Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.
Search Engine Roundtable Stories:
- Weekly Search Buzz Roundup - 05/30/08: Memorial Day, Google Favicon Update & SMX Advanced Next Week
Happy Friday! It's almost June -- can you believe it? Next week, we're heading to SMX Advanced! This week, we celebrated Memorial Day and observed a lot of interesting search happenings. Memorial Day Monday marked Memorial Day in the states, and most of you had a long weekend. The search industry celebrated Memorial Day with numerous logos -- but Google was noticeably absent. The reason why, as the Google team responds, is that a Memorial - Search Engine Optimization Should Not Be Forgotten when Building Links
Search Engine Journal's Loren Baker reminds us that if we're building links, the basic rules of SEO should not be overlooked or forgotten. Even if you have hundreds of thousands of links, SEO basics are critical to achieve better rankings. Some of these include adding keywords to your copy, avoiding duplicate pages, adding unnecessary code, integrating text in images (and not using alt text), and more. Link building itself is fine. SEO is still important - More People are Looking at Google Ads, Says comScore
Reuters summarizes a recent comScore report that indicates that Google ad views are increasing. The article states: Web tracking firm comScore Inc's monthly report on "paid clicks" showed Google's U.S. growth at 19.6 percent in April from a year ago, compared with growth of 2.7 percent in March and 3.1 percent in February, according to analysts. Forum members believe that this means the recession is over. (Or perhaps people are clicking because they're dreaming to - Google Webmaster Tools Won't Allow You To Delete Sitemaps
Google Webmaster Tools seems to have a new bug which does not allow you to delete or remove your sitemaps file from your profile. Several reports came from Google Groups starting on May 27th. All have reported that no matter what they do, the delete function does not actually remove the sitemap from the associate site. The first report said: I've tried to delete the RSS feed "sitemap" from webmaster tools, but it doesn't seem - Google AdSense Ads Disappearing
There are two WebmasterWorld threads and some Google Groups threads reporting that some AdSense ads sporadically are disappearing. Several publishers are reporting that a new ad they placed on a particular page received impressions and clicks on day one and then on day two, the ad received no impressions and when the publisher checked out the page, he/she was shocked to see the ad missing. Here is one publisher's story: Adsense were being displayed on - Google's New Blue Fav Icon :: Google Updated Their Favorite Browser Icon
Such minor things as changing a favorite icon is noticed immediately by people. Google, sometime over night, updated their favorite icon to a new icon. The favorite icon is the little icon that is displayed in the browser URL bar on most modern browsers. Here is the before and after: Before: After: If you do not see it, try shift refreshing on the google.com/favicon.ico page a few times and then go back to Google.com. Personally,
Other Great Search Forum Threads:
- Google AdSense EFT now available in Hong Kong, WebmasterWorld
- Google AdSense EFT now available in Hungary and Hong Kong, Google Groups
- Google Image Bot with an Empty User Agent, WebmasterWorld
- Interview: Jill Whalen on SEO Don'ts, Myths, and Scams, Sphinn
- PDF Seen As Duplicate Content?, HighRankings Forums
- The Importance of Pay Per Click Account Structure, Sphinn
- Webmaster tools has just updated backlinks, DigitalPoint Forums
- Yahoo BrowserPlus Gets Ready For Developers, WebmasterWorld
