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:
- Deja Vu: First Time Matt Cutts of Google Saw Web Spam
Aaron Wall posted an example of a large brand manipulating Google through an old spam technique. In short, they were buying expired domains to piggy back off of the link popularity and anchor text of those old domains. Aaron wall said, "buying expired domain names for links is something Matt Cutts loathes." What I find most interesting is the video he posted after (spam doesn't always interest me all that much these days). This video - Yahoo Search Marketing Reporting Goes Down For Many
There are several complaints at both WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums that the Yahoo Search Marketing campaigns are missing all their data. One person received a response from Yahoo, where Yahoo presumingly said: Upon researching your account we found there is a known issue causing frustration among many clients. Our reporting systems went down at approximately 8pm on Monday evening. However we have created a case for you within your account and are currently working to - Searcher Concerned After Wired's Google / CIA Article
Wired published an article last night named Exclusive: Google, CIA Invest in 'Future' of Web Monitoring. Here is a snippet of that article: The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time - and says it uses that information to predict the future. The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the - More On Google Alerts Quality Control
A couple months ago, we wrote on how Google Alerts tweaked their algorithm to be more more quality focused and send out less alerts. A recent Google Web Search Help thread has more on how Google Alerts works from Google Product Manager, Marcel. Marcel responded to a quality complaint saying: You're right, both of those are matches for your query, but neither of them are interesting documents. To get only higher quality documents, choose "Up - Image SEO Expert Knocks On Bing Image Search
A WebmasterWorld thread has Zeus, someone well known in the SEO forum space as tracking the image search engines, as not speaking positively about Bing Image Search. The thread talks how Bing is slower than Google to index new content. Which is often the case, simply cause Google is much faster than most search engines. But Zeus breaks it out to say that their image search is even more disappointing. Zeus said that typically he - SEO Is Not All About Technical Changes
A WebmasterWorld thread makes a basic and obvious point that many newbies miss. SEO is not just about technical implementation. You can place your title tags in the right place, have a nice site architecture, get links and so on but still not rank well if your site is not useful. The thread creator said it nicely: People come here with a problem about traffic dropping and people try to help by asking technical questions
Other Great Search Forum Threads:
- Google Looking At Social Networking For Games, WebmasterWorld
- Keeping Dynamic Sites Clean in the Search Index, WebmasterWorld
- LinkSpam Bombed… But How and Why?, Sphinn
- Spammers abusing Google Trends, Google Blogoscoped Forum
- 100 Million Facebook Users' Data Published, WebmasterWorld
- ATTN Google: User-Agent and FCrDNS MISSING from webmaster tools HTTP requests, Google Webmaster Help
- Young People Give Too Much Credibility To Google SERPs, WebmasterWorld
