I am writing this weekly recap while on a flight to Chicago. I won't be able to do the video version, so hopefully this text version will do. I am on my way to Chicago for Search Engine Strategies 2009. SES is actually when I started this site, six years ago on December 2nd. We have written over 10,000 stories here since and almost 2,000 in the past year alone.
On the search front, Google's Caffeine index finally made it to a data center. Google added a site performance report to Webmaster Tools to show off page speed. Google also confirmed a Sitelinks bug where you can link to a competitor. On the user interface front, Google decided to go with the fade in home page. They are showing more breadcrumbs as site URLs. They also are using larger images in the search results and region tags for some of the results. Bing went offline for the first time in their short history, it latest for 30 minutes. Bing Maps showed Google they can compete by adding street views and augmented reality. There are stories that Yahoo has begun unbanning web sites from their index. Google AdSense banned a publisher for copyright infringement over their own copyright. Finally, there are tons of more AdWords bans going on right now - I called it the Big Ban of December. That was this past week at the Search Engine Roundtable.
Select Topics For This Past Week:
Misc:
Google Webmaster:- Google Caffeine Index Now on a Google Data Center: 209.85.225.103
- Google Page Speed Report Comes to Webmaster Tools
- Google Confirms Bug With Sitelinks Where You Can Link To Competitors
- Google Sticks with Fade In Home Page Despite Searchers Hating It
- Short URLs Don't Want Google's Breadcrumb Display URL in SERPs
- Larger Google Images & Region Tags In Google Search Results
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