Google Optimization Archives

A Google Webmaster Help thread reports that because .UA domains are currently not considered "root domains" by Google, the change of address tool doesn't work for them.

I am not sure if Google did not consider them root domains or didn't allow the change of address tool to work with those domains. But Google said, whatever the issue is, it will be fixed soon.

Jonathan Simon from Google replied to the thread confirming the issue:

I've alerted the team to this issue. .UA domains should soon be supported by the Change of Address tool.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

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.

Ronald from the Google Merchant Center (Base) team reported in a Google Merchant Center Help thread that there is a known issue with FTP uploads.

Specifically, if you are uploading new data feeds via FTP, the data won't show up in the dashboard. If your feeds are less than 20MB, then upload manually, otherwise, you are out of luck.

Ronald said:

We've noticed that a few users have reported that data feeds uploaded via FTP are not getting updated in the Google Merchant Center account dashboard. We are currently investigating this issue. In the meantime, if your data feed file size is less than 20 MB, please upload your data feeds manually. We appreciate your patience.

Forum discussion at Google Merchant Center Help.

If your publication is included in Google News and you tried to submit a Sitemap file on Friday, you may have noticed it was rejected. Several publishers have been complaining about this in a few Google News Help threads.

The issue is that some publications are finding out they are no longer included in Google News. They are instructed to submit a Sitemap file, but when they do, they are told the Sitemap file is no good. The thing is, they never really changed their Sitemap file so they don't know what the issue is.

Inbal from the Google News team explained:

We've recently noticed that all news sitemaps which were submitted since Friday were rejected in Webmaster Tools. Our engineers were able to fix this bug and we've just resumed crawling the news sitemaps again. We apologize for the inconvenience in resubmitting your news sitemaps and appreciate your support while we work to improve Google News.

There is no estimated time for a fix, but you should be aware this is a larger issue that Google is addressing.

Forum discussion at Google News Help.

A Google Webmaster Help thread informs us that Google can take about two weeks to remove a blocked Sitelink from showing up in the search results.

Google's JohnMu said:

A change like this can take two weeks or a bit longer, depending on the site and on other factors. I would certainly give it a bit more time :-). Please let us know if you don't see it disappear by next week or so, but from what I can tell it looks fairly normal and nothing appears to be stuck at the moment.

You can block Sitelinks within Google Webmaster Tools by clicking on the "block" button on the right of each Sitelink:

There is also a detailed help document on how to manage Sitelinks within Webmaster Tools.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Five months ago, I wrote a piece named Want Your Google News To Show Up in Google Finance? NASDAQ:GOOG which basically said, put the stock ticker in the title of your article and you're golden for showing up in Google Finance. That is, assuming you are already in Google News.

Well, we now have a new tip from Google themselves on how to optimize your content for Google Finance. Inbal from the Google News team said to markup your HTML or XML with the following tags.

<url>
<loc>http://mynewssite.com/article123.html</loc>

<news:news>
<news:publication_date>2008-10-31T03:30:00Z</news:publication_date>
<news:title>Companies A, B In Merger Talks</news:title>
<news:keywords>business, mergers, acquisitions</news:keywords>

<news:content_types>Subscription</news:content_types>
<news:stock_tickers>NASDAQ:A, NASDAQ:B</news:stock_tickers>
</news:news>
</url>

Adding these elements, along with the title change, should dramatically help you show up in Google Finance for that specific company.

Forum discussion at Google News Help.

Update: Inbal posted an updated version of the sitemap code you also included in your article and if possible she'd like to let the world know about the update. Her last post from here contains the updated code.

Those trying to submit their product feeds to Google Base or Merchant Center may be running into errors. Ronald from the Google Merchant Center team has confirmed a bug that Google's engineers are working on fixing.

A thread at Google Merchant Help has confirmation, where a Googler said:

We're currently experiencing an issue with data feed processing. If the data feed status shows as "Internal error, feed not fully processed" without any error message, please resubmit your data feed. Our engineers are working to resolve this issue.

We appreciate your patience!

There is currently not estimated time of a fix but it is good to know that Google is aware of the issue.

Forum discussion at Google Merchant Help.

For at least a month now, there have been complaints in a Google Maps Help thread that Google is showing, in some cases, a single map result, when it should be showing seven map results.

For example, a search on orlando dodge shows a single map result:

As you can see, it shows a place named Orlando Dodge, but not all the Dodge dealerships in Orlando, Florida. Adding on FL to the query does indeed show multiple listings, including Orlando Dodge.

A Googler from the maps team said yesterday that a fix will be out soon. He said:

Thanks everyone for continuing to post examples of this issue. Hoping to resolve this shortly. Will keep you all posted.

To submit more examples or discussion, join the Google Maps Help thread.

Not sure how important this is, but it is one of those minor changes that I particularly enjoy covering. The Google Webmaster Tools API lets you verify and reverify sites directly in the API. The thing is, they have changed the meta tag name for the verification process and the API has yet to be updated.

For example:

Old Meta Name:

<meta name="verify-v1" content="0wrupKGUMvPxWPChV4qaKdewvwXnZQ9AJmg/mAc7An0=" />

New Meta Name:

<meta name="google-site-verification" content="rlnJZRMNYtwGmLlQYpDhSNnxz41TLLd-3xZSaEIbagw" />

Dennis G. from the Google Webmaster team, who is specifically involved with verification (I believe) said:

We will update the API to return the new meta tag name and content sometime (relatively) soon, but sites that are already verified with the current "verify-v1" tags will not be unverified. Only new verification attempts will need to switch to the new tag.

So I suspect, if you are trying to verify a new site using the API, it won't work just yet.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Historically, Google treated the 404 (page not found) and 410 (gone) server header page status codes as the same. Both meant, the page no longer exists.

Well, that has all changed now. Google is now treating the 410 as "more permanent" than the 404. Yes, this is a minor change but it is likely an important change for webmasters to note.

JohnMu of Google said in a Google Webmaster Help thread:

I followed up on the 404 vs 410 thing with the team here. As mentioned by some others here & elsewhere, we have generally been treating them the same in the past.

However, after looking at how webmasters use them in practice we are now treating the 410 HTTP result code as a bit "more permanent" than a 404. So if you're absolutely sure that a page no longer exists and will never exist again, using a 410 would likely be a good thing. I don't think it's worth rewriting a server to change from 404 to 410, but if you're looking at that part of your code anyway, you might as well choose the "permanent" result code if you can be absolutely sure that the URL will not be used again. If you can't be sure of that (for whatever reason), then I would recommend sticking to the 404 HTTP result code.

In the worst case, the 410 will be treated the same as a 404; in the best case it'll be a bit quicker & stickier :-).

So if you never ever will have a page return on a specific URL, then 410 it. But if you never will have a page return on a specific URL, then 404 it.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Like I said yesterday, it seems like a greater number of sites are being hacked and injected with malware and/or spam. Heck, I just reported this morning that Green Party was hacked into and removed from the Google index.

Google recently posted a blog post named Best Practices for Verifying and Cleaning up a Compromised Site offering three tips.

1. Verify Your Site with Google Webmaster Tools
2. If Your Site Has Been Compromised, Perform a Comprehensive Cleanup
3. If You Switch Hosting Providers, Disable Access to the Old Version of Your Site

Of course, the blog post goes into more detail on each of these steps. What is interesting is that I never heard of the last point before, but it is an excellent step. You want to keep the old site live as possible on the old server, but you definitely want to secure the site as best as possible.

There is a thread on this topic at Google Webmaster Help, unfortunately he kept it closed to questions, so no one can ask questions about that post in that thread.

On Sunday, if you searched in Google for [Green Party] you would not find the official Green Party of United States web site, which is at gp.com. Even if you searched for gp.org, Google would not show you the site.

One person complained about the issue at Google Web Search Help forums and a few days later, a Googler came in and told us why.

In short, the site was hacked and included harmful malware that could infect searchers computers. Google removes sites that include malware from their index, until the site is fixed. In addition, if sites are injected with links to unrelated site, with the sole intent of link spamming Google, Google will also remove the site from their index. That is what Google did in this case, and now the site is back in the index.

Googler, Jaime said:

The gp.org website was removed from Google's results because it has been hacked (if you look at the source code for http://gp.org/, about halfway down you'll see hundreds of spammy hidden links to websites selling several drugs such as Viagra and Fluoxetine).

We sent an email to the gp.org webmaster a week ago, on Monday the 19th, and they were also notified via the webmaster tools console (http://google.com/webmasters). Anyone in contact with the owners of this site, please give them this information and, as danielroofer pointed out, let them know they can visit the Webmaster Help Forum if they have additional questions.

In the meantime, we've already reinstated this site into our index, but it may take up to 24 hours for it to start showing everywhere.

Today, it seems like the spam and hack has been removed from GP.org and the site is now back in the Google index.

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

I know Google has been showing many variations of sitelinks in the search results for a while now. I also know, Google began showing Sitelinks for specific sub domains and sub directories for about a year now. But I have personally never seen them shown in the Google Webmaster Tools area, to be managed.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread has a screen shot of one webmaster noticing the ability to manage the Sitelinks within Google Webmaster Tools. I am sure this is not a brand new feature, but like I said, I have never personally seen such a configuration in Webmaster Tools.

Here is a picture:

I assume when you click on the link, it then takes you to the available sitelinks for those pages and then lets you block them ones you dislike.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A Google Webmaster Help thread has reports that the fetch as Googlebot feature might display weird characters for some pages that return non-ASCII characters.

Specifically, if the pages are not encoded in UTF-8 and use these non-ASCII characters, the tool might show weird characters. This is a confirmed known issue with the tool, and has no impact and your real crawling and ranking in Google.

Google said:

Using the Google Webmaster Tools Labs feature "Fetch as Googlebot" may show incorrect characters for pages not encoded in UTF-8 that use non-ASCII characters. This is only a display issue in Webmaster Tools and does not reflect how Googlebot actually crawls and indexes content on your pages (which you can verify by viewing the cached page or by searching for keywords within your content). This does not affect your site's crawling, indexing or ranking in our search results.

There is currently no estimated time for when this will be resolved, I assume it is not a huge priority.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Since we cover almost every little change that Google makes, why not cover this. I have been hearing reports both at WebmasterWorld and via email from Tom and on Twitter that Google is showing now a main listing with two (not one or five) indented results.

Here is one picture of what I mean:

Normally, Google will show a maximum of one indented results. More recently, Google was showing a single indented result with a plus box to five more.

I believe this double indented result is fairly new and more and more people will begin to see this.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and thanks to Tom and David.

A Google Webmaster Help thread has one webmaster who was trying to figure out why his site was not coming up for a search on its own name.

After some review, Googler, JohnMu, said the site has recently shown a placeholder page from a web hosting company or domain name registrar. These are also known as parked domains, where a domain is purchased but there is currently no web site on that domain. Many registrars or hosting companies place placeholder pages on those new domains.

Clearly, when a search engine finds such a domain is showing a placeholder page, they figure the site is being moved or changed drastically. JohnMu from Google said:

It looks like your site may have been showing a domain parking / hosting placeholder page (or something similar) for a short while there. In general, for the long term, this is not a problem. It can however confuse our systems a bit when we get something completely different like that, so it's probably just a matter of a short while until things settle back down.

You can still see that in some places, for example with:
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=site:the-silence.com/+godaddy

The next time Googlebot visits the site, it may figure out the issue was temporary and return the site's rankings fairly quickly. So be careful with not letting your domain expire and try to understand how Google handles expired domains.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

The Google Blog and Webmaster Central blog posted a blog post named Managing your reputation through search results. In this blog post, Susan from Google explains tips on how to manage your reputation online.

Basic advice from "think twice before putting your personal information online." To tips on how to contact the source of the content you want removed. If that doesn't work, Susan explains that you can try to create new pages that might outrank the negative pages in the search results. All of these tips are at the core of online reputation management.

What I found funny, maybe on a more personal level, was that every online reputation management company came out and piggy-backed off this Google blog post. Just scan some of the posts in the Google Web Search Help thread and see some of the blog posts referencing Google's post.

Anyway, if you have a reputation management issue and you cannot buy your way out of it, then you likely want to read some of those tips and join the thread.

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

There is a really long thread at Google Webmaster Help on the topic of the .GB.COM TLD. Some are of the belief that Google is penalizing or banning these domains.

Of course, to you and me, that sounds ridiculous. There are thousands of .gb.com domains indexed in Google. But these webmasters are complaining that they are not ranking well.

One said:

I have tested over 100 gb.com domains I found in the DMOZ directory (one of the webs oldest directories), and could not find a single one on the first page of Google for EVEN their own company names. EVEN their own domain name, so I can assure you I know what I am talking about. Here are an example of some .gb.com domains in DMOZ: http://search.dmoz.org/cgi-bin/search?search=gb.com

Pick any one you find at random.

The thread is pretty heated right now. No Google response has been made as of yet. Of course, when it comes to topics like this, you have to be very skeptical.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Update: Read the thread, it appears that gb.com are not real TLDs or even ccTLDs, which might be the reason behind this.

Let me start off by saying I rarely use Google's search suggestions, so I am going by hearsay in the forums (which I mostly do anyway). A WebmasterWorld thread is of the general consensus that Google's search suggestions are getting smarter and figuring out abbreviations.

For example, if you type in glgle, Google thinks you mean Google:

Same with aho and other forums of "fat fingered" typos.

WebmasterWorld admin, Tedster said:

I noticed something like this just today when I missed typing two internal letters in a company name. Yes, very fat fingered typing on my part, but Google's suggestions stuck out at me as something I'd never noticed before.

So maybe this is new, again, I have no idea. If it is, it is something SEOs and SEMs should be on the look out for.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Googler, Susan Moskwa explained why in the thread:

We've been telling people for a long time that they shouldn't focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it's the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it. :-)

Interesting... So you tell people not to focus on it and you find it silly that you show it in Webmaster Tools, but you still show it in Google's Toolbar? I mean, how many people have the Google Toolbar installed compared to those who use Google Webmaster Tools? I assume a fraction of those use Google Webmaster Tools.

Back in 2007, Google wanted feedback on removing PageRank from the Toolbar. I felt it was a good idea but the idea died out. Google cannot remove PageRank from the Toolbar, it is too much of their branding. No matter how much Matt Cutts and the Google search quality and webmaster trends team want it removed, I cannot see Google's executives allowing it.

Removing it from Webmaster Tools does make a statement to webmasters, but as long as they keep it in the Google Toolbar, it makes a stronger statement to searchers.

Here is how the PR stats looked like in Webmaster Tools:

Shouldn't Google drop it from both places, the Toolbar and Webmaster Tools? Having it public anywhere, defeats the purpose in my opinion.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

A web site named ClarksburgLeak.com makes their money documenting inmates who have their mug shots taken at the local police station there and posting it on their web site. The way they make their money is a bit controversial, to say the least.

If you go to jail in Clarksburg, ClarksburgLeak.com will find out, post your name, along with your picture, height, weight, date of birth and the felony type on their web site. Then Google will come along, index it and rank your mug shot pretty well in the Google search results. ClarksburgLeak.com takes a nominal fee of $49.95 plus tax to remove your listing from their web site.

A woman named Lily was really upset about this 'ransom' fee and complained in a clearly has guidelines around removing this type of content and I assume this web site owner knows that.

Google's JohnMu said "what that site is doing is not nice at all and I would personally not pay for this kind of "removal service". In my opinion, it's unfortunate and it makes me sad that some sites will resort to this kind of scheme to try to make money." But John added that this person can use other means to push down the results (yes, online reputation management). John said:

Instead of fighting with things like that I would take the time to be proactive and to build your own presence on the web. Do you have a MySpace page? perhaps a blog? a Twitter account? a Flickr account? All of these sites can help you create pages about yourself, pages that are much more relevant than ... those other ones. In the end, the energy that you put into work on pages for yourself will continue working for you, while energy that you put into fighting things like the site that you mention will at best result in "nothing". So instead of just posting here, make something fun & useful that can be shown in the search results for your name!

In the long run, Lily paid the $50 fee to have her name removed from the web site and she no longer comes up in a Google search for her name. I think most people would pay the fee, but is this ethical?

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

A Google Webmaster Help thread has one webmaster who noticed Google indexed his site with the server port in the URL structure. So instead of Google ranking the http://www.domain.com/ it ranks the site, and every page within the site as http://www.domain.com:1234

This webmaster asked if he/she can use the Google URL removal tool to remove these duplicate pages. The only current answer for that is, NO - you cannot. At least, if you do, both http://www.domain.com:1234 and http://www.domain.com will both be removed.

Susan Moskwa from Google replied to the webmaster, explaining:

Are you talking about using the URL removal tool to remove example.com:1234? If so, you shouldn't do that. The URL removal tool removes all versions of a site or URL (www, non-www, http, https, etc.), not just the one you explicitly submit. It should not be used for "canonicalization" -- fixing the problem of having multiple URLs serving the same content.

If you've fixed the problem--especially if you're now redirecting to the correct URL--the issue should resolve itself over time. We also did a recent blog post that you may find helpful.

In general, though, yes it is possible to verify sites with different ports in Webmaster Tools.

So don't use this tool to remove extra ports listed in the URL, to remove a www or non-www version or an https version.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Google added the fetch as Googlebot feature the other day and now people are really beginning to explore it. One topic I have seen come up was why is the Fetch as Googlebot feature only showing up to 100Kb of the page it is fetching? Does that mean Googlebot only crawls up to a 100Kb of a specific page?

The quick answer is no, Googlebot does index more than a 100Kb, but the fetch feature only shows up to a 100Kb.

Historically, Googlebot at one point only indexed up to 100Kb. In fact, some time in 2006, the Google cache showed over 100kb of the page, which put the 100Kb maximum page size limitation to rest.

Google does indeed index pages larger than a 100Kb, especially in the days of higher bandwidth. But in terms of the Fetch as Googlebot feature, for speed purposes, it only grabs 100 Kb for this tool.

JohnMu of Google said in a Google Webmaster Help thread:

As far as I know, this is a limitation of the Fetch as Googlebot feature, so I believe more or less the only difference between a real Googlebot and this feature. The main problem is that arbitrary file sizes would bog down the Webmaster Tools user interface so we had to draw a line somewhere.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

The Google Webmaster Central Blog announced the launch of a new "Labs" section in Google Webmaster Tools. Labs is for Google to launch features that might not be fully tested and have bugs, but at the same time give webmasters these features sooner to test and play with. The first two labs releases were "Fetch as Googlebot" and "Malware Details." I'll show you both below:

Fetch as Googlebot allows you to see what Googlebot, Google's spider, sees for a specific page on your domain. Here is a picture of the tool:

You type in the page name or leave it blank for the home page and hit "Fetch." After a few seconds, you can refresh the page and see the word "success" (hopefully). Click on "Success" to see the output of what Googlebot sees. Here is a snippet of what Googlebot sees for this site's home page:

A Google Webmaster Help thread reports a bug with this tool. To reproduce it, 1. Run a test then 2. View result then 3. Use the Site Picker to change site then 4. Fetch As Googlebot tries to display the path fetched in (1) on domain picked in (3) and gives "The details of this request are not available."

Another

These are all useful features and I am sure the majority of webmasters are happy to get labs features with bugs, in exchange for getting earlier releases of Webmaster Tools features.

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

One of the key topics I have heard being discussed in the speaker room last week at the SMX East conference was that the Google results were not good. It rarely came up in the sessions, except for Greg Boser on the Crystal Ball panel, but it came up often in the speaker room and in side conversations.

Looking at the Google results, for standard queries, simply did not satisfy many SEOs and SEMs. Obviously, some were upset with queries they monitor and want to rank for, but many showed queries that they have no direct business relationship with. Looking at some of those results myself, showed me they were right. Also, Danny wrote about Reviewing Some Bad Google Search Results With Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder, just last week.

A recent WebmasterWorld thread has one webmaster complaining his site no longer ranks well in Google. Let me quote you what he said:

We used to have position 8 in the Google serps. A couple of months ago we dropped to something like position 15, then 21 and yesterday 41. A lot of websites without widgets in front of us. How did they get there Google? Not relevant at all!

Okay, so he is clearly upset. But as Danny Sullivan explained to me last week, who would know better about a specific queries relevancy than a site that has quality content about that specific niche?

This webmaster asked, "Will Google lose the battle because of their penalty policy?" Personally, I think not any time soon or even in the foreseeable future. But I figured I do a poll and ask you guys:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The local SEMs are buzzing about how Google dropped three listings from the local space in the Google search results. Now, instead of showing the "ten pack" of ten local search results pulled from Google Maps on the Google web search results, Google is now showing the "seven pack." Yes, instead of A through J, we are getting A through G results.

Here is what I see now for a local result for the query [web design]:

Here is what I saw a few months ago:

We have threads on the topic at Google Maps Help, Cre8asite Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Last week Google updated their verification process for Webmaster Tools. A known issue was that it broke the ability for Google Sites to verify in Webmaster Tools. Yesterday, Google resolved the issue and now Google Sites can be verified without an issue.

An updated Google Webmaster Help thread there are a couple webmasters who have confirmed it is now working.

I personally thought it would take longer than a week to fix, but I was wrong and glad I am wrong about this one.

Forum discussion continued at Google Webmaster Help.

About three weeks ago, Google added parameter handling to Google Webmaster Tools. It basically gave webmasters another tool to help communicate to Google any duplicate content or URL issues.

I spotted two threads from the same webmaster, one at HighRankings Forum and the other at Google Webmaster Help where one webmaster is not allowed to use this feature.

When he goes to the parameter handling page, he gets this message:

Parameters for this site can not be adjusted at this time.

He believes it might have to do with his site being fully in HTTPS and/or not being fully crawled yet. I think it might have to do with the HTTPS thing, which is weird.

Google has not yet replied to the thread, but I do expect a response soon.

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum and Google Webmaster Help.

Update: Google confirmed in the thread that this feature is not available for https URLs.

In one of Matt Cutts' videos on SEO questions, he answers a question about if you should build an HTML or XML Sitemap. An HTML sitemap is an old school landing page for users to find all (or most) of your pages on your web site via single page. In many cases, for large sites, a site would require many HTML sitemaps to make this useful, but for smaller sites (see RustyBrick's sitemap), it makes sense to put everything on a single web page. An XML sitemap can also be multiple files, but they are not visible to a user, only a search engine spider.

When Matt from Google was asked if you had a choice, which one would you pick, he picked an HTML Sitemap because both users and spiders can chew on it. I am not sure if most SEOs would make the same selection, but this person didn't ask an SEO, he asked Matt.

Here is Matt's video:

As Matt said, once you make an HTML sitemap, making an XML version is extremely easy. So, my advice, do both, if possible.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Dennis from the Google Webmaster Central team informed us in a Google Webmaster Help thread that now, if you have comment code or extra HTML in the verification file used to verify your site in Google Webmaster Tools, it will allow you to verify the file.

I guess some web servers added HTML to all files on their servers. Including the verification file used by Google to verify your site with Webmaster Tools. For example, take a look at this file, you will see this added code:

Now, Google said, even with that added code to the file, Google will use the file as proof that your site is verified in Webmaster Tools. This changed should be working as of yesterday.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

During the CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & SEO at SMX East yesterday, Bruce Johnson and Kathrin Probst from Google announced a new proposal for search engines to index AJAX.

Let me explain the proposal in a very simplistic way, that honestly over simples it, but does give non-technical people an idea on what this does.

AJAX is a form of advanced or rich JavaScript. Although Google does now look through JavaScript, AJAX often shows the same URL for multiple pages of content. When an AJAX form is displayed to a user, the URL stays the same but the content changes based on the form. Google proposed a plan to allow the search engine to see a new URL and the content behind that URL.

Here is the technical overview by Google:

Starting with a stateful URL such as http://example.com/dictionary.html#AJAX , it could be available to both crawlers and users as http://example.com/dictionary.html#!AJAX which could be crawled as http://example.com/dictionary.html?_escaped_fragment_=AJAX which in turn would be shown to users and accessed as http://example.com/dictionary.html#!AJAX

For a more detailed look at how this works, see the blog post. Of course, servers and system admins would need to make this possible and web developers who have to code this in.

There are both support and pull back on this proposal. Let me quote you some of the comments from the various threads at Google Webmaster Help, WebmasterWorld and HighRankings Forum.

Wow - if this gains enough of a following, it could really open some new doors to creating rich interactivity. We're back to the roots of the problem here, which is that the 'single content, single url' model, coupled with browser technology and the internet in general were never designed to support the levels of interactivity we're pushing down the tubes.

I don't care for it, for several reasons.

Beginning with the fact that they're proposing introducing yet another illegal character into url strings and ending with it sounds like a lot more work than simply creating accessible Ajax from the get go.

My bottom line is simple. If it's important that a site or an application use Ajax and if it's also important that the site be accessible by bots and real users alike who suffer from a disability, then it should be important enough to build your Ajax app to be accessible. If not, don't.

As one of the comments pointed out, to me it looks like a complex, very questionable solution in search of a problem.

Unfortunately there is now a lot of inappropriate ajax around the web - the kind of thing that's done mostly just to display someone's technical prowess (geek credentials.) That approach is hiding useful content and I think such situations are what this proposal is an attempt to resolve.

As you can imagine, there is the possibility of cloaking here. That means, I can show a user one thing on the first URL and the search engine another piece of content on their URL. Google would have to somehow validate all of this, some way.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help, WebmasterWorld and HighRankings Forum.

Yesterday, I reported at Search Engine Land that Google is going to allow cross domain canonical tag. This means, if you have two sites (probably verified under the same webmaster tools account), you will be able to tell Google, all links pointing to domain A should point to domain B.

Clearly, this is a feature that is really something many webmasters and site owners have wanted for a while. At the same time, some webmasters are scared that this can be hacked into and you can lose your whole domain. The bottom line, Google will make sure to make this secure as possible, before releasing it.

Currently, the canonical tag is only to be used within the same domain. So this is a major change to the tag.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums and DigitalPoint Forums.

A Google Webmaster Help thread has confirmed reports of a bug with Google Webmaster Tools. The bug is someone technical, where you try to download the verification file via a URL that Google provides. That URL, which seems to be google.com/webmasters/verification/verification-file-dl?hl=en, is returning a 500 internal error.

Dennis G. from the Google webmaster team confirmed the bug, saying:

Looks like you found a legitimate bug. I believe we have fixed it now. Please try again, and sorry for the inconvenience.

I personally see the 500 response code, but honestly, I am not exactly sure how he triggered this URL and if I have to trigger it from a specific page to work or not.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

A Google Webmaster Help thread reports that some webmasters (at least one) has set his Google Webmaster Tools to geo-target to the UK, but the site is ending up being geo-targeted to France.

Here is what the webmaster said:

This has happened in the lask 4 weeks - although we will want high results on google.fr eventually, most of our audience is UK based and I don't think they are seeing the results they used to get as they are (it seems) appearing only on the google.fr search engine.

JohnMu from Google said he needs to look into the issue and that he will "pass it on to the team here to look at!" I guess this might be an individual issue or maybe a larger issue with some sites?

I should note that the domain ends in a .eu.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

A WebmasterWorld thread has one webmaster asking other SEOs what they can do to make an impact on how to change the Google suggestions so that it doesn't show a negative suggestion for his business.

This webmaster explained Google "shows "MyDomain.com" as the 1st result but shows my domain with negative words about my domain as the 2nd and final suggestion "MyDomain.com sucks". This is very unfortunate.

I tried to trigger some of these for popular brands and due to time, this is the best I came up with:

The thread tries to offer this webmaster help, but there is very little you can do to fix the issue. There are things, and the thread goes through some of them. If you have ideas, join the thread.

We did discuss this topic before, we titled it Google Suggest Reputation Management Issues. And that is exactly what this is.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google announced that they have updated the verification process for Google Webmaster Tools. The main changes include:

(1) META Tag verification is no longer tied to the email address on file, i.e. you can change your email and it won't de-verify your site.

(2) The HTML file verification process required that you set up your 404 pages properly by returning a proper 404 server status code. The issue was, many webmasters don't do this and come into the forums complaining they cannot verify. So Google gave up and decided to just allow the verification without requiring a proper 404 status code being returned on non-existing pages. Personally, I feel they should have kept it - it helps webmasters configure their site properly in the long run. But this will reduce a headache for Google in the support forums.

(3) The screens and look of the HTML verification process was updated also. Here is the new look:

The issue is, it broke many of the systems that had automatic verification in place. Google confirmed that Google Sites verification process is currently not working. But others are also reporting issues with verifying other sites. Overall, these issues will be addressed and people will be happy again.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Last night, the official Google Blog announced that they are now showing Forum Sitelinks. This is a special form of Sitelinks, which I previously named deep(er) Sitelinks. Here is a picture:

It is incredibly useful with blogs, forums and any site that covers a very nice topic, over and over again. This allows Google to show what they think is the best result for the query at the top and then show an additional four results from that site that also makes sense. Plus Google is able to show the date and number of posts in that thread.

Why didn't I call them Forum Sitelinks? Well, it doesn't only apply to forums, it also applies to blogs and similar sites link that.

In any event, it is a nice search feature.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Back in February I ran a poll asking if the Google Sandbox still exists and if so, is it US based only? I don't think I ever published those results, so I apologize.

A new Search Engine Watch Forums thread has new discussion around the topic. To be honest, the Google Sandbox, as it once was, is rarely discussed in forums anymore. As I said in the previous post, the Google Sandbox goes back to April 2004. We first spotted it when I wrote New Sites = Poor Results in Google, then it became known as the Sandbox effect and had controversial definitions. Matt Cutts confirmed the sandbox existed, somewhat, in his Coffee Talk with Brett Tabke. But since then, we really did not discuss it much.

There are some well-known and respected SEOs that still believe in it and many that don't. Which is why we ran the poll. Okay, so here are the poll results:

Question: Google Sandbox: US Based or Worldwide?

:: Worldwide said 46 respondents or 49%
:: It No Longer Exists said 17 respondents or 18%
:: US Only said 13 respondents or 14%
:: It Never Existed said 11 respondents or 12%
:: Other answer... said 6 respondents or 6%

If you go by the forum discussion as a measure of if this did or currently exists, that answer is simple. It once did exist and no longer exists, based on forum chatter.

There is a nice post from a member at Search Engine Watch Forums, where he offers practical experience.

Last year we launched a new website and againt mine and our webmasters advice, our owner went on a full scale link building frenzy which included using a Submission company to submit to hundreds of directories and do hundreds of article submissions. Well, it took that site about 9-10 months to start ranking for its primary terms and now about 4 months after being released from the sandbox it is doing well. However, to contrast that, last month we launched a brand new website. This time we convinced him to take it slow and easy and utilize the link partners we have to focus on adding quality links slowly. Well a little over a month later we are on the first page for many of the terms we have optimized for. SO I definitely believe in quality over quantity when starting a new site and trying to avoid the sandbox.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports that Google Image Search has done an update to their index. One of the members that seems to always be on top of these images updates, zeus, has said that this update is worse off from the one in February.

He said:

Hmm it looks like they are now ruin the good update for 3-4 month ago, now to many images again gets filtered and a lot of images are lost with "moderate search off".

There are many complaints about the new filter in this update at WebmasterWorld. There are also a few sporadic threads at Google Webmaster Help on the topic.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

In May 2007, Google released Google Hot Trends and I was a major fan. Google has now made this tool more visible to the public by inserting it into the Google search results, when applicable.

For example, a search for Bill Winters who recently made news by leaving quitting JP Morgan, you will see Google Hot Trends show up in the search results. Here is a picture:

The goal is for Google to show this hot trends box in the search results for any trending topics. Danny Sullivan has a nice write up on this named Take That, Twitter: Google Hot Trends Integrated Into Google Search.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Google Webmaster Help thread once again confirms that Google ignores the geo-meta tags. Those tags somewhat look like this and use to serve the purpose of telling search engines where the site is based:

<meta name="geo.placename" content="United States" />
<meta name="geo.position" content="x;x" />
<meta name="geo.region" content="usa" />
<meta name="ICBM" content="x,x" />

Google ignores them, and has for a really long time. JohnMu from Google confirmed this most recently in the thread:

We generally ignore geo-meta tags like that because we've found that they're generally incorrect (copy & pasted from a template, etc).

But we had confirmation of this when wrote that Bing relies on these geo-meta tags to determine a site's location. And time and time again, there are webmasters who find there site targeted to the wrong country because of that template issue. In that post, Google's Matt Cutts said the same thing:

Historically, meta tags for language and country have been less reliable than inferring the language or country directly. For example, lots of webmaster also just copy/paste from a friend's template without checking the meta tag values. The unreliability of the meta tags is why Google tends not to use them or give them less weight.

So three webmaster points here:

(1) Google ignore the geo-meta tag
(2) Bing currently uses the geo-meta tag
(3) Be careful when you copy templates or use pre-existing templates

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Update: I was wrong, it was not a Google issue. For some reason, I had to resubmit my subscribed links XML feed to Google. I did that and now it is working again. So if you haven't yet, make sure to subscribe here and then search for link building or other typical SEO keywords.

In May 2006, Google introduced Google Subscribed Links via the Google Coop. It was confusing, but once we implemented it here, it became clearer to people how it worked. I loved it and had tons of people (thousands) sign up to see my subscribed links in the Google search results. In fact, I expanded it in April 2008. But now, it appears to be missing from the search results.

In the past, if you searched for any of the keywords that I told Google to trigger to show my pages and you were subscribed to my links, you would get those links in the Google search results. For example, if you subscribed and searched for link building, you would have seen this in the search results:

The box under seobook.com is the special subscribed links. Now, it is missing, gone, from the search results, even though, I am technically still subscribed. Where did it go? I posted this question at Google Webmaster Help and hope to get some response.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

A Google Webmaster Help thread has one webmaster who runs a home construction resource complaining that his rankings tanked. After some back and forth, Googler, JohnMu came in and said:

I browsed your site's reviews a bit and most of the links are either affiliate links or links to the companies without nofollow. This doesn't seem to match your reply regarding the use of nofollow. Perhaps it would be good to double-check and submit a reconsideration request should you find something that could be improved.

Yes, this webmaster dared to write a review or an article and decided to link to related products within the article, via a straight link, to the affiliate. Google likely automatically found the links, felt the site was abusing their paid link policy and slapped them with a penalty for it.

So, if you have affiliate links that you have not nofollowed, you better nofollow them. If you don't, well, then you join the ranks of sites link the one in the thread or like this site. Yes - before you all comment that we don't nofollow our paid links, I admit it, we don't. I am one of the few bloggers who decided that this blog's sponsors are not just "advertisers" but also extremely related to the site's content and can be useful to ALL of our readers. Hence, I decided to take a hit on this site's PageRank and ranking - to stand tall. Don't get me wrong, I believe this was a smart move by Google, and I totally feel they have every right to do this. Doesn't mean I don't have a choice to take a hit in the Google rankings for it.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

I have been getting emails, Twitter messages and seeing threads that more and more people are seeing this newish kind of Sitelink. It isn't brand new, it has been around for some time now, but it is 100% showing up more often in the Google results. You can probably trigger it yourself for many types of queries, but I know this one is working for me. Search for [google sitelinks forums] and you will notice these newish Sitelinks formats coming up, not once, but twice. Here are screen captures:

If you scroll down, you also see:

As you can see, they offer more links from the same site with added data (such as date of post and number of posts, if a forum thread). This is a mix bread of Sitelinks and content attributes in the search results.

So this format is coming up more and more often, as opposed to standard Sitelinks. I find these types of Sitelinks to be deeper, so I am calling them "Deep Sitelinks."

Google has been experimenting tremendously with Sitelinks. From snippet Sitelinks to anchor based Sitelinks, to various layouts for the standard Sitelinks - we see Google is busy in this area.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Back in the old days, referrer spam was a way to get quick rankings by spamming other site's referrer logs. Wikipedia explains it pretty well:

Referrer spam is a kind of spamdexing (spamming aimed at search engines). The technique involves making repeated web site requests using a fake referrer url that points to the site the spammer wishes to advertise. Sites that publicize their access logs, including referrer statistics, will then end up linking to the spammer's site, which will in turn be indexed by the search engines as they crawl the access logs.

This benefits the spammer because of the free link, and also gives the spammer's site improved search engine placement due to link-counting algorithms that search engines use.

This was an issue ages ago, in Internet years at least. These days, you rarely hear about them and for good reason - it doesn't work like it use to.

JohnMu, a Google representative, said in a Google Webmaster Help thread that it generally does not hurt your rankings. He said that after someone complained their Google rankings dropped due to someone referrer spamming him. John said:

I can pretty much assure you that those referrers are not negatively affecting your collection of sites. If you are seeing fluctuations, it's almost certainly due to other issues.

John said repeatedly in this thread that this type of spam 'generally' cannot hurt a web site from ranking well in Google.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Google made historic news yesterday by declaring they do not use the meta keywords tag. Okay, I am being incredibly sarcastic. Google hasn't used the meta keywords tag for an incredibly long time and any "SEO" should know that. So why did Google blog about this, on the record? At least two reasons, (1) people continue to sue over it by claiming copyright infringement and people confuse the meta keywords with the meta description, which Google does recommend to use.

So there are official posts from Matt Cutts, the Google Blog and Search Engine Land trying to erase any confusion from people who are new to this space.

If you want to know which meta tags Google does pay attention to, see this FAQ. Plus, Googler's JohnMu tweeted that Google also does "not adhere to the "revisit-after" meta tag," if you wanted to know.

Finally, here is a video if you don't want to read any of this:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread suggests that Google is getting better at either determining or showing that they know which sites are related to others in the related command. The related command is triggered when you click on the "similar" link in the search results, here is a picture:

When you click that link, it basically triggers an advanced query for related sites. The query is [related:www.seroundtable.com. And if you look, the results are much more on target then in the past. Here are sites Google suggests are related to this one:

• searchengineblog.com
• searchengineland.com
• searchenginewatch.com
• searchenginejournal.com
• seobook.com
• highrankings.com
• mattcutts.com
• seomoz.org

And there are more and most of them I would consider to be related to this site. In the past, the related command was somewhat of a joke, now it seems pretty accurate.

WebmasterWorld administrator agreed saying:

Totally agree - it's been a long time coming, but related sites are now much more related in topic, rather than some spastic collection of loosely interlinked sites in an odd cluster that does not give a user any value.

Good to see this improvement from Google.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

If you login to Google Webmaster Tools, click on site configuration, then on settings, you will see a new option for "parameter handling." Here is a screen capture:

This basically allows you to tell Google which parameters in the URL they should ignore. This comes in handy for tracking parameters added to the URL, or duplicate content caused by printer friendly URLs and many other cases.

If you want to learn more about how this stuff works, see the Google help document or read Search Engine Land article. Also, Brain was the first to spot this.

I posted a thread on this topic at Google Webmaster Help where a Googler, Jonathan Simon added, "One small correction should be noted in regards to the Search Engine Land blog post where it says it's okay to mark parameters that control sort order as ignorable. That's only true if the sorted results all fit on a single page. Otherwise you could unintentionally be excluding some data."

Yahoo Site Explorer has had this feature for a while now. Yahoo calls it Dynamic URLs and the screen looks like this:

You can learn more about Yahoo's dynamic URL feature over here.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help and WebmasterWorld.

The question of having valid HTML and would it help your rankings in Google or other search engines is not new. Most SEOs believed that it made no impact on your rankings, unless Googlebot has serious issues crawling your site.

In a recent YouTube video, Google's Matt Cutts explained why Google.com does not validate (historically has not) and also added that Google doesn't "give any sort of boost to web pages that validate." He explained because "the vast majority of pages on the web don't validate," including Google.com.

Here is the video:

For those in the SEO community and know Edward Lewis, aka pageoneresults, you will find it funny that he posted that thread at WebmasterWorld.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Sometimes I like to point out weird anomalies in the Google search results. A search for [lufthansa fleet] returns a Wikipedia listing to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lufthansa. The issue is, the way Google lists out the snippet and title is all weird:

Why does it show it like that? What does wxloop mm5aq_stata_pm25gt65 2008112700///1 mean? Why no snippet?

JohnMu from Google said it isn't visible everyone, but it is just one of those strange anomalies. He said:

Thanks for bringing this up! I've passed it on to a team here to review. As far as I can tell, this is just a strange fluctuation that's not visible everywhere.

I bet an SEO can figure the issue out pretty quickly.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Let's file this under weird or unexpected search results from Google. A search for business website design] returns one of those middle of the page Google refinements. The weird part is what Google returns as a refinement for that search. Google returns the keyword, [semi repair]. What does semi repair have to do with business website design?

Here is a picture of the page:

Why is this the case? No one really knows, but Googler JohnMu did comment in a joking fashion saying:

As I mentioned, these suggestions are generated automatically. I wonder what that tells us ... hmm :-) Someone should be out there making DIY truck repair sites!

Maybe, just maybe.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

There is a featured WebmasterWorld thread on the topic of how Google treats affiliate links and if there are ways to hide your affiliate links from Google.

There is discussion that Google will lower your rank of a web page, if it has an affiliate link on that page. I honestly do not know if that is a true statement. The typical issue with affiliate links, is not the link, but the fact that Google wants to show the best single unique result in the search listings and not the same ten results from ten different web sites. Affiliates typically sell the same product and often have the same content on their site, with various changes to the template and content. Google wants the searcher to get one of those sites and not all of them.

So I really do not think an affiliate link is the signal Google uses to "demote" a page in the search results. It is likely more about how unique that page is.

But let's say Google does look for affiliate links. The thread discusses how you can possibly hide that link from Google, so that you don't suffer any loss for having it.

Some suggest using JavaScript, but Google now crawls JavaScript. Some suggest using a special directory for the link and then robots.txt that directory out and also nofollow the link. Some even go as far as suggesting cloaking the link out for GoogleBot and showing it to everyone else.

Whatever route you go, be careful with all these methods. And think hard, how unique is your page from the 300 other affiliates selling the same product or service?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The Google Base Blog announced that Google Base data feeds now support a new YouTube attribute that allows you to define if the product has a video demo on YouTube.

The example given is a product search for Nikon d90. If you scroll down, you will see videos from YouTube:

To add this to your product data feeds, you need to add the YouTube attribute:

The YouTube video ID for product review videos. Video IDs are case sensitive and can be located following the v= in the YouTube video URL.

Format:
Text.
Tab-delimited example:
sDDvpDNbEXo
XML example:
<g:youtube>sDDvpDNbEXo</g:youtube>

Google does not promise that even if you do add this attribute to your data feeds that the videos will show, but it can't hurt.

This feature has been on many folks waiting list for a while now.

Forum discussion at Google Base Help.

A Google Webmaster Help thread has an interesting discussion around blocking your site from coming up for both visitors and search engine crawlers on Shabbat (the Jewish Saturday). This is not a new topic, we discussed using cloaking for religious Shabbat purposes in the past.

In short, some observant Jews do not want their site to be accessible on Shabbat, which is sundown Friday night, to nightfall Saturday night. The issue on the SEO front is if you turn off your site, then what happens to the search engine crawlers? Do they get 404 pages and drop your site from the search index?

Phil Payne posted an answer to how one can handle this, which Googler JohnMu said was a good answer. Phil said:

Yes - a 503 is the correct server response for "We're closed". If you substitute a normal HTML page saying "We're closed" and serve a 200 it's very likely to get indexed by Google.

If you give the Googlebot a 503, it will just go away and come back later without indexing what you give it.

For humans, you can serve a custom 503 page that explains the situation. Are there no other Orthodox sites you can ask, to see how they do it?

Now, Friday night here, is not the same as Friday night by you. So detecting the location of a visitor is key here. There are services like Saturday Guard that do this for you, but I am not sure how they handle search bots.

Technically, the issue, as far as I understand it (I am not a Rabbi, but I am an observant Jew) is that they do not want to earn money on Shabbat or Jewish holidays. Some hold that since the money doesn't transfer from the merchant account to the bank that day, then there is no money being earned technically that day. But some do not hold that way or some want to be extra careful. If it is a matter of money, then just turn off the "add to cart" and shopping cart features for the site.

If they do not want any activity on their site by potential customers, then I guess a 503 is a good answer. But are search engine bots customers? No. I suspect, most Rabbis would be okay with spiders or automated crawlers using the site on Shabbat. The issue then is, are you allowed to serve up a 503 page to a visitor and not to a crawler - that might be against Google's terms of service and fall within the bad cloaking policies.

If the issue is about the server actually working on Shabbat. Then a 503 cannot really be served up at all, because you would technically need to power down the server and without a server to send the 503 response code - then you got nothing.

This is a complex issue that I personally never had to deal with on sites that we have built. But it would be interesting to see what to do in the case of turning off a web server. There isn't much Google can do here.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

A webmaster reported in a Google Webmaster Help thread that in his Google Webmaster Tools Keyword report, he noticed that Google is displaying a blank line as one of his more popular keywords used within the site.

The blank line is [_______________] and he has no idea why it shows up not just once, but twice. The first one is in the second most popular keyword used on the site and the second one is the eleventh most popular keyword used on the site. If you think about it, the underline or line is weird, but even if it technically was a keyword, wouldn't it be the same keyword (i.e. only show up once in the keyword list)?

In any event, the webmaster posted a screen shot in the thread - because honestly, I thought he was on crack or something. Here it is:

Why is this showing up? No idea! In fact, if you search for the line using a site command, nothing comes up.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

It seems that Google has finally gone on the record that longer domain name registration has no impact on your search engine rankings, at least not at Google. A Google Webmaster Help thread has a post from Googler, JohnMu, who said outright that it doesn't make sense for Google to use this as a ranking metric.

Let me quote John:

A bunch of TLDs do not publish expiration dates -- how could we compare domains with expiration dates to domains without that information? It seems that would be pretty hard, and likely not worth the trouble. Even when we do have that data, what would it tell us when comparing sites that are otherwise equivalent? A year (the minimum duration, as far as I know) is pretty long in internet-time :-).

I think that is pretty convincing that Google doesn't use the domain expire date as a metric.

What is funny is that we discussed this topic a few times in the past. Each time, we never really came to a conclusion. But it didn't stop domain registrars from using this as a marketing tactic.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

About ten days ago, we asked our readers "Right Now, How Much is Google Loving Keywords in URL?" We have about a 185 responses in and I wanted to share the results. Overall, about 75% of the responses said that Google does love those keywords in the URL.

Let me give you the break down:

Question: Right Now, How Much is Google Loving Keywords in URL?

:: Lots Of Love said 97 respondents or 52%
:: Completely Loves Them said 41 respondents or 22%
:: No Change In Past Year said 36 respondents or 19%
:: Doesn't Hate Them said 6 respondents or 3%
:: Other answer... said 3 respondents or 2%
:: Hates Them said 2 respondents or 1%

The other responses were:

Yes but only for TLD's like com and net

don't know

loves in domain

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

Often, when you want to create a localized version of your site, you can create a duplicate site on a ccTLD (country level top level domain). For example, if I wanted to geotarget this site to UK users, I would just place it on seroundtable.co.uk and maybe localize some of the English words, such as colour, favour, etc.

It doesn't always work this way, some languages require complete rewrites due to either being a different character type or the way people speak is completely different.

JohnMu from Google chimed in about a site that was being both targeted under different ccTLDs to both UK and Irish markets. In the Google Webmaster Help thread, John explained that when it comes to the UK and Ireland, often the sites that appeal to UK users also appeal to Irish users.

He made a few points:

(1) Google's searchers do not want the same content from two different sites in the same search results.
(2) Google finds UK and Irish sites to be very related. John explained, "There are many Irish sites that are equally important for the UK (and of course vice-versa). Those are sites that we might choose to show in the UK search results, perhaps even above or in place of similar "UK" sites."
(3) John said, using Google Webmaster Tools geotargeting setting may "help a bit in this regard, but it will take a bit of time to take affect and it's not guaranteed that it will always choose the right version (domain) of your site given that the external factors could be significantly different."
(4) John added that you should make the "two sites are different enough that they can stand on their own." Otherwise, combine the sites under one domain and they can rank well in both the UK and Irish Google versions.

I am a bit interested in knowing that since many US sites are showing in Google UK results these days, does the same now apply here?

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

A Google Webmaster Help thread reports that when using Google Sites and submitting a Sitemap file to Webmaster Tools, you may receive an error. The error some people are seeing is:

Your Sitemap appears to be an HTML page. Please use a supported sitemap format instead.

The issue is, the Sitemap files are auto generated by Google Sites. The help document explains:

Once you have verified your site with Google Webmaster tools, Google Sites will auto-generate a sitemap xml file. Your sitemap will be generated at:

http://sites.google.com/a/(your domain)/(site name)/system/feeds/sitemap for Google Apps.
http://sites.google.com/site/(site name)/system/feeds/sitemap for sites under sites.google.com/site

Once these Sitemaps have been created, you can submit them to Google using Webmaster Tools.

So why is a Sitemap file that is auto-generated by Google seen as an HTML by Google?

Googler, JohnMu said that in this case, it appears to be some sort of bug. He said he would alert the Google Sites team about the issue. JohnMu said:

You can ignore that error message -- this is your homepage's URL just written in a slightly different way (without the trailing "/"). I'll pass a note on to the Google Sites team about this, but it's not affecting the processing of your Sitemap file so you don't have to worry about this :-).

Even though Google is telling this webmaster that the Sitemap file is bad, Google is actually eating (indexing) the contents of the file with no problem.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

The topic of cloaking or IP deliver or useragent delivery is always a very touchy topic in the SEO industry. I am not going to get into the history, but in short, webmasters can use various methods to show GoogleBot one piece of content and the user a different piece of content. Now, there is a gray area in that space. For example, hiding certain links or content from GoogleBot, while showing it to searchers, at the same time, showing the primary content to GoogleBot. That is why this is a touchy topic, Google wants to take a hard stance against cloaking and forms of it, but at the same time, there are very valid reasons for it.

In a recent video by Matt Cutts he discusses why showing a mobile version of a web site is 100% okay by Google. In short, as long as you show GoogleBot the same site normal web browsers see, then you are okay. Having a mobile version or print version of your site is fine, just don't show it to GoogleBot. Here is the quick video:

A week or two ago, I go through, in detail, how I implemented this for my corporate site. You can read about it over here.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

JohnMu from Google posted in a Google Webmaster Help thread that Google typically crawls a site's robots.txt file on a daily basis. This is the first time (at least that I can remember) I have seen a Googler make a statement on the crawl frequency of robots.txt files.

JohnMu said:

We usually only check the robots.txt file once a day for most sites, so I assume you were just still seeing the version that we fetched yesterday.

I have not validated this with my sites log files, but that is not the point. The point is a Googler said, on a general level, how often Googlebot will refetch a site's robots.txt file.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

On occasion I share SEO tips on optimizing for Google News search results. Yesterday, Google's Maile Ohye posted a blog entry at the Google Webmaster Central blog on how to optimize for Google News results in both Google News and Google Web Universal Search. The video is definitely worth watching if you are a Google News publisher or an SEO for sites included in Google News.

Here is the video:

I personally love the advice on getting images to show in Google News. She really expanded on that more than what I have seen in the past.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Google News Help.

In May, Google announced the availability of adding rich snippets to the Google search results through microformats and RDFa aided code. The two major complaints were not being about to:

(1) Know if you will be able to see the rich snippets in the Google web search results.
(2) How they will look prior to them showing up in the Google web search results.

We still don't have the answer to knowing if they will show up for a specific site, without Googling it. But number two, being able to preview them, is now available with a new tool found in Google Webmaster Tools named the "Rich Snippets Testing Tool."

The tool can be accessed at google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets and you can plug in any URL (not just your verified sites) to see how the page looks with rich snippets on a Google listing.

For example, here is a preview of my LinkedIn profile:

The neat part is not just the preview, but it actually extracts all the microformats and RDFa data and shows it to you below the preview. I have a full screen capture at Flickr with this.

Extremely happy that Google added this tool. It seems like they have not announced it yet, and it is currently under beta. Hat tip to Beussery for spotting this first.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

A Google Webmaster Help thread has one 'lurker' reporting that an ex-Googler is using spam tactics to both threaten and intentionally hurt his site. By hurt his site, the ex-Googler is allegedly using hacking and injection techniques to push the site out of the Google search results, thus boosting the ranking for his (the alleged ex-Googler) in the Google search results.

This is a bit hard to believe, but who knows - anything is possible. Let me quote the webmaster from the thread, because he makes it sound like he has been around the block and there is nothing he can do.

Around May I discovered another competitors site recent appearance that looked very similar to mine, in fact even the sentences on my homepage were copied directly to his. Then by reading the press release for the company I found out it was started by a high up google employee who quit his job with google to form the company. Shorty after contacting the owner politely introducing myself, I received a threat letter back through email. I don't know if I can publish the email on this site so I will hesitate for now. Basically the owner said he was going to crush me with his skills he had received from google. He then proceeded to tell me if I want traffic on my site that I should buy links. Being a avid reader of the google webmaster forums and faq's I know this is not a good thing to do.

So at the end of all of this my page rank dropped from a two to a zero. And now my site has started showing up on malicious porn sites on the internet and in bad forums, and some seem to be in the form of hidden links that appear to be bought by someone else.

It just seems so hard to believe that anyone, let alone, someone who was employed by Google, would go to these measures. Yes, I know, people do take extreme measures, especially in this area, but a former Googler? The thing is, anyone can pretend to be anyone else on the Internet - emails, names and so on, can be spoofed. So this may be someone using a name in order to threaten and scare this webmaster out of the competition. This wouldn't be the first time Google had impersonators on the webmaster side of the coin.

Hard to know for sure, based on the information I do and do not have.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

A continuously updated WebmasterWorld thread has discussion about penalties, new sitelinks and more. WebmasterWorld administrator, Tedster, summed up what he is seeing in this thread and others.

There are two main things going on:

(1) Sites that have been ranking very well for years and years have noticed a major decline in rankings. Tedster said maybe "it's a new batch of the OOP (formerly called -950)." This might be related to the not real Google August 2009 update.

(2) Sitelinks have been changing. We are seeing anchored Sitelinks, many Sitelinks not in the top position, one line Sitelinks, four Sitelinks and even the standard eight Sitelinks. Tedster said, "It seems like the algo is getting more fine-tuned and in some cases at least is picking up more on popular internal pages that are not on the site's main menu."

That is a quick update on the state of the Google search index.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Two threads at Google Webmaster Help report that .ME ccTLDs (domain names) can now be geo targeted in Google Webmaster Tools.

Typically, Google doesn't allow you to geo-target a ccTLD (country specific top level domain). Google assumes that if you register a country specific TLD, you want to rank well in that country. They made an exception for a few ccTLDs including .TV domains a while back, but the .ME domains were not included in that exception.

That has changed as of August 17th. In fact, this blog has a screen shot proving it. But there are other various reports of this actually working. .ME is a natural ccTLD for this exception.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

A WebmasterWorld thread has new discussion around how important it is to have keywords in the URL. This is a very old SEO topic, but new chatter in the industry is saying how keywords in the URLs actually make more of an impact in your rankings in Google today, more than it has in a long time.

Now, keywords in the URL can mean two things (well, more than two, but we will discuss only two) or both of these two things. There is the domain name, i.e. domain.com and there is the filename, i.e. domain.com/filename.html. There is always a benefit to getting a short keyword specific domain name, because people link to you by your name (i.e. people link to my web development shop as RustyBrick and not Web Development because the name is RustyBrick). But the actual words in the URL, just looking at the URL component and not the links you get, how much does that impact your rankings at Google?

Many are of the opinion that Google is really looking more at the keywords in the URL. In fact, Matt Cutts surprised me when he mentioned that they do help in his WordCamp presentation. And now Tedster, the WebmasterWorld administrator, said:

Certainly keyword-in-url seems to be dialed up rather high right now as a ranking factor.

Do you agree? Take my anonymous poll:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There is an excellent guest article at Search Engine Land named The Curious Case Of Google's Bizarre UK Search Results. In this write up, Bas van den Beld explains some of the recent history with what is going on in the Google UK results and shows specific examples of why he is upset with the results.

Let me catch you up, because it actually goes a bit further back than what Bas explained. In April of this year, folks at WebmasterWorld noticed that the Google UK geo targeting algorithm might be a bit off. Maybe this was an early sign or test from Google, because those signals went quiet until June, when the Twitterverse went nuts about the UK Google search results. In fact, in July, Google tested removing the pages from UK radio button, which upset a lot of people.

This was such a big deal that Matt Cutts created a video about it:

In short, Matt explains that Google UK is now showing a lot more US sites (i.e. dot COMs) in the UK results. In the past, Google typically showed more .co.uk results, but now Google is "getting better" at showing relevant .com results He added that this change, Google will "likely not revert," so we might be stuck with it.

In any event, many UK SEOs are not happy about this and they have expressed this on Matt's video, via Twitter, forums and in blog posts.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

It appears that some webmasters are now receiving warnings from Google Webmaster Tools about SSL certificate issues. A Google Webmaster Help thread has a couple people reporting receiving the warnings over the weekend.

Here is a copy of the SSL warning from Google:

Googlebot noticed your site host name, https://www.banknorwegian.no:443/, does not match your SSL certificate Subject Name August 20, 2009

Dear Webmaster,

The host name of your site, https://www.banknorwegian.no:443/, does not match any of the "Subject Names" in your SSL certificate, which were:

* NotVerified

This will cause many web browsers to block users from accessing your site, or to display a security warning message when your site is accessed.

To correct this problem, please get a new SSL certificate by a Certificate Authority (CA) with a "Subject Name" or "Subject Alternative DNS Names" that matches your host name.

Thanks,

The Google Web Crawling Team

I am not sure if this warning is new, I have never seen this reported before. Now many more webmasters are noticing it, because there may be a bug in how Google detects such errors. Google's JohnMu said:

Generally speaking, we've added these messages to inform webmasters of issues with regards to their SSL certificates. This is just an informational message, it does not affect your site's crawling, indexing or ranking.

It seems that some of you may be seeing this message despite having a valid SSL certificate. We're looking into this issue and will let you know more as soon as we can. In the mean time, if you're certain that your certificate is ok, then you can safely ignore this message.

So two take aways:

(1) SSL certificate warnings from Google does not generally impact your site's well being in the Google search results.

(2) There may be an issue with Google's SSL certificate reporting feature.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

A couple weeks ago, I asked our readers how feasible it was to rank in the number one spot in Google.com and at the same time rank #1 in a regional flavored Google search space. We have just about a hundred responses, so I wanted to share the results with you.

In short, 86% of the respondents said it was possible. 46% said yes, it is doable, 40% said it depends on the keyword, 11% said it was not possible and the rest didn't really answer the question. Here is the visual breakdown:

Question: Can You Rank #1 In Regional Google & Google.com?

:: Yes said 45 respondents or 46%
:: Depends On Keyword said 39 respondents or 40%
:: No said 11 respondents or 11%
:: Other answer... said 2 respondents or 2%

Forum discussion continued at HighRankings Forums.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread links to Matt's slides from WordCamp. The slides can be found on Google Docs, but I say, skip those and watch the video below of Matt's presentation.

The one thing I learned from it was that it makes sense to have keywords in your URL and if you want to rank well for alternatives to the title of your page, put that keyword in the URL. Matt's example was for a blog post with the word "Change" in the title, but he wanted to also rank for "changing," so he put that word in the URL and it does work, he said.

In any event, the presentation is extremely fun to watch. Matt has really become an excellent speaker over the years.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A couple months back, Google ran an I/O conference. What many people don't know is that Matt Cutts and the search quality team video recorded a session with site reviews and posted it for everyone to see. The video is over an hour long, but it is well worth listening to and in some parts, watching.

Here it is: I would suggest just hitting play and listening to it and flipping back to it when you need to see something:

This video can likely teach most people about SEO in an hour. For more advanced SEOs, Matt did make a comment about using the nofollow attribute for login pages. Watch the video at about 31 minutes and 40 seconds in and listen to it. Matt said:

The only time I use the nofollow on internal links, is maybe a login page.

Now, I doubt this is something Matt wants people to misunderstand, so maybe Matt will comment on this statement? ;-) Why is this statement a big deal? Well, recently, Matt said that the nofollow would waste PageRank flow if used, which got people thinking that blogs are doomed and got people to reconsider using the nofollow.

Forum discussion about that comment at WebmasterWorld.

A Google News publisher asked in a Google News Help thread why his publication rarely comes up in the Google News alerts for specific queries he subscribed to. Inbal from Google explained how alerts get sent and how you need to rank in Google News to be included.

Inbal said:

In order to be included in Google News Alerts, an article must be included in Google News and appear in the top ten results of Google News for specific search terms.

Clearly, the first part of the answer is obvious. To be in Google News Alerts, you must first be indexed by Google News. The second part is less obvious for many publishers, but for SEO's it likely makes a lot of sense. You must be in the top ten results at the time the alert is triggered (both RSS and Email) for you to show up in Google News Alerts. I believe the frequency of your alerts makes a difference, because the Google News rankings often change throughout the day.

Forum discussion at Google News Help.

Many webmasters and SEOs are reporting seeing an issue with the PageRank distribution report in Google Webmaster Tools. If you login and click on crawl stats, and then scroll to the bottom, you may or may not see data. I personally do not see any data for this site. In fact, for me it reads:

No data available. Please check back soon.

JohnMu from Google confirmed the issue in a Google Webmaster Help thread saying:

Some Webmaster Tools users have reported missing PageRank distribution data for their websites. We are working on resolving this issue. This data is informational and does not affect your site's crawling, indexing or ranking.

Thanks for your patience!

Just another reason not to be freaked out and too concerned with the data shown in Google Webmaster Tools.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

A WebmasterWorld thread pointed out a very interesting observation in Google. A search for WebmasterWorld in Google shows Sitelinks for the site. But one of those Sitelinks seem to be cut off, the one with the "Google" in front of it.

The "Search News" Sitelink, is actually the "Google Search News" forum at WebmasterWorld. Why is Google shortening the link, and removing "Google" from it, when this forum is specifically about Google related search news, not search news in general.

It is a space issue or is it more related to the name "Google" being displayed in Sitelinks? I think it is more about shortening. If you look at the Sitelinks for a search on search engine roundtable forums or search engine watch forums, you will clearly see "Google" used in the Sitelinks. So I doubt there should be any conspiracy theory here.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A HighRankings Forum thread asks if it is possible to rank number one in Google.ca and Google.com, if the site is using a .ca ccTLD and is hosted in Canada. As you can see, the question has a lot of variables. It is also dependent on the keyword. For example, I hope I can rank well in any Google regional flavored search engine for my company name, RustyBrick. But to rank well for a more generic keyword would be much harder.

I felt I would poll you guys and see what you had to say. Now, like I said, the variables are important, so let's set them here.

The condition is as follows. You have a site hosting in the US, it is on a .com TLD, and you want to rank well for a generic keyword (not your company name). Can you rank well in both Google.com and a regional flavored Google?

Please take the poll and pass it on to a friend.

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

All of you are well aware of the penalties Google shells out to webmasters for disobeying their word. But does your mom know them? Does your aunt or nephew - probably not. That might soon change as more and more mainstream media outlets begin to cover how Google works and interacts with the web sites that make up their powerful index.

Ki Mae Heussner of ABC News wrote an article named Google Bans and Buries Web Sites: 6 Search Engine Showdowns. In that article she educates the average person out there on how Google manages the quality in their index and thus regulates the Internet. She covers 6 categories of topics that we all know too well:

• Hutchison's Campaign Site Gets the Boot
• BMW Germany Blocked for Deceptive Practices
• Traffic-Power Banished From Google
• GoCompare's Traffic Tumbles After Google Rap
• Google Vs. Google (Japan
• Google Vs. the Entire Internet (Malwaring the Internet)

I love seeing articles like this in mainstream media, it makes our industry make more sense to the public (i.e. your mom). I was quoted in the article, although I am not sure how my quote came out exactly like that.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There are several threads about an issue with Google News publishers and Google Webmaster Tools. The largest thread is at Google News Help where the issue is described as the Sitemap file being in the state of pending.

The Google News blog confirmed the issue, stating is began when the new design launched earlier last month. Google promised to fix the issues quickly, but here are the confirmed issues:

• Webmaster Tools may report an incorrect "Last downloaded" date for News sitemaps, display a strange number of articles indexed, or display a News sitemap as "Pending" () even though Google News is already crawling the sitemap. The best way to determine if we're crawling a sitemap or not is to check your server logs for Googlebot.
• From time to time, it may become necessary to resubmit your sitemap (for example, if the Type switches from News to Web). In order to do so, don't click the "Resubmit" button at the bottom of your sitemap list; instead, click the "Submit a Sitemap" link, select Google News from the Type dropdown box, and give us your sitemap's URL.

Google's Abe also confirmed the issue in the Google News Help thread saying:

Sorry about this rather embarrassing issue. This is most likely related to a bug on our end; from what I can tell, the sitemap in question is fine and we're using it, but Webmaster Tools isn't displaying very accurate information. The best place to check to see how we're crawling your site, including your sitemaps, is your server's logs.

Forum discussion at Google News Help.

Image search has its challenges, but yet, it is a powerful beast on its own. For as long as there has been image search, the issues of the search engine showing the original image, as opposed to those who hotlink to those images, has been a huge issue. Why? Well, Googler, JohnMu, put a lot of time into a response on why this is the case. So I figured I share the reason, directly from the horses mouth (as they say).

JohnMu said in a Google Webmaster Help thread:

As Becky mentioned, hotlinking and ranking in Image Search is a complicated problem :). One of the reasons for this is - apart from the fact that many sites host their images elsewhere - that sometimes a different page is more relevant than your page for the keywords the person was searching for. For example, if someone searches for "beach photo" and your awesome vacation sunset picture happens to match, but your own page does not mention "beach photo" (or otherwise does not appear to be relevant for "beach photo") it's possible that we'll link to some other site that does mention "beach photo" together with your image.

This can be particularly problematic for gallery scripts, eg when your own site uses "DSC_02102.JPG" as the title and as the only unique text on the landing page. It might be a great picture of a laughing penguin jumping over a striped cow on the first of August, but we wouldn't be able to tell from your page alone. If however, that same image were linked in a forum where people were talking about these kinds of things, that image - together with the forum page - suddenly becomes relevant for some keywords.

So.. if you see that your own images are not ranking with content from your site, I'd recommend taking that as a challenge and working to make sure that your own pages are as relevant as they can be, with your images.

It is hard for me to add more to this explanation. It is an issue, that is for sure and publishers often don't help. I mean, I often host my images in Flickr and then embed them here. I likely should begin hosting them here, because it would give this site more traffic, plus it would show up more often in Google News. But Flickr bears the bandwidth costs and it is just so easy, plus Flickr does send nice traffic.

Here is additional details on Google Image search that might help.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

There is a brand new Google Webmaster Tools error for Sitemaps files. The new error or warning is named "Duplicate URL" and has been springing up for many webmasters recently.

The full error reads:

This URL is a duplicate of another URL in the sitemap. Please remove it and resubmit.

The first reports of such an error being received by webmasters was on June 29th, Wednesday. The error basically tells the webmaster that they have the same URL (a duplicate) listed in the Sitemap file and they should probably remove it. In some cases, Google is wrong about what is duplicate and what is not. For example, if domain.com/page/ is technically a different page from domain.com/page/index.html, Google will still consider that a duplicate listing.

JohnMu from Google explains in detail:

This is a new warning message we added to inform you of this issue. This does not mean that we treat your Sitemap file in any way differently, it's just for your information (and this information wasn't shown to users before). In general, it makes little sense to submit duplicate URLs in a Sitemap file, which is why this message was added.

There is one item which may lead to confusion here though - Google's Sitemaps processing generally simplifies URLs in ways that make sense on a whole. This includes removing "/index.html" from the URL if that's the last part. In general, that makes sense, since you want to show users the relevant part of the URL (and since most servers will automatically check "index.html" when the root page is requested).

However, there are some cases where "/index.html" is a relevant part of the URL and can't be removed. In these cases, we'll generally discover those URLs through our normal web-crawl. At the moment, it's possible that our Sitemaps processing will show these warnings in those cases - but since this does not signal any change in the processing of your Sitemaps files, you can safely ignore these warnings.

In short: these warnings are new, but the processing of your Sitemaps files has not changed.

We have lots of forum threads, all from Google Webmaster Help.

A Google Webmaster Help thread reports that several webmasters trying to use the reconsideration form are experiencing significant difficulties.

As the user types in the box, explaining why their site should be reincluded in the Google index, the web page freezes and they get booted out. The issue seems to date back to July 26th, last Wednesday.

The issue was confirmed by Googler, Susan Moskwa on 7/28, saying, "thanks for letting us know, folks--we're looking into the issue." Then on Friday, Googler, Jonathan Simon chimed in saying, "We're still looking into this issue. In the mean time have you tried the potential workarounds that danielroofer suggests above?"

The form works fine for me, so maybe try deleting your cookies to see if that fixes things. If not, hopefully Google will figure it out.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

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

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

Inbal said:

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

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

Forum discussion at Google News Help.

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

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

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

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

The top ideas currently are:

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

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

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

Again, submit your Product Ideas for Webmaster Central.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

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

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

Google News representative, Inbal, said:

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

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

Forum discussion at Google News Help Forums.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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

The main changes include:

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

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

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

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

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

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

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

Googler, JohnMu said:

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

Forum discussion at two Google Webmaster Help.

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

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

Here are some of the many threads with the issues:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

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

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

Gabs said:

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

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

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

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

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

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

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

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

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

Can a reputation management company help with that? Possibly.

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

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

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

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

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

See the issue?

Join the conversation at WebmasterWorld.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Here is the live blog coverage of the news:

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

Back before March 2005 Google page hijacking was a serious issue. It took Google some time to tackle the issue and it was less of an issue towards the end of April. But then it sprung up again in June 2007. Since then, I have not heard much about 302 or proxy hijacking in Google.

A new Google Webmaster Help thread has a new example of one webmaster being 302 hijacked. What makes this thread interesting is the conversation around helping both the webmaster and Google isolate the issue.

Googler, JohnMu, confirmed the issue, saying:

Thanks for posting about this issue. The team is busy on a solution to this issue, but it might be a few days before it is visible in all data-centers. Hang tight -- it'll hopefully be changed soon!

After about 24 hours or so, the issue was fixed by Google. I guess if this ever happens to you, you should probably head to the Google forums.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

We asked our readers a few weeks ago if they can beat Wikipedia in the Google results? The answer is yes, most SEOs believe they can beat Wikipedia's listings in the Google results.

81% of SEOs feel they can beat the Wikipedia number one listings, if they need to. 74% said they can do it with some work, while 7% said it would be easy to do so. Let me share the break down of results:

Question: Can You Beat a #1 Wikipedia Google Listing?
:: Yes, But With Work said 117 respondents or 74%
:: No, Too Hard said 23 respondents or 14%
:: Yes, Easily said 11 respondents or 7%
:: No, Not Possible said 5 respondents or 3%
:: Other answer... said 3 respondents or 2%

That is a total of 159 responses to the poll.

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

This story was pre-written and scheduled to go live on May 29th.

Yesterday, Google made two quick announcements about bug fixes with Google Webmaster Tools.

The first item was that the URL Removal tool was not working. A Google Webmasters Help thread has confirmation from Susan Moskwa, a Googler, that this was indeed the case. Susan even tweeted that her "inbox is full of email about URL removal requests," implying there was an issue. Susan confirmed that the issue is now resolved and removal requests should now be working.

The second item is that in the new Google Webmaster Tools UI, Google had to disable the option to subscribe to notifications. Google has updated us via Google Webmasters Help that they have re-enabled this feature and you can now subscribe to notifications in the new user interface.

Forum discussion at two different Google Webmasters Help Threads.

An interesting WebmasterWorld thread has a theory that for some sites, Google may give that site higher ranking based on what day of the week it is.

The SEO has been tracking the traffic from Google to the site for months. He noticed that every Tuesday showed the highest level of referrals from Google, but every Saturday showed the least traffic from Google. Over the past five weeks, he also has been tracking how many pages Google shows were indexed from the site using the site command (which he and we all know is not 100% accurate). The pattern remained the same, more pages were indexed on Tuesdays, the days he saw the most traffic from Google. Whereas, on Saturdays, less pages were indexed and less traffic was seen from Google.

WebmasterWorld, administrator, tedster, said "ranking changes based on day of the week definitely occur - they even get mentioned in some of Google's patents."

After a few more days, the thread creator noted that everything changed this week, after months of tracking. He said:

Final update, just when I thought I had sufficient data to start tracking related considerations for effect Google changed gears on me, Today's traffic should have been trending downwards until Friday (though up from last Wednesday) but instead the site enjoyed a record up day... breaking a long running trend.

I suppose nothing ever stays still long enough to fully evaluate online, ah well.

Coincidence or truth to this phenomenon?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A few weeks ago, Google announced the support of rich snippets in the search results. Most SEOs and Webmasters said they would give it a try and I did also. So far, none of the sites I have tried it on, show the rich snippet data.

I do wish there was a way, maybe in Webmaster Tools, to verify that we did it right and what it might look like once it shows up in the search results. I know Google does not guarantee it will show up in the search results. But it would be nice to know it is not showing due to technical reasons versus authority reasons.

In any event, a Google Webmasters Help thread asks if the rich snippets will also show in Google localized versions. Would rich snippets show in the UK or Canada or Israel?

It appears that rich snippets currently only show in Google.com, and not other Google properties. Compare:

• google.com/search?q=site%3Ayelp.com+pizzeria

• google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Ayelp.com+pizzeria
• google.ca/search?q=site%3Ayelp.com+pizzeria
• google.co.il/search?q=site%3Ayelp.com+pizzeria

As you can see when you currently click through, the rich snippets only show in Google.com.

In any event, it would be nice to see if you can see how the rich snippets would appear and if you have technically set them up correctly.

Forum discussion at Google Webmasters Help.

A couple weeks ago, we reported on Google's new rich snippet markups and asked our audience if they will use it on their web sites. With 90 responses in, I wanted to share the results of the poll.

53% of webmasters said they would use the rich snippets, while only 14% said they would not use it. 29% said they may or may not use it. Here is the breakdown:

Question: Will You Use Google's New "Rich Snippets" Markups?

:: Yes said 48 respondents or 53%
:: Maybe said 26 respondents or 29%
:: No said 13 respondents or 14%

Personally, I am trying it out on a few sites and if it takes on, I will continue to add this markup, where it makes sense, to other sites.

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld, Sphinn and DigitalPoint Forums.

Google's Matt Cutts explained in a video why Google does not currently index @ signs. It stems from not wanting to index email addresses, he said. But now with the popularity of Twitter, Matt would not be surprised if Google changes how they handle indexing of @ signs.

Here is the video:

I find these little tidbits interesting.

Forum discussion at YouTube.

Google Webmaster Tools and Webmaster Central are tools I cannot believe SEOs ever lived without. Early on, many experienced SEOs were skeptical about the tools, but many of us have learned that the tools and advice are here to help us with our web sites.

Adam Lasnik, who I rarely hear from in the forums anymore, started a thread at Google Webmasters Help discussion area asking Webmasters to give Google case studies on if the Google Webmaster Central team has helped them or not. Adam said:

Did your website once scare away both users and Googlebot but -- after you put in some hard work and used the resources of Google Webmaster Central -- later turn into a success story?

Whether it was intelligence you gleaned from Webmaster Tools, insights you got from friendly Webmaster Help Bionic Posters, or wisdom you soaked up from our blog or Help Center, we'd love to know! So please take just a moment to brag to us and to your fellow webmasters, sharing your ugly-duckling-to-swan web site story.

I promise to share your positive vibes with all relevant Googlers (which will make their day!), and you might serve as an inspiration to your fellow webmasters, too! :-)

So, if you want to share your success, which you think is due in part of Google Webmaster Central, do join the thread at add your thoughts.

Forum discussion at Google Webmasters Help.

You wake up one morning, check out your site statistics and learn your traffic has plummeted. You then dig deeper to see the source of the traffic drop is from Google sending less traffic for your main keywords. Most SEO companies have gone through the experience of having at least one site penalized. The question is how does an SEO company first confirm a site penalty and then remove the site penalty.

We will discuss a thread at WebmasterWorld that has SEOs offering advice on this topic.

One of the sure fire ways to determine if a site was penalized by Google is if the site no longer ranks for it's own domain name. So if your site's domain name is rustybrick.com and you type in rustybrick into Google and you don't come up in the first page, then you got pretty good evidence that you have been penalized.

Also, since you have statistics on which keywords you ranked well for. If most of those keywords are now ranking in the 5th plus page, then that is often a sign of a penalty.

Senior member, johnnie, suggested that you first see if it is a malware issue. To do so, either go to Google Webmaster Tools and login (make sure your site is verified) and it should tell you in the messages. If not, then go to google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=mysite.com and replace "mysite.com" with your domain.

But I prefer Google Webmaster Tools cause they may show you other issues with your site. It doesn't always show you if your site has been penalized, but it is a good start.

Here is a good checklist of items to review to make sure you fix your penalized site. We also wrote about how long sites are penalized in Google. In fact, we have lots of good articles about a Google penalty in our archives.

Forum discussion WebmasterWorld.

On Thursday we reported that the backlink data was out of sync in the redesigned webmaster tools. Well, over the weekend, that was fixed.

Googler, Jonathan Simon said in a Google Webmasters Help thread that it is now up to date. Jonathan said:

Check out your site's backlinks data in the new version of Webmaster Tools. We've just finished the process of loading the most recent backlinks data so you should now be able to see all your site's backlinks.

The backlinks data between the new and old versions of Webmaster Tools may not match 100% but the new version's data should be more comprehensive for most sites.

Some people are still having issues, so if you are one of those, join the thread and Jonathan or Sagar can help you.

Forum discussion at Google Webmasters Help.

The other day, Google released a redesigned Webmaster Tools area. Soon after it was released, webmasters began noticing that the linkage data found in the new Webmaster Tools was out of sync with the one found in the old Webmaster Tools version.

Google has confirmed the issue, saying:

You may notice that your backlinks data differs between the new and old versions—this is because we're still filling in data for some sites in the new version. We hope that you'll find the new data more comprehensive once it's 100% filled in.

So for these sites, the issue hopefully will be resolved shortly. No need to panic.

Forum discussion continued at Google Webmasters Help, WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

For the past few days, dozens of threads have been popping up in the Google Webmasters Help discussion forum about how Google Webmaster Tools was showing "Data is not available at this time" for some sites.

After many complaints, Google posted it as a known issue at 5am and then at 11am, they said it should be fixed by tomorrow (which is today).

I don't see any new complaints and no, I won't link to the 10 or so threads discussing the issue. Instead, I will link to just one.

Forum discussion at Google Webmasters Help.

Part of the Google Searchology event announcements from yesterday, Google announced a new way to enhance the search results. This way is called rich snippets and it gives webmasters a way to communicate richer data to Google, so they can display a richer search for the searcher. Yahoo has been doing this with Search Monkey for a months now, on some level. But Google is Google and this is much bigger.

Google will look for markups in your HTML in the format of either microformats and RDFa and use those markups to determine more structured data about that page's content. There is a lot of technical detail available at Google and it can be used on content for reviews, people, products and businesses and organizations.

There are some pros and cons to this feature on the SEO front and searcher front. Pros are that you can add more flavor to your listing and get more visibility. Cons include that richer data might mean less clicks or that competitors can more easily scrape your content. The lists goes on and you can read the pros and cons discussion at WebmasterWorld. That being said, I think I will personally use this new rich snippet feature on this site eventually and for clients as well. Will you?

Take our poll on if you will use this new feature:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, Sphinn and DigitalPoint Forums.

The last time Google Webmaster Tools was redesigned was back in September 2007. It has been a while since the interface was updated. That doesn't mean features weren't added over time, they were, but within the same old interface.

Google announced they have refreshed things for "spring time." You can see the detailed what's new page to find out all the changes or you can watch this video below:

It seems like most people are taking a liking to the new look. We have threads at Google Webmasters Help, WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums discussing the new design.

Do you like the new design, take our poll:

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

We have written about Wikipedia's dominance of the Google search results plenty of times. A new thread at WebmasterWorld asks if it is possible to beat a number one Wikipedia ranking at Google.

I wanted to poll our audience to see what you think. Can you beat Wikipedia? Let us know:

I do like at least one post in the thread:

Yes, it's possible to rank higher than Wikipedia for some terms, but I'm not sure that it matters. Not every searcher is looking for a Wikipedia article. The searcher who searches on "widget pastry" while looking for a widget-pastry recipe or a widget-pastry shop is likely to either (a) skip down past the Wikipedia result on the SERP or (b) hit the browser's back button and try the next result if he has clicked through to a Wikipedia article on the history, etymology, and regional variations of widget pastries.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.