July 2, 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 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.