April 1, 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: April 1, 2009"

I wrote a big write up at Search Engine Land on the various search related April Fools gimmicks over here. Here, let me focus on the forum threads I found related to questions on the various April Fools jokes.

Google went back to 1990 with CADIE: Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity. In short, the intelligently designed this awesome blog. Honestly, I am not too much into the joke. The funny part is that someone asked "How can I install Gmail Autopilot by CADIE in my gmail account?" Hmm, April Fools!

Cre8asite Forums renamed to Cre8abanana:

Finally, you may have noticed that visiting this site, will spring you for an April Fools hoax. The hoax changes if you are on a PC or Mac.

Mac users (or linux) get the ever so scary kernel panic:

PC users users get the blue screen of death:

Hope it didn't freak you out too much. Honestly, every time I visit this site and get that hoax, I get nervous. Something about seeing the kernel panic that scares me, even though I know it is a hoax.

I wrote a big write up at Search Engine Land on the various search related April Fools gimmicks over here.

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help, Cre8asite Forums and Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

A DigitalPoint Forum thread has a collection of "weird" or "funny" ads people spotted through Google AdSense or AdWords. I thought I share them in text format, but feel free to see the thread to see screen captures.

• AdSense shows ads on a skydiver accident for American Airline with the slogan, "we know why you fly."
• AdWords shows ads for Big Daddy and Big Juicy Butts
• AdWords ads for used toilet paper
• Hillary Clinton Naked ads?
• Amazon selling "human remains."
• A search for world of warcraft showing an ad for virgin males (I guess that makes sense)
• You can visit hell on ebay
• Or sell your kids on ebay

Feel free to add more to the forum.

Forum discussion and pictures at DigitalPoint Forum.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks how long does it take to rank well in Google? A good question, but typically, a new site might rank well in the short term and then drop off the radar until it begins ranking again. This is sometimes known as a temporary PageRank feature of some sort.

So let me poll our audience, you tell me how long you think it takes to rank well in Google?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A HighRankings Forum thread asks why do some people use more than a single robots.txt file to control and instruct search spiders how to crawl and access their content. That is a good question. Typically, the spiders will only listen to the robots.txt file found in the root level. So technically, if you place a robots.txt on a subdomain, the search engine will likely ignore it. I do not believe the same applies to subdomains, where subdomains have their own root levels.

HighRankings administrator, Randy, said:

robots.txt anywhere but the Root level will be ignored by the spiders. In fact it would surprise me if it's ever even queried. robots.txt is not like .htaccess where you can control things on a per directory level.

The only way a subdirectory robots.txt might be valid is the rare case where someone has a domain name parked on a subdirectory of another domain. Or possibly if the subdirectory is really a subdomain, though that one too is questionable in my mind and isn't something I've tested to see if spiders look for a robots.txt for each subdomain.

I love what Ron Carnell added:

FWIW, I almost always back up a file before modifying it. My ex-wife always said I had trust issues? At any rate, I probably have a few copies of robots.txt laying around on more than a few sites. I don't worry about it because, as you pointed out, the only one that counts is in the root.

I believe Google often uses individual sitemaps per subdomain, to control their content.

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

There are several people who are complaining that Google Maps is incredibly slow for them. If you have slowness issues with Google Maps, you may be in luck. A Google Maps Help thread has a Googler helping these users by troubleshooting issues with them.

Googler, Mike CH, believes there are certain firewalls that may be causing the issue. There seem to be two issues, the first is loading the map tiles and the second is trouble loading the JavaScript "brain" of the site.

Mike is asking these users to run traceroutes and disable their firewalls. If you are also having issues with Google Maps, you may want to participate in the thread.

Forum discussion at Google Maps Help.