June 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: June 30, 2009"

About a week ago, we showed our readers many of the bing commercials and asked you guys if you liked them. To my surprise, about 60% of you said you do like them, while only about 25% of you said you don't like them. Here is the break down of the results:

Question: Do You Like The Bing Commercials?

:: Yes said 54 respondents or 59%
:: No said 24 respondents or 26%
:: Indifferent said 9 respondents or 10%
:: Other answer... said 4 respondents or 4%

Other answers include:

• I don't have any problems with google, so the commercials seem redundant to me.
• Annoying
• Who Cares
• Only the search overload ones

Forum discussion continued at DigitalPoint Forums.

About two weeks ago, we asked AdSense publishers what do you want to be called. Well, after almost 150 responses, I figured I share the results with you.

:: Web Marketer said 30 respondents or 21%
:: Web Publisher said 28 respondents or 20%
:: Webmaster said 27 respondents or 19%
:: Self-Employed said 24 respondents or 17%
:: Web Developer said 14 respondents or 10%
:: Web Editor said 6 respondents or 4%
:: Retired said 4 respondents or 3%
:: Other answer... said 10 respondents or 7%

Other answers include:

• Broke
• Additional source of income earner :)
• Disintermediator
• undefined
• Money Maker
• Entrepreneur
• SEO
• Spammer

What we learn from this is that AdSense publishers don't have a true title, they are simply AdSense publishers.

I am surprised no one said, "Google money maker," or something like that.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread has new conversation on branded links. By that, he means, getting links to your web site for your brand name. For example, if you link to this site with the anchor text Search Engine Roundtable over something like best search blog or something like that. Honestly, I'd take either, but I kind of prefer the Search Engine Roundtable link, because it is the name of this site.

Why do I personally prefer Search Engine Roundtable over best search blog? Well, if someone is reading your site and you write best search blog, they might not click over or look at the URL, so they don't know that the best search blog is the Search Engine Roundtable. But if you write Search Engine Roundtable, that might stick, so I might prefer you write that the Search Engine Roundtable is the best search blog.

Buckworks, the WebmasterWorld moderator, added his advice:

New links from quality sites would help your cause even if the anchor text isn't SEO-perfect.

Be religiously consistent about what URL you ask them to link to:

http://www.example.com/
vs
http://example.com/

NOT

http://www.example.com/index.html or whatever

So, go ahead, link to us as the Search Engine Roundtable, I won't mind.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Since early February, Firefox users may have tripped on a Google AdSense security error. The error reads:

Security Error: Content at http://googleads.g.doubleclick.net/ may not load data from example.com

It happens on some configurations of Firefox, where the security prompt seems to be warning you that content from a third party is loading on this web page.

There are threads as far back as February with this issue, specifically from Google AdSense Help. A newer thread at WebmasterWorld has more discussion around the security error.

I honestly don't think this is a Google specific issue. It seems to be a setting that warns surfers of third party content showing up on a web page.

HowToGeek.com has an article that describes how you can "fix" this security prompt from showing. But in the AdSense case, it might not work.

Forum discussion at Google AdSense Help and WebmasterWorld .

The Google News Blog is asking Google News publications to sign up for the YouTube Partner Program in order to get your videos more exposure.

If you use Google News, you would have noticed that they are playing up YouTube videos. Many of the results contain little YouTube icons, at least for the past month or so, to encourage people to view those videos. Here is a screen shot of how those icons are displayed in Google News:

Since we do weekly videos, I think it might be a good match for this site. Maybe I'll start doing more videos, if they bring in more traffic. We will see.

Right now, Google News only told Google News publishers to apply to the YouTube partner program. What happens afterwards is a bit of a mystery. Google said, "will do a separate review and follow-up about including your videos in Google News." So we are waiting further instructions.

A WebmasterWorld thread is not too happy about this request. One said:

And that's why I prefer Yahoo! News. Too many low quality blogs in there passing as "news".

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: June 29, 2009"

A WebmasterWorld thread reports a search advertiser receiving an email from Microsoft's adCenter team about his ads not showing up in Bing. The email basically said that his site was reviewed by the QBR (Quality Based Ranking) team and they were deemed low quality.

Here is a copy of the email, as reported by the advertiser:

I have been looking over your account and can inform you that the resultant drop in traffic has been due to the websites that you advertise being reviewed by our QBR (Quality Based Ranking) team who have deemed them to be of a low quality. The QBR team determines quality and relevance of sites by assessing:

The advertiser said that the same ads and content passed the AdWords quality score, with no problem, so why not Microsoft's adCenter quality requirements?

I don't believe I have ever heard of the Quality Based Ranking team before, I know adCenter launched the quality based ranking algorithm in April of 2007, but I never heard of a human team that monitors it. It makes sense that there are humans, so I am not surprised by this, but I thought it would be nice to document such an email correspondence.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I rarely cover how Google is treating the adult online industry. But I have noticed a thread at Google Webmaster Help forums that is pretty heated on the topic of Google penalizing hundreds of adult and pornographic web sites over the past week or so. Supposedly, there are many adult webmaster forums discussing this now.

Google doesn't typically penalize adult sites for being pornographic. Of course, those sites are labelled in Google as being pornographic and only show up for certain queries. But they are not typically penalized for being pornographic. So why are these adult sites all of a sudden being penalized in the masses?

There is suspicion that thumbnail software named Smart Thumbs is the culprit. I honestly, never heard of the software and I have no idea how it works, coding wise. But the pattern these webmasters are noticing is that all these penalized adult sites use the same adult focused image thumbnail software named Smart Thumbs. The thing is, some are saying that even sites not running Smart Thumbs are being penalized, so maybe that is not the commonality between them all.

If you are in the adult webmaster business, then you likely want to see this thread, which has links to other threads as well. Do be warned that many of the discussion and hyperlinks in the thread link to pornographic content. You can read the discussion without clicking the links and possibly learn something for your own industry.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Update: Google has reversed the adult penalty on most of these sites, just a few days later.

A Catalyst Group study showed that searchers mostly liked Bing's search interface and results over Google, but would not leave Google because they were familiar with it. TechCrunch covered this study first, where the key findings included:

• Most searchers liked Bing's design and organization layout over Google
• Users felt Bing and Google were equal in returning relevant results, despite the layouts
• Most searchers would continue to use Google, even though they liked Bing better

Here is the chart people are showing:

Here is the full PDF of the study:

Catalyst Group Bing V. Google Usability Study -

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

There is an interesting conversation taking place at WebmasterWorld on the topic of page one results versus page two results. Senior member, Whitey, asks the question, should webmasters begin preparing their sites to rank well on page two over page one?

Why would anyone want to do this? Well, some webmasters are suggesting that the first page results are cluttered and polluted with universal results, including videos, news, local and so on. They think that in many cases, people will begin hitting the page two button and get results from that page.

Personally, if people are clicking over to page two, I am sure Google would be aware of that and pull many of the universal results off page one. The last thing Google wants is to make their searchers click over to page two, even though that means more air time on Google's servers (which means more ads). The reason is, searchers will become frustrated and switch to a competitor, such as Bing. ;-)

I suspect Google has noticed that searchers are clicking over to page two less often now. But I can be wrong and if I am, should you start thinking about page two optimization? Or no point in that?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

In March, we reported about several Google scams. I was hoping that the issue would get better over time, but it just seems to be getting worse. The discussion forums are swarming with questions about these scams. Innocent people are believing they can work for Google and get paid, when in fact, they are not working for Google.

A Google Web Search Help thread points out that these Google scammers are not just using Google's name to make money, but they are also using Google's AdWords system to find more people to sign up. For example, here is an add I spotted for a random get job type of search:

As you can see, they are spelling Google's name slightly wrong. Many won't pick up on the typo. Why isn't Google more aggressive about stopping these people from showing ads on their ad system? It is one thing to get email spam about this stuff, but to place ads in Google AdWords?

There is a ton of discussion with more examples of these and other type of scam ads being shown through Google's AdWords, AdSense, Gmail, and so on at Google Web Search Help.

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

I'm back this week after surviving the possible Swine Flu and getting the new iPhone 3GS, catch last week's text recap in case you missed it. This week, we quickly talk about the new and frequent toolbar PageRank update. We also discuss Bing's search spike, possibly due to spam tests and how you may want to reallocate your marketing budgets. Google is asking webmasters for suggestions, so go get it. Google told us why they shorten URLs. Google AdSense is adding up and I explain why. Google tests new commission or pay for performance based product ads. Google tests Google AdSense for Apps for the iPhone and Android. AdWords My Client Center might be frustratingly buggy. Google Export Advisor is a nice tool to help your SEM efforts globally. I gave tips on getting into Google Finance. Michael Jackson death sends shock waves through the Internet. I recapped the Father's Day logos and Summer Google logo even the controversial "Winter" Google logo. That was this past 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 "HD."

Some Of The Topics Discussed:

• June 2009 Google PageRank Update: Kind Of Early
• Bing's Traffic Spike From Fake Spam Tests?
• Search Marketers: Time To Move Marketing Budgets To Bing / adCenter
• Google Webmaster Central Wants Your Ideas
• Why Google May Shorten Your Long URL in the SERPs
• Your Google AdSense Earnings Reports Not Adding Up?
• Google Testing Commission-Based "Product Ads"
• Google Announces AdSense for iPhone & Android Apps
• Google My Client Center AdWords Professionals Having Technical Issues
• Google Export Advisor Helps AdWords Advertiser Market Globally
• Want Your Google News To Show Up in Google Finance? NASDAQ:GOOG
• Google News Makes Authors More Findable
• Michael Jackson's Death Slows Google
• Father's Day '09 Logos From Google, Yahoo & Search Industry
• Google Upsets The Southern Hemisphere Over First Day of Winter Logo

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: June 26, 2009"

A week ago we showed that Google is truncating URLs in some cases. To my surprise, Jaime from the Google Web Search team picked up the story and decided to explain why Google does shorten URLs. He decided to post the details in a Google Web Search Help thread and added a comment at the original blog post.

First, here is a picture of Google shortening a URL, so you know what I mean:

So how and why does Google do this in some cases? Jaime from Google explains:

When it comes to a page's URL, there are basically two competing goals we're trying to balance:

(1) providing enough info to help you make an informed decision on which result to click
(2) presenting results in a easily readable and scannable format

Here's where the balancing act comes in: to accomplish goal #2, we'll sometimes omit parts of a URL (replacing them with ellipses) when we determine that those parts aren't critical to representing the page, and when doing so makes the search results page more readable. Not wanting to miss on goal #1, however, we won't leave out the page's host or domain, since we think it's important to know which website you're navigating to when you choose a result to click.

Of course, the rational is logical but it is nice to hear it from the 'horses mouth.'

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

Google News is an extremely powerful way to drive traffic to your site, if it is worthy to be included in Google News. Google Finance is another avenue to drive traffic to your site, but how do you get Google to list your articles in the news or blog area of Google Finance?

A Google News Help thread discusses just that. In fact, Inbal from the Google News team explained how to be included. She said that you need to include the full ticker name, prefixed by the name of its stock exchange. So in Google's case, you need to include (NASDAQ:GOOG) in the article. I think it might also help to include that ticker in the title, but we can test it out on this article and see how well it does in the NASDAQ:GOOG listing in Google Finance.

Inbal said:

A comma-separated list of stock tickers of the companies, mutual funds, or other financial entities that are the main subject of the article. Each ticker must be prefixed by the name of its stock exchange, and must match its entry in Google Finance; for example, "NASDAQ:AMAT" (but not "NASD:AMAT"), or "BOM:500325" (but not "BOM:RIL").

Clearly, you don't want to abuse this and be removed from Google News and/or Google Finance. If you want more advice in Google News inclusion see that article, keep in mind, the rules may have changed. They also have a publisher FAQ and described how they rank articles.

Forum discussion at Google News Help.

Update: Several minutes after posting this story, I checked Google Finance for the GOOG ticker and guess what I saw?

Clearly, if you write a lot about business related topics that impact stock price, make sure to use this tip when your article is relevant to that company.

The all powerful Google and their impenetrable server farms took a major hit last night, when the news about Michael Jackson suffering a cardiac arrest and ultimately passing away broke. As CNN and News.com shows, Google was displaying one of those Google "We're Sorry" pages to searches trying desperately to find out the fate of Michael Jackson. Even Search Engine Land was suffering from the news, as the tweet confirms.

I remember during 9/11, sites across the Internet couldn't handle the volume of people seeking news about what was going on. I believe back then, the only working site was Google News, probably because it wasn't being used by as many people as use it now. The spike of people searching for Michael Jackson, amongst Farrah Fawcett and the fake news about Jeff Goldblum was tremendous.

As you can imagine, there is a lot of discussion around the death of Michael Jackson. I will only point you to webmaster discussion, which is a lot less for some reason. It is worth while seeing how Loren Baker sums up how the search engines handled queries on this news.

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

Even though I kind of mocked Bing's spam tests as being the cause for many people seeing the search share of Microsoft's Bing as seizing market share, it is not the case in most situations. In most situations, the search share you see coming from Bing is legit and search marketers are taking notice.

I track a lot of web sites and in some cases, not all, Bing has overtaken Yahoo as the number two search engine sending traffic to those sites. Google still dominates, but the number two search engine for some sites I track is Bing, not Yahoo anymore.

In a 15 day period, Bing sent this site over 1,000 more visitors then Yahoo did. Of course, this is just one site and who knows, maybe Yahoo doesn't like this site too much. But a lot of webmasters and search marketers are noticing that Bing's share is exceeding Yahoo. Again, not in all cases, but in some. So what does this mean?

If you have not done so already, go to your analytics package and see what search engine is driving you traffic. Note, in Google Analytics, the Bing traffic doesn't really show until June 9th, so maybe adjust your date range to reflect that. Then see the search traffic reports and see where your visitors are coming. Then reallocate your budgets accordingly, based on traffic, conversions and ROI.

Don't get me wrong, I love Yahoo but you have to do what is best for the bottom line.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

It has been a very hard road for Yahoo, virtually since they began running down the path of building their own search engine and Panama (their new search marketing platform). I honestly miss the old Yahoo where we had Overture and a more personal side to them. It seems to me that Yahoo may not be able to turn things around. It seems to me that they are run down and exhausted. But I really hope Yahoo can make some type of come back.

There are stories that Yahoo is doing a major brand overhaul and refocusing. Is it too little, too late? A WebmasterWorld thread has conversation around that possibility. Will it make a difference? Is it simply too late? Take our poll, do you think Yahoo will turn things around?

Here is a flash from the past, the Yahoo "hair" commercial:

The good old days!

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: June 25, 2009"

This is your chance to give the Webmaster Central team your ideas and have the SEO community vote on them. The more votes your ideas get, the more likely the Google team will work on them.

The Google Blog post links us to the Product Ideas for Webmaster Central Google Moderator section. There you can submit new ideas or vote on existing ideas. Currently there are 72 people have submitted 55 ideas and cast 609 votes, which is pretty low - so get in there and get voting.

The top ideas currently are:

"In [Links to your site] I would like to see an additional summary view that just shows the domains that are linking to my website rather than individual pages. This will help me to easily see when word of my website has spread somewhere new."

"Make webmaster tools part of Google Apps so that I can give people in my company access to our webmaster tools. Right now, we have to setup each person individually using a consumer google account."

"Provide a "history" of crawling errors: how a domain and its errors are developing over the last weeks / months (less 404 etc.). It would be very useful, especially if the site structure and paths have changed."

Again, submit your Product Ideas for Webmaster Central.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Some AdWords professionals who manage their customer campaigns via the My Client Center (MCC) are having technical issues with the AdWords console. A WebmasterWorld thread is reporting that these advertisers are being booted out of the individual campaigns and back to the MCC front page, making it extremely difficult for them to manage these accounts.

This has been happening on and off since late May. The first report said:

I keep getting kicked back to the MCC level when working in our individual accounts. Sometimes it happens just seconds after entering the accounts, sometimes after just a couple minutes. Very annoying... anyone else experiencing this?

Even eWhisper, a WebmasterWorld moderator, experienced the issue the other day. AdWordsAdvisor said he/she has not heard of reports of this on a major scale but promised to try to look into the issue.

Hopefully this is not impacting most advertisers and more importantly, hopefully this is not impacting you when you need to make an important change.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

We have been seeing Google test AdSense in iPhone apps for a few months now, but not it is official. Google announced the beta for AdSense for Mobile Apps. That means that some app developers can add Google AdSense ads to their iPhone or Android applications. To apply as a developer, go here - personally, I want in!

Here are sample ads taken from Shazam on my iPhone:

Google Ad in AdSense:

Bing Ad in AdSense:

AdMob hasn't worked out great for me, but I honestly should give it another try. But I am excited to give Google AdSense for Apps a try.

Forum discussion at Google AdSense Help.

Google recently launched Google Export Advisor a tool that uses "Google translation and search data to provide an estimate of market opportunities across the world." Search Laboratory has an excellent post looking at how it works, but I'll do something similar here.

This tool combines three Google tools:

• Keyword Tool: Use this to get new keyword ideas. Just enter a few descriptive words or phrases, and it will generate a list of keyword ideas.
• Google Translator: Enter a search phrase in your own language to find information in other languages.
• Traffic Estimator: Enter your keywords, select the relevant language and geographic targets and this tool will estimate the traffic available for each keyword.

Here are screen captures of what the tool does:

And then it determines profitability:

Forum discussion at Sphinn and WebmasterWorld.

There has been a lot of Bing buzz on how the 'new' search engine is competing in the search landscape. But is that traffic all legit?

Remember, since April 2007, Microsoft has been sending weird referrals to many webmasters. They were known as internal cloaking tests designed by Microsoft's search quality team. But even though they promised to cool it with those visible tests, it came back time and time again.

Today, we are seeing new reports from a respected webmaster at WebmasterWorld, who noticed a huge influx in referrers from Bing. The issue is, as the WebmasterWorld moderator said, the referrers are porn related and totally not relevant to his web site. This, to me, implies, Microsoft is starting their spam tests again and messing around with the analytics webmaster rely so heavily on.

The moderator said that he normally gets about a "few dozen visitors per day" from Bing, but now:

But suddenly, Bing traffic has shot up sharply. Yesterday Bing sent 2015 visits, today 1829, and the day is not over. The problem is that the traffic is coming from p--n searches which are absolutely not relevant.

The number of 404 errors is up sharply, as well. One or two dozen per day would be normal, but yesterday there were over 2600.

We have no word from Microsoft on this as of yet, but I am a bit suspicious of all these recent search share reports.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: In this case, it was not a Microsoft issue. The thread has been updated noting that the site in question was hacked and injected with spam. This is what caused those referrals.

Google is offering a free webinar to educate advertiser on the new AdWords interface. The webinar takes place tomorrow, Friday, June 26th at 11am (PST). To register, go to this URL and sign up.

This webinar will teach you how to use the new interface. Ariel Bardin, Product Management Director for the new AdWords interface, will guide you through the new interface. You'll learn how to manage your account using the new interface and make use of the new features.

You can even submit questions prior to the webinar for Google to answer. To submit your question, go over here.

The previous webinar was successful, so if you missed it, try not to miss this one.

Forum discussion at Google AdWords Help.

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

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: June 24, 2009"

A Google Reader Help thread reports an increase in the number of RSS feeds being hacked into and used to redirect subscribers to spammer sites.

Googler, Roger, from the Google Reader team said:

Thanks for reporting this problem. Unfortunately, we've seen similar problems with WordPress feeds being compromised in the past. We'll look into it further, but in the meantime, I encourage you all to alert WordPress to this issue via their support forums.

Roger seems to believe there is a loophole somewhere in WordPress allowing this.

Clearly, this is not only upsetting to the publishers and their subscribers, but also to search spam. Many RSS feeds are scraped and used to inject content into Google. Spammed feeds that are scraped are can be even more of an issue for search quality.

Forum discussion at Google Reader Help.

Ann Smarty at Search Engine Journal has a nice short piece on link building worksheets. These spreadsheets help link builders keep track of their link building efforts.

She links to three worksheets, including:

• Ontolo's worksheet
• Kalena's blog post
• Your SEO Plan

In the comments, two people leave two more tools to help (yes, I bet there are more):

• Raven Tools
• WordStrea

I am a big fan of building custom tools around your business workflow. So if I was a link builder and had a team of link builders, I would build something custom. The tool I would build would track link builders time, where they got the link from, how long it took, how much it cost (time or money or both), was there an exchange, is the link still active (a small crawler) and integrate it into the business management tools. Possibly track the effectiveness of the link by looking at traffic and keyword rankings. So much can be done when you build in automation into your software.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

An interesting thread at Google Web Search Help started by "anotherDad" tells the story of how a father was shocked to see a pornographic site come up in the Google search results for a search for his daughter's name. He said:

I recently did a Google search on my daughter's name, and was surprised when one of the URL's returned by the search forwards to a porn site when clicked.

What this father quickly learned was that this site that was showing up had a cached page that contained the honor roll of his daughter's class. That cache page contained his daughter's name on it. What was likely happening was that either the URL was taken over by a spammer and Google has not updated their index yet or the page is being cloaked, in a very bad way.

I love this post because it shows how a normal searcher was shocked by this. Let me share his thoughts, after learning a bit on how Google operates.

I originally thought that the Google crawlers might have made a false association. I now believe that the Google crawler had nothing to do with the bad links. I now believe that the offending links between my daughter's name and the porn site were generated by hackers/pranksters or a perhaps by a dodgy webmaster who is alligned with the porn site.

I have a couple of suggestions for Google. I think it is relatively hard to find the corrent Google help pages and the corrent Google help forum for problems like mine. People like me who are not IT professionals don't have all day to look around every pocket of Google (and there's a lot there) for help. I also think that the "contact us" link is misleading. I think it is unusual for a corporation as big and important as Google not to have some kind of customer service for cases like mine.

This searcher is exactly the type of person Google takes seriously and it is always interesting to read posts by them. Especially when it is so close to home and so important to them.

In the end, Google was wrong - his daughter is not a porn star and the father can somewhat rest a bit easier at night.

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

Update: JohnMu from Google commented below stating there is a special form for this at Google.

The Google News Blog announced a neat new feature where they hyperlink the author's name in the Google News results. If you click on the authors name it basically takes you to a search for articles by that author, i.e. author:name here.

You can find many of my articles at Search Engine Land by searching for author:"Barry Schwartz", which shows me I need to update the feed here to include the author's full name (which I thought I did) this way the Search Engine Roundtable supports this command.

Again, the author search in Google News, I don't believe is new. But the hyperlink is new and makes it more visible.

As a searcher, you can follow your favorite authors, even if they write across several sites and publications via a Google News RSS news alert.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

According to at least two Google Maps Help Threads, Google Maps changed how they handle looking up a specific location by longitude and latitude.

Supposedly, in the past, entering in the longitude followed by a comma and followed by the latitude, it would return the location on Google Maps. Now, it shouldn't work - but honestly, it currently does for me (maybe, I am on a different data center). The way to get it to work, is to prefix the longitude and latitude with loc: (for example, enter in loc:37.425866,-122.085743).

This works for me on both my iPhone and Safari browser, so maybe it is Blackberry specific? I am not sure.

Google's Tom from the Google Mobile Maps team said:

I've checked with a few teammates, and they've informed me that we've made slight adjustments to our search algorithm: In order to pinpoint a location on a map, please use the prefix "loc:" in the search bar before entering in the lat/long. For example, the search "loc:37.425866,-122.085743" will drop a pin directly on the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA, USA.

Again, this seems to be Google Maps Mobile specific, but maybe not iPhone or Android specific?

Forum discussion at Google Maps Help Threads.

There are hundreds of reports across the web about a Google PageRank update. Most of you know, I am not a fan of the PageRank score displayed in the Google Toolbar, but I report it anyway, because I report what SEOs care about, which I determine by looking at threads in the forums.

What is interesting about this PageRank update is that it comes less than a month from the last PageRank update. The May 2009 PageRank update took place on May 27th/28th. This one started last night on June 23rd.

Normally, toolbar PageRank updates happen about every three months. So to see a widespread update like this just a month later, is interesting. Outside of that, I don't have much more to add.

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

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

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: June 23, 2009"

Update: This is not something Google is testing. The WebmasterWorld member sent me a screen shot and it has been that way since at least 2004. So ignore this post.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports one person seeing the display URL of an AdWords ad showing up above the ad's title and description. In fact, this person is noticing this ad behavior just for the premium ads, not the ads on the right hand side of the page, only the ads at the top of the page.

I personally cannot replicate this on a Mac or PC, using IE, Firefox or Safari. So I emailed this person, asking for a screen shot. This, of course, can be some form of malware infecting the user's browser or it can be some type of test Google is running.

I decided to "photoshop" what this might look like:

Clearly, this looks a bit weird, so I am anxious to see how it looks like on the forum member's screen.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A couple weeks ago, Google made me and many SEOs very happy by adding a verified change of address feature that allows you to tell Google you are moving domains.

Today, I learned from a Google Webmaster Help thread that this does not work on subdomains. This might not seem like a major issue, but if you take Google's advice when moving domains, you likely want to move your site or domain in pieces.

So if you do separate your site out by subdomain, moving pieces of your site by subdomain makes sense. This way you can slowly move your site and make sure Google and other search engines pick up on your changes.

Not having a way to move a subdomain of a site can then be an issue. In addition, if you sell off a subdomain of your property to a different site, a move of domain, in this case, also makes sense.

JohnMu of Google appreciated the feedback and said he would "pass this on to the team."

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

WebmasterWorld administrator, Tedster, created a thread at WebmasterWorld on the topic of "stingy links." In short, he said he was watching to a presentation by a Microsoft engineer about improving the SALSA algorithm for link structure analysis - and I noticed a very casual comment that "links from authors who are very stingy outlinkers are more informative."

Yea, a "duh" moment for Tedster and possibly others. As Tedster explains, it is not just about the PageRank funneling being worth more, but this may be something a search engine looks at. A site that is less likely to link out, when it does, it must be something worth while.

Like those people stingy with their money. If they do hand over cash for a product or charity, it has to make you think - well, this might be worth the money. Same here with links, those stingy with links, who do eventually link out, must be linking out for good reason.

The idea is not new but it is always nice to discuss concepts so they don't get stale.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The other week, Google released a new feature to allow AdSense publisher to control the font size of the text within their ads. This comes a few months after Google gave publishers control over the font type/style of their ads.

With all this control, I was wondering if it is actually helping you make more money with AdSense or not. Please take our anonymous poll and have your publisher friends take it as well.

We will post the poll here in a couple weeks.

Some are convinced it is helping with earnings and some are not too convinced.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

SEOmoz has released their best practices guide on SEO. This time, they used actual data to back up the best practices and have changed some of their previous best practices based on the data.

The post goes over the follow SEO elements:

• Title Tag Format
• The Usefulness of H1 Tags
• The Usefulness of Nofollow
• The Usefulness of the Canonical Tag
• The Use of Alt text with Images
• The Use of the Meta Keywords tag
• The Use of Parameter Driven URLs
• The Usefulness of Footer Links
• The Use of Javascript and Flash on Websites
• The Use of 301 Redirects
• Blocking pages from Search Engines
• Google Search Wiki's Affect on Rankings
• The Affect of Negative Links from "Bad Link Neighborhoods"
• The Importance of Traffic on Rankings

I tend to agree with most of what is laid out in the guide. But like all SEO guides, there is always room for debate.

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forums and Sphinn.

For the first time, I have seen Google comment on when they will be bringing push Gmail to any device. In a Google Mobile Help thread, Googler Ethan responded to a request about push and the iPhone, adding that it is supported on Android devices and in July, it is coming to Blackberry devices.

The only catch is that push will only be supported for Google Apps Premier Edition and Education Edition users. That means, you have to pay for it. I personally think that is fair and I know many people willing to pay a few bucks for giving them push Gmail. Again, this is only for Blackberry devices and it is coming next month, in July 2009.

Let me quote Ethan:

As a reminder, push email support is currently available with the Gmail app on Android devices and will be available for Google Apps Premier Edition and Education Edition users with BlackBerry devices in July.

So what about the iPhone? Well, no comment from Google on that yet. It is currently the 7th most wanted feature in the feature request list. But Google has yet to comment about if or when it will be available. I suspect that when it does become available, it will be only available to the Google Apps Premier Edition and Education Edition users, similar to how it is launching for Blackberry devices.

Forum discussion at Google Mobile 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: June 22, 2009"

A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion on a closed beta launch of a new Japanese search engine by the very popular South Korean portal, Naver. The search portal can be found at http://www.naver.jp/ and it is currently a closed beta.

The early feedback on the new search engine seems positive from what I can tell in the thread. In fact, one member said, "quite positive, and the patented combo SERPS, clean design and cool integrated flash elements seem quite nice." Another said, "Some of beta testers report Naver Japan. It seems to have its original features extisting search engines such as Google and Yahoo! don't have."

I cannot read the language so, hard for me to translate this review properly. But maybe someone will and post the details in the forum.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google Voice Search for iPhone no longer works exactly like it did in the past. If you installed iPhone 3.0 operating system, you may notice that lifting the receiver to your ear and speaking your command will no longer function with the current Google Mobile app for the iPhone.

This is a bit funny, in that Google admittedly broke Apple's rules by releasing such a feature. Specifically, moving the phone to your ear and having the application change to listen for you to speak, is not a supported developer feature in the iPhone SDK.

So when iPhone 3.0 OS came out, it seemed to have broke that neat feature.

Bret at Google posted in the Google Mobile Help discussion area that Google is aware of the issue and working on a fix. The iPhone application still works, but the feature where you put the phone to your ear no longer functions.

In fact, Bret said they submitted a new version to Apple, which is waiting for Apple's approval. Will Apple let this one slide through also?

Forum discussion at Google Mobile Help.

Google Blogoscoped and Wall Street Journal are reporting on a new beta advertising product from Google named "Google Product Ads Beta." The new beta is invite only and seems to be a new way of advertisers paying for their ads, this time, based on conversions and commissions.

The ads are priced not based on click but on commission set by the advertiser for a conversion. Here is the FAQ emailed and captured by Google Blogosoped:

You specify the commission rate for conversions that take place via clicks on Google product ads. Minimum pricing is your standard publisher rate, plus the network fee. To maximize your competitiveness among advertisers participating in product ads, we recommend a higher commission with the Google product ads relationship.

These product ads will run independently of AdWords, but seem like they will show up in the AdWords location, as far as I understand. To be included, you must have a Google Base product feed. The ad rank technology is similar to AdWords, but differs based on the commission. Ad Rank = Commission × Quality Score.

Some believe the product ads on this commission are in form of what we reported earlier with product from AdWords ads and even the one line product links, here are screen captures:

Having products show up in the AdWords listings is extreme enough, having them prices based on an affiliate model is way more extreme.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Google Blogoscoped Forums.

Yesterday was not only the day Google posted a Father's Day logo, but it was also the day Google posted logos for the first day of Summer and Winter. Here are those logos:

Google showed the winter/summer logos in countries that do not celebrate Father's Day on June 21st. It showed the winter logo in the Southern Hemisphere and the summer logo in the Northern Hemisphere. The issue is, just like when they showed the first day of Spring logos and ended up showing "First Day of Fall" and not the "First Day of Autumn" in the Southern Hemisphere. This time Google seemed to upset folks from that side of the globe.

A Google Web Search Help thread has posts from people in that hemisphere who are a bit upset. The original poster said it is a bit more complex:

The history of seasons associated with calendars is a bit more complex than just the Winter Solstice. Yes, the Winter Solstice (traditional time of MID-Winter festivals) falls on that date according to our modern calendar. No, that does not make it the beginning of Winter. In civil calendars (at least in Australia), Winter begins with the first of June. Earlier calendars involved the cycles of the moon and counts of days more than they involved the sun (the SOLstice being related to the sun).

In any event, it seems like Google may have ticked off a few people in that hemisphere.

Other than that, I hope you had a nice Father's Day and we decided to launch our "Welcome Summer" theme a day late, in respect for Father's Day. Here it is:

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

Recently, there was a swarm of threads of complaints in that various AdSense forums about how it appears the Google AdSense earnings reports are not adding up correctly. I'll isolate two Google AdSense Help Threads that have discussion about this.

The issue is really not a calculation error but rather that you are looking at the wrong date ranges.

Alan7769 explained in the thread that the problem is, "since last payment reporting is going back exactly 30 days from the current day, instead of back to the first of the month after your last payment was done." Alan recommends you use the "advanced reports and put in the actual dates from and to for your report, at least until adsense fixes the problem with the since last payment reporting."

There is a terrible amount of confusion now about this so hopefully Google will make things a bit clearly on those default reports.

Forum discussion at Google AdSense Help Threads.

Update: Google has posted a statement:

If you've seen a sudden drop in reported earnings, please note that it likely isn't due to a decrease in earnings but more because of a change in the date range.

You can confirm this by going to the reports section of your account and selecting the correct date range and running a report. For instance, if you were paid on May 26, then the Overview page will show earnings from May 26 to today's date, when you select 'Since last payment' from the drop-down.

However, when you run a report in the 'Advanced Reports' section and select May 1 to today's date, you will find the actual unpaid earnings for this period.

I've consulted our specialists and will follow up once they revert.

In the meantime, please refer any affected publishers to this thread.

Still, not all publishers are convinced or happy.

There are many threads across the web with webmasters concerned that their sitemaps file is in "pending" status in Google Webmaster Tools. One such thread is at Google Webmaster Help where a few webmasters are complaining about the issue.

Google issued an announcement about the "pending" Sitemaps status. Google said it is normal;

Most sites that submit Sitemap files are regularly seeing a "pending" status in Webmaster Tools for their Sitemap files. This is normal and to be expected. It shows that we are planning on fetching your Sitemap file again and that we will update the statistics as soon as we have done so. This is not a cause for alarm. Thank you for using Google Webmaster Tools and submitting Sitemaps.

That is one reason why the Sitemap file might be in "pending" status, but there are others. JohnMu explained there is a "Sitemaps processing pipeline" that has a priority queue based on Google's available resources at the time. Things that can slow the crawl of a Sitemaps file include "servers with slow response times" or "sites that do not meet our [Google] Webmaster Guidelines."

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

This is my first time being a father for Father's Day, so it is a bit different for me now. I am about to go to sleep here on the East Coast but many of the logos from the search industry are live now. Including logos from Google, Yahoo, AOL, DogPile and others. Here is a quick run down, which I hope to update tomorrow, when more logos and themes go live (specifically from Bing and Ask.com).

Google:

Yahoo:

AOL:

DogPile:

Bing:

Ask.com:

Cre8asite Forums:

Search Engine Roundtable:

For previous Father's Day logos from Google and the search industry, see our archives:

• Father's Day Logos from 2008
• Father's Day Logos from 2007
• Father's Day Logos from 2004

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: June 19, 2009"

I am skipping the video this week, simply because I am a bit sick and my new iPhone is arriving anytime now. So here is the text recap of what we covered at the Search Engine Roundtable over the past week. We covered possible evidence that Google penalizes on a page by page basis. Google began truncating URLs to one line and removed the file size from the search results snippet. Matt Cutts chimed in about the PageRank sculpting with nofollow. Will you add the common tag to your site? Google changes linkage data reports in Webmaster Tools. Bing does instant translation. Google AdSense gives us font control. AdSense publishers may be losing out from translate and cache. Google is working on a mobile AdWords interface. Microsoft sends a $750,000 warning to click fraud. Our poll on if SEOs are seen as criminals is live.

Hopefully, we will be back next week with the video recap. Have a great weekend and happy Father's Day!

Some Of The Topics Discussed:

• Evidence of Page Level Google Penalties?
• Google Sometimes Truncating URLs to One Line
• Google Removes File Size From Search Results Page
• Matt Cutts Talks About NoFollow PageRank Sculpting
• Will You Implement Yahoo's Common Tag?
• Google Webmaster Tools Link Reports Change
• Bing's Instant Translation Gets Webmaster Approval
• Google AdSense Gives US Font Size Control
• Are AdSense Publishers Losing Out from Google Translate & Cache
• Google Working on Mobile AdWords Management Interface
• Microsoft Sends $750K Warning To Click Fraudsters
• Poll Results On How Google Views SEOs (Innocent or Guilty)

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

Sandip Dedhia from BlogsDNA for spotting this and also Vertical Leap noticed a bit later. It Google seems to be truncating the display URL in the search results to a single line. So I decided to test this and it is not always consistently true.

A search for iphone 3.0 os does truncate URLs longer than one line, here is a screen capture. Notice how Google adds ... to shorter the URL in the middle portion (not at the end).

It is very nice how they keep the keywords in the display URL and truncate the less keyword specific components of the URL, i.e. "article/166311."

But when I do a more complex search for site:cgi.ebay.com test, which I know has longer URLs, it seems like those display URLs act like the old way of how Google truncated URLs to two lines:

Notice the ... added to the end of the display URL.

Clearly, the site command search I conducted is more of an advanced search. But I don't think the URL truncating is based on search query but rather the URL structure. For example, if I search for Electrical Test Lead Set you will see two results that have long URLs. One is truncated to a single line and the eBay listing is only truncated to two lines:

Interesting to see how this works, don't you think?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Update: Google has updated us on Why Google May Shorten Your Long URL in the SERPs.

A WebmasterWorld thread complains that the AdWords management interface at adwords.google.com does not rendered on the iPhone (and possible Android). In fact, I tried it and it booted me out after several seconds. I managed to take a screen shot of the page trying to load.

In addition, if you try to use the AdWords interface with Safari 4.0, Apple's latest release of their browser, you get the following message:

Support for Safari 4 is coming soon. Until then, please use an earlier version of Safari when viewing the new interface.

AdWordsAdvisor did comment specifically about a mobile AdWords interface. Let me quote what the Google representative said:

This is understood to be very important, Kobayashi, and though I can not predict a timeline (mainly since I don't know it) I do know this is being worked on.

So it seems like a mobile version of the AdWords interface is coming in the future. When exactly is the million dollar question.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Recently, there has been a lot of discussion around Microsoft's commercials for Bing. I saw a few on TV several days ago, and they are pretty unique. But some people love them and some people hate them.

Bing finally set up a YouTube channel with many of their commercials at youtube.com/user/bing so i'll post a few here and please let me know if you like them in our quick poll below.

Here is the poll, please take it:

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

We have covered Google Webmaster tools errors with News sites in the past. But this is the first time I am seeing reports of Webmaster Tools errors specific to News sites that read "Article too long" as the error. "Article too short" errors are common for News errors, but "too long?" Well, that is new to me.

I spotted two threads at Google News Help Forums with complaints from various publishers.

Google News representative, Inbal, said:

Yes, I see many "Articles too long error" messages for your site indeed :( We'll look into the weirdness in Webmaster tools. Meanwhile, we've updated your site's information in our system. We should begin to crawl more articles with videos embedded between the headline and the summary from your site within a few weeks.

Thing is, it seems like they need to conduct a manual fix for each site with this error. So if you are seeing these errors for your publication, make sure to submit a thread at the forum.

Forum discussion at Google News Help Forums.

A week ago, we asked our readers to vote on their thoughts on if Google sees SEOs as criminals. If you remember, this is based on the double-standard that some bloggers feel Google is placing on some groups over another group.

With just under a 150 responses, I wanted to share how we (SEOs) perceive how Google sees us.

Question: Does Google See SEOs as Criminals?

:: Only Some Groups of SEOs said 77 respondents or 52%
:: Yes said 43 respondents or 29%
:: No said 25 respondents or 17%
:: Other answer... said 3 respondents or 2%

It is very interesting looking at how SEOs perceive how Google sees SEOs. Kind of a circular statement there, but you know what I mean.

Forum discussion continued at Sphinn (Lisa), Sphinn (Michael) and Sphinn (Susan).

A few weeks ago, we asked our readers if they like the new Yahoo home page? With 127 responses in, I wanted to share the results.

Most of our readers do like the new home page. 73% said they like the new home page, while 25% said they do not like it. That is a pretty good distribution. Here is the pie chart:

The "other" responses were pretty much in the nature of "I don't care, either way."

Are you surprised by these results?

Forum discussion continued 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: June 18, 2009"

Richard at SEO Gadget showed how Google seemed to have penalized specific pages of his site from ranking in the Google index. The penalty seemed to be fair, in that there were nasty comments that slipped through his comment spam filter.

The drop in traffic can be seen by the keyword phrases that page ranked well for. He noticed a ~70% drop in traffic for that phrase, which in his case resulted in a 15% drop in his Google traffic and a 5% drop in overall traffic.

What I find extra fun is that a Google Search Quality Analyst, @filiber, tweeted:

Google Page level penalty for comment spam – rankings and traffic drop http://bit.ly/JNAly (via @AndyBeard) <- interesting read!

Of course that is not admission to this as a fact, but it wouldn't be too hard to believe that bad comments caused such a decline.

Now, I don't think this would be considered a keyword-specific penalty, which most SEOs believe in, but rather a specific page being penalized.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Back in February, Google gave us font type selections for our AdSense ads. Now Google announced the ability to control the size of those fonts.

Here is a screen shot of the three sizes you can pick:

Google has been testing both larger fonts sizes and smaller ones here and there, so this was expected, and it is now here.

To learn more about this, see the AdSense blog post and chat about it at WebmasterWorld.

One important note that AdSenseAdvisor said in the thread:

I also wanted to give you a heads up that soon we'll be setting the default font size a little bit bigger based on your feedback that sometimes the text ads on your page are hard to read. I'll keep you posted.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I have been watching a Google Webmaster Help thread for about a week now. The thread was started by a 3rd party individual who volunteers a lot of his time helping webmasters in the Google Webmaster Help forum. He was even promoted (no pay of course) to the position of "Webmaster Help Bionic Poster" as a top contributor.

Autocrat, the name this person goes by, questioned Google's search quality team, to give them more insight in how to help Google. He said:

It would be nice to know; * What sort of "activities" we should be reporting * What hte chances are of seeing any form of action on a report * What sort of "crimes" could we expect to see action on * Whether you have to make multiple reports - or have multiple reports made against you before action is taken * how is it that some of the most blatant stuff gets to stay on line and escape the "algorythm"

I hate to ask - but I'm tired of seeing some of the * in the SERPs - and I now fail t osee why I should bother reporting some of hte cheating * * when I know that I have a less than 1 in 20 chance of seeing them get punished!

So please - would the Spam Team please step forward and have a chat with us?

We all waited, and waited for a response from an official Google representative. But a week later we have yet to see a response.

It is tough when your top volunteers ask tough questions, but it is even tougher when your top volunteers have to ask some of these questions.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports that in some cases the Google AdSense ads will not render when using Google Translate or viewing the page on Google Cache. We reported about the Google Cache issue about a year ago, and back then I believe it was temporary.

The issue is that in some cases, people use Google Translate to view web pages and if Google doesn't show the ads, these publishers (as well as Google) is missing out. The same with the Google Cache. Some sites are hit up worse than others and it isn't impacting all ads.

WebmasterWorld moderator, martinibuster thinks it might be a simple issue of miscommunication:

It's been noted that the teams developing these tools don't always communicate with other parts of Google. This may be an instance of that.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google News is the life blood for many people who try to stay on top of news. It is also fairly hard to be included in the Google News index. So when Google News gets infected with spam, people take notice.

We have a WebmasterWorld thread with complaints and ShoeMoney posted specific details with the Google News spam.

Here is the reaction from the person who posted at WebmasterWorld:

Recently I noticed spammy news in a lot of google results. In fact, a google news article now takes the #1 position for a VERY popular search term..when you click it, the page redirects to an affiliates landing page. I thought this was just a quirk until I noticed spammy news in more search results and then I read a blog where they are also complaining about the recent surplus in spammy google news results.

Boy this is just getting bad. Whatever kind of update this is seems to be doing more harm than good. For all the work that google has done to prevent spam in their index, this is a real shame. I really hope google knows what its doing as I am just about fed up because I clicked on one of those google news results and it redirected me to somewhere and I now have a virus on my computer that hijacks all my search results. It forwards all my search results to affiliate programs. Thanks google.

If the spam sticks, rest assured people will stop using Google News.

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: June 17, 2009"

The New York TImes reports Microsoft has filed suit against Eric Lam, Gordon Lam and Melanie Suen, of Vancouver, British Columbia. The suit comes after a year of investigative work by Microsoft in tracking down reports of click fraud.

According to the NY Times, these defendants allegedly:

Microsoft said it found a pattern of click fraud on its search pages, where lists ranked by relevance and popularity appear alongside a handful of paid results. Advertisers bid on what they will pay to appear in the paid-search results for certain keywords. The more an advertiser pays, the higher they are in that list, and advertisers usually pay for each click on their ad.

Why is Microsoft doing this? Maybe to send a warning to those who are involved in click fraud to stop doing it or else. Or maybe Microsoft wants more buzz about their search ad network, adCenter?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This almost wants me to switch to an Android device, even though I am getting the new iPhone 3GS on Friday. Google announced that you can now search Google Maps on an Android device by your voice, a lot like how you use the Google Mobile Search app on your iPhone.

Christopher from the Google Maps team said in a Google Mobile Help forum that the new features include

• Search by voice
• Transit and walking directions
• Business details and reviews
• Latitude Updates

Plus, Google fixed the latitude background location updates will continue to update. Previously, a bug was causing background updating to periodically stop for some users.

Here are additional notes left by Christopher:

• The "Google Maps" update in Android Market will only appear for users with system updates for "Cupcake" and above (or SDK 1.5+; see Settings> About phone > Firmware version). If your device does not yet have Cupcake (v1.5), please be patient until it is available in your locale.
• If you experience the "Installation error - package file was not signed correctly" error, this is because your device is not on a user build identified as kila-user, opal-user, etc. (Settings > About phone > Build number). If your device is on a "userdebug" build, this update will not be able to be installed from Market at this time.
• Known issue: Traffic data use may cause some memory issues and turn Traffic off with an error message indicating this. We are aware of this issue and investigating possible fixes.
• Street View was not removed but is now available contextually within Maps instead of as its own map mode. For example, search for an address or business (or use the new long-press the map feature) to pick a location on the map. If Street View data is available, you'll have the option of seeing the imagery along with the rest of the options for that location (Show on map, Get directions, Search nearby, etc.).

Forum discussion at Google Mobile Help.

A couple weeks ago, the news that Google treated the distribution of PageRank for pages with nofollow links differently then they would other pages. As explained then:

If you have $10 in authority to spend on those ten links, and you block 5 of them, the other 5 aren’t going to get $2 each. They’re still getting $1. It’s just that the other $5 you thought you were saving is now going to waste.

So Google's Matt Cutts finally wrote a detailed blog post on PageRank Sculpting that discusses what Google does and doesn't do. Go read the whole post when you have a chance, it is very important.

This has been in place for about a year and no SEO really picked up on it.

To my question of "Are Blogs Doomed With NoFollow PageRank Sculpting Issue?" Matt replied:

Q: Okay, but doesn’t this encourage me to link out less? Should I turn off comments on my blog?

A: I wouldn’t recommend closing comments in an attempt to “hoard” your PageRank. In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of our system encourage links to good sites.

SEOs and webmasters are simply not happy. The bottom line is this is how it has been for about a year and I doubt it will change.

I am not going to summarize the comments in the thread, simply cause I am not feeling all that great, but I'll link them for you. There are some interesting comments in the thread and in Matt's post.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Sphinn.

Good news for those looking to get included in Google News. Google finally released a much needed Google News Publisher FAQ to answer those common questions.

The FAQ is focused on publishers looking to get in to Google News, and also to help them with issues and technical requirements. The article is broken down into the following categories:

• Getting accepted in Google News
• Including my content in Google News
• Sitemaps questions
• Help! Something's broken!

Google News was a very mysterious beast back in the day. The Google News team has recently done an excellent job communicating with publishers and webmasters on various inclusion and technical issues.

Forum discussion at Google News Help.

Several days ago Yahoo announced support for something called the common tag. In short, it basically gives developers a way to tag their content in a more unified way.

Vanessa Fox has the most detailed explanation of how this all works. In fact, Yahoo's post on the topic is almost unusable.

So please go skim her article and then come back here and let me know if you plan on giving this common tag a try. Personally, I doubt I will.

Here is the poll:

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

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. Note, I am not feeling well, so I am sorry for the little coverage today. There was a lot more I wanted to write, so it will have to wait.

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

The Google AdSense blog announced they have expanded the local currencies in the reports to nine more countries. The countries include Australia, Austria, Belgium, Finland, Greece, Portugal, South Africa, Switzerland, and the UK.

Here is what Google said, and read it carefully before you make any changes:

If you're located in one of these countries, you can now update your account to display earnings in your local currency. After you've updated your account, any earnings generated from advertisers paying in currencies other than your local currency will be converted daily. If you receive payments in your local currency, this means that there also won't be any additional conversions at the end of the month. However, you can still choose to receive payments in U.S. Dollars or change your payment method at any time.

Before enabling local currency reports in your account, we recommend downloading and saving copies of your past reports in U.S. Dollars for your records. You can then update your account by signing in to AdSense and clicking the link in the green prompt on your Reports Overview page. You'll be asked to review and agree to a new set of Terms and Conditions. Unfortunately, we're not able to interpret the meaning of changes in our legal documents for publishers -- if you have questions or need legal advice on interpreting the new Terms, please don't hesitate to contact your attorney.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Google Webmaster Help thread reports the small but yet significant changes made to how Google displays and aggregates the URLs listed in the external link reports within Google Webmaster Tools.

The main changes include:

• Link counts are reduced by a nice percentage
• Ordering of the URLs are now different
• 301 redirected URLs no longer seem to appear in this list

Google confirmed that they handle 301s differently. JohnMu explained:

Redirects are a normal part of the web, but for Webmaster Tools we've currently opted to show only the links that are actually verifiable by visiting the pages directly. It would be nice to show "everything", but at some point we have to draw the line and make sure that the average user can still use it :-).

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: June 15, 2009"

A WebmasterWorld thread is asking AdSense publisher what they call themselves. They said, often when they met people or speak to people, they are not sure what to say when people ask them what they do. Are they are publisher? Maybe a webmaster? How about an online marketer?

I am sure on many levels, AdSense publishers are all of the above. So I decided to create a poll to allow you publisher to answer anonymously what you would call yourself. Feel free to pick more than one choice or add "other."

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The NY Post, in NY Post style, went with an over the top title for their latest article about Google, which read Fear Grips Google. Here is the introductory paragraph:

You'd think nothing would get under the skin of search giant Google.

But co-founder Sergey Brin is so rattled by the launch of Microsoft's rival search engine that he has assembled a team of top engineers to work on urgent upgrades to his Web service, The Post has learned.

The NY Post has a history of going a bit (to say the least) over the top with their reporting. Mashable said, "the Post has a knack for spin, and while Google may not be gripped by fear, we’d think it only prudent for the search leader to consider what threat, if any, Bing poses to its dominant market position... The bottom line: we’d be more concerned if Google was not paying attention to new competitors."

It doesn't appear that SEOs and Webmasters are fooled by the title either.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

If you are currently seeing a warning in Google Webmaster Tools that reads, "Invalid XML tag," don't worry. There are many webmasters reporting the issue and Google has confirmed it is a bug. Google said in an announcement post:

Some Blogspot / Blogger sites have reported seeing a warning "Invalid XML Tag. This tag was not recognized. Please fix it and resubmit. Parent tag: author." This message is just informational and does not affect our parsing of your RSS feed for Sitemaps, nor does it affect your site's crawling and indexing.

I personally saw this error presented on a site that was not Blogspot or Blogger on Thursday or Friday and the error is now gone.

Googler, JohnMu said:

As mentioned in the other thread, you can safely ignore this message. It's more of a warning and the URLs in your feed will still get processed normally. No need to worry :-))

Forum discussion at two Google Webmaster Help.

It appears that Google has quietly removed the file size figure from the search results. I am not sure when this happened, it could have been a year ago, but it did happen.

A year and a half ago I took a screen capture of a search result for my company rustybrick and it had the file size of the page listed in the search results.

Now, the same search, does not return the file size:

A WebmasterWorld thread recently noticed this go missing from the search results. Most people are in favor of removing the file size label, being that many people have broadband connections these days. They rather see other information listed in the search results, such as if the site is in flash or if there is video or PDFs on the page, as opposed to the file size of a given web page.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Bing added instant translation as a smart answer or instant answer to their search. For example, if you search for how do you say search in spanish you get the answer "búsqueda."

Google also has some form of translation OneBox results, but they are not as discoverable as Bing. That means, you can't just type, how do you say something, or translate X for me.

Even more importantly, Webmasters approve of how this instant translation works in Bing. Not only is the translation pretty good, the way the translation shows up in the search results are "neat."

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

In this week's video, I discuss the recent debate on if Google sees SEOs as criminals or not. I also discuss how Google is now notifying webmasters after they review a site. Google updated the webmaster tools design, added a major feature for domain change and also added email notifications. Google UK is suffering from a major influx. 70 percent of our readers actually like Bing. Google continues test of images between the snippet and the display URL. Google appeals and beats AdSense publisher in appeals court. Google sent the wrong publisher the wrong check. Google released a new iPhone friendly iGoogle. People are upset that Google showed a Tetris logo on D-Day, while Bing did the right thing. Facebook is launching usernames. That was this week on 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:

• Does Google See SEOs as Criminals?
• Google Now Notifying Webmasters After Reconsideration Request Review via Email
• Google Finally Adds Domain Change Tool & Launches New Webmaster Tools Design
• Google Quickly Fixes Webmaster Tools Issues
• Google UK Search Shake Up - June 2009
• 70% Of Our Readers Like Bing
• Images Under Google Search Snippets
• Google Always Wins: AdSense Publisher Gets Shot Down in Appeals Court
• Google Sent AdSense Publisher Wrong Check
• 6 Months Later, Google Finally Releases a New Mobile iGoogle
• Searchers Disappointed With Google Celebrating Tetris Over Honoring D-Day
• Facebook Launches Usernames But Stumps Sabbath Observers

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: June 12, 2009"

About six months ago, we reported Google Drops iPhone Optimized iGoogle: Users Revolt. In short, Google dropped the iPhone flavored iGoogle and iGoogle mobile users were really upset and they were upset for a long time.

Now, Google announced a new iGoogle currently being tested for iPhone and Android users. Here are screen captures:

Much cleaner look for iPhone/Android users, don't you think? The previous look that people were complaining about looked more like this:

Paul from the Google team said in the long Google Web Search Help thread that has the complaints about this:

I know you all are very passionate about iGoogle on the iPhone. I'm happy to announce that we've got a new version for you to check out! See the article linked below for details.

If you'd like to share feedback about the new version, we're collecting it over in the Google Mobile forum.

Not everyone is currently happy with the changes, but I personally think this is a major improvements from six months ago.

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

Yesterday we reported about the new Google Webmaster Tools, with the new change of address feature and a few other new things with it. We also informed you that there were several bugs in the new interface and features.

It appears that those bugs are now resolved. The original Google Webmaster Help thread seems to have confirmation that the change of address feature is now working. Plus there is an announcement post that says that the issues with the Webmaster Tools iGoogle Gadgets, Sitemaps submissions and Change of Address features are all resolved.

Here are some of the many threads with the issues:

• New Webmaster Tools Interface - External Links Missing!, Google Webmaster Help
• Change of Address feature seems to be broken, Google Webmaster Help
• New Webmaster Tools - says site not verified when submitting a new sitemap, Google Webmaster Help

We know that Google is forcing AdWords advertisers into the new AdWords interface sooner then later. Besides for all the complaints about the interface, some are complaining that Google is encouraging advertisers to sign up for courses on how to use the new interface.

A HighRankings Forum thread has discussion around why Google is first of all forcing advertisers into an interface they don't like and then encouraging them to pay to learn how to use it.

Google organizes what are called Seminars for Success, which are actually mostly run by third-party agencies that specialize in training AdWords customers. The day long seminar costs $249 for AdWords classes.

The advertiser is steamed about paying for this. He said:

I received an email from Google saying in effect their teaching their adwords training sessions in the new interface..translation...pay us and we will teach you the new interface!!!

The cost for the seminar seems relatively small. It seems like Google is subsidizing the costs for the most part. I am not sure I agree with giving these seminars for nothing.

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

Some more sad news for the struggling search engine, Ask.com. Ask is closing down Ask Japan, aka Ask.jp on June 25th.

Bill, the moderator of the Asia specific forums at WebmasterWorld explained that Ask.jp is "reorganizing to focus on B2B solutions. Their consumer search will cease operations on June 25." The consumer search product includes Ask.jp.

Google Translate can somewhat translate the statement:

From patronage, Ask.jp We very appreciate your business. This time, ask JEPI Dot Corporation, which specializes in business reorganization and corporate solutions, Services include: Search Ask.jp (www.ask.jp) will close.

[End] Target Service
June 25: Ask.jp (web search, blog search, product search, category search)

Ask debuted in Japan in August 2004.

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: June 11, 2009"

Back in early 2006, we called for a Google Certified Domain Change solution to allow webmasters to communicate to Google when we move domains. Moving domains is one of the biggest concerns SEOs and webmasters have for when it comes to losing rankings in Google.

This tool, named the change of address feature allows you to verify two domains in Google Webmaster Tools and then tell Google that one verified domain is moving to another verified domain.

There is complete documentation on how this works at this Google document. Plus, you should 100% read the moving your site guidelines before making such a move. Here is a picture of the change address form.

One issue is that the change of address feature seems like it is currently not working. Scott Clark posted in Google Webmaster Help that when he tries the feature, it returns an error that reads, "Hm. Something isn't right. We're checking into it now." Googlers said they are looking into the issue and hopefully it will be resolved shortly.

In addition to the change of address feature, Google also launched the new Google Webmaster Tools design, which they have been testing for just about a month. Plus, Google added a neat feature to be emailed when a message is sent in the Google Webmaster Tools message box.

Forum discussion at:

• Change of Address feature seems to be broken, Google Webmaster Help
• Google Adds Change of Address To Notify Google Of Domain Change, Sphinn
• Google Webmaster Tools Has New Look!, DigitalPoint Forums
• NEW - Change of Address in Google Webmaster Tools, WebmasterWorld
• You Can Now Officially Tell Google When You Change Domains!, HighRankings Forums

Update: The issues with the new webmaster tools and change of address feature have now been resolved.

This Saturday, on June 13th, between 10am to 2pm (PST), Google will be performing system wide maintenance on the AdWords platform.

The Inside AdWords Blog wrote:

On Saturday, June 13th, 2009, the AdWords system will be unavailable from approximately 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. PDT due to system maintenance. While you won't be able to sign in to your accounts during this time, your campaigns will continue to run as usual. We apologize for any inconvenience.

This is typical monthly maintenance, so no need for concern.

If you have any questions or concerns you can post them in either Google AdWords Help or WebmasterWorld Forums.

Forum discussion at Google AdWords Help or WebmasterWorld.

I found a fun thread at HighRankings Forums that discusses what he calls "unintentional reciprocal links." What I find funny about that name is that, if you think about it, an unintentional reciprocal link, but definition, is a natural link.

I believe this person is worried that Google or a search engine might classify his site to be in a link scheme if the people who he linked to, links back to him. In many cases, the places we link to, will naturally link back.

How often do I link from here to Search Engine Land and from Search Engine Land back to here? Is that a reciprocal link? How often do I link to other search blogs, that link back to me?

It is just natural to have "unintentional reciprocal links," so don't sweat it.

In the thread, Jill Whalen, owner of High Rankings, added an other point about reciprocal links:

In that case, the original poster is under the false impression that a reciprocal links are penalized. Since they're not, there's nothing to worry about.

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forums.

I don't think I wrote about Google's latest search results test. Over the past month or so, Google has been testing images, several of them, directly under a search snippet. BlogStorm first reported the finding back on May 26th, and I covered his finding as Search Engine Land on the same day. Then it seemed to be hitting the Google UK servers as some sort of test.

Well, it seems to have expanded to Google Sweden. Brent Csutoras (a nice guy btw) wrote how they are now seeing the same thing in Google Sweden for a search on [vigselringar] which means wedding rings. Here is a picture taken from his blog, since I cannot reproduce it here:

So keep an eye on this, because it might be coming to Google.com.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Facebook announced they will be adding usernames for profile URLs. For example, my current Facebook URL is http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=528950782 but hopefully sometime early next week, it will become facebook.com/barryschwartz. In fact, it will, since Journalists don't have to wait for the Friday night deadline to secure their username on Facebook.

How does this apply to SEO? Well, for public profile pages that want to solve any online reputation management issues, a nice URL with your name in it, might help a bit.

So what is the issue? Well, as I tweeted the other day, Facebook is opening the first come first serve username registration at the same time Sabbath observers (like me) cannot login and reserve our names. Facebook said, "starting at 12:01 a.m. EDT on Saturday, June 13, you'll be able to choose a username on a first-come, first-serve basis for your profile and the Facebook Pages that you administer by visiting www.facebook.com/username/."

Do I think Facebook did this intentionally? No way. Probably just an oversight that will impact many Facebook users. Personally, I did not care that much, I just felt bad for some die hard Facebook users. Now, I can even less, being that I am a journalist and I reserved my name already. But I still feel bad.

Tamar FriendFeeded (is that a word) that she was upset she couldn't secure her name since she is also a Shabbath observer. Hopefully someone can help her out. I was told that /barry was already taken, I think by a Facebook employee.

A WebmasterWorld thread has SEOs and marketers already thinking of ways to use these username URLs for their benefit.

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: June 10, 2009"

I have excellent news for the SEO world today. It seems like Google has finally pushed through a change with the reconsideration request process that SEOs and webmasters have been asking for since the reconsideration request began.

Now, if you submit a reconsideration request, Google may email you a few days later with a notification that they have actually reviewed your site. The review email reads:

Subject: We've processed your reconsideration request for [mywebsite.com]

We received a request from a site owner to reconsider how we index the following site: [mywebsite.com].

We've now reviewed your site. When we review a site, we check to see if it's in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines. If we don't find any problems, we'll reconsider our indexing of your site. If your site still doesn't appear in our search results, check our Help Center for steps you can take.

Googler, Sagar, confirmed this to be the case. Sagar said that this is a recent addition to the Google Webmaster reconsideration request process. He added:

If your site starts showing up in the index after you get the confirmation message, your request was approved. However, if you are still having issues there is a good chance you are still in violation of our guidelines.

So now, if you submit a reconsideration request, you can know a bit later if your site is still in violation of Google's webmaster guidelines or not. This is a most welcomed addition.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

A Google AdSense Help thread reports that one publisher not only received his check in the mail this month, but also received the check for another publisher in the same envelope.

The publisher said in the thread:

My payment cheque arrived with someone else's cheque too. I don't in the least mind posting it on, but I feel I ought to let Google and the cheque's owner know what's happening. Who do I email?

Google emailed this publisher directly, to not drive more attention to the issue in a public setting.

I assume the automated check machine and mailer accidently had some paper glitch and one check got stuck to another and both were placed in the same envelope. This is the first time I heard of such an issue with Google AdSense before.

It is funny in that Michael Arrington received a $1.3 million check by accident the other day.

Forum discussion at Google AdSense Help.

Some times I have to point out the most ridiculous threads in the forums. This morning I spotted a thread at Google Web Search Help where a person was complaining that searching in Google Images for the search phrase [nude women] returned some images of (now hold on to your chair now....) nude women!

The individual wrote:

Please take nude & half dressed women off your images if you type in a name for a women alot of half dressed women come up & young kids do not need to see this kind of stuff. if you are looking for a type of bra alot of bad stuff comes up. i did not think google would have this kind of stuff on there website.

What type of search engine would Google be if it did not return images that were related to your search query? If you don't want your children searching Google for nude women, then you should get a good internet filter. Also, Google does a pretty good job filtering out nude women, even for a search of nude women, when the safe filter is set to its highest level.

Sorry for the rant, I am low on sleep.

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

Google's AdSenseAdvisor posted a thread at WebmasterWorld notifying AdSense publishers that there will be a reporting delay and we should not panic.

Normally, when the reports lag, you see hundreds of posts in the various forums with publishers panicking. It is no surprise some people worry, because some people are fully dependent on the income they make from Google through AdSense.

AdSenseAdvisor said yesterday at about 2pm (EST):

Just writing to confirm that you may be seeing a temporary delay in the reporting of clicks that started this morning (June 9). We're still recording clicks and your stats will catch up. Ad targeting and ad serving are not affected. While this is well within the "no need to panic" window of reporting time, I wanted to give you a heads up in case you see impressions registering normally but a lower-than-usual number of clicks showing up in your reports.

I'm sorry if this has caused you any stress.

Hopefully the reports are now up to speed.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The Nofollow PageRank sculpting topic was not the only heated debate at last week's SMX Advanced conference. We have some SEOs claiming Google sees all SEOs as criminals before being innocent.

Michael Gray's How Google Profiles SEO’s and Lisa Barone's Google Openly Profiles SEOs As Criminals are both well written pieces arguing that Google doesn't treat SEOs equally to all personalities on the internet. Let me quote one section to sum it up, but honestly, you should read both pieces in their entirety.

How does this show that Google is profiling SEO’s and not the rest of the blogging world? How else can you explain high profile A-List bloggers like Robert Scoble and Sarah Lacy accepting free all expense paid trips to Isreal and not getting penalized? How can Guy Kawasaki get “loaned” one, two, three cars in three years and still be within Google’s guidelines . How can “lending” Guy Kawasaki an Audi Q7 for three months in exchange for him blogging about it be OK but I can’t connect bloggers with people who want to give away a pair of sunglasses? Matt Cutt’s says “The closer you get to money for links, the higher risk we consider it”. Go to any rental car agency ask how much it is to rent an Audi Q7 for three months, you’ll have your answer how close it is to the money.

On the other hand, Susan Esparza takes the opposite view in her piece named I Don't Like Conflict (But Google Doesn't Think SEOs are Criminals). Susan explains that SEO are rightly held to a higher standard, because SEOs are search professionals.

I totally see both sides of the argument. I thought I conduct an anonymous poll asking our readers if they think Google see SEOs as criminals or not. Here is the poll, please have your friends take the poll:

Forum discussion at Sphinn (Lisa), Sphinn (Michael) and Sphinn (Susan).

In April at Search Engine Land I reported Google agreed to settle on an AdWords case for $20 million. The case was over the daily budget feature and how many advertisers may have exceeded that budget by 120% on occasions.

Google said then, "Google believes the claims are without merit, but we are pleased to have the litigation behind us and to move forward with our business objectives."

Now, I am seeing reports via DigitalPoint Forums that dozens, if not thousands, of advertisers have received a notification, via email, about this settlement.

I have a copy of the settlement as a PDF document for those interested in the extreme legal details.

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: June 9, 2009"

When Bing launched a bit over a week ago, we asked our readers via an anonymous poll if they like the new Microsoft search engine.

To my surprise, 70% of the responses said they like the new search engine.

Keep in mind, the index is mostly the same, but the search interface is the major difference, from what I understand. Interface is huge and clearly plays a major roll in relevancy.

Here is the break down of the 120 responses, where I asked, "Do You Like Bing's Search Results?"

:: Yes said 83 respondents or 69%
:: No said 29 respondents or 24%
:: Other... said 8 respondents or 7%

Here are the other answers:

• they're okay i guess
• Does it matter? People won't switch.
• Relevancy of sites returned is still hinky. but there are interesting feautures
• Where's the Sarcastic 'yes' option?
• Generally good, local crap
• It's really the same, nothing new.
• No different than LiveSearch results
• It's OK but not enough to switch

Forum discussion continued at:

• Microsoft To Launch Decision Engine 'Bing' June 3, WebmasterWorld
• Microsoft Unveils Bing - the new search engine, DigitalPoint Forums
• Microsoft’s Bing Vs Google: Head To Head Search Results, Sphinn
• Bing : Micrsoft's new search engine, Search Engine Roundtable Forums
• Microsoft’s Bing Vs Google: Head To Head Search Results, Sphinn
• Will Bing,com be your next Search Engine?, Search Engine Watch Forums
• Live Gone - Now Bing, DigitalPoint Forums
• Live switched to Bing, WebmasterWorld

In early March we reported that if you take Google to small claims court, you might win. It talked about the story where a small AdSense publisher sued Google in small claims court for terminating his account and not paying him. The publisher won in small claims court, but on May 22nd, Google took the publisher back to court, to appeal the decision and Google won.

Google showed how the publisher violated the terms of service and thus had the right to be terminated. Specifically, the publisher asked his viewers to click on the Google ads, which is not in accordance with Google's TOS. The court reversed the decision and the publisher went home empty handed.

I posted screen captures of the violation and the court PDF at Search Engine Land.

Lesson learned: Do not sue Google when you are clearly wrong, it makes all publishers look bad.

Forum discussion at Sphinn and DigitalPoint Forums.

Update: You can read the publisher's side of the story, which has a lot more detail, over here.

A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion around why the display URL differs in the "More Sponsored Links" section, when compared to the normal ads on the search results page.

WebmasterWorld's Preferred Member, Rehan said:

The first thing to realize is that the Sponsored Links search is unrelated to the keywords chosen by the advertiser to display the ad. Instead, the results shown are the ads that include the query words in the ad text. That's why you'll see only one or two ads at google.com/search?q=raccoon+squirrel (because it's not a great keyword to advertise for) but lots of them at google.com/sponsoredlinks?q=raccoon+squirrel (all of the ads shown contain those two words).

So if the Sponsored Links search is unrelated to the keywords and shows just the ads that have the query words, that's why it uses the default destination URL for the ad rather than the specific ones for the keywords.

The more link came to AdWords ads sometime in late 2004. Google then updated the design of that page in July 2008. Which is actually when the above changes happened.

You can read more about the more sponsored link at this Google help page.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Over the past week or so, I have been hearing chatter about a Google UK search shuffle of some kind. I did not see any forum threads in the discussion forums I track, until Gabs posted one in Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

The changed pushed many sites a couple hundred points down in the Google UK search results. But as of yesterday, many of those sites returned to their previous position.

Gabs said:

Last week many seo noticed an influx of US domain for many terms in the uk effecting rankings..

Many UK ranking seem to of returned today.. Hope it sticks...

You can see some of the tweets on uk serps discussing the findings.

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: June 8, 2009"

There is nothing new to Google Suggest being controversial with their suggestions. But when Google Suggest became the default on Google.com about a year ago, the suggestions became more prominent.

The business of online reputation management has been growing with Google's dominance. Normally, you don't see reputation management issues about individuals within the Google Suggest area. However, I spotted a Google Web Search Help thread with one person who said that if you type his name in Google, it suggests [scammer] at the end.

This individual is embarrassed and wants that suggestion removed from Google. He asked how can that be done. The quick answer is that it cannot be removed. Googler, Jem, said:

Suggestions in Google Suggest are based on actual queries done by other Google users. At Google, we believe strongly in the democracy of the Web, so we don't make manual changes to the suggestions. But that doesn't mean the suggestions are set in stone. Changes in the popularity of a search can affect whether it continues to appear over time.

In short, if people stop searching for his name with scammer at the end, then it might not show up in the future.

Can a reputation management company help with that? Possibly.

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

This June 6th, Saturday, is known to many as D-Day. June 6, 1944 was the day the D-Day operation began and thousands of soldiers died. It was also the 25th anniversary of the popular computer game, Tetris.

Google decided to celebrate Tetris's 25th anniversary with a Google Doodle, while Bing honored D-Day with a special theme.

Google Tetris Doodle on June 6, 2009:

Bing's D-Day Theme on June 6, 2009:

There are many searchers very upset with Google over celebrating Tetris overing honoring the fallen soldiers. We know that Google often tries to stay away from posting logos for sad events. Google even commented why they don't do a Google Doodle for memorial day (although they did post a Google ribbon this year). Google said in 2008:

Thank you for your note. We understand your interest in seeing a Memorial Day Google logo. If we were to commemorate this holiday, we'd want to express reverence; however, as Google's special logos tend to be lighthearted in nature, this would be a particularly challenging design.

We wouldn't want to create a graphic that could be interpreted as disrespectful in any way.

Should Google have not posted anything? Should Google have posted a D-Day Doodle? Should Google just do whatever they want? Take our poll:

Forum discussion at several forums:

• How can Google recognize Tetris on 6 June instead of D-Day (6 June 1944)?, Google Webmaster Help
• New Google Logo : Celebrating 25 Years of The Tetris Effect, DigitalPoint Forums
• Google start page Tetris on June 6?, Google Web Search Help
• Tetris? New Google Logo, Google Webmaster Help
• WHAT ABOUT D-DAY !!!!!, Google Web Search Help

Starting around mid-May, using Google with the Opera browser was somewhat of a challenge. In short, if you went to Google.com, entered a keyword search and hit the return key, Google would not do anything. You had to manually click on the "Google Search" button with your mouse.

A Google Web Search Help thread has dozens of reports from unhappy Google and Opera users. Google confirmed the bug on June 1st, saying:

A fix is on the way!

Pretty soon, hitting the Enter key after typing a query will perform a Google search in the versions of the Opera browser that you've reported.

I wanted to check in with all the relevant people on my team before giving you the official word on this issue. That explains the delay in my response. I understand the frustration at not hearing sooner about such an important issue. Promise to do better next time (lets hope there won't be a next time!).

Currently, it appears the enter key now works on the search results pages, but searching in Google.com's home page, still requires the click of a mouse.

I believe the bug came with Google's new Google suggest features which launched on the same day the bugs began being reporting.

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

For about a week or more now, iGoogle users have been complaining that their feeds in the iGoogle theme are not loading. There are dozens of threads about this issue, but there is one really large one at < ahref="http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Web%20Search/thread?tid=0cf4230531ec931e&hl=en">Google Web Search Help on the isssue.

Here is a screen capture of the issue, which I was able to replicate on one of the 6 feeds on my iGoogle page. Keep in mind, I don't use iGoogle, so I tested it for the first time in months. As you can see from the picture below, one of my feeds, Google Blogoscoped, was not loading:

On June 5th, Friday, Googler Paul said:

Hi everyone -- thanks again for your diligence reporting this problem. I can confirm that this is definitely a problem on our end, not yours, and we're working on implementing a fix. Meanwhile, refreshing your page may get your feeds to load properly.

Today, three days later, the issue is still bother iGoogle users.

Forum discussion at < ahref="http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Web%20Search/thread?tid=0cf4230531ec931e&hl=en">Google Web Search Help.

A week later, Google added Microsoft's new search engine, Bing, to Google Analytics. Last week we reported that webmasters were frustrated that Bing was not available in the search engine referral reports within the free Google Analytics immediately.

It seems like a week later, Google finally added Bing support. Sometime over the weekend, looks like possibly on Saturday night, Google added the Bing support.

If you now go to Google Analytics and click on the traffic sources and then search engines, you should be able to see the keyword referrals Bing sent you since June 5th, Friday.

If I compare June 5, 6, and 7th, Bing sent me 0.39% of my search engine traffic. How about you?

Forum discussion at Google Analytics Help.

In this week in search, I discuss how Matt Cutts of Google's statements on the nofollow attribute used for PageRank sculpting has sent shock waves through the industry. I discuss that topic for a while, so you may want to listen to it. Yahoo Search had a confirmed algorithm and index update. Google's search snippets can be dangerous and might even get you sued. Microsoft launched Bing early, people like it but it wasn't added to Google Analytics, doesn't seem to support the NOODP tag and hijacked IE6 users. AdWords is testing a very neat feature named Bid Simulator. Google Local Business Center added nice analytics. Google Square is live, what should SEOs know about it. SMX Advanced was this passed week, don't miss the live blogging. That was this past 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:

• NoFollow To Cause Revolt: Wasted PageRank via Sculpting & JavaScript Links Require NoFollow
• Are Blogs Doomed With NoFollow PageRank Sculpting Issue?
• Yahoo Search June 2009 Update?
• Google's Dangerous Search Result Snippets
• Should Webmasters Be Responsible For Google's Snippets?
• Microsoft Takes New Search Engine, Bing, Live Early
• Google Analytics To Add Bing to Search Engines Report
• Is Bing Not Honoring NOODP Tag?
• Bing Hijacks IE6 Toolbar Search, Google Users Upset
• Google AdWords Testing "Bid Simulator"
• Detailed Look At Google's New Local Business Center Analytics
• Google Squared Is Live: What SEOs & Searchers Need To Know
• Live Blog Coverage of SMX Advanced 2009

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: June 5, 2009"

Some advertisers are noticing a new feature in Google AdWords. The feature is named "bid simulator" and it shows you what number of impressions and position you can expect if you increase or decrease your bid.

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread has a picture of the feature from one advertiser. Here is a screen shot taken from the PDF linked to below:

This seems to have been released on May 20th to some advertisers. Someone posted a PDF document of the reference guide to Google AdWords Bid Simulator. Here is the PDF and below is an embed of it:

Google Adwords Bid Simulator Reference Guide

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Update: Google sent me a statement about this, saying:

As part of our ongoing commitment to innovation, Google constantly tests new tools to improve our AdWords product offering and provide additional benefit to our advertisers. We are currently testing a feature called "bid simulator," which helps advertisers make informed and efficient bid management decisions by estimating the results they would have achieved using hypothetical bid values. This feature is currently in a limited beta with a small number of advertisers. We have no additional news to announce at this time regarding developments for Google AdWords.

A Google Web Search Help thread tells us how to change the iGoogle layout from the new tabs along the left-side of the page to the old style of tabs across the top of the page.

To bring back the old top tabs, just go to google.com/ig?hl=all. In the past, bring up the old top tabs worked by going to google.com/ig?gl=all but now google.com/ig?hl=all is how to get there.

Here is a picture of the old tabs:

Here is a picture of the new tabs:

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

Google Squared made its debut yesterday as a Google Labs project at google.com/squared. Honestly, it is very cool to use and has a lot of potential. But it is also extremely risky and often shows very poor results.

Google Squared tries to take the unstructured nature of crawling the web and making it into structure data. In some cases it does a nice job, but in many cases, it fails completely or it shows false information.

Since I had a kid recently, I decided to search for jewish schools to send her to. The thing is, it only listed one Jewish school. It should have listed hundreds, but it did not. I understand, possibly the Jewish school web sites are built incredibly poor from a search friendly standpoint that Google could not extract the content from it to include it in a square.

So I moved on and I search for jewish newspapers to potentially advertise RustyBrick's Jewish iPhone Apps in. We got a neat ad by the way. That search worked pretty well.

As a searcher, you need to be aware that Google Squared is useful but you need to know that the data can be seriously flawed. We discussed the dangerous of snippets earlier, and it applies directly here. Over time, I suspect it will get better, but it might take a lot of time.

As an SEO, you should realize that building search friendly sites will only help Google understand your sites and structure it in Google Squared. Is that a good thing? That is up to debate. In any event, if Google remains dominate, which seems like it will for at least the near future, you need to make sure to play their game. Will rich snippets play a roll in this? Maybe. But search engine friendly design, seems key to me.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The Google Security Blog reported that malware is a growing issue. A Google study showed that a single malware source has infected over 60,000 hosts. The chart below shows the number of infected sites over time from the top ten malware sites.

Why is this a SEO issue? Well, it might not hurt your rankings but it will 100% hurt your traffic from Google and traffic in general. Google labels malware sites with a big warning on the Google search results. It looks like this:

Trust me, you don't want malware on your site and you don't want that malware warning.

For our past articles on malware, see here and you can learn how to remove the malware and remove the Google label.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

This week, we had two major stories about Google seriously causing trouble with their search snippets. The first is more obvious with The Register reporting a webmaster was sued for his listing in Google showing something that was not even written on the page. Profy reported that Google Squared, which just went live declared the living to be dead. Yet another case of unstructured search, structuring data into a false fact.

A new Google Webmaster Help thread is now discussing an individual's case of Google showing a search snippet about his company that, he feels, is derogatory about his company. If you do a search for classicexplorations.com in Google, the localsearch.com result shows this:

The owner of the site is very upset that the words "false false false" come before his company name, Classic Explorations. The person contacted LocalSearch.com and LocalSearch.com told him that this was a Google issue. He explained the meta description used for this page did not say the words false on it. LocalSearch.com said that this person needs to Google to fix the issue.

Googler, JohnMu, replied saying:

There is really not much that you could do in a situation like this. For this particular query, the keywords happen to be found on that part of the page, so this is the part that we use for the snippet. I'll pass this on to the team, but I can't guarantee that this will change quickly. In this case, the disadvantage is more on the side of the other website -- users are very unlikely to click on their result (and even more likely to click on your pages :-)), so I wouldn't spend more time worrying about it for the moment.

Clearly this doesn't seem as big of a mistake then declaring a living president as dead or declaring a company went bankrupt when it did not. But this just shows you the power of Google's search snippets and how it can impact a business or truth, as it is known.

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: June 4, 2009"

Yesterday we covered the news that SEOs are wasting PageRank by using the nofollow to sculpt their PageRank. In short, if you had 10 links on a page, and nofollowed 5 of them, the 5 that are followed only get half credit.

So what is the issue with blogs, forum and other user generated content sites? As mentioned in the WebmasterWorld, blogs and other sites that automatically add the nofollow attribute to user generated links, technically should suffer from the way Google handles nofollowed links. Let me explain.

Let's say this blog post has 5 links, 15 comments and then the remaining 20 navigational links in the blog's design. So we have a total of 40 links on a single page, 15 of them are nofollowed since links in the comments automatically get nofollowed. That means 37.5% of the links are wasted, which hurts (well, doesnt help as much) not only the sites I link out to, but also hurts the internal linkage structure of my site.

Why? Well, the links are not worth what they should be, cause of the user generated comments that get nofollowed.

See the issue?

Join the conversation at WebmasterWorld.

So, Microsoft made some serious press with Bing, their new search engine, going live. The search interface is very different from Live.com and some of the vertical search portals, like video, maps, images have new features, but a lot of the tools remain the same.

For example, people are first noticing that Bing has a Local Business Center. Honestly, the way to get there is to go to https://ssl.search.live.com/listings/BusinessSearch.aspx and it will redirect you to https://ssl.bing.com/listings/BusinessSearch.aspx. If you had a Live Search Maps listing, you have a Bing listing.

Same with Bing's webmaster tools, go to http://webmaster.live.com/ and you will be redirected to http://www.bing.com/webmaster. The features remain the same, for the most part, outside of a new logo at the top left.

Sorry for the little rant about Bing being so new and exciting. It is exciting and new, but much of the press around Bing is calling old features new, when they are not new (i.e. Live411 to Bing411).

An interesting Google Webmaster Help thread discusses the old and new way of handling duplicate content. In the old days, you either 301 redirected page A to page B, when there was duplicate content. But if that wasn't possible, you instructed the search engine not to index the duplicate page, by adding a noindex tag to the duplicate page. Some people had this automated through their CMS.

With the addition of the new rel=canonical link attribute, things have changed. The new attribute is basically a 301 redirect, without doing a real redirect. It tells the search engine, page B is a duplicate to page A. At the same time, this is hidden from the normal user of your site.

The Google Webmaster Help thread asked, can you use both, the noindex and rel=canonical tag on the same page?

Googler, JohnMu answers the question from Google's perspective:

This is definitely an interesting question :-). Before the rel=canonical link element was announced, using noindex robots meta tags was one way that webmasters were directing us towards canonicals, so this is certainly something we know and understand. However, with the coming of the rel=canonical link element, the optimal way of specifying a canonical is (apart from using a 301 redirect to the preferred URL) is to only use the rel=canonical link element.

One reason for this is that we sometimes find a non-canonical URL first. If this URL has a noindex robots meta tag, we might decide not to index anything until we crawl and index the canonical URL. Without the noindex robots meta tag (with the rel=canonical link element) we can start by indexing that URL and show it to users in search results. As soon as we crawl the canonical URL, we can change to the canonical URL instead. It's also much safer because you don't have to worry about serving different versions of the content depending on the exact URL :-).

Bottom line, don't do it, try to either not have duplicate content, or use a 301 redirect or use the rel=canonical. You can now stay away from using the noindex tag for these purposes.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

This is one of the first major Search Marketing Expo conferences we have not live blogged ever. The reason was because I recently had a kid and it would be hard to leave at this time. But that doesn't mean there wasn't any live blogging going on.

Several bloggers covered the sessions in live format. I even posted summaries of the coverage I found at Search Engine Land for SMX Advanced Day One and SMX Advanced Day Two coverage.

Lisa Barone has an excellent recap of the OutSpokenMedia live blogging coverage, which you may want to take a look at.

I totally appreciate the work of the live bloggers. Live blogging is incredibly tiring and often a thankless job.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

The other day, Google announced improvements with analytics for the Google Local Business Center. I thought I take you through detailed screen shots of how my business listing appears in the LBC.

(1) Analytic Graphs plotting both "impressions" (views) and "actions":

Impressions are the views of your local listing in Google. Any time someone sees your listing in Google. The actions include clicks on "more info," clicking on "driving directions" or clicking on your web site.

(2) The data summary for the date range listed above:

(3) Top Search Queries used to find your local listing:

(4) Where people are coming from when they click driving directions:

(5) Plus Google added a percent done of your listing, and a quick edit button to add or edit information:

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: June 3, 2009"

This is a quick technical note that I had to disable comments. I am not sure what is going on, but starting this morning, when comments are added, the post's contents would disappear.

So I have disabled comments for now.

I'll try turning them back on later to see if it was a temporary issue. If that doesn't work, then I might have to switch to WordPress or something custom.

Last night at SMX Advanced Matt Cutts of Google reportedly dropped a bombshell on the SEO community when he said that using the nofollow to PageRank sculpt might not work like you (SEOs) thought. Danny Sullivan explained it well:

If you have $10 in authority to spend on those ten links, and you block 5 of them, the other 5 aren’t going to get $2 each. They’re still getting $1. It’s just that the other $5 you thought you were saving is now going to waste.

In Danny's simplistic example, if you have a PageRank of 10 (I know it doesn't work this way) and you link out to ten pages, each page would get PR1. Now, if you nofollow 5 of those links, then the 5 normal links should get PR2s each. This is not the case, instead they get PR1s and the other PR5 is wasted.

But what really annoys me is that Matt left this out of a video he published days before the conference. Matt in his videos, answered a question about PageRank sculpting. He completely left out these details in that video. Why? I am not sure, but watch the video:

Why leave it out there Matt? Was it reserved for SMX? If so, why not wait on that topic and publish the video with the full explanation later?

In any event, Danny goes on to explain that Google now crawls and indexes links within JavaScript’s “onClick” events. Using JavaScript for links you don't want Google to find, for example, text ads, was a great solution. Now, it Google indexes those links, and that means, you need to slap on the nofollow attribute on those links or possibly be penalized in the future.

As you can imagine, both the nofollow sculpting topic of wasted PageRank and the fact that JavaScript links may now need nofollows added to them, are pretty major. Stuff like this can cause a revolt in the SEO world.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Here is the live blog coverage of the news:

• Duplicate Content Solutions & The Canonical Tag - SMX Advanced Coverage 2009, SEO Gadget
• Duplicate Content Solutions & The Canonical Tag, outspokenmedia.com
• Beyond the Usual Link Building, outspokenmedia.com
• Beyond the usual linkbuilding - SMX Advanced 2009, SEO Gadget
• Live from SMX Advanced: Beyond the Usual Link Building, Search Marketing Sage
• Nofollow Makes News at SMX Advanced, BruceClay.com
• You&A With Matt Cutts, outspokenmedia.com

It is that time of the month again and we got your Google Webmaster report based on a new WebmasterWorld thread.

The main thing I see repeated throughout the thread is that Google seems to be bouncing some results around by plus or minus fifteen positions. One SEO put it like this:

My site is recovered for 60% of terms and back to old positions. For 25% of terms is back but lower for +/- 10 or 15 positions. For 15% terms is still not back. And within 15% is one of most import keywords.

That really is what most of the thread is about today. The last webmaster report is the May 2009 webmaster report. Here are some other key items that happened with Google over the past month.

• Small Google May 2009 Update?
• Google May 2009 Toolbar PageRank Update
• Google Webmaster Tools Tests New Design
• Google Updates Backlink Data in New Webmaster Tools
• Most Webmasters Will Use Google's New Rich Snippet Markups
• Google Web Search's New Click Tracking
• Google Launches New Search Suggestions & Drops Counts
• Google Wonder Wheel & Search Options Go Live
• Why Does My Google Profile Not Show For A Google Search?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday, I wrote at Search Engine Land about a report from The Register about how a Dutch company was sued over the snippet Google choose for a certain web page of theirs. Let me quickly explain what happened.

A web page on Miljoenhuizen.nl showed up in Google for the search phrase [Zwartepoorte] and [bankrupt]. When you read the snippet under the Miljoenhuizen.nl listing in Google, it basically read that Zwartepoorte was bankrupt. The issue is, Zwartepoorte was not bankrupt. So Zwartepoorte sued Miljoenhuizen.nl to make Google remove the snippet. The thing is, Miljoenhuizen.nl did not say Zwartepoorte was bankrupt, Google took several words on a page and mixed them together to completely make that up.

A Dutch court ordered Miljoenhuizen.nl to change the page, so Google's snippet would change. Miljoenhuizen.nl removed the page and the issue is now resolved.

Personally, I think it is crazy for a court to make such a request. But what do I know? I really want to see how you guys feel about this.

Should webmasters be responsible for what Google shows in their snippets about our web pages? Take our anonymous poll:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google has been holding these webinars to help AdSense publishers pick up new tricks and tips. The latest webinar is on the topic of Channels/Advanced Reporting. That topic includes:

• Learn how to set up channel tracking in your AdSense account
• Find out how you can optimize AdSense using channel data.
• Track AdSense performance for a specific ad placement
• Measure the performance of individual sites

The webinar is tomorrow, June 4, 2009 at 6:30 pm PDT. You should be able to sign up via this page, but for some reason, the signup link doesn't seem to be working for me at this moment. I posted the issue to Google, so hopefully it will work shortly.

Forum discussion at Google AdSense Help.

Update: Here is a link you can use to register.

It has been about five years since I last interviewed Patrick Gavin, and back then I interviewed Patrick on his new company, Text Link Ads (TLA). Who knew TLA would have such a huge impact on the lives of so many SEOs and shape this industry, for better or worse. I should add that TLA has been a long time advertiser here and RustyBrick, my company, does work for TLA on the development side.

Patrick has stepped down from TLA's parent company, MediaWhiz a few months ago. Patrick has been informing various bloggers about his new SEO venture with Andy Hagans named DIYSEO.com, Do It Yourself SEO. Since Patrick is one of the most successful, honest and caring people in the industry, I thought I would cover a Sphinn thread on this new project. I asked Patrick several questions over instant messenger on DIYSEO.com. Here is that interview:

Barry Schwartz: Hi Patrick, thanks for agreeing to answer some questions about your new SEO venture, named DIYSEO.com. Can you first tell us a little bit about the new business?
Patrick Gavin: Thanks Barry. Sure, DIYSEO is a venture I am launching with Andy Hagans. The product is a SEO software platform aimed at small business website owners.

Barry Schwartz: Can you tell me about some of the software's features? What features will make this the killer SEO app?
Patrick Gavin: To start with our software is not a suite of tools, instead it is a task based system designed to give website owners a step by step playbook on how to improve their natural search engine rankings. It is unique in that it gives advice tailored to specific verticals. When a site owner begins the process, they complete a questionnaire. We then take that data to give them an SEO campaign and task list that is truly geared towards their vertical.

Barry Schwartz: I saw that ShoeMoney wrote about your new tools. But doesn't ShoeMoney also have his own SEO tools he is selling? How does yours compare to his?
Patrick Gavin: ShoeMoney has a great suite of tools. The difference to us is we are not designed for professional internet marketers who are looking for advanced tools. We instead are designed for business owners who want a step by step plan for SEO success. We think there is a need in the market for both expert tools and what we are doing: an SEO system that takes your hand and walks you through a winning SEO plan without having to be an expert.

Barry Schwartz: Would you consider any tools currently out there similar to yours? If so, which ones?
Patrick Gavin: I wouldn't consider any current SEO tools as similar to ours. We are taking a new approach to SEO and I think you would have to look outside of the SEO industry to find similar approaches. Among those would be Mint.com and Basecamphq.com.

Barry Schwartz: You have been in the SEO industry for a really long time. You are most famous for Text Link Ads, the company you founded and sold to MediaWhiz. How does this product differ from the Text Link Ads product, in terms of market-a-bilty? Do you think it will be as successful?
Patrick Gavin: The product is really quite different from TLA. Where TLA focuses on advanced "off page" SEO techniques via link buying, with DIYSEO we are offering a full service SEO platform that will instruct users with actionable on page and off page SEO actions. In terms of marketability, the market opportunity is tremendous. Adwords has some 1.5M+ advertisers buying keywords on a PPC basis. Most of these are small business owners. Some 75% of clicks go to natural search results, not PPC. All of these PPC advertisers would love the additional exposure in natural search so that is why we are so excited about this opportunity. We think we can drive value to our clients and if we can do that we will be successful.

Barry Schwartz: So our readers know, can you explain if you are still working for Text Link Ads?
Patrick Gavin: I am no longer an employee of MediaWhiz (Text Link Ads' parent company) but do some part time consulting to MediaWhiz. MediaWhiz and TLA have a number of exciting initiatives underway and I remain close to the business as a number of my best friends (and some real talented people) are there.

Barry Schwartz: To be frank, why are you asking bloggers, such as myself and ShoeMoney to write about DIYSEO when it is not even live yet?
Patrick Gavin: Well I have never been shy about promotion :-) We wanted to build some buzz to build up an initial contact list that we can then invite to our beta launch and other fun things we are doing. The SEO community is great about participating and giving feedback that we can then act on. Having been in the industry since around 2000 has given me the opportunity to build relationships with some great people and I am very thankful to be in the position to be able to get the word out on this project.

Barry Schwartz: Since I am being pretty direct, let me point you to the Sphinn thread on the topic. Some folks in our industry find the announcement on Sphinn's home page to be considered spam and should be removed from the home page. What do you think about that?
Patrick Gavin: I think it's great. Again the SEO community is a lot of fun. We will never agree on everything and I am sure we will have a few DIYSEO dissenters once the product is live but I have found that is what makes the SEO community so much fun. Fiery discussions and if you listen/read close enough there is some great feedback in those discussions.

Barry Schwartz: Finally, I asked those that follow me on Twitter @rustybrick that I am interviewing @patrickgavin right now and asked some to send questions. @shoemoney sent a question, he asked. Can you ask him about his twitter contest and if he is happy with the results http://www.diyseo.com/twittercontest.
Patrick Gavin: Twitter has been an interesting ride for me. Shoe did a post recently about Twitter being his #3 traffic sourse http://www.shoemoney.com/2009/05/05/for-those-who-still-dont-get-twitter/ and that really got me tuned back in to the marketing power Twitter has. Twitthis.com powered the Twitter contest and the results have been very impressive. Since the contest started my @diyseo follower count has gone from about 100 to 1,400 and still growing, so yes very happy!

Barry Schwartz: Thanks Patrick, I am looking forward to the DIYSEO product. Any words you want to end with? Like maybe the launch date or something else?
Patrick Gavin: Thanks Barry it has been my pleasure. We are not ready to announce the launch date just yet but if you sign up at www.DIYSEO.com you will be the first to know! :-)

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: June 2, 2009"

There are several reports at Google Custom Search Help and Google Web Search Help with searchers who use Internet Explorer version 6 on their PC and are claiming that Bing has hijacked the search feature in the toolbar.

Several users are claiming that since Bing was launched, even though Google was their default search provider in IE, Bing has taken control. Even worse, when they try to change it back from Bing to Google, it does not work.

Here is one post:

Had Google set as my default browser. woke up this morning to discover that BING had hijacked this feature. cant change it via: search/customize on the IE tool bar. all I get is a windows live page saying Ooops.

There is no official explanation from either Microsoft or Google, as of yet. Matt Cutts of Google did tweet about the issue. A Microsoft individual did tweet back saying the "folks have escalated your concerns."

Forum discussion at Google Custom Search Help and Google Web Search Help.

Update: We have a statement from Microsoft on this issue:

We're aware of the issue with IE6 and Bing and are investigating a solution. This issue is not impacting IE7 or IE8 users. We respect user choice on search providers in IE and all browsers, and designed IE to enable that choice. We will provide an update soon on this issue, and we apologize for any inconvenience it has caused. In the meantime, we encourage customers to upgrade to IE8 here. Alternatively, Firefox users can install the add-in for Bing here.

Update: Microsoft emailed me again at 2:45am on June 3, 2009 to inform me the issue is now resolved with IE6. The issue was server side, so the fix was able to be pushed out remotely to all infected browsers.

When Google's new search options feature went live earlier last month, Google also changed how they handle time based queries.

Back in 2007 Google handled the time based query refinements by appending &as_qdr= to the URL, now Google is using &tbs=qdr: for the same refinement. Let me show you how it works:

To show the pages indexed by Google on this site for the past day, I use the site command and append the past 24 hours refinement.

• Old Way that still works: http://www.google.com/search?q=site:seroundtable.com&as_qdr=d
• New Way: http://www.google.com/search?q=site:seroundtable.com&tbs=qdr:d

So as you can see, both methods still work. Why duplicate the efforts? As Tedster said in a WebmasterWorld thread, it is possible that two different teams at Google worked on the various features and didn't consult each other.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Bing launched a couple days early, yesterday morning and Google Analytics users are confused as to why it does not show up in the search engine reports. The day Google released Chrome, their new browser, Google Analytics supported the new browser immediately.

So why the delay with Bing? Well, Google didn't know exactly what or when it would be coming. It did come a couple days early and now that it is here, Google can begin programming that new search engine into the reports. I doubt Microsoft gave Google an early preview of the search engine and how the search referral strings would work. But now that it is live, Google can begin adding it to Google Analytics.

A Google Analytics Help thread has confirmation from a Googler, Anna, that this will be working shortly. Anna from the Google Analytics team said:

Our team is aware of this, and the required action will be taken soon!

As of this morning, it was not working, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was done shortly.

Forum discussion at Google Analytics Help.

In April Google began pushing advertisers to test the new AdWords interface. As it turns out, most advertisers dislike the new interface but that is not stopping Google from now forcing the new interface on some advertisers within 30 days.

Here is the email I received from Google a couple days ago:

In the coming weeks, we'll upgrade your AdWords account (Customer ID: 000-000-0000) to a new web interface designed to make campaign management faster and easier. You can try it now; log into your account to use the new interface immediately.

You'll have at least 30 days from the date of this email before you'll be required to use the new interface to manage your campaigns. During this time we'll continue to release additional features and make adjustments to the new interface based on advertiser feedback.

A WebmasterWorld thread is now discussing the topic of being forced into the new interface. The main issue that I see that advertisers are upset about is the requirement to scroll horizontally (left to right) to use the new interface. There are other quirks advertisers are upset about.

Ready or not, here it is coming and you better be ready for it. You can always use the AdWords Editor to bypass the web interface as much as possible. In fact, Google released a new AdWords Editor last night.

To prepare you for the new interface, Google created the following resources:

• Review the new interface microsite to get a quick overview of the changes and watch videos demonstrating the improvements: google.com/adwords/newinterface/
• Our "Getting Started Guide" will give you an overview of major new features and their benefits. You can download a PDF at: google.com/adwords/newinterface/new_interface_guide.pdf
• Wondering how to complete common AdWords tasks in the new interface? Visit our "How to" guide at: google.com/adwords/newinterface/standard/ads-and-keywords.html

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports that Microsoft's new search engine, Bing, which launched the other day, does not seem to support the NOODP tag.

The NOODP tag tells the search engine not to use the Open Directory Project's title or description for your search listing. Google, Yahoo and MSN Search supported the tag. The tag was introduced back in 2006 after webmasters became upset that the search engines were using some of those titles.

In any event, the WebmasterWorld thread claims Bing is now using titles and descriptions from DMOZ (ODP) even though the NOODP tag is on the page. I don't have any test cases I can remember off the top of my head to validate this, so I am leaving this open.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yahoo is frequently testing new home pages. The most recent test was announced a few days ago. The new look looks like this:

Why do I bring it up now? Well, it appears some users are finally noticing the new home page in their daily browsing activities.

A WebmasterWorld thread has several people who said they now see the new home page. Personally, I don't see it. I am not sure if I like it over the current one. What about you?

Take our poll:

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: June 1, 2009"

BillyS, a senior member at WebmasterWorld posted that he thinks Yahoo Search might be updating now. BillyS is known for watching Yahoo Search pretty closely, but in this case, no one has come in to back his observation.

BillyS said:

Anyone else seeing some pretty big shifts on Yahoo? We normally get around 12% of our traffic from Y!, but today that value is closer to 18%.

I don't expect that value to stick, but I'm expecting some settling over the next several days.

I personally checked some of my traffic from Yahoo on this and some other sites and they don't seem to have jumped up or down that much. But I do not track Yahoo as closely as other SEOs.

Yahoo Japan recently updated, which may be a sign that Yahoo US will be updating any time. But no official word from the Yahoo Search Blog yet.

The last observed but not confirmed Yahoo update was towards the end of March 2009.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: This is now official, Yahoo posted about this "weather report" at the Yahoo Search Blog on June 2nd.

Google Maps updated the business listing quality guidelines over the weekend. The new guidelines are welcomed by those who have noticed an influx of spam or borderline spam submissions to the Google Local Business Center over the past couple years.

Here are the new guidelines, as of June 1, 2009:

• Only enter listings for businesses that you own or are explicitly authorized to represent.
• Represent your business exactly as it appears in the offline world. The name on Google Maps should match the business name, as should the address, phone number and website.
• Do not attempt to manipulate search results by adding extraneous keywords into the title field, and do not include phone numbers or URLs in the title along with your proper business name.
• Create only one listing for each physical location of your business. Do not create more than one listing for each business location, either in a single account or multiple accounts. Service area businesses, for example, should not create a listing for every town they service. Likewise, law firms or doctors should not create multiple listings to cover all of their specialties.
• When entering categories, use only those that directly describe your business. Do not submit related categories that do not define your business. For example, a taxi company might properly categorize itself as "Airport Transportation", but it would be inaccurate to also use the category "Airport". Also, please use each category field to enter a single category. Do not list multiple categories or keywords in one field.
• Provide information that best identifies your individual locations and provides users with the most direct path to your business. For example, you should provide individual location phone numbers in place of central phone lines and the precise address for the business in place of broad city names or cross-streets.
• Provide the one URL that belongs to your business both in terms of the landing page and the displayed URL. Pages that redirect to another domain, or act as "click through" sites may lead to penalization.
• Use the description and custom attribute fields to include additional information about your listing. This type of content should never appear in your business's title, address or category fields.

Will it prevent spam? I doubt it. But it should make reporting and removing spam a bit easier.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

If you take a look at the Gmail Help Forum you will notice dozens of threads with hundreds of posts about Google's spam filter failing in a major way. In addition, you can see hundreds of tweets about the issue this morning as well.

I cannot summarize all the thread, but here are the largest ones in that forum:

• Why is so much spam passing through lately?
• SPAM in GMAIL getting ridiculous
• Eggs, bacon, and SPAM!
• Dear Gmail, WUDDAFUXUP with the spam today? Higher con-spam-ination content than normal...

One of my Gmail accounts suffered from spam about a month ago, but it seems to be getting better now - or maybe I am used to the new spam.

It seems like something spiked up bad today, based on the volume of posts over the weekend.

No official word from Google on the topic yet. Hat tip to Gabs for encouraging me to write about this.

The wait is over, Microsoft's new search engine, Bing is now live. It was rumored to be going live on June 3rd, but it went live some time early this morning. Techmeme is buzzing on the launch and Microsoft seems to be getting some pretty good press about the early launch.

The demo last week wasn't as positive as what I see now from the community. I guess people like what they are seeing.

Try it yourself now at Bing.com. Some SEOs are joking that BING stands for, ""But It's Not Google." It is not Google, that is true. The forum discussion is pretty positive, so I thought I ask you in a simple poll, do you like it?

Forum discussion:

• Microsoft To Launch Decision Engine 'Bing' June 3, WebmasterWorld
• Microsoft Unveils Bing - the new search engine, DigitalPoint Forums
• Microsoft’s Bing Vs Google: Head To Head Search Results, Sphinn
• Bing : Micrsoft's new search engine, Search Engine Roundtable Forums
• Microsoft’s Bing Vs Google: Head To Head Search Results, Sphinn
• Will Bing,com be your next Search Engine?, Search Engine Watch Forums
• Live Gone - Now Bing, DigitalPoint Forums
• Live switched to Bing, WebmasterWorld

Yahoo 360º is shutting down on July 13th. 360º launched in March 2005 and I was a fan of it early on, that is until I started my own personal blog.

Yahoo has been closing many properties that have not been working as they would have liked. 360º is Yahoo's latest victim.

Yahoo posted documents on how to prepare for this closure. The major topics include:

• Preparing for July 13, 2009
• Saving Your 360° Blog
• Keeping Your 360° Friends
• Keeping Other 360° Information

So long 360º!

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.