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:
- Hackers Seizing Control of RSS Feeds: Beware
A Google Reader Help thread reports an increase in the number of RSS feeds being hacked into and used to redirect subscribers to spammer sites. Googler, Roger, from the Google Reader team said: Thanks for reporting this problem. Unfortunately, we've seen similar problems with WordPress feeds being compromised in the past. We'll look into it further, but in the meantime, I encourage you all to alert WordPress to this issue via their support forums. Roger - Keeping Track Of Links, With Link Building Tools & Spreadsheets
Ann Smarty at Search Engine Journal has a nice short piece on link building worksheets. These spreadsheets help link builders keep track of their link building efforts. She links to three worksheets, including: Ontolo's worksheetKalena's blog postYour SEO Plan In the comments, two people leave two more tools to help (yes, I bet there are more): Raven ToolsWordStrea I am a big fan of building custom tools around your business workflow. So if I was - Google Told Me, My Daughter Is A Porn Star
An interesting thread at Google Web Search Help started by "anotherDad" tells the story of how a father was shocked to see a pornographic site come up in the Google search results for a search for his daughter's name. He said: I recently did a Google search on my daughter's name, and was surprised when one of the URL's returned by the search forwards to a porn site when clicked. What this father quickly learned - Google News Makes Authors More Findable
The Google News Blog announced a neat new feature where they hyperlink the author's name in the Google News results. If you click on the authors name it basically takes you to a search for articles by that author, i.e. author:name here. You can find many of my articles at Search Engine Land by searching for author:"Barry Schwartz", which shows me I need to update the feed here to include the author's full name (which - Google Maps Lookup by Longitude & Latitude Now Requires LOC Prefix
According to at least two Google Maps Help Threads, Google Maps changed how they handle looking up a specific location by longitude and latitude. Supposedly, in the past, entering in the longitude followed by a comma and followed by the latitude, it would return the location on Google Maps. Now, it shouldn't work - but honestly, it currently does for me (maybe, I am on a different data center). The way to get it to - June 2009 Google PageRank Update: Kind Of Early
There are hundreds of reports across the web about a Google PageRank update. Most of you know, I am not a fan of the PageRank score displayed in the Google Toolbar, but I report it anyway, because I report what SEOs care about, which I determine by looking at threads in the forums. What is interesting about this PageRank update is that it comes less than a month from the last PageRank update. The May
Other Great Search Forum Threads:
- Wired: Facebook's Plan to Dominate The Net, And Keep Google Out, WebmasterWorld
- AdWords API v2009 Sandbox Update, Google Groups
- Google Marker Bug, Google Custom Search Help
- Has your My Map unexpectedly split into pages? Read this!, Google Maps Help
- The Link Builder’s Guide To Analyzing SERP Dominators For Link Opportunities, Sphinn
