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 AdSense Testing "Above The Fold" Ads
I am not sure how I missed this, but in March, the AdSense blog announced they are testing "above the fold" ads for advertisers. Google said: The new feature enables brand advertisers to target their ads to ad units that are immediately visible when a page is loaded -- in other words, the portions of the page a user can see without needing to scroll down. The ads that are immediately visible are called 'above - Google's Testing A Self-Improving Ranking Algorithm? (MayDay)
Early May we reported on a possible Google Update coined the Google MayDay update. Now, I know Google wanted examples of sites claiming they were hit, so here you go, SEOmoz said they were impacted by MayDay. What is MayDay, well - a lot of sites are claiming they lost rankings in Google for their long tail keywords, which resulted in a drop of traffic of about 10 - 20% or more. Now, with the - Removing URLs in XML Sitemap Won't Hurt Your Google Rankings
A Cre8asite Forums thread, one of the last non-Google forums to still have a webmaster related Googler stop by, has discussion around removing URLs from your XML Sitemap file. There is a myth that if you are missing URLs or remove URLs from your XML Sitemap file, that Google would remove and not list those URLs in their index. That is not true and there is nothing more false about that. An XML Sitemap file - As Link Building Gets Harder, Relationships Building Is Necessary
A WebmasterWorld goes on another rant about how hard it is to do link building these days. There is a lot of confusion in the SEO industry, which makes it harder and harder for link builders to do their jobs. That being said, senior WebmasterWorld member, Wheel, said that in the past few months, his link building efforts - which was primarily done via email requests, has had a horrid return on investment. In the
Other Great Search Forum Threads:
- Doodle Singapore Art Festival 2010, Google Blogoscoped
- Google's Teacher Day Doodle, Google Blogoscoped
- Site Maintenance Thursday May 13, 2010!, WebmasterWorld
- AdWords Downtime: May 13th, 6:00pm - 6:30pm PDT, AdWords API Announcements
- Doodle Independence of Paraguay, Google Blogoscoped
- How Much To Pay Seo Sales Consultant?, HighRankings Forums
