November 5, 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: November 5, 2009"

Big news for publishers in the Google News index. Inbal from Google announced in a Google News Help thread that in six months, Google will stop supporting the old News Sitemaps format and require you to switch over to the new format.

Inbal said:

Although we will support your current Google News Sitemap during the transition period of six months, you should re-submit it under the new format as soon as possible. For more details on how to submit your Sitemap using the new format (including how to add new tags to each entry in your Sitemap, to provide more information about individual articles), please visit the Sitemaps section of our Help Center.

Once the transition period is over, we will no longer accept News Sitemaps created using the old format and any old News Sitemaps in your Webmaster Tools account will be rejected.

We encourage you to make these changes as soon as possible in order to avoid interrupting your content's inclusion in Google News. To get started, please visit the FAQ.

The new format looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
        xmlns:n="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-news/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>http://www.example.org/business/article55.html</loc>
    <n:news>
      <n:publication>
        <n:name>The Example Times</n:name>
        <n:language>en</n:language>
      </n:publication>
      <n:access>subscription</n:access>
      <n:genres>pressrelease, blog</n:genres>
      <n:publication_date>2008-12-23</n:publication_date>
      <n:title>Companies A, B in Merger Talks</n:title>
      <n:keywords>business, merger, acquisition, A, B</n:keywords>
      <n:stock_tickers>NASDAQ:A, NASDAQ:B</n:stock_tickers>
    </n:news>
  </url>
</urlset>

For more details on this new sitemap format over here.

Again, you have six months to make this change, but the sooner you do it, the better. ALso, there is a learning benefit to the new sitemap file. Any questions, join the forum.

Forum discussion at Google News Help.

Update: The Google News blog just added more information about this important update.

There is currently no AdSense publisher that would say they like the AdSense management console. Yes, Google knows that and they have finally announced a limited beta for the new AdSense console interface. And let me tell you, it looks incredibly sweet - compared to what we have now.

Here is a picture:

As I reported at Search Engine Land, here are the new features:

• More detailed performance reports
• Enables you to view daily stats in graphical formats
• Additional metrics such as the amount you've earned from various ad, targeting and bid types
• More options to manage the ads that appear on your site
• cleaner interface that makes it easier to find and review them within the Ad Review Center
• A streamlined AdSense interface to simplify common tasks, such as making a change to several ad units simultaneously
• Added more relevant help on every page, a message inbox for tips from our team, and alerts with important account related notices

When will you and I get it? Well, hopefully most of us will have this beta interface within three weeks. The others? Well, there is no eta.

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

One of the more obvious complaints about Google is not about their products but rather how to find all their products and manage how you have access to those products. Google just launched the Google Dashboard which brings many - not all - of this in one place.

The Dashboard includes over "20 products and services, including Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Web History, Orkut, YouTube, Picasa, Talk, Reader, Alerts, Latitude and many more." Here is a video demo on how it works:

A WebmasterWorld thread has early discussion around this topic. Right now, the feedback includes "it's about time" and "Well, it is a start..."

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google's Matt Cutts, the man who is incredibly responsible the idea of webmaster and search engine communication, has gone over a year without posting anything at WebmasterWorld.

His last post was on November 2, 2008 in a thread named Google.com SERP Changes - November 2008. His last post was in response to changes at Google, where Matt said "Nope, it wasn't a test, whitenight." Since then, we have covered monthly WebmasterWorld Google related threads on these topics, including the November 2009 report.

Of course, Matt is incredibly involved in webmaster communication. He is active on his blog, he publishes daily videos over here, writes at the Google Webmaster Blog and lives at conferences all year round.

Speaking of which, GoogleGuy's last post at WebmasterWorld was on July 24, 2008.

We miss the Google search folks at WebmasterWorld - I believe that is where this concept mostly got its start?

There are two threads at Google Web Search Help where there are two search suggestions that Google has listened to as a possible addition to Google's advanced search.

The first thread talks about how some searchers want a NEAR operator to search for phrases on web pages, but to specific that those pages be near each other. Specifically, the searcher said:

I would like Google to be able to check for relevance based on physical proximity of words to each other - invariably when I search for a phrtase containing several key words, most results I get have at least one of the key words located far away from the others on that website & thus the result is usually not relevant to the concept I am searching for, which is described using ALL key words TOGETHER.

Googler, Jem said:

There isn't a NEAR operator in Google, so it's true that this exact kind of search isn't available. I'll kick the idea around with the team, though. In the meantime, I think the * (wildcard) operator will be helpful. It does dictate word order, but you could try a couple searches with different orders.

There is also a image search suggestion where someone wants the ability to exclude certain image filters. Currently there are filters to filter image filters for news, face, clip art, line drawings and photos, but no way to say, I want to exclude any of those specific types. For example, I want all images for a query except for images that are faces. Googler, Jem said:

Thanks for the post, Eric. There isn't actually way to exclude faces, but I like the idea -- I'm going to share this with the team :)

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.