Google Optimization Archives

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.

In August 2005, Matt Cutts, the head of search quality at Google, launched his blog at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/. Notice, if you click on that URL, you are redirected to http://www.dullest.com/blog/. Why? Well, Matt explained that he was to switch things around, with a new name, new design, etc.

But the main thing, he is using a 302 redirect, which is a temporary redirect. When moving domains, Google almost always recommends using a permanent redirect, 301 redirect. But since Matt said this is a possible temporary change, he is using a 302.

But why?

If you read through the comments, you might notice Danny Sullivan's comment where he said "Why do I suspect some ultra-secret Google we get 302s right test is going on." Matt Cutts replied soon after saying:

Danny, my site makes the perfect guinea pig. I laughed when Greg Boser got everyone to link to mattcutts.com instead of http://www.mattcutts.com. He was trying to mess me up and cause duplicate content hijinks, but little did he know that I was the guinea pig for the www/non-www setting in the webmaster console.

Nice to have Google experiment on their own stuff when changing or investigating issues.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

A WebmasterWorld thread has a documented case of one webmaster forgetting to renew his domain name after a day or so. Then after the domain name expired, he renewed the domain and got things back up after maybe two days.

The issue was, he also noticed that his domain name was no longer showing up in the Google search results. He said:

I accidentally let one domain of mine expire and renewed it after it showed an "expired domain" message for a day or so. A few days later the site is gone from Google with no traffic at all from this SE. Even when searching for the url my website is nowhere to be found.

WebmasterWorld administrator, Tedster, told the webmaster that in many cases your domain will be lost in Google until you renew it. It might take a few days for the domain to reappear in Google. Tedster was right, a few days later, the webmaster came back in to let us know his site was indexed and ranking again.

Thanks Ted, the site is back indeed with the same traffic it had:-)

Please don't forget to renew your domain name. The couple day loss in traffic might not be the end of the world, but leaving your domain name open for others to grab and use, can be extremely painful.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Reid, a very helpful and respected Google Webmaster Trends Analysts in the Google Search Quality team has announced in a Google Webmasters Help thread that he is moving to the paid search division at Google. Let me quote you his words:

I wanted to let you know that I've made the decision to move into a new role within Google, in the realm of paid search, which means I will no longer be monitoring the forum in an official capacity. I'm sad to be leaving, but know that there's plenty of webmasters, Bionic Posters, and Googlers in the forum to keep the conversation going. I've particularly enjoyed seeing countless webmasters jump in to help out one another, whether it be in regards to how their site is ranking or a gentle (or not so gentle!) reminder to check out the posting guidelines. You've been our most vocal and truthful critics, which has helped us understand how we can make Google and Webmaster Tools better. And in the past few months, it has been a pleasure seeing BbDeath, Beussery, Chibcha and Luzie skyrocket into Bionic Posters. So, I'll miss you all! I hope to occasionally pop-in from time to time when I get a chance. Thank you again! :)

I personally have never heard of a Googler in the Search Quality team moving from organic search to paid search. To me, it seems a bit of a conflict of interest for someone with as much knowledge as someone in the search quality team to be on the paid side. But honestly, I do not know what part of the paid side he is joining? Will it be customer support or more on the side of paid search quality? There may be a ton of synergies between proving quality organic results and quality paid results.

In any event, Reid will be deeply missed in the Webmaster help forums.

Forum discussion at Google Webmasters Help.

There is a pretty funny thread for anyone who is somewhat familiar with the SEO industry. A thread at Google Webmasters Help has this SEO who goes on a rant about the nofollow and what have happened to links. In fact, he says that Google should consider all links nofollow by default and require webmasters to add a rel="follow" to links that they deem respectable enough to deserve any link equity.

Here is the webmaster's post:

I'm thinking that I should just adopt a site-wide policy that all links have nofollow. Because of Google's PageRank algorithm, links have become a dirty thing that requires a lot of consideration, a cause for concerns and panic, an object of envy, conflict, fight, bitterness, etc.. Reading this forum is a good indication of the sad state of what "links" have become. And, it's all because of Google's PageRank algorithm. It would be simpler, easier, and healthier if all links had nofollow as a policy. In fact, I wish Google would do the opposite; require people to add rel="follow" only when you want to pass "link juice" to someone else. The truth of the matter is that everyone has to know what PageRank is these days and some degree of SEO, which means that everyone is perfectly aware of what value and power links have. No one is innocent. Everyone treats links like money whether we actually get paid for it or not. Links has become a currency of power. In the old days, when we used to call them "hyperllinks" they were just a mechanism for convenience.

Now how is that for a rant? I kind of agree. I mean, the nofollow link attribute was originally designed to prevent spam in blogs, forums, and any open web form. Now it is used for ads, for managing your internal PageRank and to penalize sites. I am not going to go off on a rant on the nofollow attribute, so I will stop there.

The Google Webmasters Help thread has a lot of discussion around the nofollow attribute. It makes for a fun, pre-weekend read.

Forum discussion at Google Webmasters Help.

I found a very disturbing Google Maps issue via Google Maps Help forums. Mike Blumenthal has uncovered that Google is merging competing businesses that have nearby addresses. Let me say that again, but show you an example, that was uncovered by Mike.

Here are the results for two different hotels/motels in the same area, but that have different addresses. The map result for South Pier Inn displays the correct information, but their competitor, The Inn on Lake Superior is somehow merged into this record, showing the South Pier Inn's information and web address, while not showing the Inn on Lake Superior's information. They did however, merge both hotel's phone numbers. Here is a picture:

Googler, Nina, responded in the Google Maps Help thread saying:

Yes, the algorithm for merging changed recently. The developers who work on this have been alerted and are actively working to address this problem. They are also reading this thread.

The fix needs to be automatic - not manual. These things usually take several weeks to test and bring live. We know it's causing user pain and I know they are working really hard on it right now as we speak.

Clearly Google knows how big of an issue this is and I hope it gets fixed soon.

Mike Blumenthal has posted more information on this topic at his blog.

Forum discussion at Google Maps Help.

Update: Marty at aimClear blog wrote about this on the 21st.

Over the past day or two, I have been hearing reports from webmasters and SEOs that Google's geo targeting technology has changed in a big way over in their international or localized search engines. I have one, possibly, two threads to point you over to with more details.

A Google Web Search Help thread has reports that over the weekend, the landscape for ranking of generic keywords in Google UK has drastically changed. Searches such as web hosting, mortgage, insurance, student loans and so on are no longer as specific to UK web sites and are now showing more US based sites.

I am told by an anonymous reader that for financial terms, such as mortgages, you would never see US based results in the top ten at Google UK. Clearly that makes logical sense, why would a UK searcher, who is looking for a UK mortgage, want to find information from US mortgage companies? They wouldn't. Of course, Wikipedia type pages were the exception. I am now being told that more and more US based sites are showing for these specific UK-type queries when searching Google UK in the UK.

When I questioned if this was new, after showing that filtering them by selecting "show pages from UK" the SEO said:

For me that shows that Google knows they aren't UK sites - but is still none the less choosing to display them on queries which should really have a UK focus (UK finance products)

There have been some US based sites in searches like this before (occassionaly one might see Wikipedia) - but for so many to pop in overnight is most unusual.

The WebmasterWorld thread that is tracking Google changes in April has a post from Tedster that relates to these findings. Tedster, WebmasterWorld's administrator, said:

I'm also getting a whiff of something that's hard to document - more search terms getting the geo-targeting treatment, and the gotargeting may not be all that appropriate. When it comes to ecommerce, I don't really care where the vendor is as long as they are in the country. I don't want to see the more local vendors getting a boost and the quality vendors a couple hundred miles away tanking. For services, just maybe - but for hard goods, no.

Today I was checking something for a client in another city. They were concerned about falling to position #8 - but for me they were at position #67 or so.

This seems to be somewhat related to what is reported in the Google Web Search Help thread but not exactly.

Is Google's geo targeting technology off a bit or is Google changing how they handle certain queries in the UK?

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

For over three years now, I and others (including Danny) have been trying to get information from Google on how they handle passing link value from domain names, specifically in cases of expired domains and domain name transfer of ownership.

In April 2006, I wrote Changing Domain Name Ownership Whois Information & Google Search Ranking Impact. Then Tamar wrote a nice piece summing up the history around this topic about a year ago. Then more recently, Matt Cutts of Google commented on expired domains and if you should 301 them, he said:

Hey Michael! If you buy typos, I'd 301 them to your main site. Even things that you win in UDRP arbitration can be 301'ed. For example, if someone bought porngoogle.com and Google won it in UDRP, it would make sense to 301 it to your main domain.

What I *wouldn't* recommend is try to register unrelated expired domains in an attempt to get those pre-existing links to count toward your domain. I would also avoid registering-and-301'ing typos of competitors' domains or other completely unrelated domains.

That all being said, Danny Sullivan has more details from Matt of Google on this topic. Danny wrote Do Links From Expired Domains Count With Google?. In that piece, Matt Cutts told Danny:

There are some domain transfers ( e.g. genuine purchases of companies) where it can make perfect sense for links to transfer. But at the same time it wouldn’t make sense to transfer the links from an expired or effectively expired domain, for example. Google (and probably all search engines) tries to handle links appropriately for domain transfers.

The sort of stuff our systems would be designed to detect would be things like someone trying to buy expired domains or buying domains just for links.

Danny then analyzed these comments and wrote some scenarios on what types of domains would pass value and which would not. We still don't have Google saying in case X, Google will do B and in case Y, Google will do C. I am not sure if we will ever get there.

But domain name change of ownership happens often enough and communicating to Google what really is happening with that domain, via Google Webmaster Tools, makes sense to me.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Google has confirmed last week that they are officially bring "one-line sitelinks" to the Google search results.

In early March rumors of these Sitelinks were spotted first in the UK region. Then the tests of the classic sitelinks continued and we saw them in the US. On April 15th, the day before Google announced it, it seemed to be available to everyone and there were some great insight posts on how they work.

Well, now they are here to stay, after just under two months of testing.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A Google Webmasters Help thread has a webmaster worried that Google has not downloaded his XML Sitemap file in about five days. I went to check the status of my sitemap file in Google Webmaster Tools and Google has not downloaded the Sitemap file for this site in five days as well.

So I decided to panic and shut down my web site. Just kidding. I checked to see if one of my more recent articles is indexed in Google and it was. An article I wrote Friday, April 17th is indexed. So is an article I wrote minutes ago, and so will this article, within minutes.

A Sitemap file is great but it does not mean Google has not indexed your content. The Sitemap file is one way that Google may find your content, but Google typically finds your content other ways, and typically Google may find your content faster without the Sitemap file. Meaning, Google will typically find new content on your site through their normal crawl process, faster then they would when compared to the Sitemap file. That doesn't mean that the Sitemap file doesn't help, I believe it does help.

In summary, don't worry about the reporting in Google Webmaster Tools. We know it is often buggy. If your rankings drop, traffic from Google dies and your Google Webmaster Tools console shows scary signs, then you know you have issues. Otherwise, make sure to use all the tools at your disposal before worrying all that much about a delay in reporting from Google.

Forum discussion Google Webmasters Help.

About two weeks ago, we polled our audience asking if they thought Google had a keyword specific penalty. By the I meant, does Google penalize a site from ranking well for a specific keyword phrase, while allowing the site to rank well for other keyword phrases. There are now well over a hundred-sixty responses, with the majority, seven-eight percent, saying Google does have such a filter.

I went as far to break down the poll by asking if you do believe in such a filter, is the filter or penalty algorithmic or manual. Meaning, does Google give these keyword penalties by hand or is there an algorithm that does this automatically?

86 of the respondents or 53% said it is done algorithmically, while 41 of the respondents or 25% said it was done manually. Only 35 respondents or 22% said there was no keyword specific penalty. I wonder how Matt Cutts voted. :)

Forum discussion continued at HighRankings Forum.

This article was written earlier this week and scheduled to go live April 16th.

Google has been testing showing classic (one line) Sitelinks in the search results for a while now. The one line Sitelinks are interesting in that they seem to differ some from the Sitelinks we are typically accustomed to.

Melanie Phung posted very interesting observations of these Sitelinks. Let me bullet point the key points, but feel free to check out the post for more details.

One Line Sitelinks Can:

• Show for non-branded terms
• Can show multiple times on a single search results page
• Can show up at the bottom of the search results page
• The Sitelinks can differ based on query
• One line Sitelinks can be displayed with typical 8 Sitelinks
• Show for sub folders
• Can show for sub domains

Those are just some of the insights this post showed. Some of these insights also apply to the 8 Sitelinks version. I do wonder if Google has a name for these. I.e. Does Google call them Sitelinks? Will these replace the Sitelinks we know?

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

This article was written earlier this week and scheduled to go live April 15th.

A detailed Google Webmasters Help thread has discussion around how Google perceives affiliates and how they need to go above and beyond to warrant ranking well in the Google search results.

Googler, JohnMu, answers one affiliate, as to why he is not ranking as high as he would have liked:

I believe one of the issues that you might want to work on is to make sure that your site provides unique and compelling content to the web. It's important for us that the site not only contains "rewritten" descriptions and articles, but that it actually provides something more than just "different words" for the same content. In other words, given the choice between your site and the company providing the products, what could your site offer to make Google want to show your site instead?

John then links this webmaster over to a Google document on Affiliate programs for webmasters. The document explains how you can make your site stand out from the other affiliates:

• Affiliate program content should form only a small part of the content of your site.
• When selecting an affiliate program, choose a product category appropriate for your intended audience. The more targeted the affiliate program is to your site's content, the more value it will add and the more likely you will be to rank better in Google's search results and make money from the program. For example, a well-maintained site about hiking in the Alps could consider an affiliate partnership with a supplier who sells hiking books rather than office supplies.
• Use your website to build community among your users. This will help build a loyal readership, and can also create a source of information on the subject you are writing about. For example, discussion forums, user reviews, and blogs all offer unique content and provide value to users.
• Keep your content updated and relevant. Fresh, on-topic information increases the likelihood that your content will be crawled by Googlebot and clicked on by users.

Does this mean you must do this to rank your affiliate site well? Not necessarily but for the long term, it might be best to follow these strategies.

Forum discussion at Google Webmasters Help.

Every month we report on a monthly WebmasterWorld thread that discusses the current state of the Google web search index. This month, the WebmasterWorld thread has very little to report. If you want to see last month's report click here.

Instead, I thought I highlight the most important posts here over the past couple weeks, in relation to Google's web search changes.

• Google Gets Generic on Local Web Search Queries
• Google Releases Major Blog Search Blogroll Algorithm Update
• Google Blog Search Updates Link Query Algorithm
• See Google "Classic" Sitelinks In Action (One Line Sitelinks)
• Google Still Showing Different Results Based on Query Case
• April Fools Google PageRank Update
• Google Adds More Search Refinements & Detailed Snippets
• Google Pushing More Search Options On Searchers?

Those are some of the more important Google related updates over the course of the past few weeks.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A few weeks ago, we reported that Google released a major blog search update. That update fixed the issue with Google Blog Search finding content in the blogroll and thus showing irrelevant search results. It directly impacted the "blogroll detector" aspect of the algorithm.

Today I learned via a Google Groups thread that Google has finally updated the link operator aspect of that algorithm in Blog Search. That means, if you come up in the blogroll as a link, you won't be shown in a link operator on Blog Search every time that blog writes a new blog post.

Jeremy Hylton explains:

We deployed our latest improvements for blogroll detection late last week. The change affects link: queries. We now drop most or all of the links that occur in the blogroll or in other parts of the page that are just boilerplate. I'm sure there are lingering problems, but our internal metrics suggest that its a big increase in quality for link: queries. We've got a few more improvements in the works, but I think this recent change fixed the biggest part of the problem.

As always, please send me specific examples where things have gone wrong. We'll do our best to fix them.

The link command and blogroll issue with Google Blog Search has been an issue since November 2008 and I hope this update resolves it. Honestly, over the past day or so, it does seem to have been removing many (what I call) false positives in the search results.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

A very helpful WebmasterWorld thread shares insights from a long time SEO who decided to pin two sites, competing in the same industry, with each other. He took two different strategies for each site. One site was pushed using old school SEO tactics, including doorway pages, paid and reciprocal links, content development and so on. The other site was to build a site with no paid links, unique content, no doorway pages, but add videos, blogs, rss feeds, Twitter integration and so on.

Let's call the first site the "SEO'ed Site" and the second site the "Quality Site." Guess which one is earning money and getting quality Google traffic? You got it, the "SEO'ed Site."

The member said:

Site 1 (AKA "SEO'ed Site"): after just 3 months it was skyrocketing past some pretty hefty competition with traffic increasing well each month. The site was making £10,000+ a month for the last six months we had it and just sold for a rather nice figure.

Site 2 (AKA "Quality Site"): has struggled to rank anywhere, even for it's own name, and traffic has been stagnant since the outset - it made a loss for the first 8 months and made just under £3000 in it's best month which was last month.

So what is a webmaster to do? Of course, this is just one single case study. To see exactly what tactics were used on each site, see the WebmasterWorld thread.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google continues to say that Google searches are "always case insensitive. Searching for [ new york times ] is the same as searching for [ New York Times ]." But since February 2008, we have been reporting cases where Google is case sensitive in terms of the search results they return. In fact, we reported it in February 2008, May 2008 and October 2008. So I am not surprised to see more threads about this topic spring up now at Search Engine Watch Forums.

In this example, the query is [seo services] in different cases. The three cases that return slightly different results include seo services, SEO Services and SEO services. As I 'tab' between the results, I see rank shifts and results that are missing on one, but on another.

For example, [SEO Services] shows webuildpages.com in the 10th position, while seo services doesn't show webuildpages.com in that position, but rather, seomoz.org. There are several examples in this single search query of differences. I have posted screen captures of these results at Flickr. The screen shots are from searches I took within seconds of each other for these queries.

Does case matter in search or is something else in play here?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Google typically cuts down the display of the title tag in the search results to no more than 65 characters. A WebmasterWorld thread asks does that mean Google won't look beyond the 65th character to determine what that page is about? Or if they do look beyond that 65th character, does Google deem the value of the words after the 65th character as less valuable?

The title tag is arguably the most important on page SEO component of a single page. Most, if not all, SEOs suggest that if you want to rank for a specific keyword phrase, you must have that keyword phrase in the page's title tag.

In addition, almost all search engines display your page's title tag in the search results, as the blue, clickable link to your page. It is vital to make sure the link is "clickable," meaning that people are encouraged to click it, by making it read well and appear nice.

Finally, the title tag is also displayed in the browser's title bar, tabs, and as bookmarks or favorites. So having them formatted nicely, is key in that respect. Let alone all the different social networking sites that use the title tag of the page as the default title of your article.

When formatting your title, I take the approach of making it short enough to be attractive in the Google search results. But you also want to make sure it has your keyword phrase in it. Will Google rank you for a keyword phrase that goes beyond that cut off? Most SEOs say yes, Google will rank you for keyword phrases found after the 65th character.

Long time WebmasterWorld member, pageonresults said:

There really is no hard rule when it comes to longer titles. I've seen titles with up to 20+ words perform just fine. tedster has mentioned that he has seen pages with longer titles perform for keyword searches where the words were towards the end of the long titles.

Senior member, wheel, said:

I care more about clickability than I do rankings when it comes to title and particularly description. I want my 'advertisement' to really pop out.

An older Google Groups thread has Googler, Reid saying:

Also making sure the most difference in the title is starting on the left ensures it will show up as a distinct button when the window is minimized or the tab is at the back of the browser window. Furthermore this also helps Googlebot in determining how unique that is.

I mentioned length of the description meta tag in terms of words because this is the typical measurement. But yes, 2 lines for a total of about 160 characters or so. As for teh title, it depends on the browse but about 70 characters are safe.

In short, there are no fixed number of words/characters that are allowed for a meta description.

A Googler did say have the most important keywords to the front of the title tag.

Let's not forget that Google recently confirmed showing longer snippets for the description part of the search listings. Would this translate to longer titles and clickable links? Who knows - it would not surprise me to see this.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This article was written earlier this week and scheduled to go live April 10th.

A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion started from a webmaster of a five year old e-commerce site, which had seen a drop in their Google Image search traffic, only to notice that their images are still in the Google results, but Google is using a different source to display the images. What that means is that Google thinks the other source is the true source of the images, while in fact, that source has stolen the images from the true owner.

Clearly, this webmaster is upset that this third party is getting credit for the images, and profiting from them. What can he do? Here are recommendations from both the thread and my own ideas:

• I would post a thread at Google Webmaster Help and call out @SusanMoskwa to look at it.
• File a DMCA with Google
• File a DMCA with the site's hosting company.
• Email or call the person who took your images
• Call a lawyer

There are more ideas in the WebmasterWorld.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This article was written earlier this week and scheduled to go live April 10th.

Back in April 2007, Google gave webmasters a new easy way to remove content in Google, through Google Webmaster Tools. It is a great feature to quickly remove your content in Google, but it is an extremely powerful tool. If the wrong people gain access to your webmaster tools account, either by getting your username and password or by hacking into your site and validating your site on their webmaster tools account - you can be in bad shape.

Not only can they remove your site from Google, which is incredibly bad, they can also gain competitive knowledge on your site. Google Webmaster Tools provides detailed linkage data, detailed keyword data and much much more on your site. So if a competitor or evil person gains access, they cannot only do major damage, but also take all your sensitive data.

Besides for changing your Google Account password every now and then, you should also reverify your site owners in webmaster tools. To do so, login to Google Webmaster Tools, click on Tools and then click on Manage site verification. Then when the page comes up and if you see other verification files, you may want to click on the "Reverify all site owners" button, if a verification file doesn't look right. This feature should remove all access to webmaster tools and require re verification. If, indeed, someone uploaded a verification file, you will want to look into a security breach on your server.

A recent Google Webmasters Help thread has a site owner that seems to have had his site removed by some evil doer. In short, Google confirmed that someone with verificaiton access has removed his site via the Google Webmaster Tools feature. This is not the first time this has happened, we reported a similar case in early February. Don't let this happen to you.

Forum discussion at Google Webmasters Help.

This article was written earlier this week and scheduled to go live April 9th.

A week ago, we polled our audience asking How Long Should It Take To Rank Well in Google?

With over two-hundred responses, I thought it would be a good time to share the results with you all.

How Long Does it Take To Rank Well in Google Results:

:: 3 - 6 Months said 83 respondents or 35%
:: 6 - 9 Months said 46 respondents or 19%
:: 2 Months said 28 respondents or 12%
:: A Year Plus said 24 respondents or 10%
:: Weeks said 22 respondents or 9%
:: A Year said 13 respondents or 5%
:: A Month said 13 respondents or 5%
:: Other answer... said 10 respondents or 4%

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

This article was written earlier this week and scheduled to go live April 9th.

The Google blog announced that Google is now showing more local results in web search for more generic queries. This is something that was noticed before the announcement but now it is officially confirmed by Google.

This means that searches for local-like keywords no longer need to have a location in the query. For example, a search on web design automatically shows me a local box in the middle of the Google web search results, without me specifically specifying web design, suffern, ny, which then shows the local box at the top of the results. Here is a picture of Google detecting that I am near the city of Monsey, in New York and it even ranks my company in the number two spot.

Google explains how they get your location:

In most cases, we match your IP address to a broad geographical location. You can also specify your likely location using the "Change location" link on the top right corner, above the map.

These searches work for a wide range of keywords, such as restaurants], [dentist], [groceries], [sporting goods], [flowers], [bank], [gym], [post office], or even [111 8th ave].

My big question is why are there so little people discussing this new change in Google in the forums? I know there are plenty of blog posts on this topic, but very few forum threads.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread has interesting discussion around the topic of pages earning Google PageRank with little or no links to those pages.

The discussion was started by a webmaster who asked, how can his page have a PageRank score of four, when Google webmaster tools reports the page has zero links? The obvious answer is that Google is not reporting all the links yet and it is very possible the page has links, but just not being reported yet. But that might not be the full answer.

WebmasterWorld administrator, Tedster, feels that Google gives "mom and pop" sites an artificial PageRank boost, in some cases. Let me quote Tedster:

My assumption is that this unusual PR boost is one of the ways that Google helps "mom and pop" sites compete - something that Matt Cutts made a side comment about on his blog a few years ago. He never said WHAT Google does specifically, only that they do a few things.

It seems like many top names in the thread believe in this "artificial PageRank boost." The question is, what is the artificial part? Is it the score shown, how the score is made up, or how Google sees the page in terms of trust and popularity?

In any event, do you believe in the artificial PageRank boost? Take the poll below:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Throughout my many years (makes me sound old) in the search industry, I have heard about many filters and penalties, including a filter or penalty to prevent a site from ranking well for a specific keyword phrase. For example, if I want to rank well for big blue pineapple chair and I create a page about a big blue pineapple chair but Google never ranks me for that term, I may consider my site to be penalized from ranking well from that specific term.

A HighRankings Forum thread has a couple webmasters asking about such a filter. They say they rank well for everything they want, but not for a single keyword phrase that they once ranked well for. The question they asked does a search engine, such as Google, penalize a site for a specific keyword phrase?

Here is a poll, let me know what you think about this topic:

As you can see from the poll, I have two Yes answers and one No. You can select all or none. Yes algorithmically means that Google has a filter that is automated. Yes Manually means Google does filter for keyword phrases, but a human does it. No, means, no, Google does not penalized in this way.

I'll vote but I won't tell you what my thoughts are until after I post the results.

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

About a month ago, we reported Google was testing classic Sitelinks, i.e. one line Sitelinks. Well, now it seems like we can reproduce the single line Sitelinks.

A Google Webmasters Help thread shows how two different queries return different types of Sitelinks for the same site.

A search for cashforgold returns the standard Sitelinks:

A search for cash4gold returns the classic Sitelinks:

Both are the same site, but showing only half the number of Sitelinks shown on the current Sitelinks format. Plus, the Sitelinks are shown on a single line, as opposed to four lines in two columns.

I wonder if Google will be going back to the classic user interface for Sitelinks?

Forum discussion at Google Webmasters Help.

Update: Dennis Dornon commented pointing to a blog post that shows for a search on internet marketing blog on Google returns classic Sitelinks with numbers. Here is a screen capture:

The thing is, Sitelinks are normally made up anchor text of the links and the numbers might just reflect that and nothing more.

We all know that Google ignores the META keywords tag on pages, or at least that is what we believe and what we are told. This does not mean Google ignores other meta tags, such as the meta description, but they do ignore the keywords meta tag.

A recent Google Webmaster Help thread has some confusing information from JohnMu, a Googler.

John said:

One problem I see when looking at your site's meta tags at the moment is that they're all included in your "keywords" meta tag - they're not separate meta tags.

That said, I think you can safely remove all of these meta tags. Google doesn't need them and they can be confusing the way you have them now.

If you look at the thread, we can see that the keywords used in the meta keywords is a bit overboard, to say the least. However, if Google completely ignores the tag, why would it "be confusing." Is it confusing for GoogleBot? Is it confusing for other search engines that might use it? Is it confusing the the searcher who doesn't view the source code of the page?

You see why I am struggling with this post? I know we can't always sit there and analyze the words of Googlers. But sometimes we do and we scratch our heads.

I will ping JohnMu and ask him to comment and clarify. I am sure I am just looking into this a bit too much.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Update: So I John commented and I decided to take a closer look at the site he commented about. What I found was the meta tags coded as HTML entities, which really is incredibly weird and likely does not work for Google or any bot. Here is a picture of the code, where I highlighted the core issue, as I understand it:

So John's comment does make more sense now.

Over a year ago, almost two years ago, there were rumors that Google would treat underscores in the URL the same way they treat hyphens in the URL, as word separators. Matt Cutts squashed the rumor back then, suggesting that Google was not treating them the same.

Historically, underscores (i.e. domain.com/file_name.html) was treated as a single word (i.e. filename) and hyphens (i.e. domain.com/file-name.html) was treated as two words (i.e. file name).

A new WebmasterWorld thread asks more questions on that. Senior member, internetheaven, noticed, and I quote:

I have a URl: www.example.com/folder/file_name.htm

and if you search for:

allinurl: file site:example.com

or

allinurl: name site:example.com

you get 0 results. Whereas if you search for:

allinurl: file_name site:example.com

the page shows up in the results fine.

I thought underscores were the same as hyphens these days?

Well, they are not the same these days, and that might be proof. Technically, I do see results that do match on sites I tested for these types of queries. What I mean is that Google will still highlight and display results for a keyword that is in part of the underscored URL. I am not sure why it did not show up for this member. Maybe it is something happening at Google.com and since I am currently in Israel, I am getting a different data set.

Receptional, WebmasterWorld moderator, explained:

In certain cases, Google may figure out that underscore is being used as a word separator (similar to the process for conjoined words). But an underscore is not a word separator - treating it as such would at a minimum cause a lot of developers to be frustrated when using Google, as many function names etc. use underscores.

Underscores and hyphens have never been treated the same - if you want a guaranteed word separator in a URL, always use a hyphen.

For now, until we hear from Matt on a change in underscores and hyphens, Google treats them differently.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There is an old WebmasterWorld thread on the topic of how many header tags (i.e. H1, H2) you should have on a page and how you should use it. The thread was revived yesterday when Matt Cutts of Google answered a question on that topic on video. Here is the video:

So there you have it. Don't wrap all your content in the H1 tag. You can use it multiple times on a page but use it for page heading above paragraphs of content. Don't over do it.

WebmasterWorld's Tedster disagreed a bit with Matt, he said:

Even though Matt say s it's "OK" to use more than one, I'm still a big fan of using only one H1 element. If it seems like two are really required, I almost always make that content into two pages. Or if the content is too thin to support two pages resonably, I'll figure out a single over-arching headline that can be the H1 to support multiple H2 tags.

I find that approach also "packages" the semantic signals more effectively. That's kind of the way I understand websites, pages, and even code. They are all ways of "packaging" data and information, and we are all packagers.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

In a Google Webmaster Help thread, Googler, JohnMu, might be stating the obvious, but it is always good hearing it from someone who is in the know.

JohnMu, answered a question about links, but in his answer, he confirmed that even with or without sever header responses (301s, 404s, etc.) Google will typically treat the home page of a site, i.e. /, the same if it were / or /index.html and likely index.php or any other extension.

John said:

Given that generally URLs like "/" and "/index.html" are the same, we tend to treat them the same (unless there's a good reason not to do so -- say when there is unique content on them).

Clearly, if the pages look different and have different content, Google will notice and likely treat them differently. It is still good practice to 301 redirect the canonical URLs to a single URL, but most webmasters have no clue about these issues and Google has to be smart enough to figure these issues out themselves. In most cases, they are.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

A Google Webmaster Help thread asks if there is a limit on the number of Sitemap files you can have under a single Google account.

Currently, there is no documentation on the limit but there is a 500 limit per Webmaster Tools account.

Google's, JohnMu said, "As it is, the current limit is 500 Sitemap files per account." But John added a way to get around this limit. John said:

You can get around this limit by including your Sitemap files in Sitemap Index files (with 500 websites/account, you could use a single Sitemap Index file per site to cover all of them), by submitting Sitemap files via HTTP ping or by submitting them via robots.txt files. If you decide to use Sitemap Index files, you should still be able to drill down to the individual Sitemap files through Webmaster Tools, so that you can get feedback on them separately.

John added that he "wouldn't be surprised if that particular limit were raised in the future."

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

A month and a half ago, Google began testing Google AJAX search results, which caused a major uproar amongst webmasters who were unable to track referrer information in their analytics package. Google released a statement that they test things all the time and didn't say more. Soon after, AJAX search results went away and we forgot about it.

Then Brett Tabke asked Google's Matt Cutts at PubCon last week about this test. Lisa Barone has the live blog coverage of that question, where Matt answered:

That was really funny. The team there only thinks about speed. They want to get the results back to users as quick as humanly possible. JavaScript makes the search results a lot faster. Suppose you do a search for flowers, as you’re typing flowers, they can do a query from the back end and fold search results right into the page. You’re still in Google.com and they can pull in the results automatically. It doesn’t give you the referrer. He says the team didn’t think about the referrer aspect. So they stopped. They’ve paused it until they can find out how to keep the referrers.

Right, and that is what most of us assumed. So Brett followed up by asking Matt, "why didn't they just come out and say that?" Matt replied, "that's nice feedback and he would let them know".

Some actually think Google is starting the AJAX test again. SEO Smackdown reports again, seeing it. He said that to get around the referrer problem, Google is passing variables in the click through URL that Google Analytics understands, but other analytical programs do not. Of course this is not the solution and he says so. I also see the URL parameters in my searches, but I am not getting the AJAX search results.

Google is a big company. Google Analytics was upset that the Google search UI team did this. Google's search UI team had no idea of the implications of their change.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Sphinn.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks an interesting question. If you have a space in the nofollow link attribute, does Google consider it the same as having no space? Let me explain.

A standard syntax for the nofollow attribute looks like this: <a href="http://www.site.com/page.html" rel="nofollow">Visit My Page</a>

But what if the programmer added a space between the no and follow, such as: <a href="http://www.site.com/page.html" rel="no follow">Visit My Page</a>

What do you think? Is Google or other search engines treating both the same?

I asked Google's Matt Cutts and John Mueller this question and they told me that currently they don't treat them the same. Currently, a nofollow with a space would pass link value. "The microformat is explicitly defined as rel="nofollow" (). I would not count on other rel-attributes having the same effect, even if they look similar at first glance," John told me.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread has several different webmasters reporting seeing huge spikes in Google referrals recently and then those spikes dropping down.

The first post was on February 28th, but the spikes continue to happen on random days for several webmasters. Here is the first post:

I have a Amazon site using AWS to display product pages. I have about 500,000 pages indexed on Google and generally see about 200-400 uniques a day. Yesteday, 2/27/09 I had over 1400 uniques. Today, Saturday it seems to be back to the same old numbers. I am looking forward to Monday to see if things pop back up.

Old time member, robzilla, found something similar:

I saw my Google referrals double on one site last Monday. It hasn't exactly continued at that rate throughout the week, but there was still a noticeable increase overall. I can't seem to be able to pin this down to one particular keyword or -phrase, or even a few. Instead, overall keyword performance seems to have increased. That Monday would have been the new record if it hadn't been for a big spike in StumbleUpon traffic on Friday.

It is hard to say if this is regarding a Google change or a change in the site or just a weird bleep. But it is interesting to see a nice set of diverse webmasters notice this and discuss it over the course of two weeks at WebmasterWorld.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Two weeks ago, we reported that Google Blog Search To Test New Link Command Features Next Week. Well, it has now been postponed a bit.

An updated Google Groups thread has Googler, Jeremy Hylton saying this has to be pushed off by a couple weeks. He said:

Unfortunately, we ran into some delays with these experiments and had to push back the schedule a couple of weeks.

I know many folks were eager to see the changes this or last week, but it seems like we may have to wait until the end of this month or early April.

In short, the changes were going to impact how Google Blog Search returns matches for blog posts for queries. Google is a bit too inclusive right now on what they return as keyword matches on blog posts. Google Blog Search is working on fine tuning their "blogroll detectors" and other detectors to make the results more relevant.

Forum discussion continued at Google Groups.

Google has been very proactive about cleaning their index of pages that contain malware. In fact, they have stepped up the email notifications to webmasters with these issues. So I have been seeing thread after thread in a multitude of forums on malware related topics.

A Google Webmaster Help thread has one person asking if he should check the Google Cache to see if Google indexed the cleaned up version of his site. In response to that, Googler, Oliver Fisher said Google doesn't use the Google Cache to look for malware. He said:

Google's automated malware scanners don't use the cached version of the pages. They make real fetches while evaluating the pages.

When the scanners reviewed the tpod site yesterday (at ~4am PT), they found lots of fake Yahoo counters, including on the pages you've listed. If you've cleaned up the site now, you should file for another malware review via Webmaster Tools.

It does make sense that Google would bypass an older copy of the site and go directly to the pages to see if they are infected, in almost real time.

Oliver, I believe, specializes on the Google Malware team and has written topics at the Google Webmaster Blog on Malware related issues. Oliver rarely posts in the help area, so it is nice to see posts when he does them.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

About a week and a half ago, there was the start of discussion around Google's brand push in the algorithm. Some people started noticing that for some queries (mostly generic queries), more "big brands" were showing up in the search results.

The discussion started at WebmasterWorld and then Aaron Wall provided some statistical data to back the rumors. HuoMah, then chimed in, trying to keep SEOs on their feet and thinking logically about this.

In any event, Matt Cutts of Google made a video talking specifically about this change:

In the video at 1 minutes and 17 seconds in, Matt said, they made a "change" but he wouldn't call it an "update", but rather a "minor change." In fact, in Google they call it the Vince's change (see 1 minute 30 seconds in). In short, he said this impacts a relatively small number of queries, not the long tail ones and it is more about "trust," the "quality" of the page, the page's "PageRank" and "value" then about brands.

One example he gives at 2m12s is that if you type in eclipse into Google, the first result is not from Mitsubishi. So he says it is not "brand" focused but more about trust.

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld and Sphinn.

A month and a half ago, we polled our audience, trying to gauge how concerned SEOs are with Google's 'hidden' supplemental index. The results are now in, we have 80 responses and I wanted to share them with you.

Here is the breakdown of responses to the question "Are You Concerned Over Google's Supplemental Index?"

:: Somewhat Concerned said 32 respondents or 40%
:: Very Concerned said 24 respondents or 30%
:: Not Concerned said 24 respondents or 30%

As you can see, 70% of SEOs are still concerned, on some level, with Google's supplemental index. Whereas, only 30% are not concerned at all. I suspect the results would have been much different if Google didn't drop the supplemental tag from the search results.

Forum discussion continued at HighRankings Forum.

Back in September 2005, Google began emailing webmasters about violations to the Google webmaster guidelines. Then in March 2006, Google started stepping up those notifications. Webmasters were loving Google reaching out to them with issues, so they can address them quickly.

But then the spammers and hackers got involved. In May 2007, we reported that fake Google emails were being sent to webmasters, scaring them. These emails repeatedly went out and Google had to do something.

In July 2007, Google stopped sending email notifications and created a message center in Webmaster Tools to securely notify webmasters of issues. The only problem is that these webmasters had to have a Google Webmasters Tools account and verify their sites, to see these notifications. But I guess it was better then the issue with having fake emails go out.

However, Google seemed to have continued to send out malware notifications via email, before and after Google introduced the Webmasters Tools notification. However, it did not happen as often.

I believe, but I am not 100%, Matt Cutts of Google asked in one of the panels at SMX West, just a month or two ago, if we want emails again. Most people said yes. But validating the email came from Google is hard.

Today, I see a WebmasterWorld thread that notes someone received an email from Google, notifying his site was hacked and thus delisted from Google until the hack is removed. The email says that he should login to Webmaster Tools, validate his site and confirm these details. Then remove the hack and clean up the site, and then submit a reconsideration request. In addition, the email gave specific details on how his site was hacked and what mess the hack left on his site.

So it appears that Google may be emailing webmasters again, to notify them of hacks and other issues that Google may find quicker then some webmasters.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: A Google Webmaster Help thread has a copy of one of these emails.

French town of Eu to change name because of Google searches from the Telegraph is getting a lot of attention. In short, a town named Eu is considering changing their name, because they feel they have a hard time ranking for their name in Google, due to it being "eu" and thus feel they are losing out on tourism.

Let me quote you part of the article:

Marie-Françoise Gaouyer, the local mayor, now has two options - to pay internet giants like Yahoo and Google thousands to put the town at the top of all "Eu" searches, or change the town's name.

"The second option appears the most sensible," said Mrs Gaouyer, adding: "As far as the internet is concerned, we have to bring ourselves up to date." Mrs Gaouyer's favoured option is Ville d'Eu (Town of Eu), with other possibilities including Eu-le-Château and Eu-en-Normandie.

The mayor, who believes tourism revenues are down by as much as a third because of the town's current name, now wants all of the alternatives put to the local population of some 8,000 in a referendum.

As Vanessa Fox < ahref="http://searchengineland.com/what-france-can-teach-us-about-search-success-16744">points out, the town does rank number one in Google.FR for eu. Why? As Vanessa explains, their web site has a .fr extension and is entirely in French, which means it is targeted to French users. A tourist that doesn't speak French won't understand the web site and Google knows that. So Google does rank that site number one for the term "eu" in Google.Fr.

Vanessa said if they made a tourist version of the site in a different language, then maybe it would compete for the term "eu" in Google.com. I am not too sure about that, take a look at the search results for that term. I guess it is possible over time, plus I doubt the paid search results would cost that much.

Is the solution to your ranking issues to change your name or to evolve your web site?

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Since November 2008, Google Blog search's link command has been scanning too much information, including blogrolls. Since then, Google vowed to fix the blogroll issue with the link command back in early December. At the end of December, Google said they fixed the issue but there was still more work to be done. That was indeed true, because there are still many complaints over Google Blog Search's matching skills.

Googler, Jeremy Hylton, has said that Google is going to be releasing a "user visible experiments early next month," which is next week, to better target Google Blog Search's issue with "blogroll detectors" and the link command.

You can find Jeremy's post in a Google Groups thread, I will quote it here:

This is just a brief status report. We've been continuing to experiment with blogroll detectors. We're going to do some user- visible experiments early next month, probably starting with link: queries. I'll follow up here when the experiments are running.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

A week ago today, we reported that some webmasters noticed the link reports in Google Webmaster Tools was not being updated or was not allowing for download.

On the 19th, Google said in a Google Webmaster Help forum thread that they fixed the issue for some sites. Then on the 23rd, they said they fixed it for all sites:

Ok everyone....thanks for responding here. It looks like there was a hiccup over the weekend with this fix getting completely rolled out to everyone.

With some extra legwork this morning the fix should be in place for all. Is anyone still seeing this issue?

But the issue has not been resolved for many. We have many messages both in that same Google Webmaster Help thread and a WebmasterWorld thread that this bug is still an issue today, the 25th.

So I guess Google will keep plugging away at the issue and hopefully resolve it soon.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help and WebmasterWorld.

In August 2005 was the first time I saw "According To" Google results show up in the search results. Since then, they show up for very specific queries.

I spotted an interesting thread, where a webmaster asked why is his client showing up in the Google "according to" results. The thread is at Google Webmaster Help forums, and the webmaster showed that his client ranks for the search query octopus top speed. Here is a screen capture:

The webmaster asked a valid question, i.e. how did this happen? He said:

I am interested to know how this data is sourced and how we can improve the A-Z-Animals.com website so this happens for all the animals listed on the site (over 350 animals are listed with comprehensive fact lists) as the client has worked extremely hard to source reliable information for the site which will be extremely valuable to users of Google search. Or is it simply a case of given time Google will source other information from the site assuming another source isn't being used?

Autocrat, a top contributor in the forum says he really doesn't know exactly how Google shows or complies these, but he offers his two cents:

Your client does realise what a recommendation and acknowledgment that is, right?

Chances are that it''s automated/algorythmic.

Its probably done over time and based on various factors - possibly things like time, references, quotes, links to the information etc.

The only advice I can offer is for your client to keep on doing what they clearly excel at!

This may be similar to how Google Definitions works, but I would just be guessing.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

If your Google Sitemap file is in "pending" status and you are worried that it will never come out of that status, I would not worry. Google recently posted an announcement that this is a known issue and they are working to resolve it.

The announcement was posted by Google's JohnMu:

Some new Sitemaps submitted via Webmaster Tools may remain in a "pending" state. We are aware of this issue and are looking into it; you do not need to take any action. This will have no effect on your site's performance in search results.

We have some worried webmasters, who I have notified not to worry. There are threads on this topic at WebmasterWorld and Google Webmaster Help, amongst others.

Like I said yesterday, Google Webmaster Tools is buggy, so don't let the bugs, um... bug you out (sorry, I had to).

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Google Webmaster Help.

Searchers and SEOs have recently been noticing Google offering searchers tips on how to search better at Google.com. Two recent threads have popped up about this, one at WebmasterWorld and the other at Google Web Search Help. Thankfully, I found the thread at the Google forum because WebmasterWorld does not allow examples.

In the Google Web Search Help thread, the example given was for a search on Charlatt NH. At the bottom of the first page of the Google results, Google shows a line that reads, "Tip: These results include the word "charlotte". Show results that include only "charlatt"." Here is a picture:

Clicking on the tip, changes the search query to a [+Charlatt NH] search and appends the following parameters to the URL, "&sa=X&oi=stemming_tip&ct=title".

Now, this is something that doesn't come up all that often. It seems to be a new feature Google is trying out. But what can SEOs and webmasters learn from this? How can they use this stemming data to write better page copy and so on? The discussion seems to be headed that way at the WebmasterWorld.

In any event, it is interesting to see Google aiding searchers in using more advanced search queries. It is interesting to see when this is being offered, what queries trigger it and what advanced query operator Google is returning in this cases.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Google Web Search Help.

SEOs and Webmasters should all be huge fans of Google Webmaster Tools, it provides data and insight into our web sites that we did not always have. SEOs and Webmasters that are educated know what to make from these reports and use the data in an educated manner. There was a good quote at SMX West last week, it went something like, "data is not the same thing as wisdom."

Google Webmaster Tools has often had major issues with bugs, especially in the reporting side of things. The latest bug has to do with the external link reports. Google confirmed the issue saying:

The data shown in your link reports in Webmaster Tools may not currently show links or allow you to download these links for all sites. We are aware of this issue and are looking into it; you do not need to take any action. This will have no effect on your site's performance in search results.

Personally, I am able to see my external links but downloading the report is just lagging for me. I suspect this will be fixed eventually, but just be aware that these types of issues are common in this tool.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Tools.

Are you one of those webmasters that simply cannot get out of the Google penalty box? Are you convinced you have a penalty that is keeping you from the first page of Google? Have you tried everything and still cannot achieve high rankings in Google?

A WebmasterWorld thread shows one webmaster who has gone through the exhaustive list of changes to his, what he calls, white hat site, to make it even more clean, if that is possible.

Check out this exhaustive list of changes he made to 'fix' his site:

- Fix trailing slash duplicate content issue through a 301
- Fix 'index.php' duplicate content issue through a 301
- Fix 'www' subdomain canonical duplicate content issue through a 301
- Remove all defective and/or thematically irrelevant links
- Added a privacy policy
- Added a creativecommons licensing statement
- Checked robots.txt -> nothing wrong
- Checked safebrowsing tool -> nothing wrong
- Checked meta tags -> nothing wrong
- Added noindex,follow to news index and category pages
- Added rel="nofollow" to a button of a thematically relevant high-quality top50 listing
- I NEVER purchased or sold a SINGLE link
- I added 'nofollow' to my free thematic business listing, just in case G might be thinking I'm selling these positions.
- Built a couple of nice high-quality links through guest posting.
- Added new quality content on a regular basis
- Added a tagcloud to improve crawlability
- Added a great deal of relevant wikipedia-like internal linking (as per Ronburk's classic post)
- Added noindex,follow on the individual tag-pages to prevent duplicate content
- Added the new canonical tag (yep, I am desperate)
- Removed interlinking (it was only minor anyways)
- Added valid XML Sitemap

He has submitted reconsideration requests to no avail. What should he do? What should you do if you are in this situation?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft announced together a new way to handle internal duplicate content issues with a new "canonical" header tag. Vanessa Fox does an excellent job explaining what it is all about in her piece at Search Engine Land.

So for all duplicate pages, you insert this tag in the header elements of those pages, specifying the main URL. The tag looks like this:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/true-url.html" />

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have detailed explanations of how they work.

Three main things:

(1) This works only internally, not across domains.
(2) Treat this like you would a 301 redirect, so be careful
(3) Search engines consider this a "hint" and do not have to abide by it (just yet)

Outside of that, there is good recaps on this at Techmeme.

We have a ton of Q&A on this from our live coverage of the Ask the Search Engines panel from SMX West. I am sure your questions are answered in that panel or in the discussions below.

This tag can be confusing, because it is new. But after webmasters begin to understand where, if and how to use it, they are more likely to love it.

JohnMu said in a forum post:

Here are some examples where this could be used: - Web-shops (mutliple URLs depending on how you got to a page) - Sites that work with Session-IDs within the URL - Ad-tracking URLs (eg using AdWords + Analytics) - Affiliate tracking URLs - News sites with multiple URLs per article - Forums with multiple URLs per thread/page (eg "&highlight=", etc)

Plus, Yoast already posted plugins to support this for Wordpress, Magento and Drupal.

Forum discussion Google Webmaster Help, Cre8asite Forums, WebmasterWorld and Sphinn.

Last night at Search Engine Land I reported that Google Penalizes Google Japan For Buying Links. In short, the Google Japan team took on a marketing initiative to of paying bloggers for reviews, that turned out to be paid links, which they did not know was against Google's guidelines. In turn, Google's search quality team slapped Google Japan with a PageRank penalty, from a PR9 to a PR5.

Matt Cutts of Google twittered the event and you can see the surprise in the FriendFeed comments.

Danny came back into my post and added some history to the discussion, which is valuable if this is new to you.

There is a lot of discussion around this news at the forums, including DigitalPoint Forums, WebmasterWorld and Sphinn.

Many don't understand why Google would penalize themselves. But some suspect it is a PR stunt (public relations). Others think it is just Google manning up to their own policies and doing what is right.

It will be interesting to see how long the penalty lasts. If it was an ordinary site, they could submit a reconsideration request and Google can restore the PR fairly quickly. Would Google make their own sister site wait even longer to appease the public? Or will Google treat this like any other site?

There are many implications to this and this is not the first time Google penalized themselves. They did so with when they found themselves cloaking content.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums, WebmasterWorld and Sphinn.

Having images show up in Google News can be very beneficial in getting searchers to click over and read what you have to say. The more visually appealing content and images you have in your articles, the better your chance in increasing your click through rate from Google News.

A Google News Help thread asks how does one increase their chances of showing an image in Google News? Inbal, a Google representative, answered that by linking to an FAQ named Submitting Your Content: Images. The tips include:

• Label your images with well-written captions.
• Make sure that your images are fairly large in size.
• Use images that have reasonable aspect ratios.
• Ensure that your images are inline (not clickable).
• Place your images near their respective article titles.

Search Engine Land does a good job of getting author images in the Google News results. They place a small author image, in a nice square, below the article. And it then shows up like this for searches on barry schwartz in Google News.

So keep experimenting until you are happy with how often Google shows your images in Google News.

Forum discussion at Google News Help.

If you recently noticed that your News site is spewing errors in Google Webmaster Tools, under the "Diagnosis" - "News Crawl" reports, do not worry.

A Google News Help thread has confirmed reports from Google, that this is just a bug.

Googler, Inbal, explained:

Thank you for taking the time to report this problem with the Webmasters Tool giving error messages when publishers click on "Diagnostics" --> "News Crawl".

We're aware of this bug, and our engineering team is actively investigating to find a solution.

We apologize for any inconvenience and hope to resolve this issue in the near future.

I personally do not see any errors for this site and we are in Google News. So either it is fixed or it is impacting only a group of publishers.

Forum discussion at Google News Help.

It has been a while since we really discussed the "Google Sandbox." 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.

So why bring it up now? Well, Patrick Gavin wrote a post about it, asking if it is US based or worldwide. The discussion is now on Sphinn about it.

The thing is, I don't believe the original Google Sandbox Effect still exists as it was. It has morphed into something different and although it has signed of the original sandbox effect, it is far from the same thing. So I ask you, in a poll below - does it exist and if it does, is it just impacting Google.com or the other localized versions of Google.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Last week, we reported that Google made the new "Did You Mean" feature a standard. Meaning, Google's search spelling suggestions are now acting in this new manner.

The issue is, many are complaining that they are getting killed by this. Some have e-commerce sites and this is resulting in Google dropping their position by at least two placements, due to showing the new "Did you mean" feature.

One example is brought by a webmaster in the Google Webmaster Help forum, who says a search for ecotrimmer returns this "did you mean" feature and pushes his site down to a much lower position, resulting in a huge sales slump for this business owner.

See how low this site is now on the Google search results in this screen capture:

As you can imagine, this is not the only webmaster impacted by this change.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

A Google Webmaster Help thread asks if he is being ripped off because his hosting company wants to charge him to help him verify his site with Google Webmaster Tools.

So you know, all it takes to verify a site with Google Webmaster Tools is to either upload a blank html file or add a meta tag to your site.

Is it criminal for a hosting or design company to charge for this?

I don't think so. It is like paying someone to install a new door lock or paint a room or add a new page to your web site. We can all try to do this ourselves but some either don't have the time or know-how to make it happen.

In this case, it seems like the host charges only a few dollars per month and this host doesn't allow any file to be uploaded. So the webmaster cannot technically upload the file. But then, I guess, you get what you pay for.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

A site owner has confirmed reports from a Google Webmaster Help discussion thread that his site was completely removed from the Google index by his previous webmaster.

It seems like this previous webmaster was upset with the site owner and when they parted ways, the site owner forgot to remove the previous webmaster's access to Google Webmaster Tools. Then the previous webmaster decided to use the Google removal tool to drop the site out of Google's index.

Googler, JohnMu, confirmed this indeed took place:

It does look like a previous webmaster removed your sites using the removal tool. I've passed a note on to the team so that they can look into what we can do now. Thanks for posting!

I suspect the site will be returned shortly, but let this be a lessoned learned for all webmasters and site owners. Make sure to remove the Google Webmaster Tools (and Yahoo Site Explorer and Live Search Webmaster Tools) access as soon as you remove their FTP access.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

For Google News publishers, getting high placement in Google News can be great. Most publishers would love to see prime time placement of their stories on the main Google News home page, but many settle for ranking well in Google News for news searchers.

One such publisher asked how can he help his articles see higher placement for news searches. The question was asked in a Google News Help thread and was answered by Google representative, Inabl.

Inbal linked this publisher to an article that discusses how ranking works at Google News, but added:

We work continuously to improve this grouping technology; your feedback can help us identify areas that need work. Please let us know if you have any suggestions for improvement.

The article isolated three areas for their Google News ranking algorithm. They include:

• Freshness of content
• Diversity of content
• Rich textual content which would help users searching for information to find your articles

Plus you need to factor in standard search engine friendly design and basic SEO principles.

Forum discussion at Google News Help.

Googlers, John Mueller and Susan Moskwa put together a very comprehensive Knol page on Google Webmaster Tools verification.

So if you are new to Google Webmaster Tools and you are about to verify your site with Google Webmaster Tools.

You can already see several revisions to this knol page, including one waiting in moderation by Cristina Wood.

Who cares? Well, besides for this being very comprehensive, you might want to investigate it for your own stuff. Matt Cutts of Google wrote Four Things You Need To Know About Knol, where one point was:

My personal conception of Knol is that when you want to write a quick article or put some information on the web, Knol is a great place to do it.

That being said, Knol launched in July of last year and is still trying to gain traction on Wikipedia and the likes.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Two years ago today, Google launched an algorithm to defuse Googlebombs. It basically helped remove the miserable failure results at Google, amongst others. In May of 2007, we learned that the Googlebomb algorithm was not a live algorithm, meaning, it was run manually, as often as Google wanted.

Now, in Detecting Googlebombs by Googler, Matt Cutts, we learn there are two parts to the algorithm. Matt explains the first algorithm finds these Googlebombs and then lessens their impact in the Google search results. The second algorithm goes through the entire Google index to locate more of the detected Googlebombs and defuse those. Here is how Matt put it:

The short answer is that we do two different things — both of them algorithmic — to handle Googlebombs: detect Googlebombs and then mitigate their impact. The second algorithm (mitigating the impact of Googlebombs) is always running in our productionized systems. The first algorithm (detecting Googlebombs) has to process our entire web index, so in most typical cases we tend not to run that algorithm every single time we crawl new web data.

Matt explains that the "mitigating the impact of Googlebombs" is run all the time but the detection of Googlebombs is run every now and then and in 2008, they ran it "5-6 times."

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and at Sphinn.

If you are noticing that your index count in Google Webmaster Tools in your Sitemaps section shows zero pages are indexed, then don't panic. Google has confirmed in a Google Webmaster Help thread that there may be a bug impacting some reporting for Sitemaps files.

JohnMu of Google said:

It looks like the "0" count may be a bug at the moment, so I wouldn't worry about it for now. I looked at your Sitemap file and some of the URLs are indexed. Because of that, I imagine that this is just a case where what you want indexed just doesn't completely match what Google wants indexed at the moment :-).

This is not the first time Google had a reporting glitch with Sitemaps. A few months ago, we reported a similar issue. I cannot express how many times we have reported issues with the reports at Google Webmaster Tools. So, whenever you see something really out of the norm, I would strongly recommend you not panic and wait.

Forum discussion Google Webmaster Help.

Google will label sites in their search results as harmful, when the site is believed to have malware on it. The last thing Google wants to do, is help an unsuspecting searcher land on a web page that can infect your computer. So Google takes a proactive approach to discovery and labeling malware results.

But sometimes, your site can be found to have malware. Malware can get on your site through being hacked or through third party code. If you find this label on your site, you need to remove the malware from your site and notify Google that it has been removed.

After it is removed, go to Google Webmaster Tools and there will be a place to request a review. Go through that process and then hopefully, within a few hours, that label will be removed.

Google has a detailed post on this at the Webmaster Central Blog. That post and in a recent thread at Google Webmaster Help, it says, it typically takes hours to remove the label, but can take as much as a day.

Webmasters are eager to have a Google malware label removed from their site and often ask how long a review of the site will take. Both the original scanning and the review process are fully automated. The systems analyze large portions of the internet, which is big place, so the review may not happen immediately. Ideally, the label will be removed within a few hours. At its longest, the process should take a day or so.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Google Operating System wrote about a new personalization feature Google is testing, named Preferred Sites. How does it works? You go to your search preferences and enter in a list of domains or sub domains that you prefer. If Google finds a result from any of the sites listed in your preferred list, Google will bump up that listing to the top of the search results and label them as such.

Here is a screen capture from Google's preferred site help document.

This is not available to most people, but it is a limited test for some users. If you see the preferred site option in your Google search preferences page, that means you are in the test. Clearly, this is an extension of SearchWiki, which is now the default.

We have two threads discussing the impact this might have on SEOs. One thread is at Sphinn and the other is at WebmasterWorld. And this will impact SEOs just like any other personalization feature and similar to how SearchWiki will impact SEOs. In short, most searchers will be clueless to this preferred site preference, even if Google flashes it in front of their faces, like they do with Search Wiki. So we will see how much of an impact this makes being that (1) it is a test right now and (2) being that users might not know how to use it.

Forum discussion at Sphinn and WebmasterWorld.

The first week of January, when we wrote about the Major Google Search Results Changes, January 2009, I noticed the Google Sitelinks for this site, disappeared. Today, I noticed they are back. Today, also, many webmasters are noticing they have lost their sitelinks.

A WebmasterWorld thread has two webmasters noting that their Sitelinks disappeared both in the Google search results and in Google Webmaster Tools. They both are concerned and asked if they should be.

One noted his/her traffic is up 30% month over month and rankings seem to be steady. But still, he/she is concerned.

Personally, I was a bit taken back - but I did nothing. I decided to see what would happen with my traffic. I just checked my traffic now, and it is up from a week ago, but it is fairly level from a month ago. See, I forgot to even look to see if those Sitelinks had an impact and now they are back. But the smart thing would be to check in and see the impact on traffic and then maybe even rankings. I would be concerned until you see a negative impact over on that site. There can be many reasons why Google would temporarily drop the sitelinks for your site. Many of those reasons might be an issue on Google's side.

I agree with Tedster's comment in the thread:

Seeing Google traffic up by 30% is a very good thing. I would not have major concern about the loss of sitelinks if search traffic goes up (especially well-targeted search traffc), but certainly do keep a watch on the situation. It sounds rather odd, especially that potential sitelinks don't show in WMT. If you haven't made structural changes to your site, this might well be a Google bug.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Webmaster posted a thread at Google Webmaster Help groups asking why his description for his site shows porn related terms in the snippet. The clear answer was that his site was hacked.

The question was posed by a concern webmaster:

The description showing on google for etceteraonline.eu is for a porn site, the link works fine but the description is wrong and not contained on my site please help.

Several top contributors replied, showing that the site was hacked and had tons of porn content on it. Here is the first response by Aaron:

you had most likely been hacked.

i see the indexed content as well:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Aetceteraonline.eu+porn

Google has pulled the site a few hours ago, but you can see the concern this webmaster had that his site was showing up as a porn site in Google. Not only is it upsetting to the webmaster, it would also be very upsetting to the unsuspecting searcher. Plus, who knows if this site had malware that can infect one's computer.

These are one of the many reasons why Google acts so fast to remove hacked sites from the index. And we all know Google reincludes hacked sites after they are patched, fairly quickly.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

About a week ago, we ran a poll asking Who's To Credit For Faster Indexing? The options included Google Sitemaps or FeedBurner, due to the topic we were discussing. The results are now in and the majority said, Google Sitemaps, in this case, gets the credit for increasing the indexing speed of these sites in Google.

Here are the results of the 80+ responses:

:: Google Sitemaps speeds up indexing said 49 respondents or 60.49%
:: FeedBurner speeds up indexing said 26 respondents or 32.1%
:: The remainder responded with "Other" but did not comment said 6 respondents or 7.41%

Forum discussion continued at Sphinn.

August 1st of 2007, Google dropped the supplemental tag from their search results. The main reason why they did this was because their supplemental index was fresher and deeper then it was when it first launched in 2003, plus, in my opinion, to reduce all the confusion is caused.

Google said back then:

The current system provides deeper and more continuous indexing. Additionally, we are indexing URLs with more parameters and are continuing to place fewer restrictions on the sites we crawl. As a result, Supplemental Results are fresher and more comprehensive than ever. We're also working towards showing more Supplemental Results by ensuring that every query is able to search the supplemental index, and expect to roll this out over the course of the summer.

Since then, there has not been much discussion around the supplemental results, due to it being out of sight, which makes it out of mind. But are SEOs and webmasters still confused and worried about this supplemental index?

A HighRankings Forum thread has discussion on that topic. It seems at least one person is still considered over this index. In fact, the SEO wants to know, which of her pages are in this index. Like I proposed when Google dropped the tag from the results, Google might want to consider adding a report to Google Webmaster Tools to aid the webmaster in knowing how many of their pages are in this index, this way they can work on getting them out.

Does it matter if those pages are out of the supplemental index? I think most SEOs would agree, yes, it matters. But now that we have our heads in the sand, we really don't know exactly how to improve those pages, outside of the "holistic" approach. :)

Here is a poll, are you still concerned about Google's supplemental index?

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

The Google Webmaster Central blog announced the release of a new Google Sitemaps generator available at code.google.com/p/googlesitemapgenerator.

The new tool works differently then other sitemaps tools. The tool "finds new and modified URLs based on your webserver's traffic, its log files, or the files found on the server," said Google. Plus the tool will send pings to Google Blog Search for all new or modified URLs in the XML file.

It is pretty neat to use site traffic as a method of determining which pages to include in your Sitemap file.

Google's JohnMu said in a Google Webmaster Help thread that it runs on both Microsoft IIS and Linux Apache servers and:

While it's not for everyone (you need to have administrative access to the server for one), I think it's pretty cool :-).

Forum discusison at Google Webmaster Help.

A Google Webmaster Help thread reports that Google Webmaster Tools seems to be missing the feature to change the method you would like to verify you site with. Now, I personally don't remember what should or should not be on this screen, but reportedly, there should be a way to tell Google that you want to switch from the html file verification method to the meta tag verification method, or visa versa.

Here is a screen capture of what I currently see for one of my sites:

A top contributor at the group said, "There was an option there in Manage Site Verification not too long ago. Now it is not there. There must have been a page code update and a new one is pending?" So, I suspect he is right.

Hopefully the feature will come back shortly.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

There is a webmaster at DigitalPoint Forums who is convinced that Google has penalized all his sites that were verified in his Google Webmaster Tools account.

This webmaster claimed his sites are clean and he complies with Google's terms of service. But they were all penalized soon after adding them to the same Google Webmaster Tools account. I find this all hard to believe.

It is possible that they were linking together in a weird fashion, but I am not sure - since I don't know the site's URLs. It is possible they were violating the terms of service. It is possible he accidently excluded the pages in his robots.txt. It is possible he had server issues. It is possible he spammed the heck out of his pages. I don't know.

But it is common sense, if you are doing anything borderline with Google. Please don't tie those sites to others via Webmaster Tools. Even more so, why are you verifying a site that is borderline spam with Google in the first place? To me, that seems like you are testing Google, teasing them to ban you. If that is what you like, then go for it.

Do you think Google does site wide webmaster tools account penalties? I guess this is an obvious question. Google sees spam, a human looks at it, it notices the site is verified in webmaster tools, then looks at all the other sites by the same account holder and sees the same type of spam on those sites. The Googler clicks the big red blinking button and bam - goodbye sites.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

An SEOMoz post charts the positive impact having a Sitemap file can have on the speed of Google and Yahoo crawling and indexing your web pages.

The report seems pretty impressive and I myself feel that Sitemaps are important to have, for more sites. In fact, I recently added a Sitemap for this site, although, I really don't think it will help much with indexing this site any faster due to us being in Google News.

That being said, the Sphinn thread around this post has some quality discussion. I want to isolate one post from "IncrediBILL" who asks the question, is the Sitemap to credit for these sites getting indexed faster or is it FeedBurner?

Google acquired FeedBurner and FeedBurner is incredibly fast at picking up new content, specifically from WordPress blogs, which is what the study was done on. That being said, the report would have not shown an increase in speed to crawl if Sitemaps did not have anything to do with it. FeedBurner was a factor before the Sitemaps files were in place and they were a factor after the Sitemaps files were in place. So the only thing that really changed with this site (outside of Google changing variables, which they do often) is the Sitemaps addition.

So who would you credit for the faster indexing? Google's Sitemap protocol or FeedBurner? I'll poll it up:

Try not to use the "other" response. Yes, I know, I know.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

A Google Webmaster Help thread asks a very interesting question. Should a webmaster consider submitting a reinclusion request if the site is still ranking well in Google?

The question seems obvious. Why would you bother submitting a reinclusion request when you are ranking well. But in this case, it is not so cut and dry. This webmaster received a notification from Google that they are hiding text. The notification came about a year ago, and they didn't really care so much back then. Now that they are boosting their web efforts and revamping their site, they have removed the hidden text. They believe they have good rankings, but they wonder if submitting a reinclusion request will improve their rankings in Google.

Googler, Wysz, suggested that they play it safe and submit a reinclusion request in any case. He said:

Over time it's possible that we detected a violation of the webmaster guidelines was removed, but as Autocrat said, it's probably best to play it safe and let us know that you've made changes to your site to fix previous violations. Don't worry about any downsides to requesting reconsideration. We don't bite. :)

Just be upfront about what you did, when you did it and what you changed. Google doesn't "bite," at least according to Wysz. I am sure many folks would argue with the bite phrase. :)

Now, if your site is nice and white, sparkling clean, I would also suggest submitting the request. I don't see how it can hurt, unless you are hiding something or you are unaware of something that is wrong on your site.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

There is a nice old school SEO thread at HighRankings Forum on the old topic of ranking well for singular cases, when you are already ranking well for the plural version.

For example, you are in the tops of tops at Google for [buy widgets], but you want to rank well for [buy widget]. The thread goes over some SEO copywriting tips on how to help achieve your goal.

Ian McAnerin has a nice tip, let me quote it:

Here is a trick I've used (I don't know if it will help you, but it might help someone):

Original Links:

Gray Widgets | Blue Widgets | Brown Widgets
...this is fine if you are optimizing for the plural, but not helpful if you are optimizing for the singular. Just removing the "s" makes it sound/look funny. But you can fix a lot of plural singular issues by changing the sentence context:

I'm looking for a: Gray Widget | Blue Widget | Brown Widget

For the on page stuff, you can control how your content is written. It is not as simple as removing an S at the end of the phrase. You need to make sure to rewrite the content on the page to make sure it still reads logically and grammatically correct after removing the S.

The only issue is, then you may drop in your ranking for the plural keyword phrase. Personally, I have seen many cases where either the plural version brings in the conversions or the singular case brings in the conversions, but it typically is one or the other. Of course, both would bring in conversions, but in many cases, one version brings in the majority of those conversions. This is something you need to test and fine tune over time, like most of your SEO efforts.

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks why does the site command in Google not match up in the number of "indexed" URLs reported in Google Webmaster Tools. A very valid question, let me show you.

A simple site command in Google for site:www.seroundtable.com returns 17,500 results. So that means, Google has indexed approximately 17,500 pages from the www of this domain.

Now, if I login and check my Sitemap data for this site (yea, I finally created a Sitemap file), it shows about half of the indexed URLs. It says Google has indexed 8,813 URLs of the 9,086 I submitted.

For me, the answer is simple. I seem to only sending URLs of the individual blog posts here. So although I have about 9,000+ blog posts at this domain, I still have about twice as many pages on this site, due to the categories, date archives, tag landing pages and so on. Those pages are not included in my Sitemap file. So Google seems to only showing the indexed URLs of what I submitted. Of course, it is hard for me to validate that by just looking at the numbers.

What I found interesting is when I went to Yahoo's Site Explorer, Yahoo told me they h have indexed 16,498 of my pages, but crawled only 15,022 pages and thus know about 16,498 of my pages. I guess via linkage data, they can index more of my pages then they actually crawl?

In fact, Yahoo's numbers for a inurl:seroundtable.com command is almost on target to the numbers they report in Site Explorer, which is nice.

In regards to what is going on with Google... I am not sure if the results are accurate or not. Tedster at WebmasterWorld said:

I'm never surpised when Webmaster Tools information seems peculiar in some way - it happens a lot. Also note that site:example.com results are getting weirder and weirder, often omitting urls that definitely are in the index - sometimes with a simple site:example.com/directory/ query.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

An older WebmasterWorld thread has been updated to share the time frame it took this webmaster to transfer his Google PageRank scores from old URLs to new URLs.

In summary, he set up a new URL structure (possibly a new domain, but that is not so clear). He redirected his old URLs to the new URLs. He then noticed his PageRank was gone, completely. So he got nervous. The folks in the thread suggested he relax and wait it out and ultimately, it worked out.

Here is the timeline:

• October 2nd - Site migration and 301's implemented
• October 10th - Week or so later lost all PR on new URLs (all to PR N/A)
• October 30th - Month later, PR N/A now changed to PR0
• December 29th - 3 months after 301 redirects back to original URL PR

So from start to finish, it seems like it took three months for the toolbar PageRank to transfer over.

How does this help any of you? Well, it really doesn't, outside of having something to point a client of your to. What I mean by that is that although the Toolbar PageRank didn't appear in the new URLs for three months, it likely had PageRank internally but not yet visible in the toolbar. I am sure the traffic from Google took less than three months to get to where it was.

In addition, these numbers will vary from site to site, depending on many factors. Those factors include, but are not limited to, size of the site, when the move was made, number of redirects, how popular the site was originally, if you use Sitemap files, and many more factors.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Google Webmaster Help points out that Google handles most date formats in US format. So if a site has a date in the format of 04/06/2007, Google will read that as April 6, 2007, but in UK format, it might be known as June 4, 2007.

Here is a screen capture of one such result:

And here is the date on the actual page:

You can see more details on this at Google Webmaster Help, where Googler, JohnMu said he will pass this information on to the right people.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help,.

Remember a few months back when Google published their internal SEO guide? Well, Michael Gray asked if Social Media links is an easy way to SEO death row.

Michael pointed out that on page twenty of the guide, under the "Good practices for promoting your website" section Google writes you should avoid:

involving your site in schemes where your content is artificially promoted to the top of these services

Michael feels we will soon see a tool in Webmaster Central named "How to report social media spam."

Of course, social media and SEO go very well together. But like anything that works well with SEO, it does get abused. The question is, is Michael right here? Do we have something to worry about?

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

A Google Webmaster Help thread points out an interesting bug of some sort in Google. A webmaster asks about a particular site that seems to have flooded Google with tons and tons of subdomains. Since the site is already "outed," I figure I show you this example, because I find it to be pretty interesting.

I am going to jump you to page 33 for a set of search results that show handster.com in all ten spots. You will notice that all of the handster.com results are starting with unique subdomains. Let me show you a quick video of the results:

As pointed out in the thread, it seems like this domain supports wildcard domains, so anything preceding the handster.com will return a page. Yes, a major duplicate content issue. For example, try http://spam.handster.com/ or http://google.handster.com/ or http://duplicatecontent.handster.com/ and so on. They all return the same page, and it also works for specific pages, such as http://barryschwartzwuzhere.handster.com/software.php?id=203&for=Yakumo+PDA.

I see you get the point. This looks like a major oversight by the web administrator but it also shows an issue with how Google handled this problem.

JohnMu at Google commented in the thread saying that he has "passed it on here for someone to look at."

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Every web page should have a HEAD and BODY tag, but some people, erm, forget them. What happens if your BODY tag or other significant tags are missing? Will search engine spiders ignore the web page?

Both tags are optional. The big issue is more that Googlebot may not know how to distinguish between the HEAD of the page and the BODY of the page if the code snippet is missing.

In general, though, if your page does pass HTML validation, the crawler should have a good idea of how to traverse the page and get the content. And if not, and there are some missing close-tags, some portions of the web page may go unnoticed, but it's not 100% definitive.

A test is ongoing to see how a missing BODY tag will impact the crawlers in the related discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Google Webmaster Help thread reports that in some instances, Google will tell you that your Sitemap file is OK, but in reality, it is not.

The issue comes up when on the summary page, Google may report that your Sitemap file is set to an "OK" status. But when you click through to get the detailed report, it will then show that the Sitemap is not OK, but rather has errors.

Googler, JohnMu, said:

It looks like you've stumbled upon a bug or something similar :-).

So, don't just rely on the the summary page, make sure to click through to see any Sitemaps errors.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

A Google Webmaster Help thread has a report that Google's preferred domain setting section in Google Webmaster Tools is not working. When some webmasters click on the "Settings" link on the left hand side, they get a response from Google that says "oops!"

It works for me, personally, and for many others:

But for this webmaster and some others, it is not working.

Susan Moskwa from Google has confirmed the issue and said a fix is underway. She explained that due to the holiday weekend, it might take a few more days to fix than a typical weekend. She said:

Thanks for additional information. Sounds like an error on our end; I'll have the team take a look. FYI a fix may not happen right away since it's the holiday season and many folks are out.

Again, I personally was able to access the settings section and even set a preferred domain for a site, as a test.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

An updated WebmasterWorld thread has new reports of changes at Google.co.uk and Google.com.au.

Senior member internetheaven, who keeps an eye on the Google UK results said:

Google.co.uk is all over the place. The results for one of the more competitive terms here in the UK (and across the world!) have completely changed. All the major financial companies and associations that usually rank at the top have been pushed down in favour of a few smaller companys and the inner financial sections of "related" websites (e.g. the car insurance ad section of a used car sales magazine) -- plus several MFAs to boot!

It is a slow holiday weekend, so there is not yet much response to internetheaven's post, but this member is senior and I trust him. Have you noticed any major changes with big competitive terms?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

We recently covered a comment from Googler JohnMu on if click data is used in Google for ranking purposes. Of course, John gave the typical Google response.

But now we have a comment from Matt Cutts of Google at a Sphinn thread, where it appears that Matt has completely denied the rumors that Google may be using click data (aka bounce rate) to rank web pages.

Matt said:

Without reading the article, I'll just say that bounce rates would be not only spammable but noisy. A search industry person recently sent me some questions about how bounce rate is done at Google and I was like "Dude, I have no idea about any things like bounce rate. Why don't you talk to this nice Google Analytics evangelist who knows about things like bounce rate?" I just don't even run into people talking about this in my day-to-day life.

So this seems to me that Google seems not to take into account people clicking from Google's search results to a web page and then clicking on the back button. This is the strongest statement on the topic I have seen from a Googler to this date.

I also recommend checking out HuoMah.com and see his analysis about all of this.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

In early November, I reported an issue with Google Blog Search scanning blogrolls, which was then confirmed later on. The confirmation told us that Google would fix the issue, where Google Blog Search would continue to index and use more than just what RSS feed, but would try to exclude blogrolls and navigational elements of the blog.

The issue was, if you conducted a link command in blog search, such as link:www.seroundtable.com (which I do all the time to find new posts commenting on posts I write here), Google Blog Search started to show blog posts not mentioning your posts. Why? Cause many blogs out there have this blog on their blogroll and Google considered that post to have a link within their post, but all it was, was a link in the Blogroll.

Since then, Google Blog Search has really made big improvements in this area. I have witnessed it first hand. But it is not perfect and Google knows that. Google is asking for examples of issues with the link command in Blog Search in the Google Groups area. So if you see issues, go to Google Groups and let Google know.

What has Google changed specifically? Jeremy Hylton of Google Blogsearch said:

The basic approach is to analyze each blog to look for text and markup that is common to all of the posts. Usually, these comment elements include the blogroll, any navigational elements, and other parts of the page that aren't part of the post. This approach works well for a lot of blogs, but we're continuing to improve the algorithm. The search results should ignore matches that only come from these common elements. The indexing change to implement it is deployed almost everywhere now.

How is that for transparency?

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

I am a huge fan of Google Sitelinks for a lot of reasons. But what do you do when the Sitelinks Google is displaying for your site is wrong? The manage Sitelinks feature doesn't give you too many options, outside of removing them. So what do you do?

First place to go would be the Google Webmaster Help discussion forums and post a thread like this guy did. In short, his site is showing Sitelinks for a search on developer fusion. You will notice that Google is cutting off the Sitelinks, so that they don't really make full sense.

Here is a screen capture showing how "Convert C# to VB.NET" ends up being "Convert C# to" and sections that start with "ASP.NET" end up just being "ASP." Why is this happening, it appears to be related to the period.

Googler, Susan Moskwa said, "I've passed your feedback along to the sitelinks team to look into." She then suggests that this webmaster wait it out and see what happens after the next Sitelink update.

John, a top contributor in the forum, gives a pretty good piece of advice. He said, why not try to "escaping them," "as in using . instead of "."" That might help Google understand they are the same phrase or maybe not. The webmaster said he might give that a try.

Manipulating and managing your Sitelinks is not an exact science. Experimentation is often necessary but at the same time, scary to play around with. Documenting these types of threads, may help SEOs figure out ways to best manage their Sitelinks.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

There's a Google Groups thread that is discussing the ways webmasters can tell that their site is penalized by Google.

In case you wanted to cover all your bases, you might want to try the tactics that they suggest you look at:

One person suggests that you will *only* find your site listed when you do a site:domain.com search (rather than searching for the homepae). Another says you won't see it when you do a site:domain.com search either. And another helpful hint:

If aboutus.org outranks you for your domain name, you've got problems and it probably has something to do with links, how you manipulated them, got them, or distributed them.

It's always helpful to check Google Webmaster Tools for any error messages. A user named John adds that Google will notify you of small infractions like hidden text. Not all issues are reported in Webmaster Tools.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

Last year, we wrote about how Google is to perceive subdomains. Matt Cutts wrote back then that in some circumstances, subdomains will be treated like subfolders. He goes into more detail on his blog. In the post, he explains that sometimes people have performed long tail searches and gotten too many results from a single domain and its subdomains and Google has made it more difficult for that to occur.

The issue was relatively silent for a year, but now people are starting to ask questions. On a WebmasterWorld thread, tedster says that "A legitimate subdomain today often gets treated as something of a hybrid between a totally different domain and a part of the main domain."

On the other hand, there's a DigitalPoint Forums thread that disputes the weak relationship:

I've actually learned first hand that Google started treating subdomains as directories (happened months ago). I had some websites on subdomains where the main domain had 0 links. The websites were doing well until one day when they fell drastically. I then started to build links to the main domain and within 2 months the subdomains were also stronger than ever. The stronger the domain is - the stronger the subdomain is.

That said, there's confusion yet again.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

A Google Webmaster Help thread has a member upset that Google is crawling his site during times when his server is overloaded. Is there a way to tell GoogleBot to stay away during these times?

JohnMu of Google said, yes there is. John explains that you can use a 503 status code to tell GoogleBot to come back later. The thing is, you would need to just server this status code to spiders and not your visitors - and that might get a bit sticky. Let me quote John:

One thing you can do is to encourage Googlebot (and other crawlers) to not visit your site at busy times by returning a 503 HTTP result code. This tells us that you currently can't serve the content, but that we should come back at some later time. The difficulty would be to recognize search engine crawlers and to only serve this result code when the server is actually under load - but it might be worth following up on if your server resources are limited.

John in the past recommended using the 503 during site downtime and site maintenance, so that Google doesn't think your site went bye-bye. The 503 will simply tell the spider to check back later and that your site is fine, but only temporarily not available.

Now, automating this at specific times or during specific CPU utilization patterns might be fun for coders. You can set up logic to say, serve GoogleBot or other spiders a 503 status code when it is between the hours of X and Y or when the server's CPU load is above Z. The only issue is, would this be considered a form of cloaking or not showing the search spider what the visitor sees? A bit of a gray area.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Last night I was noticing Twitters and some blog posts, as well as a DigitalPoint Forums thread that asked why did Google ban themselves. In short, a search for [google], [analytics], [adwords], [adsense], [google adwords], and so on, did not return the main Google.com result. So a search for [adwords] would not return http://adwords.google.com/ like it normally would.

Matt Cutts of Google even Twittered that he saw the issue and then soon after it was fixed, magically. ClickZ has captured images of the issue, I tried last night, and I did not see it myself but it did happen.

I have emailed Matt to try to learn what happened, if I find out, Ill update this post.

In any event, this is not the first time Google has been perceived to ban themselves. We covered a time in March 2005 and then again in July 2004.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Update: Here is a statement from Google:

Unfortunately, for a short period of time yesterday, we experienced an issue where our search engine wasn't returning some pages hosted on google.com in users' search results. We've since fixed this problem, and users can now find all Google-specific sites they are searching for. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

A Google Webmaster Help thread discusses a unique issue to a few niche sites that have no choice but to block all users from the United States while also wanting to allow GoogleBot to access the site.

Since GoogleBot lives in the US, blocking US based IP addresses, would likely also block GoogleBot. That would result in Google not indexing your site and you not ranking well in Google for the country you are targeting.

Googler, JohnMu, shares one acceptable way to block US based users but at the same time, allow GoogleBot to access your site. I assume this is not considered JavaScript cloaking, cause John said you can use it.

One potential solution would be to use a JavaScript-based interstitial that verifies the IP address and otherwise blocks access to your site. I assume you have to use JavaScript within your site, correct? If so, there would be no simple way for a user to selectively block the JavaScript interstitial and allow the JavaScript casino content. Assuming the JavaScript is in an external file that is disalllowed through your robots.txt file, Googlebot would not be able to view the interstitial and would be able to crawl the site normally.

This solution isn't necessarily new, but it is the first time I have seen a Googler suggest it in a forum.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

In our continued coverage of the a WebmasterWorld thread started by senior member CainIV, we learn two more things. These two items are likely obvious to most, but have been confirmed (at least to CainIV) that they are true based on his experiments.

1. Changes to navigation links can have a serious impact on a site's ranking in Google. CainIV said, "there are certainly nav and footer link thresholds that cause a website - even a website into the top 5 - to spin out and down to pages 5 and 6 in ranking."
2. Navigation links are treated differently then links within the content. CainIV said, "Google appears to handle thresholds from links within content different than those within nav or footer sections - this is to say, that content links have a fuzzier 'trust' logic about them, and I could more links to content, faster and more focused on the primary keyword pointed at the root url without the same threshold being crossed."

Like I said and like CainIV said in the thread, this is likely all assumed already but can't hurt to validate it.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The question over Google using click data, such as how many people click on your site from a Google result, how many people click click the back button and so on, as it relates to ranking web pages in Google - is nothing new. We discussed it at least three times.

But this time we have a small and obscure comment from a Google representative on the matter. A Google Webmaster Help thread has a comment from Googler, JohnMu, not saying much on it, but you tell me what he means:

I can tell you for sure that anyone visiting your site a few dozen times and hitting the back button on their browser is not going to impact your site's crawling, indexing, or ranking at Google. That wouldn't make much sense and would be too easy to abuse :-).

So, John here clearly talks about "hitting the back button on their browser." He goes on to say that it won't "impact your site's crawling, indexing, or ranking at Google," if done a "few dozen times." Now, it is not clear if it is done a few hundred thousand times if it will make a difference or not. I don't think we can use this as a confirmation from Google based on this statement on if Google uses this data in their ranking algorithm or not. But who knows.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Yesterday we reported there were issues with verifying your site in Google Webmaster Tools. The issues were around using the META tag verification, but that is now resolved, as of yesterday evening.

Googler, Susan Moskwa said in the Google Webmaster Help thread:

We're rolling out a fix for the meta verification issue right now, so this issue should be resolved. Please give it a bit of time to roll out fully, and then if you're still getting the "We've detected that your verification file returns a status of 404 (Not found) in the header" error when trying to verify by meta tag, please post back here.

If you're getting any other type of verification error, please search the forum for an answer, and start a new thread if your issue hasn't been answered/resolved.

Soon later, webmasters began to report that it was now working. In fact, the person who initially reported the error said:

I think I was the originator of this thread - and this is just to say that Meta tag verification worked OK for me this morning.

Thanks to Google for fixing the problem.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

The topic of does domain registration impact your search engine rankings is nothing new. We have covered this topic here at least a handful of times, especially since Google became a registrar. But a new WebmasterWorld thread has several case studies from SEOs on the topic.

It all started when senior WebmasterWorld member, SEOPTI, said that he forgot to use private whois information when renewing his domain. His domain name went under the real information and then soon after he said, Google devalued his incoming links by 80% or more.

As you might imagine, many are skeptical. Another senior member, wyweb, said:

I removed privacy protection from 6 or 7 domains last summer, all with 5 and 6 PR. There has been absolutely no change in either PR or traffic levels.

Senior member, CainIV, said something similar:

Personally, some of my domains are protected and some are not. I did not notice a ranking change when switching to privacy, however, none have ever reverted.

Forum administrator, Tedster, said:

I have a client who changed the legal ownership of the domain (and business) twice within the past year. No changes in the SERPs followed on either time.

Other clients in the past have purchased other online businesses, changed the domain's Whois to reflect that, and also seen no ranking changes. Based on that, I'm thinking this is not an open-and-shut case of Whois changes influencing ranking.

Seems like this isn't as clear cut as we would like. Google might or might not reset the domain based on probably several variables.

Past articles on domain registration and SEO:

• Google is a Domain Name Registrar
• Google Can Not Use Registry Data As Thought
• Theories on Advanced Link Mapping with Google Registrar
• Google Admits to Improve Search Quality with Registrar Data
• Changing Domain Name Ownership Whois Information & Google Search Ranking Impact
• The "Google Certified Domain Change" Proposal
• Really, Does Google Use Whois Registrar Data to Rank Sites? Can They?
• Does Registering A Domain Name for 10 Years Help Search Ranking?
• Impact of Changing Registrar Data on Search Rankings

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

JohnMu at Google has posted a thread announcement at Google Webmaster Help discussions stating there is an issue with some folks who might be trying to verify their sites with Google Webmaster Tools. Specifically, if you are trying to use the meta-tag verification method, you may currently be unable to verify your site with webmaster tools.

Dozens of reports came into the forum on Friday. So John posted an official thread and wrote:

It seems that some users have run into issues regarding meta tag verification of new sites in Webmaster Tools. We're looking into the issue and hope to have a solution as soon as possible. In the meantime, you might want to try file-based verification to see if it works better on your site.

Thanks for your patience, I'll post back when I know more!

There has currently not been an update that confirms things are working again.

Hopefully, you are not impacted.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Update: This is now resolved.

Google has made two changes to Webmaster Tools. The first is they consolidated your settings into a single page for a site and the second is they are now giving more control over your crawl rate.

There is a new "Settings" link on the left hand side of a site profile in webmaster tools. That settings section gives you the ability to manage a site's geographic target, preferred domain, enhanced image search preference and your crawl rate control. Note, some of these settings expire after 90-days. Here is a picture:

The second enhancement is the ability to allow Google to decide how to fast or slow crawl your site, or to give you those options. The screen capture pretty much explains it:

This is one of those settings that set back after 90-days. So keep checking it if you make a change.

There are some webmasters who are not allowed to change the setting. They are told Google has set their rate and they cannot do anything about it. There is discussion about this notification at Google Webmaster Help and DigitalPoint Forums. But why can't they change it? One suspects the site is hosted at Blogger or a free hosting site, but JohnMu of Google wrote:

You usually won't have to fiddle with those settings, which is why they aren't available to all sites. We usually work out how much we can (and want to) crawl automatically. I would generally only change these settings if we're crawling your site too hard (and slowing down your server).

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help and DigitalPoint Forums.

It is now official! Google Webmaster Helps Groups has officially closed yesterday and they have opened up a new discussions area at Google Webmaster Help.

Susan from Google explained that the archives at the old group "will remain read-only, but no new posts will be accepted."

So go to the new introduction thread and say hello to the new group! Currently, the following Googler's are signed up:

• Matt Cutts
• John Mueller
• Susan Moskwa
• SagarK

Vanessa Fox posted the history of Google Webmaster help at Search Engine Land.

I will do my best to continue tracking these discussions, but there are some additional difficulties being worked out. Those details can be found in this thread if you are interested. Until then, I will do my best to bring you the best threads from this group!

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.