July 1, 2009 Archives

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

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: 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.

A DigitalPoint Forum thread has a copy of a email sent to a webmaster for violating Google's webmaster guidelines. The email specifically shows the webmaster which guidelines they are breaking, in this case, hiding text.

Here is a copy of the email:

Dear site owner or webmaster of somewifi.com,

While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that are outside our quality guidelines, which can be found here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769&hl=en.

This appears to be because your site has been modified by a third party.

Typically, the offending party gains access to an insecure directory that has open permissions. Many times, they will upload files or modify existing ones, which then show up as spam in our index.

The following is some example hidden text we found at http://somewifi.com/:

songs Power Of Quest download songs Thomas Newman buy mp3 Tied and Tickled Trio new mp3 AFI top mp3 Alex Lifeson dowland ALO (Animal Liberation Orchestra) instrumental Dark oscillators mp3 songs Distance music download Euskefeurat music download F.J.Haydn download Fair to Midland

In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from somewifi.com are scheduled to be removed temporarily from our search results for at least 30 days.

We would prefer to keep your pages in Google's index. If you wish to be reconsidered, please correct or remove all pages (may not be limited to the examples provided) that are outside our quality guidelines. One potential remedy is to contact your web host technical support for assistance. For more information about security for webmasters, see http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/my-sites-been-hacked-now-what.html. When such changes have been made, please visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?hl=en to learn more and submit your site for reconsideration.

Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team

Google specifically emailed this webmaster because they thought it was done by a third party, i.e. a hack. Google wrote in the email, "this appears to be because your site has been modified by a third party." Google then informed the webmaster that in order to protect the safety of the Google searcher, they have removed the infected website temporarily.

It is nice to see specific examples of this in real life, so I thought it would be nice to share with you all.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.