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:
- Google Sitemaps Now Accepting Images
Sitemaps has truly been a basic SEO step for many large or even medium sized web sites. Google Image search has been a strong driver of traffic to many sites, but sometimes it is hard for webmasters to get their images indexed. Google announced support for images in Sitemaps. Here is an example: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:image="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1"> <url> <loc>http://example.com/sample.html</loc> <image:image> <image:loc>http://example.com/image.jpg</image:loc> </image:image> </url></urlset> With this you can specify image, location, caption, geolocation, title and license. For more details, see this document. - Yelp To Change Review Policies
For years Yelp has had controversy over reviews displayed and added to the system. In fact, recently they were sued over them. In response to all the questions and legal issues, Yelp decided to make two changes. (1) You can now see filtered out reviews (2) Yelp is discontinuing the "Favorite Review" feature Here is one comment from a WebmasterWorld thread on this change of heart: Ahh this is great. Watching them back peddle and - Google Reminds Users How To Blur or Remove Maps Details
Ever want to remove something from Google Maps, such as a street view image of your car or you walking down the street? Google allows you to do so. Alvin from the Google Maps teams posted a thread at the Google Maps Help forum explaining how. I'll quote Alvin: Have you found your house on Street View and prefer it isn't show for privacy reasons? Have you found a face or license plate that hasn't
Other Great Search Forum Threads:
- Google uses wrong thread date in SERPs (Seems like a bug of google), Google Webmaster Help
- 10 SEO Tools Every Blogger Must Use, Sphinn
- AdWords account log out oddities, WebmasterWorld
- AdWords Downtime: April 10th, 10am-2pm PDT, AdWords API Announcements
- AOL May Sell or Close Bebo, WebmasterWorld
- Bing Fine with NOT Catching Google, WebmasterWorld
- Bing/MSN needs to update the HTTP ACCEPT header., WebmasterWorld
- Known Issue: "Error Try Again" error message when posting a comment, YouTube Help
