, they are.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Bill at WebmasterWorld found a new MSN Japan search engine named Zenbu Kensaku at http://zenbu.jp.msn.com/.

I don't read or understand Japanese, so let me quote you his comments:

This new search engine beta actually will work with a lot of English keyword searches in addition to the Japanese. Enter a keyword and give it a try.

The tabs at the top offer a number of ways to break down the SERPs. The default is to show all of the different categories together on one page "zenbu". Then we have web, Q&A, images, movies, news, maps, shopping, and sponsors.

I've run through several searches, and it looks like a useful way to break down the SERPs. Could this be part of the MS Kumo beta?

Common to Asian based search engines, the interface is very graphical. I decided to try searching for the word privacy in Japanese and I took a screen capture of the very interesting search results layout. You can see a screen capture of it at my Flickr account.

This is clearly powered by Live Search, but the big question is, might this be a preview of Kumo in Japan? I doubt it is what we would see in the US when Kumo launches.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The Yahoo Directory is rarely talked about any more, but it was one of the first search engines (i.e. human based search). In January 2002, Yahoo began charging an annual fee for your site to be submitted to the Yahoo Directory for approval. Sites included prior to that date were grandfathered in and did not have to pay an annual fee.

But it appears that some sites that have paid for inclusion into the Yahoo Directory are no longer being charged for the annual resubmission fee.

A few webmasters confirmed in a WebmasterWorld thread that they have not been charged the fee and their listing is still there.

I've always had 3 websites that I paid for inclusion into Yahoo Directory. Now, 2 of the three are no longer listed under my Yahoo account (the backend where my billing info etc. is).

I noticed this after realizing I wasn't charged for them towards the end of last year. But the listings are still active in the directory - they show up in the same categories, everything just like when I was paying for them.

I have two sites listed in the Y directory. One was listed about 3 years ago. I paid the fee but it never renewed, it remains in the directory to this day. The other listing I just paid for last December. Since my credit card expires before next December, I'm pretty sure I won't be billed for it. I'll be interested to see if it stays in the directory. I suspect it will stay.

Maybe Yahoo downsized the employee who managed the bills for the Yahoo Directory? ;-)

I would not be surprised if Yahoo let's certain sites remain in the directory without paying. Quality sites should not be delisted from one of the best human edited directories, simply because they did not pay.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Earlier this month, we informed people how one can close down a business on Google Maps without being that business owner. Since then, Google has posted instructions on how to reopen your business on Google Maps. The issue is, it can take up to two weeks to reopen your business.

Google said, "it can take up to two weeks in some cases."

In any event, here are the instructions on how to remove the "Place Closed" note from your Google Local listing.

• For listings that have been claimed and verified through the Google Local Business Center, please sign in to your account and select the Edit link. The editing wizard will appear. Click the Submit button.
• For listings that aren't claimed through the Local Business Center, they're open to community edits. Please select the Edit link below the address and select Restore Place.

Forum discussion continued at Google Maps Help.

Threads at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums have webmasters complaining about Google's keyword tool. The complaint is that the keyword suggestions are too broad.

Here is one of the reports:

Anyone notice more broad terms being included in their adwords keyword tool searches? It used to group related keywords at the top of the results and list more broad/related terms below. I just noticed them all mixed together...not sure if it's a glitch or one of their tweaks.

For example, I did a lookup on the keyword [ipods] and Google gave me suggestions such as [wholesale], [deals], [free], [best price] and so on.

Webmasters and advertisers are hoping that this is some type of bug or glitch that will go away soon.

I'm really hoping this is a bug, not a change. The tool is pretty much worthless in its current state. I think it might be a bug since some keyword phrases still get divided into two lists the way it should be.

I have a feeling this might be related to what the API users were seeing a couple weeks ago.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums.

Update: Google Confirms Keyword Tool Issue is a Bug.

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: March 17, 2009"

A Google Webmaster Help thread asks if there is a limit on the number of Sitemap files you can have under a single Google account.

Currently, there is no documentation on the limit but there is a 500 limit per Webmaster Tools account.

Google's, JohnMu said, "As it is, the current limit is 500 Sitemap files per account." But John added a way to get around this limit. John said:

You can get around this limit by including your Sitemap files in Sitemap Index files (with 500 websites/account, you could use a single Sitemap Index file per site to cover all of them), by submitting Sitemap files via HTTP ping or by submitting them via robots.txt files. If you decide to use Sitemap Index files, you should still be able to drill down to the individual Sitemap files through Webmaster Tools, so that you can get feedback on them separately.

John added that he "wouldn't be surprised if that particular limit were raised in the future."

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports the Australian communications regulator said you can be fined $11,000 per day for linking to sites that are on their banned list. This is going to begin shortly, even though there is a lot of criticism over the news.

Link building has never been so scary, or has it? ;-)

It seems like this blacklist is a secret and the sites you are not allowed to link to, well - are only known to the regulators. So if you do link to one of these sites, you may not even know it and you may be fined for it. I assume most of the links are illegal sites, such as child pornography and the like, but some may not be that obvious, as watchdog groups claim.

A WebmasterWorld thread has comments on this new regulation.

So lemme get this straight, if your site is hosted in Australia, you are not allowed to link to these 1300+ sites, but they're not going to tell you who they are?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

We have talked about Google Ad Manager here somewhat often, we even use Google Ad Manager to serve the ads on this site.

Google Ad Manager was first introduced a year ago, and then in August 2008 opened up to all to use. I even wrote an article on how to get started with Ad Manager, the quick tutorial.

Now that more and more publishers and webmasters are using this ad serving tool, Google needs help with aiding webmasters and publishers in setting up and trouble shooting. Right now, there is a very useful Google Ad Manager forum that people can use for help. But Google just announced a certified Ad Manager program. There are currently four companies listed as certified consultants. I assume if you want to be a certified Ad Manager consultant, you would need to contact Google.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

As expected, yesterday, Yahoo launched several enhancements to their search marketing platform that brings them up to speed with many of the competing products and in some way, surpasses some features of their competitors. The main issue for Yahoo is that Google still has all the traffic.

The features include:

I have an incredibly detailed walk through with screen shots of the new features at Search Engine Land.

Honestly, I feel bad for Yahoo. The announcement went live at 4pm (EST) yesterday and no one cares, no one is talking about it. It made it to Techmeme via a manual tip and editor addition. There are three forum threads on the topic, all started by a Yahoo representative and only one response in all three posts and that response is extremely anti-Yahoo. Yahoo, please do something to bring back your appeal!

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

A DigitalPoint Forums thread has discussion over a new trademarked term that made it into Google's trademark policy list. The word is "MySQL" and is the name of one of the more popular open source database systems.

Yesterday, I received an email that one of my demo ads (wasn't live anyway) was disapproved due to trademark violations. I read it, thought to myself, no big deal and trashed the email. But some are upset. Showing an ad for MySQL does help promote the brand in many ways. For example, if you are a developer that specializes in MySQL, then putting ads out there for that term, might benefit both parties. If you are a development company looking to hire MySQL engineers (like we are), then that also promotes and helps the MySQL company.

That being said, the easy way around it is to just drop of the "My" from the "SQL" in the ad copy and you would be set. Clearly, it won't help brand the database company, but that is their call.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Happy St. Patrick's Day everyone! The mandatory line, please drink responsibly! I wanted to share with you the logos from around our industry celebrating the day. We have logos from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft's Live.com, AOL, Ask.com, DogPile, YouTube and others!

Google:

Yahoo (animated):

AOL (animated):

Live.com:

Ask.com:

DogPile:

YouTube:

Cre8asite:

PPC Hero:

Search Engine Roundtable:

We covered the logos for the past several years including 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005 and 2004.

Update: It seems, Googler JohnMu made his Google profile icon green for today. How funny!

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: March 16, 2009"

Googlers know they have to be very careful what they say in public forums when I am watching. In a recent Google Webmasters Help thread, Googler, JohnMu replied to a thread, and I am going to beat him up for his response. Before I do so, let me say that John has provided so much value to the forums and to webmasters, that I admit, he does not deserve this, but I know Googlers have thick skin.

The Google Webmasters Help thread was complaining that Google was ranking his site well for a keyword phrase, but the page Google returned was not the page that best suits the searcher for that query. He asked why doesn't Google show the page that is the best result from his site for that query.

From the looks of it, there are some SEO issues with the site that might explain why this is happening. But John's response is what I felt was a bit non-Google like. Let me quote him:

As long as users are coming to your site because they're finding it in the search results, I wouldn't worry about the actual page they're landing on. If they come in and read your content (regardless of whether it's the page where just one post is or if it's your homepage), I think you've pretty much won the first part. They made it to your site. The actual URL shouldn't really matter too much.

Really John? So if they even land on the home page, but there is a better internal page about the query, shouldn't Google show that? Relevancy is key. Now, in this case, there may be SEO issues or relevancy is in the eye of the searcher, so who is anyone to say page A is more relevant than page B. But to say landing on the site is good enough, I am not too sure about that.

Striving for the actual URL is key. Usability consultants know this all too well. I assume landing on the best page possible would lead to higher conversions. I assume it would also make for a happier searcher.

I am not done beating up one of Google's most helpful Googlers.

Forum discussion at Google Webmasters Help.

A WebmasterWorld thread has tips from senior member wheel on how to get links from .edu pages, even when they might not be .edu pages.

Wheel said that many professors have web sites that might not be on an edu top level domain. Since edu links might not be better than any other TLD, then why not go after any link from any professor's site?

Wheel said:

Searching on things like widget instructors, widget courses, and anything you can think of related to education in your niche is likely to provide a rich list of potential link sources.

For example, if you sell video cameras, why not sure for videography instructor or videography professor and then continue by drilling down on those professor's web sites.

The same goes with college or university students. Find their web pages and send them some beer. Of course, as discussed in the thread, that might be considered a paid link. ;-)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A month and a half ago, Google began testing Google AJAX search results, which caused a major uproar amongst webmasters who were unable to track referrer information in their analytics package. Google released a statement that they test things all the time and didn't say more. Soon after, AJAX search results went away and we forgot about it.

Then Brett Tabke asked Google's Matt Cutts at PubCon last week about this test. Lisa Barone has the live blog coverage of that question, where Matt answered:

That was really funny. The team there only thinks about speed. They want to get the results back to users as quick as humanly possible. JavaScript makes the search results a lot faster. Suppose you do a search for flowers, as you’re typing flowers, they can do a query from the back end and fold search results right into the page. You’re still in Google.com and they can pull in the results automatically. It doesn’t give you the referrer. He says the team didn’t think about the referrer aspect. So they stopped. They’ve paused it until they can find out how to keep the referrers.

Right, and that is what most of us assumed. So Brett followed up by asking Matt, "why didn't they just come out and say that?" Matt replied, "that's nice feedback and he would let them know".

Some actually think Google is starting the AJAX test again. SEO Smackdown reports again, seeing it. He said that to get around the referrer problem, Google is passing variables in the click through URL that Google Analytics understands, but other analytical programs do not. Of course this is not the solution and he says so. I also see the URL parameters in my searches, but I am not getting the AJAX search results.

Google is a big company. Google Analytics was upset that the Google search UI team did this. Google's search UI team had no idea of the implications of their change.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Sphinn.

Two recent articles sparked some discussion around the question if SEOs that specialize in an industry or two are more qualified then SEOs that do not specialize. One article was from Search Engine Land and the other from Top Rank Blog.

Lee Odden said:

Experience in a particular industry may be important on one level, but a company that specializes in a particular vertical warrants questions about conflict of interest. How can a company specialize in “real estate” for example, without working for competing firms? The biggest advantages that come industry specific experience is the ability to quickly ramp up on client key messaging and audience needs as well as connections made online for content promotion, online public relations and link building.

To me, there is nothing better then having an SEO that is 100% devoted to your site and has been an SEO in your industry for a couple years. These SEOs have the experience of seeing, day in and day out, what has been working on your site and your competitors. But if you can't afford to hire a full time SEO, then hiring a company is a good alternative. Should that company have direct experience in the industry that you are in? You can see the pros and cons to that. Direct experience means they have other clients that are your competitors but yet they know what it takes to rank you well.

So let me ask you, should SEOs specialize in a specific industry or not? This really applies to all work categories, from lawyers to web developers to doctors and caterers, but still, let's poll you guys:

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

I have been seeing a strong wave of posts and discussion threads on the topic of the Google Money System or Google Kit. In short, there are emails going out telling people Google will pay you by using Google's services. I did not get into the details on how they work, but I can tell you, Google is not paying you for these services.

I see tons of threads, tons of them, in the various forums, asking why hasn't Google paid me for this yet. Or asking more questions about these services. Google has not yet responded officially because Google isn't offering any of these programs. I am sure their lawyers are on it, trying to crack down on these people using Google's name in part of this scam.

One thread at Google Web Search has a confirmation from a third party member, who responded to this claim. The person said:

Just because the Google name is mentioned does not mean that Google has anything to do with it. There is wide-spread use of the Google name in relation to money-making schemes. You will have to use your common sense as you evaluate anything like this (even when the Google name is not mentioned.) Read the fine print on the sites. Search the internet for other discussions about the specific offer that you are checking into. A search on this site for [ money ] [ cash ] [ scam ] should provide you with a variety of opinions about these types of schemes.

I assume Googlers can't officially respond until their lawyers look into it. But Google should do something, because it seems like this issue is getting worse. I guess an official blog post on the issue would do good. If that blog post ranked #1 in both the organic and paid listings, it might save some people from signing up to this possible scam.

Forum discussion at Google Web Search.

Friday, we reported at Search Engine Land that Google is testing favicons (the icons you see in the URL bar) in Google AdWords ads. The test seems to be limited to the European market. Here is a screen shot taken from one of our members at Search Engine Roundtable Forums:

Notice the bottom two ads on the right have little icons on the left of the display URL. Those icons seem to be from the favicon.ico file on those respective sites. For example, eBay's is at ebay.com/favicon.ico.

There are several members reporting seeing this at WebmasterWorld and one at Search Engine Roundtable Forums. In fact, one received confirmation from his AdWords representative that this is something Google is testing on a very limited closed beta. Kerstin, who posted this, said:

Spoke to our AM at Google this morning, they've confirmed that they're testing. It's limited (for both advertisers and searchers) and closed.

What was interesting was just a few months ago, Google was testing favorite icons in the search results, the free listings.

It seems like if you are in the UK area, you may stumble across this test every now and then.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and 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: March 13, 2009"

Google launched a new beta for advertisers to target users based on their interests and online behaviors. Don't worry, AdSense publishers can opt out. AdSense had a major contextual relevancy bug that results in lots of lost money. Utah's House passed a law banning trademarked keywords for search ads. Google pushed off the Blog Search update. Microsoft is discontinuing their adCenter analytics. Google's keyword tool had major issues this week. SEM companies are weathering the recession just fine, according to a recent poll. 55 percent of SEO's won't take on pay for performance deals. Spaced out nofollow attributes currently don't pass value. Google Docs had a major security breach. Google Maps can't help you find a lost car but it may send horny men to your office. That was this week at 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:

For the original iTunes version, click here

Some Of The Topics Discussed:

• Google's Behavioral Ad Beta Scares Publishers Over Contextual Relevancy
• Google Gives AdSense Publishers Way To Opt Out of Interest Based Ads
• AdSense Stats Issue Maybe Related To Google's Contextual Relevancy Failure
• Utah Law Passes Ban On Trademarked Search Ads: SEMs Discuss
• Google Postpones Blog Search Ranking Update
• Microsoft Shuts Down adCenter Analytics
• Google's Keyword Tool Acting Funky?
• Most SEM Companies Are Weathering Recession Just Fine
• Do Nofollow Tags With Spaces Pass Link Value?
• 55% Of SEO Companies Won't Offer Pay For Performance Deals
• Google Docs Security Breach Should Encourage People Not to Use Google Health
• Car Stolen? Find It With Google Maps?
• Google Sends 'Horny' Guys To Marketing Firm's Doorstep

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

A WebmasterWorld thread has complaints from Yahoo Search Marketing advertisers on the conversions, or lack there of, from Yahoo Shopping.

For example, if you do a search on Yahoo Shopping for ipods you may see Yahoo Search ads at the top of the product listings. Here is a screen capture:

As you can see, it takes some scrolling to start seeing Yahoo Shopping results. And some Yahoo Search Marketing advertisers are not happy with their ads showing up in Yahoo Shopping. They want a way to opt out of that Yahoo property.

A WebmasterWorld moderator said, "shopping.yahoo.com provides me with horrible conversions. After about 9 pm EST, all of a sudden I get a barrage of shopping.yahoo clicks and never get any sales." A preferred member agreed, "I agree. I have horrible numbers for shopping.yahoo.com. I want to block them but I can not. The traffic is not good for the campaigns I run."

Control is key for advertisers, especially in online and in search.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There are reports from Google Docs Help forum that people in China cannot access their Google Docs or even FeedBurner on feedburner.google.com.

Here is what the China Google Docs user said:

Google Docs appears to be blocked here in China. I live in Shanghai and work at Concordia International School here. No students can access their docs at school or at home where they are all on different ISP's.

I guess that is a better excuse then my dog ate my homework? But seriously, this must be a router issue that is temporary and someone in China needs to open this up soon. We have seen China block many sites, including Google properties, time and time again. Sometimes they do it on purpose and sometimes it is a mistake.

Forum discussion at Google Docs Help.

Microsoft has been beta testing adCenter Analytics since 2007, but yesterday, they announced they will be closing the tool down.

They really didn't say why. All they said was, "The Microsoft adCenter Analytics team announced today the end of the adCenter Analytics beta program." Current users can continue to use the service until December 31, 2009 but are urged to export their data to one of the many analytics packages available and cease using Microsoft adCenter Analytics as soon as possible.

Microsoft added:

Our team would like to sincerely thank you for your participation and your invaluable contributions to the program. Our objectives at the outset were to serve the needs of small and midsize self-service customers, as well as evolve the Microsoft strategy to address the Web analytics space.

The insights you’ve contributed through your feedback and your use of the tool have served an invaluable purpose in shaping Microsoft’s future in this space. You’ve helped us work towards making an informed decision about building a general Web analytics solution, and despite the end of life plan, the beta was very much a success.

It enabled us to confidently determine that we can be of most value to advertisers and publishers by offering a tailored solution that meets more specialized needs.

Then they listed a number of companies offering analytics, including Google.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks an interesting question. If you have a space in the nofollow link attribute, does Google consider it the same as having no space? Let me explain.

A standard syntax for the nofollow attribute looks like this: <a href="http://www.site.com/page.html" rel="nofollow">Visit My Page</a>

But what if the programmer added a space between the no and follow, such as: <a href="http://www.site.com/page.html" rel="no follow">Visit My Page</a>

What do you think? Is Google or other search engines treating both the same?

I asked Google's Matt Cutts and John Mueller this question and they told me that currently they don't treat them the same. Currently, a nofollow with a space would pass link value. "The microformat is explicitly defined as rel="nofollow" (). I would not count on other rel-attributes having the same effect, even if they look similar at first glance," John told me.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Last night, Google began emailing AdSense publishers about their new terms of service to cover the recent behavioral targeting changes to be made to the content network. The email I have a copy of is sent to a Danish publisher and he used Google Translate to translate the text. Here is a copy:

...Following this announcement, your policy on privacy now reflect the use of interest-based advertising. Please review the information on http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=100557&hl=da to ensure that your site's policies for protecting personal information has been updated and make any necessary changes before 8 April 2009. Because publisher sites and laws vary across countries, unfortunately we can not propose a policy to protect personal information in a certain language...

I personally did not receive this email yet, but there is a lot of discussion at Google AdSense Help and WebmasterWorld around this update.

Yesterday, when I covered this news, I asked if publishers will be able to control if the ads are triggered from the interest categories or not. Google answered that question now, saying yes, they can control it.

So you need to make sure that your site's privacy policy is in accordance with the terms of service to run AdSense ads. You can learn more about that at this document at Google. Google actually asked publishers in the past to make sure they had a solid privacy policy, when they began serving ads through DoubleClick.

Forum discussion at Google AdSense Help and 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: March 12, 2009"

The other day, we polled our audience, asking should URL shortening services pass link value? We now have 168 responses and I thought I share them with you.

The response was overwhelming yes. 75% of the respondents said, these URL shortening services should pass link value and the search engines should retain that value to the redirect. 25% said they should not pass value.

Here is the pie chart:

The "other" responses included, "dont care," one suggested that they offer a paid option that passes value, while the rest are nofollowed. One even suggested that Google make their own URL shortening service.

Forum discussion continued at Sphinn.

I found a unique and somewhat weird post at a Google Webmasters Help thread. Let me quote the request for you:

I hope you can help find my husbands truck using your technology. 7 welding trucks have been stolen in N. CO and it is our livelyhood. Please help us in any way you can to find it. It was stolen on 3/11/09 at around 4:45a.m. from 1101 3rd St., Windsor, CO.

I really feel bad for this family business. Seven of their trucks were stolen from them? Wow! But to use Google Maps to find them? That is just funny. It would be cool and we did hear stories about how Google Maps help cops find illegal activity, but Google Maps is not a real time satellite feed.

I believe this is a picture of the house and one of the trucks:

View Larger Map

I hope the cops catch these guys, but I doubt Google can save the day here. Just very funny seeing someone who thinks Google has that much power to be able to make a difference here.

Forum discussion at Google Webmasters Help.

I spotted a thread at both DigitalPoint Forums and Google AdSense Help discussions that is extremely suspicious.

The user is linking to a page that has AdSense ads on them, calling this user out for violating Google's terms of service. It seems like this guy really wants the publisher to get banned. So he calls them out.

My thoughts? Well, I got a few.

(1) I think that this user may want to ban other AdSense publishers and maybe put up an AdSense ad with their publisher IDs in the ad. Then made the page overly against Google's terms of service, in an effort to ban these publishers. This happens and it sometimes works.

(2) The page which is over here is overly in your face on Google's terms of service. It doesn't just violate one issue, but virtually all of them. At some point, you can expect that this looks like a fraud and that anyone who visits the page thinks it is a fraud.

(3) These are so over the top that punishing this publisher doesn't do any good. They simply want to be punished (not that I think the pub ids in use are the ones who did it, see #1). I can't see most internet users actually taking the time to click on those ads. Heck, they probably would leave the site immediately. But what do I know.

I hate seeing this type of stuff and I rarely bring this out into a post over here. But this is just way over the top and I decided to share it.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and Google AdSense Help.

A Google Reader Help thread has Google Reader users who are very happy with a new feature added yesterday. The feature allows the feeds you share with your friends to be commented on. You can see a detailed walk through of the feature set at the Google Reader Blog.

Here is a picture showing the comments in a Google Reader shared section:

I personally am not a heavy user of sharing feeds with friends. But I can see how this can be useful. It reminds many people about FriendFeed, who has a more public form of this sharing feature.

The Google Groups thread has a lot of happy users, but most want more. Many want integration with trackbacks, more public comments and integration with blog software.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Just a heads up to you Google AdWords API users. If you are running development tests off Google's sandbox environment, do not that it is having technical issues for the past day or two.

A Google Groups thread has confirmation of the issue by Google's Jeff Posnick.

Jeff Posnick said:

The engineering team is working to resolve what is believed to be the cause of this Sandbox issue. Without getting into too many details, they'll be addressing a database-related issue that seems to have cropped up in a recent deployment of the Sandbox servers. I don't have an ETA for when this will be completed, but will update the group with any additional information as it becomes available.

It does not seem to be fixed yet, so just hang tight and keep watching the thread.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Update: It should have been back up as of 2:30pm today. Jeff updated the thread saying:

Yes, there was just an update made a few minutes ago that will hopefully restore functionality for most of our users. However, my understanding is that there is another change that the engineering team still needs to push out a bit later today, so I don't want to say that things are completely stable until that's complete.

Google Gets Into Behavioral Targeting, Launches “Interest-Based Advertising” Beta at Search Engine Land is a must read on this story. In short, Google is testing behavioral ads on the content network, using what they call "interest based categories" and "previous interactions." The cool part is that Google allows you to specify which categories (600 of them) interest you and you can also opt out at http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/.

In any event, the Search Engine Land article is a really good article on this topic. I know I wrote most of it, but both Greg Sterling and Danny Sullivan added tremendous perspective to the article. In fact, Greg touched on a major concern AdSense publishers are discussing about this program.

The concern is that Google's contextual relevancy may dwindle down, in exchange for behavioral relevancy. Contextual relevancy is what Google takes pride in, they love to say they have ads that match the exact content of the page. If you are reading about Sony video cameras, Google will show you AdSense ads for Sony video cameras. But possibly now, if you are a sports enthusiast (Google knows this because you visit sports sites) and you are reading an article about video cameras (because you want to buy one for the next game), you may see sports ads and not video camera ads.

This is incredibly new for Google. They have been using previous queries to trigger ads in search. But right now, Google said this is not tied to search history. There have been rumors that Google said they don't plan on behavioral target a while back.

In any event, let me pull out some quotes from the threads. We have discussions at Sphinn, WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Publishers who really care about the ads that are shown on their site and want them to be relevant to their site will be frustrated/angry when site users call up to complain that there are inappropriate/irrelevant ads on it. This will especially be an issue for people that share a computer (example: families).

So if you look at baseball they will show baseball ads. So they follow you around and put ads up that has your interest. So oneday later on the day you look at something else and they still are showing those dam baseball ads. Give me a break. Have I mentioned that google is not god and google and adsense sucks.

SO you come to the forum and they still show those dam baseball ads.

There is also a lot of discussion around the privacy and opt out features. The big question is, will publishers and advertisers be able to say, I don't want my ads to be targeted behaviorally?

Forum discussion at Sphinn, WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

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

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: March 11, 2009"

Late last week, I polled our readers, asking them how are you weathering the recession. As it turns out, most SEM and SEO companies are saying, they are doing just fine. In fact, most said they have seen a recent spike in sales leads with a recent spike in actual sales.

As I reported then, some companies have noticed a recent turn around in business after being hit by a slow down to the recession. That same day, the market fell to its 52 week low at 6,469.95. But yesterday it rose almost 400 points, so maybe a positive sign? Who knows, this whole economy and recession is confusing and depressing, to say the least.

That being said, many businesses said they saw a recent pick up in sales. Let me give you the break down of the 130 responses.

How Is Business Doing For You Now?:
:: Increase In Leads said 41 respondents or 32%
:: Increase in Sales said 26 respondents or 20%
:: Decrease in Sales said 22 respondents or 17%
:: No Change in Sales said 16 respondents or 12%
:: No Change in Leads said 15 respondents or 12%
:: Decrease in Leads said 10 respondents or 8%

I would like to point out a comment from Chris Elwell, President of Third Door Media:

It is pretty typical in downturns that spending starts slowly in a new year. Decisions are reviewed to death before spending decisions are made. But investing in growth can't be put off forever, and inevitably some initiatives are approved.

Forum discussion continued at HighRankings Forum.

One of my top referrers on virtually all my web sites is Google Image Search. Google Image Search typically is in the top five referrers for most of my web sites. And it is likely one of the top referrers for your web sites. The issue is, Google Analytics doesn't consider Google Image Search a search engine.

A Google Analytics Help thread has a request from a webmaster or two that they would love to see which keywords trigger the referrers from Google Image Search. In response to that, Googler, Christelle said it is not possible as the default set up. Christelle said:

You won't get the keyword information because images.google.com is not treated as a search engine by default.

Why is Google Image Search not treated as a search engine? Isn't Google Image Search one of the most used Google properties, just behind YouTube and maybe Gmail? I cannot tell you how I wish I had the keyword reports broken down under the Google Image Search engine. I bet there is a way to set up advanced reports to make this happen, but why shouldn't Google treat Image Search as a search engine. Isn't it a search engine?

Take the poll below and let me know if you want Google Analytics to treat Google Image search as a search engine:

Forum discussion at Google Analytics Help.

Imagine that a search for "Gentlemen's Club" and your zip code in Google returns your business in the top result set. Now, imagine if you are not a Gentlemen's Club and you get all these men coming to your office and you have to turn the men away. How would you feel?

That is exactly the issue one music PR company is having. A Google Maps Help discussion thread has a business owner who asks, what can he do to fix the issue. He said:

If you do a Google search for "Gentlemen's Club" and my zip code, my business is the first listing. Only problem is that we are a business marketing office. We get disappointed guys showing up here from time to time. I established an account a few months back, updated our profile, added images and made sure we had all the information updated. Unfortunately, months later we still come up in Gentlemen's Club searches. How do we fix it?

Can you imagine such a thing happening to your business? On occasion I get phone calls asking if my business, RustyBrick, does building construction. It makes sense, but I never had someone call my office or come to my office, expecting a Gentlemen's Club. I have received calls about building web sites for these types of companies and for escort services, but never had someone come into my office looking for those services.

I honestly don't know what to suggest to this guy to help him with his issue. I asked to see the specific listing and maybe a title tag or some anchor text can be changed to help the issue, but hard to say.

I know a lot of companies would pay big bucks to rank this well for this keyword in Google. But that doesn't mean it suits every business.

Forum discussion at Google Maps Help.

A WebmasterWorld thread has several different webmasters reporting seeing huge spikes in Google referrals recently and then those spikes dropping down.

The first post was on February 28th, but the spikes continue to happen on random days for several webmasters. Here is the first post:

I have a Amazon site using AWS to display product pages. I have about 500,000 pages indexed on Google and generally see about 200-400 uniques a day. Yesteday, 2/27/09 I had over 1400 uniques. Today, Saturday it seems to be back to the same old numbers. I am looking forward to Monday to see if things pop back up.

Old time member, robzilla, found something similar:

I saw my Google referrals double on one site last Monday. It hasn't exactly continued at that rate throughout the week, but there was still a noticeable increase overall. I can't seem to be able to pin this down to one particular keyword or -phrase, or even a few. Instead, overall keyword performance seems to have increased. That Monday would have been the new record if it hadn't been for a big spike in StumbleUpon traffic on Friday.

It is hard to say if this is regarding a Google change or a change in the site or just a weird bleep. But it is interesting to see a nice set of diverse webmasters notice this and discuss it over the course of two weeks at WebmasterWorld.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The Google AdSense blog suggested that publishers add the Google News Widget to their web site. But publishers are not understanding why they should direct people off their web sites for free.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks, what is the incentive to lure visitors off your web site and into Google News? One publisher said, "if a widget is going to take visitors away from my site, it certainly better compensate me for them!"

I spent the past fifteen minutes looking for an old feature that Google AdSense had available but discontinued years ago. It basically was a widget you can add to your site that would show news, web results and other content from Google, but it wouldn't earn you money. They discontinued it, but I cannot find my post that talks about it, at least not now.

Here is an example of this Google News Widget in action:

But some publishers say that this added content makes for a better quality site.

I actually have two sites where I plan to add it as a service to my regular members. I don't really care if they leave my site, what I care about is that they keep coming back. The more useful the site, the more likely they are to come back.

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: March 10, 2009"

A week ago, we polled our audience asking Are You Still Offering SEO Services Paid By Performance? For example, are you willing to exchange direct payment in exchange for payment on the basis of rankings, or traffic or on revenue earned.

The majority of respondents said they never will or have taken this type of payment in exchange for SEO services.

Here is a breakdown of the seventy-five or so responses to the question "Do You Offer Pay For Performance SEO Packages?"
:: Never said 41 respondents or 55%
:: Very Rarely said 13 respondents or 18%
:: Sometimes, Only Great Ideas said 10 respondents or 14%
:: Very Often, But Depends said 5 respondents or 7%
:: Only Do Pay For Performance said 3 respondents or 4%
:: Other answer said 2 respondents or 3%

I wish we would of had more responses, I guess I should have pushed this poll more. But I do think these numbers make sense and likely represent the industry as a whole.

Forum discussion continued at Sphinn.

In March 2007, Google Israel had a special logo for today's Jewish holiday, Purim. Last year and today, there is no special logo at Google Israel or Google or any of the search engines that I looked at, including Yahoo, Live.com, Ask.com, or even DogPile.

But that is okay, we have a special theme live for the holiday. Here is a picture of it, but you can see the whole theme live at the Search Engine Roundtable:

We also had a theme last year and a picture of that is over here.

Maybe Google will have a logo in 2010? It is a fun holiday and they can go wild with the logo, if they like.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Last week at Search Engine Land, I covered an Eric Goldman story on Utah trying to pass a bill for the third time, on regulating search ads. In short, the bill finally passed in the Utah House (still needs to be approved by Senate) and it holds search advertisers liable for targeting trademarks as keywords. It does not hold the search companies, i.e. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft liable (that bill failed). To see the bill, click here.

Shorebreak at WebmasterWorld gives a good explanation of the bill:

This bill, sponsored by 1-800-Contacts, prevents search engines from being able to serve competitive ads if someone searches for a branded/trademarked keyword. So, for example, if someone Google's '1-800-Contacts', Google would not be able to serve LensCrafters' ad, even if Lenscrafter didn't include the brand term in their ad copy.

Now, most search companies do not allow the trademarked terms to appear in the ad copy, but do allow bidding on many trademarked terms, as long as they are not in the ad copy. There has been a ton of legal precedent in this area already, so that is why Eric Goldman is surprised it finally passed. He said it "barely made it through due to the fierce last-minute lobbying efforts of 1-800 Contacts."

That being said, some advertisers hate the law and some actually like it. Guess who likes it and who hates it? :)

Many don't believe this law will last, since e-commerce goes over state boundaries and because geo-targeting capabilities are often not 100%.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: Eric Goldman updates us once again to let us know that the bill did not pass in the Utah Senate. He said the bill "died quietly last night when the Utah Senate failed to act on it before the Utah Legislature adjourned for the year."

This and last week we reported issues with Google reporting up to date stats. Many publishers felt that Google had a major reporting delay and they were very concerned. Typically, it turns out to be nothing and the numbers tend to update themselves over time. But this time, it was a little different.

Google admitted to a bug in the AdSense contextual targeting system that returned irrelevant ads on publisher sites. Typically, Google AdSense ads are relevant to the content on the page, but something went wrong where Google's contextual targeting went off. On Thursday of last week at 2pm (PST) a bug for "approximately 10 hours" triggered these issues. The issue was resolved by Friday morning, according to Google.

Google admitted that non-contextually targeted ads may result in lower earnings and impact your earnings for those ten hours. Google said:

You were still credited for all valid clicks and impressions on the ads which appeared on your sites, but this bug may have impacted your overall AdSense for content revenue if you had visitors to your pages during these hours. Please note that because we're unable to determine which ads would have been viewed or clicked on by visitors to your sites in the absence of the bug, we will not be manually adjusting yesterday's earnings.

The big question was, was this a reporting glitch or were these publishers that severely impacted by the relevancy issue?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Two weeks ago, we reported that Google Blog Search To Test New Link Command Features Next Week. Well, it has now been postponed a bit.

An updated Google Groups thread has Googler, Jeremy Hylton saying this has to be pushed off by a couple weeks. He said:

Unfortunately, we ran into some delays with these experiments and had to push back the schedule a couple of weeks.

I know many folks were eager to see the changes this or last week, but it seems like we may have to wait until the end of this month or early April.

In short, the changes were going to impact how Google Blog Search returns matches for blog posts for queries. Google is a bit too inclusive right now on what they return as keyword matches on blog posts. Google Blog Search is working on fine tuning their "blogroll detectors" and other detectors to make the results more relevant.

Forum discussion continued at Google Groups.

If you go to Google Maps and zoom into the World Trade Center Site, you will see that Google has labeled the area, "Ground Zero."

Ground Zero was what many people started calling the World Trade Center after the terrible attack on September 11, 2001. I think most of us still remember the day vividly. But some New Yorkers (and I am a New Yorker) are upset that Google still labels the area Ground Zero.

Here is the complaint from at least one New Yorker found in Google Maps Help discussion area:

Please remove the "Ground Zero" label from the World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan. I realize that anyone not from New York City comes here expecting to visit the site and that this is a common reference, but that is not its real name and it should not be used. It is equivalent to awarding the attackers a marksmanship medal, and we should not be doing that, nor frankly should we be equating what happened here with a nuclear bombing reference. All NY'ers refer to the site as 'the World Trade Center site', and that's what it still is to us, and will be again, if they ever get the construction completed. Finally, as a born-and-raised New Yorker who was here htat day I find the label 'ground zero' just plain despicable, and I really wish people wouldn't use it, and people I know here feel the same way. Please stop encouraging its use.

I can totally understand this person's frustration and rational here. But from a searcher's perspective, people still search for worlds like "ground zero" and "september 11" on Google Maps. Google still wants to return those results. I guess technically, Google can hide the label on the map itself and just return this area for the search, but maybe searchers find it useful.

Tough call here. As many people know, maps and borders and what you call places can become a very touchy and sensitive topic.

Forum discussion at Google Maps 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: March 9, 2009"

A few weeks ago, Google finally gave AdSense publishers a way to specify the font type they want to show on their web sites. AdSense publishers were really happy with the added control and Google was happy to give publishers this level of control.

So why am I seeing reports that Google is ignoring these AdSense font preferences and overriding them with something else?

A WebmasterWorld thread has several publishers complaining that Google is not using the font they picked in the AdSense ad set up.

One said, he doesn't mind, because it helps against "ad blindness." But why give the publisher the option. If I set my preferred font, then use it. If I don't set it, then feel free to experiment.

One publisher said:

just curious whether anyone else has set up their ads with a fixed font, only to see them carry on changing.

i know it's probably just google testing the fonts again, but why are they carrying on testing them when they've already given us the option to change them

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Over the weekend, I heard some reports of issues with Google's keyword tool. I received a Twitter from @dalka, I spotted a Google Groups thread from the AdWords API forum and a Google AdWords Help forum thread with complaints.

They all surround the keyword tool, both via the API and via the external web based tool. Jeff Posnick from the AdWords API Team said:

Fresh search volume data is currently being pushed out and replicated globally, and the engineering team believes that the sporadic -1 results you were seeing is a side-effect of that process. Once it is complete there should be up to date data available globally. They mentioned that you should check again on Monday to confirm this.

AdWordsPro Stephen, an official Google representative said:

It sounds like the AdWords system is reacting to receiving many requests from you in a very short time. Using scripts or 'screenscrapers' to gather data from AdWords is a violation of the AdWords terms and conditions, and there are some automated monitors that enforce this.

There does seem to be minor issues with the tool, so be on the look out if you are using any of these tools today.

Forum discussion at Google Groups and Google AdWords Help.

Google AdSense statistics have been having issues updating since March 4th. In fact, we have seen reports prop up again and again since then. March 6th, people were complaining and people have been complaining since, including this morning.

We have two threads, one at WebmasterWorld and the other at Google AdSense Help. Each thread complains about the same thing, over the course of the weekend and today.

There are also dozens of threads at DigitalPoint Forums on the issue.

We have no official word from Google on these recent issues.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Google AdSense Help.

Late last week, I saw dozens and dozens of threads in the Google Docs Help discussion forum, where Googlers were saying that they would contact these individuals directly, via email. Now, I saw a bunch of these, but didn't really look into them, simply because the issue was handled off the public forum.

Over the weekend, Google posted the details of the issue, which seemed to me to be a major security breach. Let me quote it:

We wanted to let you know about a bug (now fixed) that affected a small percentage of users who may have shared permissions between some documents in their account without their knowledge. This inadvertent sharing happened only when the document owner, or a collaborator with sharing rights, selected multiple documents and presentations from the documents list and changed the sharing permissions. (This issue didn't affect spreadsheets.) As part of the fix, we used an automated process to remove collaborators and viewers from the documents that we identified as being affected. We apologize for the inconvenience of having to re-share your docs. We have sent notifications to the owners of impacted docs, informing them of this fix and posted this information to the Apps Status Dashboard: http://www.google.com/appsstatus

Can you imagine if you were sharing financial information or personal medical information with someone and some how, it was shared with strangers? And Google wants you to use Google Health to share your most confidential and personal details with your doctor and family? I am all for sharing in exchange for convenience but what is stopping a security bug like this from happening on Google Health?

Forum discussion at Google Docs Help.

Sometimes we forget or forget to look after basic SEO topics. The other day, I caught one of my programmers allowing both capitalized URLs and lowercase URLs result in having the same destination page. Let's take Twitter as an example, since it was brought up in a Google Webmaster Help thread.

Twitter allows both capitalized and lowercase URLs return the same page. For example, both http://twitter.com/google and http://twitter.com/Google return the same exact page, content and information. But Google considers http://twitter.com/google and http://twitter.com/Google to be different pages, in many cases.

Now, Google isn't that dumb, just do a search for http://www.google.com/search?q=http://twitter.com/Google (the capitalized version) and Google will know you really want the lowercase version:

But you don't want to make Google figure this stuff out. What you should do, is make sure there is only one version, preferably the lowercase version in my opinion. If someone does go to a capitalized version, 301 that page to the lower case URL.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

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

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: March 6, 2009"

Please let me know if you prefer the longer videos in the comments area. Google may have updated PageRank, but the "brand push" is called the "Vince" change. I talk in detail about the "Vince" change and why webmasters are upset. A publisher takes Google to small claims court and wins. You can close down your competitors in Google Maps. Google emails webmasters about malware, again. Microsoft preps new search engine, Kumo. Ask.com just went to far when they started framing search results again. Google UK is testing one line Sitelinks. SEOs still fear the Google supplemental index. Google does expandable AdSense ads. Google AdSense adds Euro reports after exchange rate complaints. AdSense updated their home page. Google delayed payments to some advertisers by three months. AdWords title bug shows more than 25 characters. Is business improving for you in the past two weeks? Finally, happy Square Root day! Again, please let me know about the length and to see the full video, you need to use the iTunes feed or download the original file (I am working on getting an extended YouTube account). That was this week at 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:

For the original iTunes version, click here

Some Of The Topics Discussed:

• Google March 2009 PageRank Update or Glitch?
• Google Confirms Algorithm "Change" But Down Plays Brand Push
• Take Google to Small Claims Court: You Might Win
• "Place Closed" In Google Maps: Close Your Competitors Down on Google
• Google Starts Emailing Webmasters Regarding Web Site Issues Again
• Reaction: Microsoft Testing New Search Features: Code Name Kumo
• Ask.com Crosses The Line: Frames Search Results
• Google UK Testing "Classic" One Line Sitelinks
• Study: Fear Still Exists Over Google's Supplemental Index
• Google Ad Blindness: Google Introduces Expandable AdSense Ads
• Google AdSense Shows Reports In Euros For Some Publishers
• European Google AdSense Publishers Not Happy About Exchange Rate
• Google AdSense Updates Home Page While Stats Lag
• Google Delays Payments To Publishers Yet Another Month
• Is a Bug Allowing Extended AdWords Titles?
• Business Improving Recently? Poll: How Are You Weathering The Recession
• Happy Square Root Day : Google Not That Geeky?

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 was hoping to reach out to our audience and find out, via an anonymous poll, how your companies are weathering the recession.

Why now? Well, I noticed a HighRankings Forum thread that discusses some SEO companies noticing a recent "jump" in business. In fact, the new thread has three people saying they noticed a recent spike in leads and sales over the past two weeks. One explained:

I work by referral only and in the past 5 months or so, it was dead, very little came in, but in the past two weeks, wow. Is it a trend here? I'm trying to figure out why all of a sudden I'm getting all this new work? I love it, don't get me wrong, but why now? Anyone else notice the phone ringing a bit more these past few weeks?

It is funny, because I said the same thing about my business just the other day. We don't do SEO, but we do provide extensive web development services and in the past week or two, I have been going into more and more prospects, including closing some. The previous month, was pretty dead.

Heck, I listen to the financial news every day and it is very sad. Yesterday was incredibly depressing. But maybe we are starting to see the first signs, via the grassroots, that things may be turning around? Not spending money is important during a recession, but you cannot close your business down and stop innovating and improving.

Please share with us how your business is doing. Check all that apply:

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum .

Huffington Post has a story about a Google AdSense publisher who had his account terminated by Google for "posing a signficicant risk to advertisers." That advertiser sued Google in small claims court for $721, the amount of money he had accrued for clicks on his site. Guess what? He won! Seriously, go read the story, it reads very well.

Let me now give you the AdSense publisher reaction from DigitalPoint Forums.

Its small claims court. Google didn't even have lawyers representing them - a paralegal instead.

All you'll win is the few bucks Google owes you. Better than nothing I guess... but you cannot get your account back via small claims court.

Sounds like a rare exception, doubt others would be able to do it.

Very nice article. I'm happy for the dude. Everybody whose account got cancelled, sue Google!

You can see his original posts in the Google AdSense Help Forum.

Is this going to spark a ton of law suits for Google?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Update: Turns out that publisher did indeed violate Google's TOS and the court overruled the decision in appeals court.

Google has been very proactive about cleaning their index of pages that contain malware. In fact, they have stepped up the email notifications to webmasters with these issues. So I have been seeing thread after thread in a multitude of forums on malware related topics.

A Google Webmaster Help thread has one person asking if he should check the Google Cache to see if Google indexed the cleaned up version of his site. In response to that, Googler, Oliver Fisher said Google doesn't use the Google Cache to look for malware. He said:

Google's automated malware scanners don't use the cached version of the pages. They make real fetches while evaluating the pages.

When the scanners reviewed the tpod site yesterday (at ~4am PT), they found lots of fake Yahoo counters, including on the pages you've listed. If you've cleaned up the site now, you should file for another malware review via Webmaster Tools.

It does make sense that Google would bypass an older copy of the site and go directly to the pages to see if they are infected, in almost real time.

Oliver, I believe, specializes on the Google Malware team and has written topics at the Google Webmaster Blog on Malware related issues. Oliver rarely posts in the help area, so it is nice to see posts when he does them.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a story named Google Maps Closes Down Business When it is Still in Operation. In short, Google labelled a business in Google Maps as being closed, when it was actually in business and servicing companies. Back then, I thought it was an issue with a user not correctly setting his or her Google Local Business Center information. But I was wrong. It seems to be a bug with Google's Local Business Center.

We have several threads in the Google Maps forum and one longer one in the Google Maps Help discussion area.

Googler, Joel H described how this can work. But let me show you how you can do the reverse, i.e. close down a business on Google Maps without having access to that business.

Let's go to Microsoft's listing in Google Maps.

Then click on the "Edit" link on the left bottom side of the map bubble:

Then click on "Remove Place:"

Then check off, "it is permanently closed" and add a comment:

My request went through and it likely will be rejected:

Like I said, it will likely be rejected, because it is Microsoft. That is why I picked Microsoft. But for some smaller businesses, removing them, might slip through the cracks, like they did for these businesses.

If your business is verified with Google's Local Business Center, I don't think there is a way for anyone to make this request. But for the majority of business in Google Maps that are not "verified," this can easily be done and potentially hurt sales for those businesses.

"Community Edits," aren't they great? FYI, this is nothing that new. I am illustrating this not to have a bunch of people start removing businesses, but rather to make it harder for these things to happen. Clearly, this has turned into a bigger mess then one expected.

Forum discussion at Google Maps Help.

Update: If you have this problem, you can learn how to fix it here.

I posted a search brief on this topic at Search Engine Land, when I saw Search Engine War noticing Google UK testing single line Sitelinks. But it seems like more folks in the UK are noticing the "classic" Sitelinks showing up. I call them "classic," because the first time we saw Sitelinks, they were in the form of a single line.

A WebmasterWorld thread has one UK searcher noticing them. They call it "mini" but there is nothing "mini" about having any extra line in the Google search results. Typically, Sitelinks look like this:

Eight links, in four rows and two columns. Earlier, Google was testing four links in a single column:

But originally, before we even knew what they were called, they were on a single line:

Search Engine War has a picture of the new "classic" Sitelinks in place.

Personally, I prefer the single line Sitelinks - at least from a searcher's perspective. Just seems cleaner and lets me see more results on a page.

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: March 5, 2009"

Rimm-Kaufman posted data that shows how their are less people searching for products and services to buy, leading to less sales, which impacts the overall PPC budgets. Yes, all related to this global recession.

I laid out the key points in my Search Engine Land brief:

• Approximately 20% reduction in sales from search ads from last year
• Approximately 20% reduction in his costs from search ads from last year
• The average order value from search ads dropped 10% from last year
• The conversion rate from search ads seemed to remain stable from last year
• There may be more competition in the space, but hard to prove

One advertiser noticed this himself and posted a question at Google AdWords Help asking if others noticed this. The only response we have so far is from a Google representative, AdWordsPro, who wouldn't comment about what Google has seen.

Advertisers, take the anonymous poll and let us know if less people are searching and clicking on your ads.

Forum discussion at Google AdWords Help.

In a day and age where 70% of Google publishers are reporting less earnings with Google, Google needs to take bold moves to get more people to see and click on their ads.

Google introduces expandable ads. The ads will be displayed on publisher sites and they can click on the ad to make them expand into a much large ad that overlays over the content of the page. The expandable ads can contain movie streams, show video game clips, or display various views of an item for sale.

Google said this won't disrupt the end user because it has to be clicked on to be expanded, will never be "double its width or height," the "user may close the expanded panel at any time," it won't change your content, and it has to comply with their terms. There is a comprehensive help section devoted to expanded ads at Google AdSense Help.

Here is a sample ad:

Publishers await to see if this helps earn them more money. Who is the real loser here? I guess the searcher or the average consumer. Outside of that, the advertiser, publisher and Google are all winners.

Also, this may lead to publishers trying new tricks to get people to click on the ad. Note, clicking on an ad to expand it does not generate cost to the advertiser, it is only the click that leads to the advertiser's landing page that has any cost.

By the way, Google is also testing more interactive ads, according to Amit Agarwal.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

There are different levels of search spam. Some search spam involves creating spam on sites you control. Some spam involves injecting links into third party sites, hacking sites, infecting computers, phishing attempts and so on. Where does search spam cross that line and become "evil." That is somewhat of a debate, but Danny Sullivan is coining the term "craphat" in order to differentiate between "blackhat" and "whitehat" SEO. Because, many believe that "blackhat" SEO is not necessarily "evil" and that some people who consider themselves "blackhat" go to extremes that make some "blackhats" not want to be considered blackhat anymore. Which is why I think the industry hats and colors are melting a bit.

Danny created a Sphinn thread to discuss this topic, the topic of "craphat" SEO. How does Danny define this work?

Real crap? Automated link drops. Anyone who runs a blog, look at the shit that your comment filter catches automatically. It’s a crap harvest. Manual off-topic link drops, like we delete routinely here. Gibberish pages that say nothing and serve no purpose either than to get a rank and shove some Google AdSense ads at the top of them. Or one of my favorite examples, or not so favorite because it’s so sad, how a memorial site that Mike Grehan did for a friend got covered in link spam, adding to the further stress his widow was already under.

Danny thinks the industry should "try to stamp out." But being a realist, Danny knows "it won’t get stamped out," but adds, that it "doesn’t mean we shouldn't try."

Spam is getting worse and worse by the day and people are going to extremes they may have never thought they would go to. Matt Cutts discussed this in detail with his Virtual Blight video.

How can we make a difference and help prevent this type of stuff? Can we?

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

About a week and a half ago, there was the start of discussion around Google's brand push in the algorithm. Some people started noticing that for some queries (mostly generic queries), more "big brands" were showing up in the search results.

The discussion started at WebmasterWorld and then Aaron Wall provided some statistical data to back the rumors. HuoMah, then chimed in, trying to keep SEOs on their feet and thinking logically about this.

In any event, Matt Cutts of Google made a video talking specifically about this change:

In the video at 1 minutes and 17 seconds in, Matt said, they made a "change" but he wouldn't call it an "update", but rather a "minor change." In fact, in Google they call it the Vince's change (see 1 minute 30 seconds in). In short, he said this impacts a relatively small number of queries, not the long tail ones and it is more about "trust," the "quality" of the page, the page's "PageRank" and "value" then about brands.

One example he gives at 2m12s is that if you type in eclipse into Google, the first result is not from Mitsubishi. So he says it is not "brand" focused but more about trust.

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld and Sphinn.

There are many ways to price your services. In the SEO world, you can charge a monthly fee, you can charge by hour, you can charge for results, you can take a piece of the action and so on. The Pay for Performance model is popular amongst some SEO firms, while others prefer the steady and secure income of other pricing models.

Search Engine Guide has a very nice write up on this model named Is the Pay-for-Performance SEO Model Still Viable? The article goes into the various forms of Pay for Performance, including (1) Pay Per Ranking (2) Pay for Traffic and (3) Pay Based on Revenue. Stoney deGeyter shares his personal experience with these models and concludes "while some SEOs have figured out how to make the pay-for-performance pricing model work for them, I remain skeptical."

There are over twenty comments on that article and it went hot on Sphinn. I thought we run a poll, asking you guys, do you still offer Pay for Performance payment models in this new economy? Take the poll:

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

If you visit the Google AdSense home page you may notice that the login page has been redesigned. Here is a picture of the new page:

The old one looked like this:

We anticipated the new home page would be coming soon this morning, when we reported about the recent login issues with AdSense. This also probably means that many (not all) AdSense counters, notifiers and trackers are having issues operating now.

Note that this is occurring while there are major stat delays with the AdSense reports.

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: March 4, 2009"

A month and a half ago, we polled our audience, trying to gauge how concerned SEOs are with Google's 'hidden' supplemental index. The results are now in, we have 80 responses and I wanted to share them with you.

Here is the breakdown of responses to the question "Are You Concerned Over Google's Supplemental Index?"

:: Somewhat Concerned said 32 respondents or 40%
:: Very Concerned said 24 respondents or 30%
:: Not Concerned said 24 respondents or 30%

As you can see, 70% of SEOs are still concerned, on some level, with Google's supplemental index. Whereas, only 30% are not concerned at all. I suspect the results would have been much different if Google didn't drop the supplemental tag from the search results.

Forum discussion continued at HighRankings Forum.

Last night, I noticed dozens of reports that Google AdSense publishers were unable to login to their AdSense consoles. The first report came in at 1:59am (EST) from a Google AdSense Help thread.

Most of these publishers noticed a new Google AdSense login page. The page then wouldn't allow them to login. The question is, is Google testing a new login page for AdSense? I know a lot of third party AdSense tracking tools stopped working last night as well. Maybe Google tried to change things up to prevent those scraper bots from bogging down their system? I don't know.

At 5:57 this morning, a Google AdSense representative, William, confirmed the issue and said it was fixed. Some publishers may still have issues logging in, if you do, he recommends "clearing the cache and cookies or try using a different browser."

At about 2:50am, I saw first reports at a DigitalPoint Forums thread that publishers were able to login again. But there are still lingering reports of publishers not being able to login. So make sure to listen to William's suggestion above.

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

If there was a three strike rule for Google SMS Search, Google would have been out a long time ago. For the fourth time in about two months, Google SMS Search went offline again.

The most recent, was the other day. We have two threads at Google Mobile Help. The first thread has confirmation from a Googler.

Googler, Zeke said:

Thanks for posting. Yes, we were experiencing some issues yesterday with the mobile aggregator used by many carriers. This caused a delay in responses, but them problem has been fixed.

You should be able to use Google SMS normally now. Please let me know if you run into any other trouble.

The later thread specifically complains about Google not returning hockey scores. I tried some of those searches and they did not return results for me, but searching for [scores lakers] did work just fine for me.

Here are the past articles we wrote on Google SMS search failing:

• Google SMS Search Not Returning Search Results, January 8, 2009
• Did Google SMS Search Die Again?, January 15, 2009
• Google Finally Confirms Fixing SMS Search, January 27, 2009
• Google Mistakenly Sends Dozens of Unwanted SMS Messages To Users, February 3, 2009

Forum discussion at Google Mobile Help.

Google has announced the addition of showing a new currency for publishers based in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain. So now, AdSense reports support both the US Dollar and now the Euro.

Why the recent change? Well, besides for it being a very popular request (not just Euros but other currencies), AdSense publishers based in those countries have been very upset with the exchange rate Google uses this. Google said this will allow "earnings converted daily, you'll avoid the risk of currency exchange fluctuations between USD and the Euro." To change currencies, you need to agree to new set of Terms and Conditions, which are explained in Google's post.

Overall, many publishers are really happy that Google added this option. Many others want the currencies to be expanded to more options outside of just the US Dollar and the Euro.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Microsoft Search, MSN Search, Live Search, Windows Live Search, and now Kumo? Yea, Microsoft is still finding themselves with a brand for search. Currently, Live.com is the search portal for Microsoft, but everyone knows they have issues branding that portal. Plus they need to differentiate. Until now, and even now, they are playing catch up with search technology, trying to get up to speed with even Yahoo. Google, well - they are pretty far ahead.

Microsoft's answer? Code name, Kumo. I am not going to show screen shots, that has been done all over the web already. I would suggest reading Danny Sullivan's break down of screens and features.

I want to share the reaction from the webmaster from WebmasterWorld. Here are select quotes from the thread:

Good news but you cannot "catch up". A new service won't create more searches so they'll have to cut into Yahoo and Google to borrow some of theirs.

You know, it's the Yin and Yang and Yahoo effect.

Microsoft entered and took over the browser war in about 5 years.

In search, they have not gained any ground in 5 years. Time to go back to making your OS better. Like maybe having an upgrade path from XP to your latest OS, considering XP still has a 70% market share... But hey, we are talking Microsoft here... They will do what they want regardless of common sense.

If they're smart and they can work out the licensing, the next version of Windows will ship with IE, FF, Chrome and Safari all set to go and all defaulting to their search engine.

Oh yeah, and they'll quit changing the name of their search engine every year.

Oh yeah, and they'll quit choosing stupid names for a search engine, like Live or Kumo.

Sounds like lipstick on a pig to me. Google's safe for another decade or two.

What I like about this new search they are testing is their focus on the usefulness of the search engine in terms of accomplishing tasks. Microsoft appears to be looking closer at user intent.

Some of this comments are classic! I was wrong, I thought by now Microsoft would be totally competing with Google. I admit it, I was wrong.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

In our monthly tradition, we are reporting on the March 2009 Google Search changes as seen via the ongoing WebmasterWorld thread. You can see the February report that we posted last month to catch up.

This month, one member feels Google is now weighing heavier on the keywords used in backlinks (anchor text) to determine page relevancy. Full member, jcmiras said:

Assuming you searched for "word1+word2+word3" (without quotes), usually, we thought that all of the pages that appear in the SERP should contain all of the keywords. However, there are pages in the result which contain only "word1" and "word2" but "word3" is not there, instead, it is on one of the pages that that particular page in the SERP is linking to.

WebmasterWorld's administrator, Tedster, said he has seen a recent spike in chatter about this in the forums and elsewhere.

Other news that happened recently and that is being discussed include stories that we posted within the past couple weeks. They include:

• Google Blog Search To Test New Link Command Features Next Week
• Google March 2009 PageRank Update or Glitch?
• February '09 Google Image Search Update?

Keep watching this space and the WebmasterWorld thread for updates.

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: March 3, 2009"

You think Google is a "geeky" company? Well, they did not have a special logo for Pi Day last year, nor do they have a special logo for today, Square Root Day.

What is Square Root Day? Well, today is 3-3-9 and it is celebrated on "dates where the day and the month are both the square root of the last two digits in the current year," according to Wikipedia. The next time it is celebrated will be on April 4, 2016, so it doesn't happen all that often.

We decided to put up a special theme for the day, even though no other search engine did. Here is our theme:

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums and Google Webmaster Help.

Update: Google's Twitter account posted a mention saying, "Happy Square Root Day from all of us at Google!" at 5:16pm (EST) linking to a search result for square root of 9.

A Sphinn thread has discussion around a "quick" study done to test if URL shortening services like TinyURL and others pass any link value. Clearly, all the time you and I spend on services like Twitter, makes this question something that many SEOs and webmasters want to know.

The study said that these services do not pass link value. Some don't believe the study, some do. I won't be getting into the validity of the study. Do your own tests and prove it to yourself.

I do know that Googlers often say in the Google help forums to use URL shortening services when they don't want to share their specific URL. The reason, I don't think is about passing "link juice," but rather that they can expire the URL shortened version, so it does not return a redirect for that URL, where they can't do the same if they link directly to their web site URL.

That being said, and I know a lot of you spend a ton of time on Twitter and services like it that use URL shortening services. Do you want those services to pass link value? There are two possible ways the services won't pass the link value. Either the service themselves marks the links as nofollow or something like it or search engines decide on their end to not let them pass value.

Should they pass value? Take the poll:

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Back in September 2005, Google began emailing webmasters about violations to the Google webmaster guidelines. Then in March 2006, Google started stepping up those notifications. Webmasters were loving Google reaching out to them with issues, so they can address them quickly.

But then the spammers and hackers got involved. In May 2007, we reported that fake Google emails were being sent to webmasters, scaring them. These emails repeatedly went out and Google had to do something.

In July 2007, Google stopped sending email notifications and created a message center in Webmaster Tools to securely notify webmasters of issues. The only problem is that these webmasters had to have a Google Webmasters Tools account and verify their sites, to see these notifications. But I guess it was better then the issue with having fake emails go out.

However, Google seemed to have continued to send out malware notifications via email, before and after Google introduced the Webmasters Tools notification. However, it did not happen as often.

I believe, but I am not 100%, Matt Cutts of Google asked in one of the panels at SMX West, just a month or two ago, if we want emails again. Most people said yes. But validating the email came from Google is hard.

Today, I see a WebmasterWorld thread that notes someone received an email from Google, notifying his site was hacked and thus delisted from Google until the hack is removed. The email says that he should login to Webmaster Tools, validate his site and confirm these details. Then remove the hack and clean up the site, and then submit a reconsideration request. In addition, the email gave specific details on how his site was hacked and what mess the hack left on his site.

So it appears that Google may be emailing webmasters again, to notify them of hacks and other issues that Google may find quicker then some webmasters.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: A Google Webmaster Help thread has a copy of one of these emails.

There is an interesting thread at WebmasterWorld forums on the topic of saving Google AdWords accounts. You know how Google has this quality score component to AdWords? ;-) Well, sometimes an ad or ad group or account has a very low quality score, making your cost per click prices soar. Some call this the Google Slap.

That being said, if the quality score gets really bad, is it ever worth ditching the account and starting fresh?

eWhisper, WebmasterWorld moderator, said that in "almost every case, an account can be 'saved'." Saving your account might be time consuming, but it seems like the general consensus is that it is almost always worth saving the account, as opposed to starting new.

How exactly can you save a 'lost' AdWords account? Well, I'll leave those details to the thread.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Over the past couple months, I have been seeing thread after thread from AdWords advertisers with complaints that their competitors are showing over the 25 character limit in the Google AdWords title of the ad.

Google says there is a max 25 character limit for the title, including spaces. But advertiser after advertiser have been posting in the forums, with complaints that advertisers are using more than that 25 character limit.

A month or so ago, I sent this information to Google asking if there was a policy change. Google told me, no, this must have been a bug of some sort. A Google spokeswoman told me, "We haven't changed our AdWords policy regarding the number of characters allowed in the title line."

So why is it still happening? I know, when I upload my SEO videos to YouTube sometimes they enforce their title word limit and sometimes they don't.

I am not sure what is wrong with Google AdWords, but something is for sure up. Maybe these are getting by through AdWords Editor, maybe through the API, maybe through the standard interface or maybe through dynamic keyword insertion - I am not sure.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Google AdWords Help.

Update: This appears to not be a bug, I have more details at Get Longer Google AdWords Titles Through Dynamic Keyword Insertion.

A Google Mobile Help thread might have some signs that Google will be releasing push email for the iPhone.

Before you jump up and down in joy, I am making an assumption on this news from the following details.

In a Google Mobile Help a Googler named Robin marked a user's answer as being correct, when the person said, and I quote:

Google will probably release push email for the iPhone (using an Exchange protocol) in the near future. They have begun supporting push contacts and calendar, and mail is the only data service left to transition. The reason it works on a Blackberry is because all mail goes through the blackberry servers first. This server then pushes the email to your phone.

Now, Googler, Robin, marked the answer as correct. Robin did not comment in the thread to say if the first part or the second part is correct. Clearly, no one would say the second part of her answer is correct. But the first part would be a dream for most Gmail users using the iPhone.

Did Google just validate that they will enable push email support on the iPhone through the Exchange protocol?

Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised to see it soon. They did it for calendar and contacts already, so adding email is the obvious next step.

Forum discussion at Google Mobile Help.

It appears Craigslist, the very popular and old school directory listing site, has added the nofollow meta tag to most of their pages. If you view the source of the listing pages, you should see <meta name="robots" content="NOARCHIVE,NOFOLLOW"> in the header of the pages.

This tag was designed to tell a search engine not to follow any of the links on the page, including all the internal links. This is part of the reason the nofollow link attribute was designed, to give webmasters more control on which links should be followed by search engines and which ones should not be followed.

I find it interesting that Craigslist decided to simply nofollow all the links on the page, using the nofollow meta tag, as opposed to slapping on the nofollow attribute on user generated links.

As Google's help document explains, "originally, the nofollow attribute appeared in the page-level meta tag, and instructed search engines not to follow (i.e., crawl) any outgoing links on the page." But since the creation of the nofollow attribute value of the rel attribute, most sites have abandoned using the meta tag for the more controlled attribute.

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

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

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: March 2, 2009"