July 2009 Archives

In this week's recap, I spend some time discussing the Yahoo and Microsoft deal, specifically the financial side and how that plays a role on how it impacts SEOs and webmasters. I also discuss the Google and Bing search updates, did you notice the updates? Bing has some geo targeting issues that they may need to resolve. Microsoft has a cool search game named Page Hunt. Google is testing search options side bar for image search. Bid Simulator shows up in more Google AdWords advertiser's accounts. Google's Webmaster Tools API has a confirmed bug. Google money scams might be taking to the phone. Google does radio ads for AdSense. AdWords certified professionals can get their label in the AdWords forum. Twitter focuses in on search as their sugar daddy. SES San Jose is coming up and we got you covered. That was this week at the Search Engine Roundtable.

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Some Of The Topics Discussed:

• Yahoo Search Powered By Microsoft Bing: What SEMs Need To Know
• Small Google July 2009 Update?
• Bing July 2009 Update
• Bing's Geo Targeting Algorithm Needs Some Work
• Microsoft Page Hunt, Game To Make Bing Better
• Google Image Search Tests Left Bar Search Options
• Google AdWords Bid Simulator Live For More Advertisers
• Google Webmaster Tools API Bugs
• Google Money Scams Take To Phone?
• Did You Hear The Google AdSense Radio Commercials?
• Google AdWords Certified Professionals To Get Labels in Forums
• Twitter Focuses In On Search With New Home Page
• SES San Jose '09 Real Live Blogging Schedule

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: July 31, 2009"

About a year ago, Google introduced the new Google Webmaster Tools API. This API allow developers to communicate with Google Webmaster Tools (GWT), without actually accessing the front end, so they can code reports, verify sites and so on, without touching the actual GWT interface.

Over the past month or so, there have been several complaints about the API not working properly. Here is a Google Webmaster Help thread with one complaint, and here are a few more.

The issue has finally be discovered and confirmed. If you try to use the PUT and DELETE request methods in the Webmaster Tools GData API, you will get a "400 Bad Request" response returned. Again, Google has confirmed the issue and hopes to get it fixed "early next week."

Jonathan Simon said in the thread:

Good news...we've tracked down the API issue and should have an fix in place early next week. Thanks for your help in getting this resolved!

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Update: This bug was resolved on August 5, 2009.

A Google Web Search Help thread reports some users seeing Google Image Search adding a left bar with added search options. Google Operating System posted screen shots of this in action, so I thought I share them here.

All the options displayed on the left are available image search refinements in the advanced search box or by changing the URL parameters. Google Operating System named this the "Toolbelt for Google Image Search."

I personally tried to replicate this on both Safari and Firefox for Mac and IE, Firefox and Chrome on a PC, without any luck.

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion about future of Yahoo's SearchMonkey and BOSS tools, specifically after the Microsoft & Yahoo deal, where Yahoo is pretty much giving up on search technology.

If this is a concern for you, i.e. will SearchMonkey, BOSS, Site Explorer and so on, be around in a year or two from now, then you should read on. In fact, Vanessa Fox covered these questions in detail at Search Engine Land.

To make a long story short, we honestly do not know. Yahoo doesn't know, Microsoft doesn't know, I don't know and you don't know. I can still see SearchMonkey, BOSS, Site Explorer all working with Microsoft's Bing, but will Yahoo continue to invest in those tools? I don't know. It is clear to me that Yahoo wants to cut most, if not all, of their spending on search. So if that is true, which I think is, then Microsoft would have to pick up the technologies behind those tools.

Will they? I don't know. I can honestly seeing all three of these tools being forgotten in two years from now. Maybe some form of "Bing" tool will come out to replace them, but will they replicate all the features? I doubt it.

The truth is, I don't know. If I had to guess, in two years, we won't have a SearchMonkey, BOSS, or Site Explorer. I am not sure if we will have something equivalent from Microsoft Bing.

Should we start worrying about it now? I am not sure if that would do any of us any good. Clearly, Microsoft is reading this and know that these tools and features are something that webmasters and SEOs treasure.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The other day, I reported at Search Engine Land that Google was marketing the AdSense product over the radio, in specific markets.

These AdSense radio ads are targeting publishers or bloggers in the realm of finance site owners, health site owners and even "mommy bloggers."

A DigitalPoint Forums thread has one person who said they heard it and called it a "cheap [sounding] commercial" where "the girl was reading off cards."

I wish I could get an audio copy of the commercials to hear myself, but I guess that might be hard to find. If you do have one, please send it my way.

It is surprising to many to see Google using traditional means of advertising. Google is known not to use radio, TV or print ads to market their products. However, recently, Google has been using these forms of media to promote some products.

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: July 30, 2009"

Over a year ago, we reported that Google Recommends You Split Sitemap Files By File Type. The issue back then, is the same issue some webmasters are experiencing. When you want to create a geo-sitemap, you have to make that sitemap it's own file. Why? Well, because it confuses Google.

The <geo:geo> <geo:format>kml</geo:format> </geo:geo> line, if found in the normal sitemap, produces an "Invalid XML tag" error. The only way to fix it is to separate out the geo-sitemap, as it's own sitemap. Having multiple sitemaps is not a problem, but it might be a little more work for some.

The thing is, it was assumed that this was a temporary requirement and that Google would allow you to add geo specific data elements to your normal sitemap. Over a year later, it is still an issue and new threads are asking why.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Earlier, we noted how Bing, Microsoft's search engine, relied heavily on the meta language tag. Google's Matt Cutts even commented why using that method can lead to issues (don't you love it when the search engines nitpick at each other). In any event, Bing's geo targeting capabilities continue to plague some webmasters.

A WebmasterWorld senior member started a thread at WebmasterWorld with his issue with Bing's capability in classifying where his site is targeting. He said:

I've just been testing my most important keyword1 keyword2 keyword3 in both Show All and Only From The United Kingdom. All my sites are UK registered and UK hosted.

Show All and I'm #1 for my .com directory site and #2 for my .eu B & M site.

Only From the UK and I'm #1 for my .com directory site and no .eu site in sight anywhere!

Is Bing not aware that the UK is in the EU?

No, Bing is not aware that your site should be in the UK. Not yet at least. Maybe the BingHoo deal will give them some intellectual property on how to geo target a bit better.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

We have been reporting about the Google AdSense scam, that rides on the Google name and takes people money, with virtually no return, for a long time now. We first mentioned the Google Money System or Google Kit back in March, and then we blasted Google for allowing AdWords advertisers to advertise for such scams the month after. Finally, Google did something about it by banning these advertisers and then writing about the scam publicly, so people are more aware.

It now seems like these scam artists are taking their business and marketing offline by making cold calls to random businesses. An AdSense publisher posted a thread at Google AdSense Help telling a story that his parents received a phone call from someone claiming to work at Google. The person tried to convince his parents to sign up to Google AdSense. The story is not incredibly clear, since it comes third hand, but it would not surprise me if these scams are making their way to phone scams.

The one thing I should add is that Google has been pushing the AdSense marketing budget a bit. They recently started doing AdSense radio ads to try to help educate people about the product and drive more publishers to use it. So there is a possibility that Google set up a sales team to encourage publishers to use AdSense, via cold calling. But it seems not too likely, in my opinion.

Forum discussion at Google AdSense Help.

I thought I knew everything there is to know about Google Webmaster Tools, but I guess there was one thing I did not know. A WebmasterWorld thread talks about how one webmaster received a message from Google that his site had a URL taken down in the Google results due to a DMCA request. I honestly never knew Google notified webmasters of DMCA issues via Google Webmaster Tools. It goes on...

The webmaster explained that the URL was specific to a forum thread, that was actually taken down about 2 years ago. So this seemed to be a legacy DMCA request, where the post was removed two years ago, the webmaster was notified by Google via the message center a few months ago, about a page that was removed.

His issue is simple:

Well, once a month or so, I still continue to get a message in Google's Webmaster Tools that someone had filed a DMCA complaint and that particular URL has been blocked. Even though that particular posting was deleted probably 2 years ago!

Why does Google continuously remind this webmaster about a DMCA issue, when the issue is gone?

One person feels that he has to submit a reconsideration request, to have a human review the situation. Another person suggests the issue is related to how the DMCA'd URL is a 301 redirect to the main forum listing. Maybe Google thinks that since it was 301ed, that the URL the issue URL is being redirected to, is also an issue?

I am hoping to get some clarification from Google on this either in the comments here or in the thread.

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: July 29, 2009"

Seems like in the past 24 hours, more Google AdWords advertisers are seeing the bid simulator tool that Google has been testing for a few months now.

I am personally seeing it in my account, but not in some of my client accounts. Here is how they are handling it now, in the new interface.

You click on the bid price or the little icon near it:

And it opens up a window with more bid options, a simulation of how the bids might impact cost, clicks and so on. This picture is taken from E-Commerce Circle:

It seems like this is now being rolled out to more and more advertisers. Google confirmed this is a feature they are testing, but have not confirmed when all advertisers will see it. For more details on bid estimator, see this help document.

Forum discussion continued at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Update: Google confirmed it is live for all. Here is a video demo of it:

There is a thread I have been watching at the Bing Community where one member said that he had log files that shows MSNBot (Microsoft Bing's crawler) is clicking on Microsoft adCenter search ads, possibly charging him for those clicks.

This advertiser set up very specific tracking URLs for the adCenter campaigns and noticed that MSNBot came up for triggering a click on that ad URL in his log files. The advertiser asked:

Why is the msn bot clicking our paid text ads?

There is still no clear answer from Microsoft or the webmaster as to why those URLs were found in the log file. I keep asking for an update to the thread, but no response yet.

Maybe it was a bug on the webmaster side or maybe it was a bug on the MSNBot side. I do not know, but I would love to hear some type of answer on this matter.

We all know, bots can drive a huge amount of clicks, really quickly. So it would trigger a read flag in the ad quality measurements.

Forum discussion at Bing Community.

WebmasterWorld moderator, eWhisper, created a thread at WebmasterWorld on something he spotted recently with the Google AdWords quality score. He believes that AdWords has adjusted hows they handle proper names.

eWhisper said:

I'm seeing some odd results for names in AdWords. Many proper names have much lower QS in many accounts than a couple weeks ago.
In fact, my own name, in my account, going to my website, is running a QS of 3 right now and the ad isn't even showing very often due to low QS. That's one of those situations where you know something is wrong as usually this is a 9-10 (and should be).

Are you advertising for names? If so, do let us know if Google smacked your quality score on those ads or not.

I am not sure why such ads would receive a lower quality score. I don't see the logic in such a decision or maybe it is something else.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

If you visit Twitter.com today, you may notice a brand new home page (if you are not logged in). The home page really has a strong focus on search. Here it is:

Why? Twitter said to help "people access Twitter in more relevant and useful ways upon first introduction lowers the barrier to accessing the value Twitter has to offer and presents the service more consistently with how it has evolved."

This is an interesting move for Twitter, clearly showing the direction Twitter wants to move forward with.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yahoo and Microsoft have finally announced their search deal, after years of negotiation. In short, if the deal is approved by regulators, Yahoo Search will be powered by Microsoft Bing and Yahoo Search Marketing (aka Panama) will be powered by Microsoft adCenter.

For SEMs, you need to know when this will happen. Best case scenario, the deal will be complete in early 2010, the longest it can take for full implementation is two years. The integration will begin in the United States with search and then with search ads. The integration will then expand to other countries and regions.

The search brand at Yahoo will remain to be "Yahoo Search" but it will have a label at the bottom of the page that says "Powered by Bing." Nothing is changing now, not until they get regulatory approval, and then when they get that approval, they will begin pushing out the integration. So SEMs and SEOs have time to prepare. They won't have to worry about managing both adCenter campaigns and Panama campaigns, just adCenter (and of course, Google AdWords). I assume this means that the Yahoo Publisher Network is dead and really dead (not just in action, but legally dead).

I spent some of the morning posting the key financial points at Search Engine Land and now Danny and Greg are posting their notes on the conference call now.

I assume the forums will heat up throughout the days going forward. But again, this will take time, so no need to panic right now. Remember, Yahoo first started off as a directory, then they powered their search off of that directory, then worked out a deal with Google to power their search, then dropped Google for their own search engine and now is dropping their own search for Microsoft's Bing. Who knows, maybe in 5 years (even though this is a ten year deal), maybe Yahoo will go back to Google. :)

More news coverage at Techmeme and forum discussion at Sphinn, Google Webmaster Help, DigitalPoint Forums & 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: July 28, 2009"

SES San Jose is just a couple weeks away now and I wanted to let you all know, we will be true live blogging the event. Last year, I personally did not go, but we did have coverage of the SES San Jose 2008 event. This year, I am personally back and we have a great crew of volunteers helping me with the coverage.

First, let me explain what I mean by "real" live blogging. We were one of the first to do "live blogging" of search conferences (in fact, Andy Beal might have been the first, but he gladly handed that over to me in 2003). After several years of live blogging, we always received both very positive and very negative feedback. So I decided to change it up a bit and offer real-time live blogging, so you see as we type, what we are typing and what we are seeing. We first did this with our SMX West '09 coverage and to be honest, it was a ton of fun. We will be using Cover It Live on this blog, to provide our stream of live coverage, including our notes, pictures and reader comments (yes, you can ask us questions and interact with us, while we are in the sessions).

Second, let me introduce our volunteer live bloggers to you, many of them, you already know. Chris Boggs (live blogging almost as long as I have) from Rosetta, Keri Morgret of Strike Models is back, Patty Adams from Vertical Measures and Gaurav Sharma of Think Mantra will be helping out with the live coverage. In addition, Brian Ussery will be providing some of the photography during some of the sessions. Some of the sessions we cover, will have dual coverage, some will be solo.

Third, please help contribute by giving money, sponsoring or attending the IM Charity Party at SES San Jose.

Finally, here is the schedule of real live blog coverage of SES San Jose 2009:

Tuesday, August 11 - Day 1
9:00am-10:00am
Keynote: Clay Shirky, Author of Here Comes Everybody covered by Barry Schwartz
10:30am-11:30am
How to Optimize for Search and Engage the Community covered by Patty Adams and Barry Schwartz
Always be Testing: Marketing Optimization in Challenging Times covered by Keri Morgret
11:45am-12:45pm
The View From the CMO's Office covered by Patty Adams
Creating a Web Analytics Culture covered by Keri Morgret, Gaurav Sharma & Brian Ussery
The Next Wave for Online Video covered by Barry Schwartz
1:45pm-2:45pm
Turn Brain Science into Bucks: Incorporating Persuasive Messaging into Your Content Strategy covered by Keri Morgret
Turning the Social Web Into Real ROI covered by Patty Adams
How to Turn Your Web Analytics into a Money Making Machine covered by Gaurav Sharma
Don't Call it a Comeback: Semantic Technology and Search covered by Chris Boggs
3:00pm-4:00pm
SEO Tools of the Trade: What's in YOUR Toolbox? covered by Keri Morgret, Barry Schwartz & Brian Ussery
Meaningful SEO Metrics: Going Beyond the Numbers covered by Gaurav Sharma
4:30pm-5:30pm
Keeping it Local: The Convergence of Smart Phones & Local Search covered by Barry Schwartz
Launching a Global Website covered by Gaurav Sharma

Wednesday, August 12 - Day 2
9:00am-10:15am
Keywords & Content: Search Marketing Foundations covered by Patty Adams
Small Voices, Big Impact: Social Media for the Little Guy covered by Keri Morgret & Barry Schwartz
10:45am-12:00pm
Search on a Dime Keri Morgret covered by Barry Schwartz & Brian Ussery
1:00pm-2:00pm
Keynote: Nicholas Fox, Business Product Management Director, AdWords, Google covered by Barry Schwartz
2:30pm-3:45pm
Discover the Power of Linking: Link Building Basics covered by Patty Adams & Keri Morgret
Google Analytics and Website Optimizer, Secrets Revealed! covered by Gaurav Sharma
Four Paths to Success in a Tough Travel Economy covered by Chris Boggs
4:00pm-5:15pm
Turning Simple Change into Big Profit covered by Patty Adams & Gaurav Sharma
Social Media: White Hat vs. Black Hat covered by Barry Schwartz & Brian Ussery

Thursday, August 13 - Day 3
9:00am-10:00am
Keynote: Charlene Li, How to Prepare for the Future of Search covered by Barry Schwartz & Gaurav Sharma
10:30am-11:45am
SEO Through Blogs & Feeds covered by Patty Adams, Brian Ussery & Barry Schwartz
Advanced Paid Search Techniques covered by Keri Morgret
12:45pm-2:00pm
News Search SEO covered by Patty Adams & Gaurav Sharma
Brand, Trademark & Reputation Management covered by Chris Boggs & Keri Morgret
2:15pm-3:30pm
Advanced SEO Roundtable: What is it Really? And Where is it Going? covered by Chris Boggs
Independent SEMs/SEOs - Issues & Answers covered by Keri Morgret & Gaurav Sharma

I am looking forward to this conference, it is a shame there is no Google Dance this year, but hopefully next year. Hope to see many of you in San Jose, if not, you know where to find the live coverage!

Yahoo Search seems like it is dead in the water, at least if you use the forums to track what is living and breathing. The most recent news that Yahoo Search seems dead is that the Yahoo Search URL review form seems to have no one on the other side. You know, like those suggestion boxes that lead to a garbages on the other end.

One SEO recently gave the form a try and posted his distaste for the response in a WebmasterWorld thread. He basically said he received an automated message back that was of no use. His site was banned, Yahoo says to use the form to send the reinclusion request to them and then they don't have anyone look at it?

Martinibuster explained, "where managers have to justify how budgets are spent, it's unreasonable for a company to pay for personalized customer service for people who are not customers and do not contribute to the profitability of the company in any way." He added, "This doesn't mean you and your problem aren't important. It means you are not a customer and are not entitled to customer support."

Now this is all based on the assumption that others who have recently used this form are getting the same response, or lack there of. It might be that in this case, the SEO is just disgruntled or maybe not?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

For a few months now, users from Finland have been complaining that Google Maps Finland is in Swedish and not in their native language, Finnish. A Google Maps Help thread has those complaints.

A Googler even responded on May 26th, saying, "This is an issue which I reported to our team for their review and resolution." Another Google replied three days later, adding "we know this is a problem and it's definitely going to get fixed. In fact one of the engineers who works on tile rendering is Finnish, and is as happy about this bug as you are."

A few months later, still no fix and loyal Finland Google users are upset, to say the least. On July 14th, Googler, Adam said that it was fixed, but it was not fixed. I personally don't speak the language, so see the thread for more details.

Forum discussion at Google Maps Help.

I am so tired about writing about the Microsoft and Yahoo talks rumors, so I am sure you are tired reading about it. But over the course of the past week or two, the rumors that a deal is going to happen "soon" is pretty strong. Exactly when, is unknown, but the rumors seem really strong.

The question a WebmasterWorld thread asks is should SEOs start preparing? Even if we know a deal is going to take place, what should SEOs prepare for?

I remember in early 2004, Yahoo was shopping for search engines to buy, so they no longer have to be dependent on Google's search engine. They were expected to use Inktomi which an engine they bought earlier, but then they bought AllTheWeb and Alta Vista. They made changed to both engines and released their own flavor of Yahoo Search.

Back then, SEOs were preparing for a version of Inktomi, but it turned out to be it's own beast.

In my opinion, if Yahoo would do some deal with Microsoft, I really don't think we would see a Yahoo flavored Bing that soon. If any deal is announced, I suspect several months of discussions and announcements before anything changes with Yahoo Search. So I strongly doubt we need to prepare for a Yahoo flavored Bing today.

You should be thinking Bing anyway, cause that engine is getting a lot of buzz recently and market share is increasing (depending on who you ask).

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

AdWordsPro Sarah, an official Google representative, announced in the Google AdWords Help forums that they want to give Google AdWords Professionals, those that are certified by Google, special logos or labels under their profile names in the forums.

Sarah said:

To help people identify our Google Advertising Professional forum members, we are going to try and label users with current certification (it will show up right below your user name when you post- much like 'Top Contributor' shows up now).

The only trick is, you are all anonymous posters, so for us to figure out who is who, I need all GAP certified individuals to give me a shout out in this thread. If you signed up for the forum using the same login information as your MCC, I should be able to verify your certification and label you! Doesn't need to be anything facy, a simple 'Add me to your list' will do fine (or clever jokes are always appreciated :) ). I will then lable people on an ongoing, weekly basis.

I cannot help but wonder if my post about Google certified SEOs and top contributors in the forums had something to do with this idea?

So if you are a GAP, then go to the forums and let Sarah know, so you can get the special logo by your name.

Forum discussion at Google AdWords Help.

The Technology Review reports the Microsoft research team designed a game to help make Bing a better search engine. The game is named Page Hunt and it presents players with web pages and asks them to guess the queries that would produce the page within its first five results. Players score 100 points if the page is no.1 on the list, 90 points if it's no.2, and so on.

Here is a video demo, without sound, of me playing the game:

It is interesting, because it may show you how good or bad the Bing results are, in clear site. A WebmasterWorld thread has some fun quotes about this game:

Wow, Bing is crazy bad. I got like 1 out of 20 and some were very obvious.

I don't want to come across as a bing cheerleader, but I must say, that's a pretty dang creative idea to get the kind of direct feedback from users that might make for a better product. Will be interested to see if they post a general summation when the test has run it's course, as to whether they feel it gave them enough useful data to push bing another step forward. The better bing gets, the more competition we'll see in a field that needs more competition -- we'll all come out ahead...

Creative idea indeed, nice to see.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Last night, Google sold off their 5% stake in AOL for $283 billion. Google acquired that 5% stake in 2005 for $1 billion. The news of the sale was pretty big, showing that AOL was valued at less than $5.66 billion and Tim Armstrong, a former Google executive, now CEO of AOL, will earn at least $1 million a year in salary and up to $4 million a year in bonuses, not including stock options.

AOL is really trying to change their perception and gain some traction this year, under the wings of Tim Armstrong. It will be interesting to see how that goes.

For more details on the deal, see Techmeme.

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: July 27, 2009"

The Google Maps Help forums posted an announcement that there will be scheduled downtime this Wednesday, July 29th. The downtime will be between 1pm - 2pm(edt) / 10am-11am(pdt).

I assume that after 2pm on Wednesday, we might be in for an updated set of features or a new user interface in the Google Local Business Center. Of course, this is just an assumption, but many people are expecting updates from Google in this area and it is due time for an update.

What would you like to see? My preferences?

• A way to easily unmerge those bad merged business records
• A way to give multiple people access to local business records
• Improved spam controls and reporting
• Enhanced business hours

Forum discussion (kind of) at Google Maps Help.

On Friday, Liz (Googler) at the YouTube support forum posted a thread at the YouTube Help forums about why some videos get stuck at the 300 view mark.

Liz explained that when some videos become popular very fast, YouTube takes longer to figure out if those views are legit or not. So it can take several hours for YouTube to update the view counts to reflect the accurate views. Let me quote Liz:

Recently we have seen questions about why some YouTube video view counts "freeze" around 300 views. To help prevent confusion, we wanted to post a quick explanation of what's going on. View counts are extremely important to our community, so we work hard to ensure those view counts are accurate. Occasionally, when a video becomes popular quickly, it takes our computers longer to make sure those views are accurate. This means a video's viewcount may not update for several hours, sometimes allowing ratings and comments on the same video to climb temporarily higher than the views. So if you see your video views aren't moving, or that your video's comments and ratings are moving faster than your views, don't worry. If you're still getting views, the count should update soon.

The issue is that many YouTubers are noticing their view counts getting stuck at 300 for a lot longer than just several hours. Some are complaining about them being stuck for several days, if not weeks. I am not sure what the issue is there or if it is a spam issue or not.

Forum discussion at YouTube Help.

Not to be outdone by Google, Bing seems to also be updating. I spotted at least three different threads, in three different forums, discussing how these webmasters either had no rankings in Bing prior to the other day and now have excellent rankings or had great rankings and now have poor rankings. This is a clear sign of an update, when you see several different forums discussing this, with so few webmasters actually looking.

The forum threads are at WebmasterWorld, HighRankings Forum & Bing Community thread. Here are excerpts from some of those posts:

Something seems to have changed with the Bing results over the last couple of days here in the UK. I used to struggle to rank on MSN search and when Bing launched and since I have checked and we were still on page 2 or 3 for most terms that we are #1 on Google.

Today for all of my main target terms (except one) we have gone in at #1 on Bing. The results below us look very much like Google.co.uk.

I was no.1 for my main keyword, and had been there for quite some time. Though I went to show a client an example and searched for my term in bing and now i'm not in the top 200?

Was a bit embarrasing to say the least!

Before a week it was in first page while searched "Tour Operator of Bangladesh" or "Tour Operator in Bangladesh" in Bing. But now it disappears from first page even it is not in second page. Last week backlinks showed 400+ now it shows <350 links.

Have you noticed a major update in Microsoft's Bing search engine?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, HighRankings Forum & Bing Community.

There is some discussion in the forums about a potential Google update underway. Keep in mind, the Google results are always in a state of fluctuation, so updates have to be more about how many people are noticing a major shift. Sometimes those shifts are major enough to be considered an update and sometime they are a bit smaller and either impact a large group of sites or represent the onset of a new update coming down the pipe.

An updated WebmasterWorld thread calls this some type of "rollback." These webmasters are noticing "old" data show up in Google, including old cache, old dates and old snippets. A DigitalPoint Forums thread also has conversation on this possible update. The thread is basically not stating what these webmasters are noticing, but rather an argument if there is an update or not - so it is not too constructive.

There is definitely something going on, if it is a rollback, an old index, an onset to a big update or something else, it is something you might want to be on the lookout for.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Google is now looking at location based links for location specific queries. Google might be selecting the wrong title for your site. Is Google penalizing StreamRotator or the porn industry? Bing does geo based location from the meta language tag. Google Webmaster Tools added features. Google should allow multiple verified local business accounts. Yahoo and Microsofts earnings were bad. Yahoo changed up their home page, again. YouTube does 3D videos. Is Google certifying SEOs? We have three polls out, one on naming updates, one on client involvement in SEO and the final on AdSense earnings. Finally, we talked about the 40th anniversary of the moon landing and the logos from Google, Bing, YouTube and others. That was this week at the Search Engine Roundtable.

Make sure to subscribe to our video feed or subscribe directly on iTunes to be notified of these updates and download the video in the background. Here is the YouTube version of the feed:

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

Some Of The Topics Discussed:

• Google: Location Specific Queries Now Requiring More Location Specific Links?
• Google Picking Titles Incorrectly?
• StreamRotator Blamed For Google Penalizing Porn Industry?
• Bing Geo-Targeting With Meta Language Tag
• Google Webmaster Tools Adds Some Features
• Google Should Allow Multiple Google Accounts To "Own" A Local Listing
• Yahoo's Revenue Drops Again, Squeeze Out Higher Profits (YHOO)
• Yahoo Tries Something Old, Launches New Home Page
• YouTube Testing 3D Videos (YT3D)
• Google Certified SEOs = Top Contributors / Bionic Posters?
• 82% Say We Should Name Some Google Updates
• 96% Say Clients Need To Be Involved In the SEO Process
• 56% of Google AdSense Publishers Say Earnings Are Down in July 2009
• Moon Landing Logos From Bing, YouTube But Not Google

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

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

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

One person posted a rant in the Google Webmaster Help forums about the "Top Contributors / Bionic Posters" in that forum. In short, Top Contributors / Bionic Posters are given the title by Googlers, who believe that these people are smart enough, experienced enough, skilled enough and helpful enough to be giving answered at Googler levels. But this person felt the Top Contributors / Bionic Posters were not helpful.

The interesting part of this thread is that Googler, JohnMu, does the right thing and backs up the Top Contributors / Bionic Posters with a really nice post. The post, kind of leads me to see that Google may (maybe stretching it here) consider the Top Contributors / Bionic Posters as "certified Google SEOs," if there is such a thing. Google does have certified AdWords professionals, Ad Manager pros, Google Apps, etc, but not Google SEOs, simply because it is something that would be considered very controversial on many levels. But in a sense, these Top Contributors / Bionic Posters are Google Certified SEOs.

Read John's post:

This is one of the reasons we mark a few people as Top Contributor / Bionic Poster. It's not because of their own website(s). Some websites rank high for no particular reasons and some websites are filled with information that is made up -- I wouldn't trust people online just because of a website that they give you :).

Top Contributors / Bionic Posters are people who do more than just work on a single website. They help thousands of users here with their problems. They see issues here weekly which the average webmaster does not ever see. Because of that, they're frequently very quick in finding a diagnosis and frequently the diagnosis is spookily correct (not always, I don't think that's really possible). They might be a little too direct at times, but when you have so many people lined up asking for help I don't think it makes sense to be anything else than direct. Sometimes things can get heated, they're only people after all :), but overall they help an awesome amount of users.

Keep in mind that you can't become a Top Contributor / Bionic Poster by just posting a lot of stuff here. It's not based only on the quantity but to a large part on the quality of the feedback given. When we find that someone is doing an exceptional job here, we may decide to reach out to them and ask them to become a Top Contributor / Bionic Poster. We don't do that based on a single reply, we do that by looking at 100s and often 1000s of replies to webmasters with all kinds of problems.

If this message is not a clear indication that Google vouches for the Top Contributors / Bionic Posters, then I don't know what is. I don't blame JohnMu for backing up the Top Contributor / Bionic Posters, but it also leads John and Google to basically certifying them as certified SEOs, which can get hairy.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

We have covered the topic of someone else's Google web history showing up as yours. Including one parent catching her son searching for pornography. But what if you find your web history showing searches you did not do personally and you are convinced no one has access to your computer.

There are two possibilities, the first we covered as Google might have a bug where your history is merged with another Google user. The second is discussed in a new Google Web Search Help thread.

There, Googler, Jimmy Deheeger said that in some cases, someone may be watching you with keylogging software. The keylogging software can watch you as you type in your passwords and then these evil people might login as you and conduct searches that make you unhappy. Why would a person spend the time to use keylogging software, simply to run pornographic queries on someone else's account makes little sense to me, but Google suggests it as a possibility. I mean, the person can easily sign out and no web history would be tracked. I don't get it.

In any event, Google offers this up as a possible reason why web history that is not yours would show up in your Google account.

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

There seems to be a bug in the Google AdSense console that is preventing Google publishers from submitting tax information to Google. There are several reports in the Google AdSense Help forums with complaints about this issue.

The issue is, when one clicks on the "Submit your tax information now" button, nothing happens.

This was first reported on Wednesday and Google confirmed the issue saying:

Thanks for bringing this to our notice. I've consulted our specialists on this issue. I'll follow up once they respond.

It is still an issue this morning.

Forum discussion at Google AdSense Help.

The other day, Google Mobile launched two new features (amongst others). One feature has been asked for ever since Google Latitude launched. The ability to use this program on your iPhone. Well, now it is here, well, kind of.

Apple wouldn't allow Google to build a native iPhone app for Latitude because (I think) apps cannot run in the background and constantly pull your location. Instead, Google made it work over the mobile browser at http://m.google.com/latitude. The new iPhone browser supports geolocation services, so Google uses that to pull the location of the individual and then plots it on the map. Here are some pictures:

Also, for you who don't have iPhones (seriously, no iPhone yet?), Google released map layers for Windows Mobile & Symbian devices. More on that over here.

Forum discussion at Google Mobile Help Forums.

A Google Maps Help thread has a few business owners and consultants suggesting that Google should allow multiple Google accounts to gain access to a single business listing.

I cannot agree more. This is a feature that is currently supported in Google Webmaster Tools, but is likely needed more in the Google Local Business Listing Center. Giving businesses a way to have more than one person with access to such a listing, just makes (um) business sense. In addition, there are many search agencies that handle local listings for their clients. These agencies would love to give access to their clients, if the client needs to make changes as well.

I was going to create a poll asking if you agree, but honestly, I doubt anyone would disagree that this feature would not be useful.

Forum discussion at Google Maps Help.

A Bing Community thread has one webmaster asking why is he getting traffic from http://www.bing.com/spresults.aspx?

Brett Young from Microsoft's Bing Team came in to explain that the traffic seen coming from http://www.bing.com/spresults.aspx is actually from the Internet Explorer (IE) version 6 search pane or search box.

Brett said:

It is used for the IE6 search pane. I'm thinking the traffic is legitimate.

So if you see this traffic, it may be coming from a really old and outdated browser.

Forum discussion at Bing Community.

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: July 23, 2009"

The infamous and legendary GoogleGuy at WebmasterWorld has gone almost a full year without posting at WebmasterWorld. GoogleGuy's last post was in a WebmasterWorld thread on July 24, 2008 at about 6:30pm (EST). He replied to confirm a PageRank toolbar update.

GoogleGuy use to be extremely active in the WebmasterWorld forums, ranking up 2,882 posts over the year. But for the past few years, he/she has been very quiet. Why? Well, now GoogleGuy is not the only Google Guy in the forums, there are plenty of Google representatives that go under aliases, i.e. AdSenseAdvisor or their own names, i.e. MattCutts, in both WebmasterWorld, other forums and the official Google forums.

But we would hate to see GoogleGuy expire. So please, GoogleGuy, just say hello, like you did in the past, to let us know you are still out there. If you do want to unmask yourself, that would be fine, but personally, I like the mask. ;-)

Sadly, no forum discussion here to link to.

About a month ago, we reported that Google slapped the porn industry with a Google penalty of some sort. Soon after we reported the issue, Google seemed to have reversed the penalty on that industry. But we all thought it wasn't industry specific, but rather the software used by many of the webmasters in that industry.

There seems to be a new batch of issues in that adult/porn industry now. StreamRotator by StreamScripts.com seems to be the cause of the next penalty. In fact, a representative from the company came into the Google Webmaster Help thread and said:

I represent StreamRotator Content Management Script (http://streamscripts.com). Lately we’ve been receiving numerous complaints from our users that the sites powered by our script have disappeared from Google’s SERPs. The worst thing about that is that the users can’t even find their own sites for “domain.com” kinds of searches.

It has also been reported that sites running other scripts (not only StreamRotator) have suffered from similar penalties too; however some of them have gradually found their way back to Google SERPs. This has not been the case with StreamRotator driven sites. There are roughly 10 thousand users of our script and this problem influences a massive number of people.

I kindly ask You to suggest me the ways to help the owners of the sites that use our script. We do not have an idea what caused such penalties and I would be really thankful for any information You could provide me with.

I wonder if Google will address the issue or is StreamRotator is doing something against Google's terms of service. Time will tell, but the saga with the porn industry and Google continues.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

I spotted a thread at the Google Maps Help forum asking why Google doesn't allow people to walk across the George Washington Bridge. Specifically, why doesn't Google let people plot the directions as walking directions when traveling across the bridge. Any New Yorker knows, the bridge is filled with people walking or biking back and forth. It is a good question.

But when I was scoping out the bridge on Google Maps, using street views, I noticed that you can only get street views at the lip of the bridge. Any blue area shows where the street views are available, the plain yellow, is not available:

That reminded me that there is a law where you cannot take pictures of anything on the bridge. In fact, one day, I took a picture of the no taking pictures sign on the George Washington Bridge. I guess Google listens to those rules.

So why can't we get walking directions on the bridge? And why no directions to the moon?

Forum discussion at Google Maps Help.

Greg Sterling always does a great job with the financials, and he did so with the Yahoo (YHOO) earnings details. were wrong.

We are all anticipating some Microsoft/Yahoo deal happening sooner then later, so time will tell. The Yahoo home page news failed to excite and the earnings report was not too positive. No wonder 60% feel Yahoo won't make a come back.

Microsoft (MSFT) is to announce earnings tonight, while Google (GOOG) already announced higher earnings. The real impressive company, to me, is AAPL.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There are some reports of Google Webmaster Tools not loading for some users. Some of these reports are coming from WebmasterWorld and I also personally have this issue.

When I try to access the tool, the URL redirects back and forth between the Google Account authentication system and the webmaster tools home page. If I try a different browser, it lets me in, so it seems to be a cookie issue for some users.

Firefox Error:

The page isn't redirecting properly

Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.

* This problem can sometimes be caused by disabling or refusing to accept cookies.

Safari Error:

Safari can’t open the page.

Too many redirects occurred trying to open “https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en”. This might occur if you open a page that is redirected to open another page which then is redirected to open the original page.

I can login to all other Google properties without an issue, I am just having this issue with Google Webmaster Tools. I rather not delete my Google cookies, cause that will stop them from tracking me for the past 15 years. :)

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: July 22, 2009"

Last week, we asked you if you felt client involvement is necessary for a successful SEO campaign. The obvious answer to me, was yes, it was. But not everyone agrees, most do, but not everyone.

96% said some level of client involvement is necessary for a successful SEO campaign. Only 3% said, it is not necessary. This is out of over a 160 responsiveness. Let me break out the poll results for you:

Question: Is Client Involvement Necessary for SEO Success?

:: Yes said 138 respondents or 84%
:: Maybe Just a Little said 19 respondents or 12%
:: No said 5 respondents or 3%
:: Other... said 2 respondents or 1%

The other responses, really are not valid here. In any event, no surprise here in this poll.

Forum discussion continued at HighRanking Forums and Sphinn.

Every now and then we reach out to our Google AdSense publisher readership and poll them on how their earnings are doing month to month. Recently, I have been hearing buzz around the community that earnings are down, so I decided to run an anonymous poll asking if that was true.

56% of the responses said their earnings were down, while only 25% said their earnings were up and 20% said earnings were about the same. Here are the results:

Question: July 2009 AdSense Earnings: Up Or Down?

:: Way Down said 36 respondents or 35%
:: Down said 21 respondents or 21%
:: No Real Change said 20 respondents or 20%
:: Up said 18 respondents or 18%
:: Way Up said 7 respondents or 7%

I hope you are on the up side of this poll.

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

I have been tracking the WebmasterWorld thread on the July Google changes and a lot of people are now discussing how Google is treating location specific queries differently.

By that I mean, the consensus in the thread is that there was a ranking adjustment for location specific queries. For example, searchers for real estate or travel specific searches that are highly dependent on location specific search criteria.

The feeling is that Google is now weighing links from localized sites higher than random links. Tedster, the WebmasterWorld administrator, explains this well in post number 3956975:

One market where I "think" I'm seeing this "semantic theme" backlink phenomenon is the travel SERPs - those with [very specific location] in the query phrase. Sites with backlinks predominantly from other [very specific location] pages are now doing better than those that have more of a scattershot collection of backlinks. This is a change from just a few weeks ago, when backlink quantity seemed to rule all on its own.

One thing I'm becoming quite convinced of (and this has been a growing impression) is it's time to stop trying to control anchor text in backlinks. Instead, just attract backlinks from good, on-theme, pages and let the anchor text be naturally randomized as the webmaster chooses - external anchor text should naturally include a high occurrence of [domain name] or [business name].

Of course, many SEOs have been aiming for links like this for a while and Google continuously tries to make links mean more, in terms of determining relevancy.

Have you noticed this?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google Webmaster Tools recently added some features to the toolkit. Those include the ability to quick search for sites in your profile, block sitelinks for subpages, review page removal requests made by others and fading out the unverified sites on the home page of the tool.

The two most significant changes are the sitelinks addition and removal request addition.

You can now block sitelinks for subpages, here is a picture:

This feature is something they needed to add since displaying inner/deeper page sitelinks back in November 2008.

Also, Google is now displaying third-party requests for page removals. So you can see which pages people want Google to remove from your site and either agree or disagree with that request. Here is a picture:

It would be nice to know who made the request, but I doubt Google would show that.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

SEO Companies should have ironclad contracts that specify the terms of the business deal and what the deliverables are. Without it, you may not get paid and you may risk your business's future. This should be a no brainer for any company, but often it is something many businesses avoid.

That is the story of one such SEO who was stiffed by a client after not delivering based on the client's expectations, but met their own expectations. A HighRankings Forum thread has some of those details. In this case, it is a bit unique in that the SEO company did the work for a different company, who outsourced that work to the client.

The SEO said:

I currently work with a web design firm who subcontracts all of their SEO to my company (at a huge discount too). I recently optimized a site for this web designer and her client's site ranked on the first page of Google for 5 of their keywords within a few weeks. Well, her client refuses to pay simply because his site is not listed above his competitors (his site varies from position 5-8). We had a call with him... I explained the process of SEO, what Google looks at, etc. etc. He then says he won't pay unless we can get his site to rank in the top 3 positions. I told him his expectations were unreasonable and even Google couldn't guarantee top 3 rankings.

My question is... now that we've discussed the issue with the client; educated him on SEO; and told him that even Google could not give a guarantee - how do I get him to pay? I don't know what else to tell him.

Jill Whalen of HighRankings asked a simple question, "What does your contract say? " It is really that simple.

I'll be honest, I rarely do contracts with clients. I have detailed proposals with deliverables, but there is no legalize to it, just a detailed proposal. I also don't offer SEO services, so it is a bit different.

Lesson learned, have a solid contract with any of your clients and vendors.

For more on SEO contracts, see:

• The SEO Contract
• Pricing & Contracts For The Small SEM Shop

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

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

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

Less than a week ago, we polled our readers asking should search updates be named? Well, we have over a hundred responses now, so I thought I share them with you.

Overall, 82% said we should name all or some of the updates. Only 17% said we should not name any of the updates. 59% said we should name only the important updates. Here is the break down of the results.

Question: Should We Name Search Updates?

:: Yes, But Only Major Updates said 61 respondents or 59%
:: Yes, All Updates said 24 respondents or 23%
:: No said 17 respondents or 17%
:: Other... said 1 respondents or 1%

The other response said:

Yes but just with normal update terms... 3.1 ... 4.5. otherwise it's confusing.

Personally, I agree here with the majority.

Forum discussion continued at Google Webmaster Help.

With the latest on how Google handles the nofollow attribute, I know of many webmasters who are removing them completely from their sites. Instead, they are either not linking out or linking out without the nofollow attribute added to the URLs. However, not all webmasters are going this route.

I was curious to see from our readers how many of you are removing the nofollow attribute from your pages. Please take our anonymous poll below and have your webmaster friends take it as well.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

About a week ago, we reported the issues Google News was having with some RSS feeds. At that time, Google dropped the RSS links from the main Google News search pages.

The question is why did they drop the feature? Well, the feature is still there, but they removed the obvious access to that RSS link. Still, why? Well, according to a Google News Help thread, a top contributor said:

The feed link was removed on all versions of Google News, much likely because people started to abuse the feed usage rights. Your page looks all right, though.

Inbal, a Google News representative, confirmed the answer. So was the link removed do to spammers abusing the feed? I am not sure.

In any event, the feature is still there. You can access it two ways:

(1) Go to the bottom of the news search result page and click on the email alert link:

Then select "Feed" from the drop down menu:

(2) Most modern browsers have RSS discovery built in, and you should see an RSS icon in the top right of the URL box. Clicking on it, should give you the RSS feed URL:

Firefox:

Safari:

Forum discussion at Google News Help & Google Web Search Help.

Update: Inbal updated the thread to address my question as to why it was removed. It was not a spam thing, but a usability thing.

Please be assured we've removed the RSS feed link *not* in response to usage abuse nor to spam, but it's part of improving our User Interface and your user experience with Google News.

Honestly, if it is a user interface experience thing, then they should add it back.

A Bing Community thread has one webmaster who had his meta language tag set to the UK and he paid for it.

Supposedly, Microsoft's Bing plays close attention to that meta tag and in the case of Joomla, the default might be set to GB.

Brett Young from the Bing webmaster support team suggested to the webmaster to change the meta tag to:

<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en-us">

Brett said specifically, with Joomla, "I suggest adding the following meta tag to your home page header and verify that there are no tags pointing to "en-gb"--especially if you are using the Joomla CMS."

It seems like this is a common issue webmasters run into when using Joomla. So I thought I point it out here. I believe Google pays less attention to the meta tag, so it might not be an issue with Google.

Forum discussion at Bing Community.

I cannot tell you how many times I have reported that Yahoo has released a new home page in the almost 6 years of me covering search. I honestly cannot count the times I reported on this topic. From numerous times they tested various home page designs, to the times they released the new design, to the times they rolled back those designs. To me, this news is a big snore, but what is a blogger to do?

Right now, it is pretty hot on Techmeme and since we covered this type of news an infinite number of times, I figured, I'd let you read the news via Techmeme. What I really want to hear from Yahoo is Microsoft buying them. :)

Here are screen shots of the new home page, which you should see on Yahoo.com later today.

And how search may be integrated into the new design:

Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land has more pictures and commentary.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Did you know that you don't need to set up an ad serving system, such as Google Ad Manager to rotate between various AdSense color palettes? I'll be honest and admit, I did not know about this feature until I saw a WebmasterWorld thread where AdSenseAdvisor explained it could be done.

How do you do it? Go to Google AdSense, go through the set up of an ad unit and when you pick the color palette, you simple select the "use multiple palettes." Then you can pick up to four palettes for Google to rotate between. Not sure how I missed this feature, but here is a more visual walk through.

(1) Select "Use multiple palettes" from the drop down:

(2) Select the multiple (up to four) palette colors by pressing control or command and clicking on them:

(3) Google will then dynamically show those selections on the left side of that selection box:

Here are those ads in action:

For instructions on this from Google, read the Google help section.

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: July 20, 2009"

Jill Whalen started a fabulous thread at HighRankings Forums asking if there is any formula or calculation being used to figure out how competitive she or any SEO can go with a specific client. Jill explained that when it comes to having a Fortune 500 customer rank well for very competitive keywords on their PageRank 8 domain, it is a no brainer. But when it comes to brand new web sites, for new clients, how competitive should an SEO company go with their keyword ranking goals?

Typically she determines this based on "gut feeling" she said:

I typically have no problem doing this mostly by intuition. I'm sure somewhere in my brain I'm calculating a number of different factors as to where to start/stop on the AIT numbers, but it's at a gut level.

Does anyone have a more scientific formula they use to do something similar? I don't need it for myself, but I'm putting together a teaching presentation on choosing keywords, and there's no real way to explain how to use your gut instincts!

The thread now has several members listing out variables that can be used in such a formula. Those variables can include PageRank, allintitle numbers, paid listings, and so much more. It clearly needs to be measured against the power of the current site wanting to rank for those keywords and what the competition is out there. It would be nice to see someone attempt such a calculation tool.

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forums.

A Bing thread has two complaints from webmasters on Microsoft's newish crawler, MSNBot 2. The bot, in some cases, might be adding a pound sign (#) to the end of the URLs.

Now, this might not be the fault of Microsoft, it might be an issue with links and/or the web site's being crawled. But there are now two people reporting it and MSNBot 2 is a beta bot that may have issues, as Microsoft did allude to.

On June 29th, Brett from the Microsoft team did say, "I'm getting our crawler team to look at this. I'll update you as soon as I've heard back." But since then, we have not heard back.

Of course, there are ways to force the bot to the correct URL. I.e. block the # signs in your robots.txt or 301 redirect those URLs to the main URL.

Forum discussion at Bing Help.

It appears that some time over the weekend, YouTube began experimenting with 3D videos. I spotted a thread at the YouTube Help forum about this, where Googler Pete said he developed this in his 20% time.

He said he is the "developer working on the stereoscopic player as a 20% project." He added that "it's currently very early, hence the silly bugs like swapping the eyes for the anaglyph modes." Peter also shared the various ways to view such videos:

• yt3d:enable=true Enables the view mode. (obviously you've already discovered this)
• yt3d:aspect=3:4 Sets the aspect of the encoded video.
• yt3d:swap=true Swaps the left and right sources. You may need to add this to videos when the player with fixed anaglyph modes ships. Apologies for the inconvineince.
• yt3d:left=0_0.1_0.5_0.9 and yt3d:right=0.5_0.1_1_0.9 These tags are very provisional and most useful for fixing up old videos. They set the source area for each eye as pairs of coordinates x1_y1_x2_y2. The scale of these coordinates is 0,0 for the the top left down to 1,1 for the bottom right.

I spotted a video that is currently experimenting with this over here.

Again, this is a side project for one Googler right now and he did say:

Your feedback and suggestions are welcome, but as this isn't my primary project I can't promise a speedy turnaround with improvements.

I find it pretty cool that this is being done and I have a feeling it might gain a bit of a following by some videographers out there.

Forum discussion at YouTube Help.

Last week, we asked if Google was picking titles from Google Maps? It turned out to not be the case. In fact, there has been a surprising number of people complaining about the titles Google is showing for a specific page in the search results.

A newer thread at Google Webmaster Help brings up a new case where a search for http://www.animationarena.com/best-animation-schools.html returned a title that read "Schools that teach Flash - Best Animation Schools" as opposed to just "Best Animation Schools." It seems to be fixed for me now, but JohnMu of Google did chime in.

John said:

There are certain situations where we'd replace a title in search results (as is happening here), for example if we find that the same title is used on a number of pages or if the title is otherwise not that good (eg "Home"). It looks like in this case we chose a weird title -- I've passed it on to the team so that they can take a look and adjust things if possible.

Now, John replied with a similar message to several other threads or blog posts. Google must have done something recently which caused many titles to be overwritten by what Google thinks would be a more appropriate title.

Let's explore what John said a bit more. A different title may be used in the Google search results if:

(1) "The same title is used on a number of pages," a duplicate content title adjustment?

(2) "The title is otherwise not that good (eg "Home")", which we knew for a while now.

The first one is most interesting to me and I personally have never seen Google admit before.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

40 years-ago today, on July 20, 1969, the United States's Apollo 11 mission, successfully landed a man on the moon. Some search engines, such as Microsoft's Bing and Google's YouTube have special logos for the day. Surprisingly, Google, Yahoo and Ask.com have no logo. We have a logo for the day also. Here are the logos from the 40th anniversary of the special day.

Bing:

YouTube:

Search Engine Roundtable:

Actually, we had a logo two years ago as well. Maybe you will remember it:

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Update: At 3:30pm (EST) Google has added a special Google logo (Doodle) for the special day:

Also, Google's Street View Man is dressed in a space suit today:

In this weeks search video recap, we unveil our new video opener, please tell us what you think. We also discuss the Google's second quarter earnings statement, recent Yahoo and Microsoft merger discussions and the Twitter scandal. Google updated their image search filter, for worse or better. Google gave their approval for image replacement techniques. Google said, don't use the site command, it isn't useful. AdSense earnings are down for many, we polled you. Many SEOs are addicted to links and for one, it earned them a awesome link from News.com. Most SEOs submit it and forget it, when it comes to dmoz. Finally, happy birthday Sphinn and great new launch. 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 & hit "HD."

Some Of The Topics Discussed:

• GOOG Earnings Up While YHOO & MSFT Complete Search Deal
• 60% Of Our Readers Feel Yahoo Cannot Turn Things Around
• Google Image Search Improves Filter?
• Google Gives Blessing To Image Replacement Techniques
• Google Recommends Not Looking at Site Command Results
• Google AdSense Earnings Down in July 2009?
• Link Addiction: 46% Of SEOs are Active Link Builders
• CNET Calls Link Exchanges Poor Man SEO
• DMOZ (ODP): "Submit Once & Forget It" Says SEOs
• Sphinn 2.0 Launches On Two Year Anniversary

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: July 17, 2009"

Earlier this month, we polled our readers asking how addicted are you to links. Well, we have about a 150 responses now, and it shows that not all SEOs are addicted to links. 32% said they hate links, while 21% said they dream about links. Overall, 46% are active link builders. Here are the results.

Question: How Addicted To Link Acquisitions Are You?

:: I Hate Link Requests said 46 respondents or 32%
:: I Dream About Links said 30 respondents or 21%
:: I Request Links Weekly said 19 respondents or 13%
:: I Request Links Daily said 17 respondents or 12%
:: What Is a Link? said 6 respondents or 4%

Forum discussion continued at HighRanking Forums.

Jill Whalen posted an article at Search Engine Land that caused a stir in the SEO community. The name of the article is Is Most Of SEO Just A Boondoggle? (not sure if it was named something before). It is short, so it is worth a quick scan, but if you don't have time, it basically discusses how some (many) SEO companies sell SEO services which don't change a thing on your site. She lists which ones she feels are a waste.

Although I agree on the overall point of the article, there are some details I would disagree with. In any event, the big question I have for you, the ones that SEO sell, is how important is client involvement in a successful site? I am personally a strong believer that the client needs to bring to the table more than just money to make his site a success. But I am not sure all would agree with that.

So take the anonymous poll and let me know your thoughts:

Forum discussion at HighRanking Forums and Sphinn.

Last night, Google (GOOG) announced earnings and they "met" expectations, because the revenues were up 3%. There is a lot of buzz about this on Techmeme, but to read more about the earnings and the conference call about the earnings, see Greg's notes at Search Engine Land, there are some really nice tidbits in there.

Shortly after, news is leaking out that Yahoo and Microsoft are back at the table and this time, they are really really close to finalizing a deal. Of course these rumors and discussions have been going on for a really long time and many of you are tired of hearing about it. I for one, would like not to mention it until it actually happens, which I hope is soon.

Meanwhile, the biggest buzz over the past 12 hours is that TechCrunch posted stolen internal memos about Twitter's business strategy, that involved their discussions with Google, Microsoft, future growth plans and so much more. Matt McGee posted at Search Engine Land how these correspondence impact the search industry, so you can read those details there. The situation is just a sad one, and I believe law suits will follow.

That is the past 12 hours in search business news, it has been pretty busy.

Forum discussion on the GOOG news at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Several weeks ago, we discussed the debate over if Google treats SEOs as criminals. We even polled our readers on that question and the results were split.
In any event, if you believe this to be true, or even if you don't but you don't want to risk it, you might want to do your best to not be labeled as an SEO.

Winning the Web posted a piece named 7 Red Flags that Reveal to Google You're an SEO Criminal – Avoid These!. He goes through save things to avoid, in order not to be profiled as an SEO. Here are those points, in short form:

• You have a big mouth about your SEO tactics
• Your sites are all tied together = easy target
• Your site is over-optimized for certain keywords
• Your link profile is unnatural
• You use the nofollow link attribute to sculpt PageRank
• You buy or sell obvious paid links
• You use SEO and links to get a spammy site to the top of the rankings

On a personal level, I find it funny that I fall for some of these and I am not an SEO. I mean, I write about SEO and know a heck of a lot about SEO through writing and hands on work, but I don't sell "SEO services."

In any event, is it better to be safe then sorry?

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.

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

The Florida update, Vince/Brand update, April Fools update, Dewey update and so many more are code names for Google updates. We even named a few Yahoo updates, like the Tim update.

A Google Webmaster Help thread asks what are these names all about? Well, typically nothing. Naming updates first came from WebmasterWorld, with the Boston update being named in 2003. Sometimes they are named after people, like the Tim update and Vince update. Sometimes they are named for places or events and sometimes by date and by type of update.

The question is, do we need the names? I personally don't think the names are necessary, but they are nice to have, especially for big updates. Who doesn't remember the Florida update that shook the SEO space? Calling updates by names, gives it more character in my opinion. Some don't agree, what do you think? Take our anonymous poll:

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Title tags in the search results are very important, they drive clicks, which drives sales. It now appears that Google is pulling the title for some listings from Google Maps and not from the title tag in the page's source code.

A Google Webmaster Help thread reports this issue with a search for blinds or even their title tag, "Shop for Blinds, Window Blinds, Shutters, Plantation Shutters, Window Shades" returns the title tag, Blinds.com.

Why is this happening? No one really knew in the thread, it was a mystery. But I subscribe to Mike Blumenthals blog where he noticed that Google is overriding the title tags for some sites with the business name listed in Google Maps. The thing is, in Mike's case, that site has an ODP listing and the ODP listing's title is being used in Google. If the site were to use a NOODP tag, I think, in this case, the title would revert back. Blinds.com doesn't have an ODP listing, so maybe Google is pulling the title from Google Maps?

If you look at the Google Maps listing for Blinds.com, you will notice the business name is Blinds.com:

The title tag in the source code, again is "Shop for Blinds, Window Blinds, Shutters, Plantation Shutters, Window Shades."

Why would Google replace the titles of the search listings with Google Maps? They do this sometimes with the ODP title, but people complained and Google supported the NOODP tag to stop Google from using that title over your title tag. So now we will need a NOgMAP tag?

I hope this is some weird bug.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Update: It looks like in this case, Google used something just because the robots.txt file prevented Google from reading the site at some point. JohnMu of Google just replied to the thread saying:

It looks like this URL was briefly disallowed via your robots.txt file. In a case like that, we might choose a different title (if we can't access the original URL), as we did here. In general, once the robots.txt is back to normal, this usually settles down over time, no worries :)

So I assume the title came from anchor text links.

A Google Web Search Help thread reports that now Google is rolling out the left hand navigation design to iGoogle users in the UK and France.

I believe the US had the new, left hand navigation for a while now. Many users miss the old tabs at the top and we discussed a way to bring the top tabs back. So, if you are in the UK or France and you miss the old tabs, check out that article, I hope it still works. mooredc54, in the thread, discusses other methods to get the old tabs back.

Old:

New:

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

There is only so much CSS can accomplish with making headlines pretty. If you want to give your headlines a pretty font that not all computers support, then you need to go with graphics. But as an SEO, you don't want to lose out on search engines reading those headlines. Yes, search engines cannot always read graphics, even if you use alt text.

This is not a new issue, it is a common issue that many sites struggle with. A work around is to use image replacement techniques with CSS. Either you use CSS to swap out the text for an image replacement alternative or you can use an sIFR replacement technique, if you want the content to be dynamic.

Either way, as long as the content matches the content in the graphic, then you should be fine, according to Googler, JohnMu. John said in a Google Webmaster Help thread:

If you are using image replacement techniques and replacing the text with an image that is equivalent (with the exact same text in approximately the same visibility) then that is generally fine. This provides a nice user experience and still lets those who cannot access the images (eg crawlers or vision-impaired users) use your website normally.

Now this does not give you the okay to stuff keywords in that section. It has to match and it should be relevant to the page. Use your best judgement when using these techniques. In fact, I hope to use the sIFR technique on the new RustyBrick site, when it launches in 4 years from now. ;-)

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: July 15, 2009"

Link exchanges: The poor man's SEO from CNET discusses the pros and cons of link exchanges. The article isn't bad, overall.

What I personally find funny is that CNET quoted Evan Duffield after Evan emailed CNET with a link exchange request. Evan got a lot more than a simple link exchange, he got a whole article with clean links to his sites on the News.com domain.

Anyway, the article is being discussed at WebmasterWorld now, so if you are somewhat new to the SEO space, you should read the article and see the discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld

I am pretty fascinated with how Google News works and how the workflow runs there. I recently spotted a thread at the Google News Help forum which shows how not only does Google review publications periodically, but before removing publications, they may email those publications.

One site owner was upset his site no longer showed up in Google News. Inbal, a Googler, informed this site owner that after receiving some complaints from Google News users, the site was reviewed and removed. Inbal said:

The reason why we stopped crawling your content since July is that we periodically review news sources, particularly following user complaints, to ensure Google News offers a high quality experience for our users. When we reviewed your site we found that we can no longer include it in Google News at this time.

We currently only include articles from sources that could be considered organizations, generally characterized by multiple writers and editors, availability of organizational information, and accessible contact information. When we reviewed your site we weren't able to find this evidence of an organization.

What was more interesting was that Inbal said they do try to contact the publication before removing it, to get more facts about the complaints. Inbal said:

Please be assured that we tried to contact Eritrea Daily via email before removing it from Google News to offer the necessary remedy, however, alas, our emails bounced back, and due to some user complaints about no evidence for an organization behind the source we took this action, as we weren't able to find multiple writers and editors and accessible contact information on your site.

In this case, the publication was restored and placed back in Google News after being removed for a couple weeks. But learning about this process, I admit, does fascinate me a bit.

Forum discussion at Google News Help.

For several weeks, Google News has been tinkering with their RSS feeds. We have a thread at Google News Help where Googler, Inbal, said it should be fixed in a week or so, well, it has been a week.

We have a new Google News Help thread with an example of foreign language searches via RSS not working. Let me show you.

A Google News search for [фармацевтический] which means pharmaceutical returns several results on the web version but when I flip to the RSS version, I get no results. Here is a picture of the RSS version using Safari's RSS reader:

I am not sure when this will be fixed, but Inbal from Google said, "Thanks for taking the time to report this issue. Our engineers are on top of it."

Forum discussion at Google News Help.

Starting a few weeks ago the Google Maps Help forum reports that when you want to display text in the bubble of a Google Map pin mark, using the longitude and latitude of the location, it would no longer work.

For example, you can see it live at this link but here is a screen copy.

The issue is, the only way to get this to work is by appending [&iwloc=A&hl=en] to the end of the URL, if you remove it, the info bubble disappears. It works fine without that extra parameter in the URL for a standard address match, i.e. here but not sure why it doesn't work for the longitude and latitude version.

Forum discussion at Google Maps Help.

The site command (site:www.domain.com) is often used to determine the health of a web site in a search engine. The thing is, Google's site command is far from accurate and too many SEOs look at it too closely. We discussed this before and I just want to cover it again.

Googler, JohnMu, said in a Google Webmaster Help thread:

Focusing on the site:-query rough approximations will not lead to useful results.

Did he just say that the site command results are not useful? Are you surprised? I'm not. Like I said, we said this before.

For example, a site:www.seroundtable.com command returns for me over 17,000 pages. When I look at Google Webmaster Tools, I see indexed URLs at 9,921. So who do I believe?

We discussed the site command dozens of times here over the course of about 6 years. It is interesting to see how this has changed over the years.

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: July 14, 2009"

The other day, I spilled my guts out about missing the old days of Yahoo. I honestly wish Yahoo was on their way to a full recovery and become a strong competitor to Google or even not compete with Google, but just become stronger then it was a year ago. But it doesn't seem to be happening and it is sad.

I decided to feel out our readers, and ask them if they feel Yahoo has a shot and making a come back? Here are the results:

Question: HowWill Yahoo Turn Things Around?

:: No said 45 respondents or 60%
:: Yes said 25 respondents or 33%
:: Other said 5 respondents or 7%

Most of the "other" answers were "I doubt it" type of responses. Yahoo, prove us wrong, please!

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

Earlier this month, we polled our audience asking how important is DMOZ to your SEO strategy? As expected, most SEOs take the philosophy of "submit it and forget it." Why? Simply because to many SEOs, it is not worth them wasting their time following up with DMOZ when many editors won't act on those follow ups.

Here are the full poll results:

Question: How Important is DMOZ (ODP)?

:: Submit Once & Forget It said 158 respondents or 63%
:: Don't Bother Submitting said 49 respondents or 20%
:: Submit & Follow Up said 40 respondents or 16%
:: Other answer... said 2 respondents or 1%

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

I recently signed up to enable YouTube revenue sharing on my search videos. It was part so that I can try to get my YouTube videos into Google News (still working on that).

One thing I noticed was that while my AdSense reports update daily, my YouTube data in the AdSense reporting tool shows "no data available." I then spotted a thread about this "issue" today at Google AdSense Help. I dug around and noticed that this is by design.

YouTube earnings are documented to be 30 days back dated. So the YouTube earnings will first show 30 days after the previous month, for that previous month and then it would be paid out 30 days after that, if you have $100 of earnings or more. Google said, "AdSense for Content Host revenue is paid 30 days after the month's end. "YouTube" includes revenue from ads placed next to your videos. YouTube revenue is paid 60 days after the month's end."

Forum discussion at Google AdSense Help.

There are dozens of threads at the Google AdSense Help forum and a thread at WebmasterWorld with complaints from publishers that their July 2009 earnings are way down, relative to past months.

There are of course a few publishers who are noting that their earnings are actually up. But like most threads, people only come to complain and those that complain, are those that have seen their earnings drop.

So I ask you, the publisher, are your earnings up or down in July 2009? Please take our anonymous poll:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A day after Sphinn's two year birthday, that is right, Sphinn was launched on July 12, 2007, version 2.0 of Sphinn was pushed live. Sphinn is the social forum-like site where SEOs and SEMs can submit stories or discussions, members can then vote and comment on those stores. It is a fairly popular site and it is pretty fun to use.

The Sphinn Blog has the details on version 2.0 of Sphinn. Here are the main points:

• New, cleaner look
• Much improved moderation and spam controls
• The removal of the “Discussion” option for submissions
• My Network – Friend and follow the people you like
• "Show Me" Filters – Only show submissions from My Network, or your favourite categories
• Subscribe/Unsubcribe to stories that you’re interested in, with email notifications
• Save stories that you enjoyed or want to come back to
• My Sphinn – A one-stop dashboard for your network, important topics and an expanding list of blog content

Also coming soon, but not yet live, are Private Discussions, Live Chat and a Members-Only directory.

Here is a picture of Sphinn soon after it first launched in 2007:

Here is Sphinn 2.0:

Happy Birthday Sphinn!

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.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: July 13, 2009"

There is a large thread at the Bing Community on the topic of how Bing treats domain names. There are some people that feel that Bing's algorithm weighs too heavily on words in a domain name.

Cleo started the thread, which now has about 30 replies, even from Brett Young of Microsoft. Cleo said:

If I have one criticism of the Bing, it is that it puts WAY too much emphasis currently on keyword domain names. Like for example, if you made bread and had a website named www.bread.com, it would rank really high with Bing.
However, the actually quality and content or even code of the website may be terrible. It may not even be related to bread, but the people at Bing put way too much emphasis on just the names alone...

In the past and present, it has been a major source of abuse/keyword stuffing.

Two things I find interesting in this thread.

(1) The topic of how valuable a domain name is in the eyes of Bing. Clearly this is up for debate and anything you see today, can change tomorrow.

(2) How a site was sent to the spam team for review after discussion in the thread. Yes, you may be able to expedite spam reviews if you complain about specific sites in the Bing community.

Forum discussion at Bing Community.

Whenever there is an image search change at any search engine, Zeus, a WebmasterWorld member, knows about it. He posted a thread at WebmasterWorld noting that he has seen a change to the moderate filter used by Google Image search.

Zeus said the change is a big improvement to what was there previously. Specifically, images often wrongly associated with being adult pictures are no longer classified as such. He said, and I quote:

Today I see big changes in search with "Moderate filter on" and I can say its to the way better, I have made my usual searches with some keywords which can not be mistaken as adults searches and some which could be mistaken both search gave me good results with more images presented, so as it seems now we are on a good way, but sometimes they make a few changes to the filter, so we have to wait a few days, but for now it looks good.

WebmasterWorld administrator, Tedster, also noted that Google Image Search's product manager, Peter Linsley was interviewed by Eric Enge last week. There are some good tidbits in there.

So if you noticed an spike or decline in Google image search referrals, this may be why.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The Google scams have been an issue since early this year. They got a lot worse last month and finally Google began banning advertisers who are promoting these Google scams.

Google has taken this to the next level by blogging about it on the official Google Blog. Google outed the scam finally and clearly, by saying:

We're seeing disturbing cases in which websites, emails and advertisements claim that you can make large amounts of money from home with very little effort using Google products and services. They're designed to look like they were written by a regular person, just like you, who stumbled across an amazing opportunity to make their monetary dreams come true. What they don't tell you clearly is that Google is not affiliated with these sites and that they may add extra charges to your credit card or misuse your personal information.

So don't fall for it, too many people have already and I hope you don't. Google offered ways to detect these scams as well as ways to report them, here is how to report them:

• If you've been ripped off, or suspect others are, report the site and file a complaint with the appropriate agency.

• If you come across many sites with duplicate content or common templates intended to direct users to the same product or scheme, please let us know with a spam report.

• If you've been contacted to place suspicious links on your site for money, let us know with the paid link report form. If you have your own website or are in charge of advertising on a site, think carefully before accepting ads or entering into affiliate programs that will lead your users to schemes like those mentioned above.

• If your site's forums or comment sections have been spammed with fake offers of fabulous financial gain, you may need to take steps to fight comment spam. Spammers will take advantage of any user-generated content sections of your site, and will even generate thousands of fake user profiles to try to slip under the radar.

• If you receive suspicious messages that claim to be from Google, these may be phishing attempts. Please report them to phishing@google.com.

Forum discussion continued at Google AdWords Help.

Last week Google added a creative commons drop down filter to Google Image Search. The filter looks like this:

Google said:

This feature allows you to restrict your Image Search results to images that have been tagged with licenses like Creative Commons, making it easier to discover images from across the web that you can share, use and even modify. Your search will also include works that have been tagged with other licenses, like GNU Free Documentation license, or are in the public domain.

This feature also helps artists who want their images to be discovered and reused across the web — on their own terms. Creative Commons licenses allow artists to specify the ways others may use their work. Artists can license their images for general reuse, or for noncommercial reuse only. They can also decide whether or not to grant people the right to modify or remix their images. Once they've chosen to make their work available online under these terms, Google Images helps people start to find and use it.

Yahoo has had this feature since May or so.

Yes, this is a help to both content owners and searchers, now if only more people understood what creative commons was.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

In this week's recap, I share how the Google logo sent me tons of traffic for Tesla's birthday. I also discuss the July 4th logos and our video game pacman logo. Google Chrome OS was revealed this week as coming out in late 2010. Yahoo SearchPad finally launched. Google bolstered their real estate search. Google finally is taking action against AdWords scammers. Google is testing forum sub links in the search results. An SEO company got caught with their pants down. Empty answer sites are so annoying in search results. Google added a toggle for SafeSearch preferences. Google history may be leaking your search history to others. Get into Bing News with an email. Michael Jackson fans are upset with Google. 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:

• Google Commemorates Nikola Tesla's Birthday
• July 4th Search Engine Logos (Google, Yahoo, Bing, AOL & Others)
• Google Chrome, The Operating System
• Yahoo Launching SearchPad Today
• Google Tries To Save The Housing Market With Real Estate Search
• Google Begins Banning Google AdWords Scams
• Google Testing Sub Links For Forum Thread Results?
• SEO Company Caught By Client Using Google Support Forums
• Most Annoying Google Search Results? Empty Answer Sites
• Google Makes It Faster To Find Pornography
• Can Someone Else's Search History Show Up In Your Google History?
• Getting Listed In Bing News
• Michael Jackson Fans Upset With Google Over "Ugliest Person in the World"

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: July 10, 2009"

WebmasterWorld administration, engine, reported in a WebmasterWorld thread that he is now only seeing UK news at Google.com.

He said, in the past, when he wanted UK news he went to Google.co.uk, but when he wanted US news, he went to Google.com. Now, since he is based in the UK, he only sees UK news at Google.com.

Engine is a bit upset, adding, "Google has taken one of my toys away, and I want it back!"

Not every UK searcher is noticing this right now. It might be related to how Google is testing dropping the country filter search option - or it might be totally unrelated.

Just as a heads up, you can get any news edition for any country at this page so if Engine wants US news in the UK, he can go to news.google.com/news?ned=us.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Let me start off by saying this is not brand new, but Microsoft is now making sure people know about the Bing Toolbox. The Bing Toolbox is basically a landing page that has links to the most important webmaster tools that Bing manages.

That includes features such as:

• Submit a site
• Add a Sitemap
• Get an API key
• Browse API tools
• Access webmaster tools
• See Bing community forum & blogs
• And more...

Here is a screen shot of how the page looks right now:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google's web history is great for finding things you have searched for in the past. It comes in handy for many reasons. In fact, it even helped a parent catch his son searching for porn, but is it always accurate?

Every now and then, I see threads pop up with complaints that someone else's search history is showing up in that person's Google history. I always dismiss it as someone else accessing this person's computer or someone having his Google account password, and messing with this person. But now, I am not a 100% convinced it is always user error.

An updated Google Web Search Help thread has one person who reported an issue with his web history back in January and came in recently to tell us his story. He basically said a Google representative talked to him offline and then took down his information. Shortly after, that web history was gone, according to this searcher, and the problem never occurred again.

I asked him what happened and he said:

I never found out what the issue was. If Google knew the answer, no one from Google told me. I had a conference call with a product manager and and an engineer, they said they'd work on it, and then the problem went away. That was several months ago, and the problem has not returned for me.

I don't know how widespread the issue is--not that many people check their web history. I suspect it's a lot more than the handful of people who are reporting it here. I was, and am, most concerned about the integrity of my searches and my personal information showing up on someone else's computer and my having no idea it was happening. I don't use online map services any longer, nothing that would indicate my address.

Personally, I rarely check my web history and I am sure 90% of searchers don't even know about Google web history. So I wouldn't be surprised that if there was an issue, a lot more are being affected without knowing. Clearly, this can be a huge security, privacy and confidentiality concern for the Google searcher.

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

If you visit Google.com today, you will notice a special logo that looks like a coil lighting rode. It is a depiction of the Tesla coil created by Nikola Tesla.

Without Tesla, most people think we would not have had electricity as early as we did. Without electricity, no computers, no computers, no Internet, no Internet, no Google.

Tesla was born on July 10, 1856 and he passed away on January 7, 1943. Today is July 10th, so 153 years later, Google is remembering Nikola Tesla.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and Google Web Search Help.

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

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: July 9, 2009"

It is not uncommon to find SEOs asking other SEOs questions in the SEO discussion forums. But it is not everyday where you find the clients of an SEO coming in an asking questions about their own site, only to find out that his SEO previously asked the same question in the same discussion forum, to the same people. That is exactly what happened, as pointed out by Autocrat in a Google Webmaster Help thread. The real shocker is what the client discovered his SEO said about his own abilities.

Yesterday, Gary from Manchester, posted a thread at Google Webmaster Help asking for advice about a client's site. The client noticed a major drop in rankings and hired Gary to fix the issue. Gary then offered his findings in a thread and asked other SEOs for advice and other tips. Again, this is common and often done, either in a public forum or offline, with SEO's who are friends.

Later on in the day, Mike, the webmaster from the company that Gary is proposing SEO to, posted his own thread at Google Webmaster Help asking the same question. What is kind of funny is that one member who replied to Mike said that he should stop posting duplicate threads. Mike replied that he "had no idea Gary had come to a forum for answers."

The issue is, Gary, the SEO, said in the thread, "I personally don't think this will get them their rankings back." Now, Mike saw this and was very upset that Gary would offer an SEO proposal "between £2,500 & £5000 to produce a report on the problems YOU have outlined." A report that, Gary himself thinks would not solve the site's problem. Mike added, "I will look forward to talking to him tomorrow!"

A tip to you SEOs out there. If you are asking for advice in a public forum, please be more discrete. Use URL shortening services, to mask the URL and be upfront with those helping you that you don't want the client to know you are asking for advice. But more importantly, do not say you think the site is doomed. But even more importantly, above that, if you think the site is doomed and you can't fix it, don't charge the client money when you think you can't help - that just seems ethically wrong.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

There is almost nothing worse than a malware warning for a webmaster or SEO to see in the search results. You can have top rankings in a search engine, but if your listing is labeled to be harmful and the search engine warns users not to visit the site, it can be devastating.

That is why Google and the other search engines offer malware reviews, either in their webmaster tools section or via a form. Google is known to take action on malware reviews within hours, the other search engines typically take days. But according to one thread, Microsoft's Bing may take several weeks.

A Bing Community thread has one webmaster who claimed he submitted his site for a malware review to all the search engines. Google removed the malware label within the same day, the other search engines took days, but Bing took several weeks, according to this webmaster. The webmaster simply said, "but this whole process did take too long."

I am not sure if this is a common practice with Bing or not. Any webmasters experience this as well? Please let me know.

Forum discussion at Bing Community.

Google has confirmed in a Google Mobile Help thread that many mobile users of Google News will be redirected to the desktop version. Some people already began noticing it and Google's Robin has confirmed it saying:

Hi folks - As you've noticed, we're switching around the Google News site a bit. Let us know what you think about using the desktop site vs. the old mobile version!

I am not sure if this applies to iPhone and Android users, because I personally see the iPhone version, which looks like this:

But some are seeing this on their mobile phone:

Big difference in the mobile experience, don't you think? Most people are not happy with the change.

Forum discussion at Google Mobile Help.

Remember a little back Matt Cutts of Google posted that he wanted the Google search results to remove empty review sites from the listings? Recently, during my Google searches, I have been landing on sites that have answers, but require you to login and pay to view those answers.

This has happened to me several times over the course of the week, but let me share one example with you. I was looking on how to mess around with imap outlook folders and found a Google result at, you guessed it, Expert Exchange. Here is a screen shot:

Great, this is my exact question, I click over and what do I see? I see a teaser to sign up to view the answer:

I cannot tell you have annoying this search experience has been for me. It makes me want to completely remove all expert-exchange.com results from my search experience at Google. I know this is not new, it comes up very often in the forums. But now it is bothering me personally, so I thought I take a recent thread and vent about it.

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

Update: As noted by Adam in the comments, if you actually keep scrolling and scrolling, you will see all the answers listed there. I assume they are doing this to not cloak content to Google, but it still seems wrong.

Did you know that both Yahoo and Bing cannot tell the time in Tehran, Iran? A Bing Community thread points out the issue with Bing. Let me share with you searches for [time tehran] from Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask and Wolfram - you will notice that both Bing and Yahoo are off.

Bing shows 3:55pm:

Yahoo also shows 3:55pm:

Google, Ask & Wolfram Alpha all show the correct time, as 4:55pm:

I am not sure why there is a difference between these search engines. Some cite that the difference comes from Iran Standard Time versus Iran Daylight Time, but Iran has one time right now.

Forum discussion at Bing Community.

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: July 8, 2009"

In August 2008, Google released what was called the enhanced 404 widget that allowed webmasters to easily create custom 404 pages. In fact, we still have a sample of this in action at advertize.html.

But for some reason, I think Google removed the feature from the Google Webmaster Tools section. As a Google Webmaster Help thread discusses, he can't find it in the Webmaster Tools section. I looked for several minutes and I also cannot find it anywhere.

Did Google move it and I can't find it? Did they drop the feature with the launch of the new design?

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

You know how to get listed in Google News but what about Bing News? A Bing Community thread has discussion around that topic.

Brett Yount from the Bing Webmaster Center said the way to be included in Bing News is a manual process. You simply need to email bns@microsoft.com and wait to hear back.

What if you don't hear back? Brett suggests emailing again:

There should be confirmation from the review team. If you did not get one, I suggest emailing them again.

Yahoo News and Google News are tremendous traffic drivers, but Bing is gaining market share, according to some. So it cannot hurt to be listed.

Forum discussion at Bing Community.

If you conduct a Google search for ugliest person in the world today, you will see Google listing a picture of the late Michael Jackson. Here is a picture I took from this morning of the search results:

As virtually everyone knows, Michael Jackson died on June 25th and the memorial service was yesterday. The popularity of Jackson, especially right now, with how Google ranks documents, has likely lead to Jackson's picture being listed as the number one result for that search.

A Google Web Search Help thread has one Jackson fan who is somewhat upset with Google over the listing. He said:

i'd think google would be a little nicer then that maybe put him third at least

Clearly, there was some sarcasm there, but I doubt you will see Google make any changes to that image result - at least I hope not. Not because I am not a Michael Jackson fan, that has nothing to do with it. Simply because Google has a policy of not changing the search results for things like this.

Does the search result bother you?

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

Rumors of Google building an operating system has been nothing new, but confirmation that they are building an operating system is something new. Google confirmed that a Google OS named Google Chrome OS, is coming in the second half of 2010.

The OS will be first a light weight OS designed for Netbooks, not it is not Android. You can read about it at the Google Blog and all the billions of news items at Techmeme.

One thing I will highlight from the blog post:

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We're designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. ... and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

As you can imagine, this has people talking about things like Google going after Microsoft directly, Google owning not only our web lives but our desktop lives as well and Google getting into a business they should stay out of. Yes, there are tons of opinions on this news and the best place to discuss them and share your own opinions is in the forums.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

There seems to be a persistent bug with the site authentication tool in the Google AdSense publisher controls.

Some publishers are complaining about errors being returned when trying to use the feature. There is a Google AdSense Help thread that says the issue has been happening for about a week now. Google said it was fixed, but some publishers are still complaining about it not working. One posted the error:

Error

We apologize for the inconvenience, but we are unable to process your request at this time. Our engineers have been notified of this problem and will work to resolve it

Yesterday, AdSensePro Jennifer, an official Google representative, said, "Should be fixed now. Let me know if it's still not working." But a few publishers came in afterwards to inform her that it is not working.

This site authentication feature launched in July 2007, but has been seen since June and early May of 2007.

Forum discussion at Google AdSense Help.

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

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: July 7, 2009"

A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion around how Google seems to consider any web site that contains an RSS feed, as a blog. In fact, several webmasters are complaining that their web sites are showing in the Google Universal Results, under the label of, "blog posts about," when their site is simply not a blog.

What seems to be happening is that Google may be considering any site that has an RSS feed as a blog. Many sites have RSS feeds these days, including Apple.com that has autodiscovery set up to their hot news headlines feed and even my site, RustyBrick.com that has our autodiscovery set up to our news section (which I really need to update).

It does appear that Google may classify www.rustybrick.com as a blog by listing our results in blog search, but it does not list apple.com in blog search. It does list many sites with RSS feeds, no matter if they are a blog or not, in blog search.

So does Google have a problem misclassifying blogs based on the RSS feed availability? Should webmasters be upset if their sites are included in Google Blog Search? Can it hurt?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google loves indexing content, any content it can get their hands on. In fact, it isn't just Google, it is any search engine. But there is some content you probably don't want Google to index, and those are pages that reveal how to login to your server and make changes.

Just take a look at the number of CPanel login pages Google has indexed. Yahoo has some and so does Bing. No, the search engine is not to blame, it is the hosting company for not blocking the search engine from indexing those pages.

A "top contributor" at the Google Webmaster Help Forum is venting about the issue. He said:

I don't have control over that web page, it's as provided by the makers of Cpanel (and that is adminstered by my own hoster admins). It responds with a 200, while it uses javascript redirection to send one to the login page itself. There is no robots meta tag on it. I cannot modify it. Stupid. I have a mind to contact Cpanel and ask them to add a robots noindex meta tag and whatever else. But that may not happen any time really soon.

What can you do? Bug your host.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help Forum.

Yahoo is reportedly releasing SearchPad today. We covered the preview of this earlier, where webmasters called it a big scraper tool - what search engine isn't. ;-)

What is it?

Search Pad is a note taking application built into Yahoo! Search that automatically assists you in saving websites you visit and taking notes as you search. Search Pad helps you collect, edit, organize, save, print, and email your notes for immediate or future use.

Search Pad is helpful in completing tasks and making decisions that require collecting information over multiple search sessions such as making a large purchase, planning a vacation or gathering information on a health issue.

You can learn all about it and see additional screen shots at http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/searchpad/.

This can be a very useful tool for searchers, so I am looking forward to trying it out once and never using it again.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

The other day we reported on Searchers Want "Pages From [Country]," Google Might Drop It. Go read it quickly and come back here. The reports of people seeing this has grown tremendously. I see dozens of forum threads on the issue, and it is not limited to countries outside of the United States, it is also being reported within the United States (not sure how that is possible).

In any event, at first I thought it was a "feature" Google was testing. But I keep watching the threads and I keep seeing Googler, Jimmy and Jem, respond that this is something Google is looking to fix. I don't get why this would be a "bug" because it looks like a deliberate change or test from Google, but Jimmy from Google keeps calling this a bug impacting some users.

Some people who have seen this are reporting they no longer see it. Again, I really don't think this is a "bug," no matter what Google says. This really seems like a feature test to me. I don't think the Googlers in the thread understand the issue.

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

Update: Google has confirmed that this is not a bug, but rather a test they are running.

There are several reports around the web about a new search bot by Microsoft that is causing major issues for web servers. The bot is named adidxbot and the useragent looks like this: adidxbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm).

This bot has been on the loose since the middle of May. There are threads at WebmasterWorld and Bing Community with complaints about this bot. The bot reportedly indexes and crawls incredibly quickly, with no remorse on the web server. This can cause servers to see spikes of CPU usage and slow down the normal visitors from using the site. In addition, the spider does not obey the crawl delay command.

A Bing representative said the fix was just released this morning and the bot should no longer cause issues for webmasters. Brent Young of the Bing team said:

I just received word that they fixed the bug that was causing this. If you are still experiencing issues, please email me at lswmc@microsoft.com

I hope so.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Bing Community.

A reader, BlogsDNA tipped me off on a new Google test. It appears that Google is showing a form of sub links under the main search results, that link to additional forum threads, when relevant, from a specific site. Here is a picture showing two such cases for a search:

I personally do not see this in any browser I tried, nor on any platform. But it does seem interesting. Often discussion forums have many threads about the same exact topic. This gives Google a way to include multiple threads without cluttering up the search results with indented results from the same site.

I am not sure if this will stick, but it does look interesting.

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: July 6, 2009"

On June 29th we reported that the Google scams were getting worse. In short, people have been promoting fake Google payout systems, such as Google Money Kit or Money System, along with dozens of other names, to convince people that Google is giving people a way to earn quick bucks. Google does have publisher programs like AdSense and other programs, but not these get rich quick scams.

It has been going on for a long time and I was kind of getting sick of it recently. Now, I am seeing reports that Google is taking action against not just the Google scams but other potential scams advertised through the Google AdWords system.

A Google AdWords Help thread has several advertisers complaining they have been banned from AdWords. The email being sent to advertisers is:

It's come to our attention that you have submitted ads that promote Google Money Tree or ads that promote a misrepresented affiliation with Google. Due to multiple complaints from our users and publishers, we've made the decision not to accept these ads.

This is a notification that your account has been suspended due to the submission of these ads and your ads will no longer run on Google. Please note that future accounts you open will also be suspended.

These don't seem to be fake emails, so this seems like Google is finally enforcing their terms of service. Kim said Google began enforcing the policy on July 1st. About time!

I just hope that some innocent advertisers didn't get hit by friendly fire.

Forum discussion at Google AdWords Help.

Every industry has their addiction. Wall Street is known for their speed addiction, Hollywood for, well - can't list them all and so on. The SEO industry may have an addition to link acquisitions, mostly Google's fault :).

In any event, I found a humorous thread at HighRankings Forum that talks about one person's addiction to links. He said:

Hi I was just wondering if I am the only one that spends a lot of my spare time looking for links? I seem to be fanatical about contacting people, I even rang a company in Turkey that I thought would be good for me but we didnt understand each other on the phone - i think they got confused when i mentioned google, anyway every time I get a positive response I jump for joy and need another hit.

It made me laugh, I admit it, I guess it is all the time I spend reading forum threads and I cracked (no pun intended).

So let me ask you, anonymously, if you are addicted to links. Take our poll:

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

When Bing first launched, it received a lot of hype around the amount of porn it found. Soon after, Microsoft added additional measures to help filter out the porn and adult content.

Now, it seems like Google has changes Google Image Search to make it just a bit faster and easier to find adult or pornographic content with the search engine. If you conduct a search, you will now notice the "SafeSearch" filter has a quick drop down box that allows you to make the filter stronger or turn it off:

In two quick clicks, you have access to any type of picture you want.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Okay, so maybe the title is a bit too much. Building out Google Maps to make a difference in the housing market is a bit of a stretch. Google announced the launch of Google Maps Real Estate Search.

It allows you to:

• Find houses currently on the market
• Search nearby for schools, restaurants and public transport
• See the property in Street View to explore the neighborhood
• Find directions between the property and your favorite places

The Age seemed to break the story and now we have lots buzzing on the news.

It is pretty nice to have, even though there are many real estate search engines out there. Here is a look at my area, near my office.

As you can see, you can filter by price range, foreclosures, number of bed rooms, bathrooms and square footage.

Again, real estate search is not new. The big player in this game, in my mind, is Zillow.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google Blog Search announced the addition of a few features. The most noticeable changes are to the Google Blog Search home page, where Google now shows the top hot queries and the latest blog posts from popular blogs.

Here is a picture showing those two new sections:

Another feature that was released was the ability to subscribe to RSS and Atom feeds. Simply click on the links under "Subscribe" in the left-hand column of the Blog Search front page to subscribe to any topic or story in any feed reader.

Clearly the hot queries box will become a target for spammers and/or marketers, just like the Twitter trends box is. In fact, the Google Trends page has been hit by spammers in the past, at least a few times.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Happy July 4th All! Here are the logos celebrating the special day from Google, Yahoo, AOL, Ask, YouTube, Bing, Dogpile and many others.

Google:

Yahoo:

AOL:

Bing:

Ask:

Dogpile:

YouTube:

Search Engine Roundtable:

For past July 4th logos from the search industry, see 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005 and 2004.

In this week's video recap, we discuss the July Google webmaster report, a lot has happened over the past 30 days. Google may have had a PageRank quirk. Google penalized the porn industry and then reversed it. Google is messing with international search filters. Many of you like the new Bing commercials. Bing tries real-time search with Twitter answers. Microsoft adCenter has a quality based ranking team. Google announces the new AdWords API, v2009. Google has payment issues with Australian AdSense publishers. Selling SEO before the site is developed, is not easy. Google insults their top forum help contributors. Have a wonderful July 4th weekend! 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:

• July 2009 Google Webmaster Report
• Google's Recent PageRank "Technical Quirk"?
• Google Search Spanks The Adult Porn Industry?
• Google Reverses Adult/Porn Site Penalties
• Searchers Want "Pages From [Country]," Google Might Drop It
• 60% Of Our Readers Like The Bing Commercials
• Bing Adds Tweets Answers But How Real Time Is It?
• Bing's Quality Based Ranking Team for adCenter
• Get Ready For The Google AdWords API v2009
• Google AdSense Australian Payments Not Being Issued
• Offering SEO Before The Site Is Developed
• Google's Support Forums Member Status Glitch

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: July 3, 2009"

We are a few days into July and the WebmasterWorld thread that covers Google changes from month to month has been getting a lot of traction over the past couple weeks.

The overall theme is that there is a lot of ranking fluctuation taking place over the past few weeks. There are some rumors that Google has adjusted their link algorithm to look more at how "relevant" the link is to the page it is linking to. What exactly that means and if the rumor is true, is incredibly hard to validate. But the thread is getting a lot of traction and if you are noticing unstable shifts in Google for your search phrases, you might want to take a look at that thread.

Overall it has been a busy month, from adult sites being penalized and restored, to a couple PageRank updates and new Webmaster Tools features - Google has been up to a lot of things over the past 30 days. Here is a rundown of our Google specific coverage over the past thirty-days.

• Google's Recent PageRank "Technical Quirk"?
• Google Reverses Adult/Porn Site Penalties
• Google Search Spanks The Adult Porn Industry?
• June 2009 Google PageRank Update: Kind Of Early
• Why Google May Shorten Your Long URL in the SERPs
• Google Webmaster Tools Link Reports Change
• Google Finally Adds Domain Change Tool & Launches New Webmaster Tools Design
• Google Now Notifying Webmasters After Reconsideration Request Review via Email
• Google UK Search Shake Up - June 2009

For last month's report, see the June 2009 Google Webmaster Report.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

It seems like there are several threads around the SEO forum space that have discussion on a recent PageRank update. Yes, even more recent then the June PageRank update.

There is a WebmasterWorld thread, a few DigitalPoint Forum threads and a few Google Webmaster Help threads. I will only link to two, but there are plenty out there.

In the Google Webmaster Help, Googler, JohnMu, replied to one webmaster saying that he/she should not worry about the last PageRank change because it was likely a "technical quirk."

The way John said it, made it sound like the error was on Google's side. Here is what John said:

You have a nice-looking site :). As far as I can tell, it looks like the change in Toolbar PageRank for your site is only due to some technical quirk and not something that you need to worry about.

So I am wondering if the recent PageRank update noticed by a small percentage of webmasters, was a technical bug on Google's front?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Google Webmaster Help.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks if DMOZ is still relevant in 2009? DMOZ is a legendary web directory and has a ton of history. But is it still a critical or what it ever a critical part of your overall SEO or link building strategy?

I don't often see discussions around DMOZ (Open Directory Project) these days. In the past, the SEO forums were more likely to have an active discussion around the value and tips for submitting to DMOZ. Nowadays, I don't see it too much.

So I decided to create a poll and hope to get some responses from you on how important DMOZ is to you, as an SEO. Here is the poll:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Shaun, aka Hobo, has released a 157 page PDF guide on SEO. You can download the book over here.

There are many SEO books out there, some free, some at a price. I would list some that I recommend, but I honestly don't want to leave any out. So I'll just list a few, but please don't be insulted if I don't list yours.

• Google SEO Guide (PDF)
• SEOmoz SEO Guide
• SEOBook.com (not sure if they still got the book)

Those are just a few and now we have this new one.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

There are some countries that simply do not like Google or they simply don't get along with Google. If you are in one of those countries and you try to access Google AdSense or possibly other properties, you may see a message from the provider.

A WebmasterWorld thread has a copy of that message. Here it is:

Unable to access AdSense homepage

A connection has been established between your current IP address and a country sanctioned by the U.S. government (for more information, see http://www.ustreas.gov/offices/enforcement/ofac/ ).

We're unable to grant you access to the AdSense homepage at this time.

I personally never saw such a message, so when I saw a thread about it, I found it interesting.

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: July 2, 2009"

On June 30th, Mozilla released Firefox 3.5. On June 30th, we had the first complaints at Google AdWords Help that the Google AdWords interface was not supported in Firefox 3.5.

The error message being displayed to AdWords advertisers was:

Support for Firefox 3.5 is coming soon. Until then, please use an earlier version of Firefox when viewing the new interface.

Google fixed it a day later, and we have confirmed reports in that thread that the new AdWords interface is fully operational in Firefox 3.5. Oh, and by the way, it is also now working in Safari 4.0.

Forum discussion at Google AdWords Help .

We knew Google was going to discontinue the 800# call tracking feature "shortly after May 5, 2009." Well, it seemed to have continued to work, until yesterday.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports from one advertiser who religiously used these free 800#s that they no longer seem to work. He said:

At this moment it looks like the numbers are dead. If you were waiting to swap them out, do it right now. I am trying to confirm when they turned off. It has to be within the last 3 or 4 days.

It is a shame but maybe Google Voice will come up with 800# support soon. The call tracking was a nice feature, but there are plenty of companies that offer that as a paid service, if you really love it.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

So Gabs spotted last week that Google was testing removing the "pages from UK" radio search button at Google UK. He was the only one I saw mention that until now, but I blogged it at Search Engine Land, because I knew it would come up again.

Today, I spotted a thread at Google Web Search Help with complaints from some searchers that Google South Africa is no longer showing the radio button "pages from South Africa" only. They are pretty upset about Google dropping this. Keep in mind, it seems to be a limited test and Google might not go this route.

Here are some screen captures from Gabs:

Google UK With the Country Specific Filter:

Google UK without the Country Specific Filter:

To make up for the lack of the radio button, Google will add a link to the bottom of the search results page that shows: "Show only results for United Kingdom."

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

A HighRankings Forum thread has discussion around a topic I can relate with. My company, RustyBrick, builds out custom web software and sites, including iPhone apps. I often get new customers coming to me with their request to build them a web site. They are clueless about SEO and honestly, don't have the time or care to learn about it.

So we build the site for them, whatever it might be (e-commerce, CMS, social networking, etc), to the best of our ability. It is incredibly search engine friendly, with all the nice link structure, proper coding, dynamic 301s, 404s, XML sitemaps, and so on. So they got themselves a nice search engine friendly web site without knowing it.

My company does not do the content development, we just build the code and the design and make a working site structure. So when it comes time for the client to build out unique, useful and superior content, in most cases, they do not. They either don't understand the value, are too lazy or too dumb.

Some get the whole SEO thing right away, but many do not. Many will come to me later and ask about ways to get traffic. I will then explain to them the whole SEO bit. If I see the client doesn't get it, I'd recommend they seek out an SEO company.

You see, for companies like mine that build sites up from scratch, it is not easy to explain the value in SEO, before the site has potential to get traffic. But for SEO companies to show value in a site that sits without traffic, it is a tad easier.

HighRanking moderator BBCoach said the same thing that I did. Do you find the same issue with new site builds and clients?

Forum discussion at HighRanking Forums.

It is amazing how many blogs are buzzing about Bing adding Twitter results for some "prominent and prolific Twitterers." It works by searching for name tweet/twitter or the @username.

So for example, @rustybrick returns my "latest" Tweet.

The thing is, I took this screen shot five minutes after making a new Tweet. Here is that new tweet:

So we know that Bing must pull from the public Twitter API, not in real time, but on set intervals. A lot of people are touting this Bing/Twitter search answer as "real time." If it was literally real time, the Bing search results that contain tweets would have the potential to fail too often. Twitter is known for their downtime and to pull Tweets in real time from the API can fail also. So clearly, Bing is storing these Tweets in a local data source and serving them up in close to real time, but not exactly real time.

FYI, it is now 10 minutes after tweeting and the tweet does not show up in Bing.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday, if you viewed a video on YouTube in HD format, it would display in a large format. It would basically move down all the content on the right of the video and increase the video size to the full browse width. Here is a picture:

YouTube seemed to have changed it now. When you view a video in HD, it no longer increases the video size to the full width of the browser, instead it just keeps the current video size. Here is a picture:

I am not sure if this is a bug or a feature, but it is being noticed by several YouTube viewers. A YouTube Help thread has a couple people complaining about the change.

The way to force the full width, is to append &hd=1 to the end of the URL, so for my last video recap: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XS0tTyJG9SA&hd=1.

Also, YouTube has increased the file size limit from 1GB to 2GB the other week. In fact, I was the first to notice this change, and some sites credited me, while others did not.

Forum discussion at YouTube 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: July 1, 2009"

A Google Webmaster Help thread has a searcher asking Google how they can remove a Facebook page from Google. The page has been deleted from Facebook, but it still shows up in the Google Cache.

Googler, Wysz, gave the searcher a detailed explanation of how he can remove this Facebook page. I'll quote him word for word:

In this case, you'll want to do a cache removal request, which does not require the page to return a 404; it just requires that the webmaster modifies the content. While going through the steps documented in the help link below, you'll want to choose "The site owner has modified the page..." option. Make sure you include the correct URL (the Facebook page you mentioned, not the URL of Google's cache) and only mention terms that were on the page but are no longer there. (Don't use "Facebook" as a term, as that is likely still on the page.)

So go to this document to learn more and if you have questions, hit Wyzs up in the thread.

Forum discusison at Google Webmaster Help.

On Monday we reported that Google spanked the adult porn industry by penalizing many of the sites. There were many theories as to why those sites were penalized. It wasn't all the adult sites that were penalized but a nice percentage were.

Sometime last night, Google seemed to have reversed the penalty. An updated Google Webmaster Help thread reports two of the adult webmasters saying their sites are back to normal in the Google index. One said:

My rankings are back, right where they were. So are some of the other sites I know were penalized.

What exactly caused the temporary penalty is not yet known. It might have been a misclassification of something all those sites are using. Hard to know exactly without a Googler coming in and letting us know.

One adult webmaster wants to know why this happened. Why did he lose his rankings and revenue for several days due to this Google glitch? He asked:

Yes same here all search engine traffic has returned, so whats your take on this everyone? Was it just part of a google dance? Did google make a mistake? I mean we obviously we're penalised to begin with since we all moved to page 4-5 of the search results. And now we've all come back when many people changed nothing on their sites cause they thought it would make matters worse? It's a mystery isn't it?

I am not sure if all these adult sites have been restored in Google yet or if it was just a handful, but it seems like many are coming back.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

We have covered time and time again about Google having issues paying publishers in this country or that country. This time, Australians are suffering from now being paid on time.

There are at least two threads with reports of the delayed or no payments from Google this month. The threads include a Google AdSense Help and a WebmasterWorld threads.

A Google representative posted in both forums, at WebmasterWorld he/she said:

Your unpaid USD earnings from May will be issued to you at the end of June, provided you have exceeded the threshold amount. Any monthly earnings accrued during June will be finalised in your local currency and posted to your payment history page in the first week of July as per usual.

For those of you who are eligible to migrate to local currency reports but haven't yet, please note that this won't affect the timing of your payments. If you migrate your account today, your June earnings will be converted to your local currency between July 12th and 15th, and if you've exceeded the payment threshold, you'll be issued a payment for those earnings at the end of July.

In the Google AdSense Help thread:

There seems to be an error in processing your payment. If your payment isn't issued in a week, you should see it credited to your account and included in the next payment that you receive. Apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Some publishers are really suffering from this, because AdSense is their sole income. One said:

I'm in a huge financial crisis because of this. Adsense is my main source of income and Google hasn't sent checks to South Africa for the 2nd month in a row. They told me that last month's check will be issued with this month's check but again no payment has been issued yesterday.

Hope this is worked out soon!

Forum discussion at Google AdSense Help and WebmasterWorld.

We rarely cover forum news about the forums themselves, so I figured I pull out one significant thing that happened in the forums over the past 24 hours that is really bothering some forum members. As you know, Google has newish help forums, which launched in October.

In the forums, each member is assigned a "level," which shows other members how active (helpful) a member is in a specific forum. The levels go from 1 to at least 5 and then there are "Top Contributors" who are assigned that status manually by the Googlers who manage the respective forums. Each forum has their own weights to determine the number of posts required to reach a new level.

In any event, over the past twenty-four hours, it seems like some member profiles were demoted from a high level, down to a level one. There are threads about this in virtually every Google help forum.

I figured I would highlight one thread, the one in the Google Webmaster Help where you have several members complaining about the bug. JohnMu of Google confirmed the bug and said:

Hi everyone,

We're still working on a fix, so those who are not Bionics will have to wait a little bit, sorry! I'll post more when I have it!

For what it's worth, this will not affect your site's crawling, indexing or ranking in Google. Nor it's PageRank. Just so you know :-)

John

I just find it so funny, because most people are worried about their Google PageRank. In this thread, they are more worried about their Google forum level rank then anything else. Good times.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Yesterday Google announced the latest version of the AdWords API, version v2009. This is an upgrade from AdWords API 13 which was released in October 2008. There are major changes between v2009 and version 13 and Google wants you to be well prepared for the changes.

To get ready for the new version, you need to apply for the beta of v2009. You can however begin playing with the v2009 sandbox at any time.

You can read about the changes in the AdWords API upgrade over here. Version 13 will not sunset until early 2010.

Forum discussion at Google AdWords API Group.