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Daily Search Forum Recap: March 12, 2010

Posted: March 12th, 2010, 10:00pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Search Forum Recap

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.

Video Recap of Weekly Search Buzz :: March 12, 2010

Posted: March 12th, 2010, 8:30pm CET by rustybrick

It has been two weeks since my last video recap, but I have been doing text recaps - so check those out. Why did I miss the video recaps, I was in Israel for both pleasure and business. I ran SphinnCon Israel this past sunday, it was a blast.

Yahoo Search updated their index this week. Google's AJAX crawling proposal is now live. Google is upgrading the Site Performance report in Webmaster Tools. Yahoo upgraded their search marketing desktop tool out of beta. People ignore real time search results, according to a study. Google Shopping added stock levels. Google Maps added bike directions. Google is testing TV search. Microsoft starts a major ad campaign in the UK. MSN.com updated their look. Google News Archive added a "browse" feature. Google Doodle controversies over International Women's Day and Chuck Norris's 70th birthday. That was this past week at the Search Engine Roundtable.

Make sure to subscribe to our video feed or subscribe directly on iTunes to be notified of these updates and download the video in the background. Here is the YouTube version of the feed:

For the original iTunes version, click here or to see the YouTube version in higher quality, click play & hit "HD."

Search Topics of Discussion:

Industry News:

SMX's SphinnCon Israel 2010 Recap

Yahoo SEO:

Yahoo Search Update: March 2010

Google SEO:

Yahoo PPC:

Yahoo Releases Search Marketing Desktop Just In Time To Kill It

Real Time Search:

Study: Searches Ignore Real-Time Search Results

Google Updates:

Microsoft News:

Google Doodles:

Please do subscribe via iTunes or on your favorite RSS reader. Don't forget to comment below with the right answer and good luck!

Google News Archives Adds "Browse This Newspaper"

Posted: March 12th, 2010, 3:10pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Google Search Engine

If you go to the Google News Archives and find a digitized back issue from the Google archives, you should be able to now browse that newspaper directly on Google.

For example, let's take a look at the The News and Eastern Townships Advocate. I can then browse the newspaper by panning through the pages.

Here are some screen captures:

I spotted this addition via the Google News Help forum where Googler, Inbal replied to an old thread with this feature request. She said:

We're excited to announce the launch of browse mode for newspapers in Archives! To do so, click "Browse this newspaper" to view other editions from that newspaper!

Indeed, very neat feature!

Forum discussion at Google News Help.

Google Shopping Adds Inventory Levels

Posted: March 12th, 2010, 3:02pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Google Search Engine

Ever want to pick up a product from a store now and want to know if it is in stock in nearby stores? Yea, you have, I have. I end up calling stores to find a store that has it. But you may no longer have to do that. Just open your smart phone, go to Google, click on shopping and type in your product. Then look for a blue indicator to see which stores have them in stock.

Here is an example I ran in my iPhone for a search in Wii Fit:

Click on the link near the blue icon:

Great feature for the typical searcher. If you are a merchant and you want your product inventory data in Google Shopping, you will need to be part of the Google Merchant Center and Local Business Center and then fill out this form.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

SEO's Nemesis, Ripoff Report, Caught Selling Links

Posted: March 12th, 2010, 2:50pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Spam

Frank Watson wrote that RipOff Report Now Selling Links, Verifying Safe Cash4Gold. In short, he shows how they are selling links for certain "qualified" and "verified" businesses.

What is the big deal if a site sell links? Well, it is not - it is up to the site if they want to take the risk of selling links and being penalized by Google for doing so. So what is the big deal here?

Well, Ripoff Report is a site that can often be an online reputation management nightmare. Ripoff Report tends to rank very well for business names that have complaints about them. Pushing down results in Google from Ripoff Report is often not the easiest task to complete. Which is why SEOs might like to call out issues with the site, especially webmaster guidelines issues.

Just read this Sphinn comment:

Its hard to understand how Google can justify the authority it betows on this site. They break all the rules and continue to thrive hurting many innocent victims of their so called consumer advocacy site.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Google Adds XML Validation to AdWords API Sandbox

Posted: March 12th, 2010, 2:39pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Google AdWords

I cannot tell you how many issues I see come up in the AdWords API forum about why does a certain request work in the Google AdWords API Sandbox and not in the normal AdWords API. A Sandbox API is a test ground for developers to test out new code changes without impacting live data.

Eric Koleda from the AdWords API Team announced in a AdWords API Help thread the introduction of enhanced XML validation for the AdWords API sandbox. That means, the XML you use in the sandbox will be stricter and return more detailed errors when it does not validate. Let me quote Eric:

Yesterday we enabled an enhanced form of XML validation on the AdWords API sandbox that returns more detailed error messages for incorrectly formatted SOAP XML requests. This new validation mechanism is more strict and enforces rules that were previously ignored. Most SOAP libraries already conform to these rules, but requests that are constructed manually may now return validation errors. Some key changes in the validation logic are:
* The fields of an object must be in the correct order. The order of the fields is defined in the WSDL and reflected in our developer documentation.
* The namespaces used in the request body must be declared on the method element (get, mutate, etc). If all of the namespace prefixes are declared on the SOAP envelope element you must ensure they are re- defined on the method element.

For right now this will only be enabled in the sandbox to give you time test your code against this new type of validation. If you have any questions or issues please let us know.

Forum discussion at AdWords API Help.

How Important is Google PageRank in 2010?

Posted: March 12th, 2010, 2:10pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Google Optimization

Every year or so, the Google PageRank debate lives on. Some people say Google PageRank is the number one important attribute to have a page rank well in Google. Some say PageRank is worthless and should be completely ignored. Others take a middle ground. SEO's opinion on the topic changes from year to year - even mine.

A WebmasterWorld thread has renewed discussion on the topic. So I thought it would be a good time to run a poll and see how important you all feel PageRank is nowadays. Here is the poll.

How Important is Google PageRank in 2010?online surveys

Now that you have taken the poll, I want to share some recent Google chatter on PageRank.

A couple weeks ago at SMX West Google's Director of Research, Peter Norvig told Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman that PageRank is overhyped. Here is an abstract from Search Engine Land's coverage of the event:

One thing that I think is still overhyped is PageRank. People think, yeah, you do this computation on the web graph and then you just order all the pages by that [PageRank]. Yes, that computation is important but it’s just one of many things. And people say, “Oh, well you’re stuck if you don’t have that.” We never felt that way. We never felt that it was such a big factor. It’s got the catchy name and the name recognition, but we’ve always looked at all the available data….
There is this confusion that there’s this one component that’s called PageRank, but the whole thing [Google's algorithm] has [also] been called that. That was a mistake. We need some better branding.

There is no doubt that Googlers involved with webmasters want to remove the PageRank values from the toolbar. In fact, PageRank was removed from Webmaster Tools last year after concern of PageRank became overwhelming for many. Since before 2007 Google wanted to remove PageRank from the toolbar. In fact, then Matt Cutts personally wanted it gone, but I guess he failed? And my new favorite Googler, Tomer Honen tweeted, "And that's why I don't use Twitter that often - only 140 characters... Get over PageRank!"

As you can see, I did not make a distinction here between real PageRank and Toolbar PageRank.

So what do you think? Take the poll and feel free to comment.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Working with multi-regional websites

Posted: March 12th, 2010, 8:50am CET by John Mueller

Tags: crawling and indexing

Webmaster Level: Intermediate

Did you know that a majority of users surveyed feel that having information in their own language was more important than a low price? Living in a non-English-speaking country, I've seen friends and family members explicitly look for and use local and localized websites—properly localized sites definitely have an advantage with users. Google works hard to show users the best possible search results. Many times those are going to be pages that are localized, for the user's location and/or in the user's language.

If you're planning to take the time to create and maintain a localized version of your website, making it easy to recognize and find is a logical part of that process. In this blog post series, we'll take a look at what is involved with multi-regional and multi-lingual websites from a search engine point of view. A multi-regional website is one that explicitly targets users in various regions (generally different countries); we call it multilingual when it is available in multiple languages, and sometimes, the website targets both multiple regions and is in multiple languages. Let's start with some general preparations and then look at websites that target multiple regions.

Preparing for global websitesExpanding a website to cover multiple regions and/or languages can be challenging. By creating multiple versions of your website, any issues with the base version will be multiplied; make sure that you have everything working properly before you start. Given that this generally means you'll suddenly be working with a multiplied number of URLs, don't forget that you'll need appropriate infrastructure to support the website.

Planning multi-regional websitesWhen planning sites for multiple regions (usually countries), don't forget to research legal or administrative requirements that might come into play first. These requirements may determine how you proceed, for instance whether or not you would be eligible to use a country-specific domain name.

All websites start with domain names; when it comes to domain names, Google differentiates between two types of domain names:

ccTLDs (country-code top level domain names): These are tied to a specific country (for example .de for Germany, .cn for China). Users and search engines use this as a strong sign that your website is explicitly for a certain country.
gTLDs (generic top level domain names): These are not tied to a specific country. Examples of gTLds are .com, .net, .org, .museum. Google sees regional top level domain names such as .eu and .asia as gTLDs, since they cannot be tied to a specific country. We also treat some vanity ccTLDs (such as .tv, .me, etc.) as gTLDs as we've found that users and webmasters frequently see these as being more generic than country-targeted (we don't have a complete list of such vanity ccTLDs that we treat as gTLDs as it may change over time). You can set geotargeting for websites with gTLDs using the Webmaster Tools Geographic Target setting.

Geotargeting factorsGoogle generally uses the following elements to determine the geotargeting of a website (or a part of a website):

Use of a ccTLD is generally a strong signal for users since it explicitly specifies a single country in an unmistakable way.
or
Webmaster Tools' manual geotargeting for gTLDs (this can be on a domain, subdomain or subdirectory level); more information on this can be found in our blog post and in the Help Center. With region tags from geotargeting being shown in search results, this method is also very clear to users. Please keep in mind that it generally does not make sense to set a geographic target if the same pages on your site target more than a single country (say, all German-speaking countries) — just write in that language and do not use the geotargeting setting (more on writing in other languages will follow soon!).
Server location (through the IP address of the server) is frequently near your users. However, some websites use distributed content delivery networks (CDNs) or are hosted in a country with better webserver infrastructure, so we try not to rely on the server location alone.
Other signals can give us hints. This could be from local addresses & phone numbers on the pages, use of local language and currency, links from other local sites, and/or the use of Google's Local Business Center (where available).

Note that we do not use locational meta tags (like "geo.position" or "distribution") or HTML attributes for geotargeting. While these may be useful in other regards, we've found that they are generally not reliable enough to use for geotargeting.

URL structuresThe first three elements used for geotargeting are strongly tied to the server and to the URLs used. It's difficult to determine geotargeting on a page by page basis, so it makes sense to consider using a URL structure that makes it easy to segment parts of the website for geotargeting. Here are some of the possible URL structures with pros and cons with regards to geotargeting:

ccTLDs eg: example.de, example.fr	Subdomains with gTLDs eg: de.site.com, fr.site.com, etc.	Subdirectories with gTLDs eg: site.com/de/, site.com/fr/, etc.	URL parameters eg: site.com?loc=de, ?country=france, etc.
pros (+) - clear geotargeting - server location is irrelevant - easy separation of sites - legal requirements (sometimes)	pros (+) - easy to set up - can use Webmaster Tools geotargeting - allows different server locations - easy separation of sites	pros (+) - easy to set up - can use Webmaster Tools geotargeting - low maintenance (same host)	pros (+) (not recommended)
cons (-) - expensive (+ availability) - more infrastructure - ccTLD requirements (sometimes)	cons (-) - users might not recognize geotargeting from the URL alone (is "de" the language or country?)	cons (-) - users might not recognize geotargeting from the URL alone - single server location - separation of sites harder	cons (-) - segmentation based on the URL is difficult - users might not recognize geotargeting from the URL alone - geotargeting in Webmaster Tools is not possible

As you can see, geotargeting is not an exact science (even sites using country-code top level domain names can be global in nature), so it's important that you plan for the users from the "wrong" location. One way to do this could be to show links on all pages for users to select their region and language of choice. We'll look at some other possible solutions further on in this blog post series.

Dealing with duplicate content on global websitesWebsites that provide content for different regions and in different languages sometimes create content that is the same or similar but available on different URLs. This is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries. While we strongly recommend that you provide unique content for each different group of users, we understand that this may not always be possible for all pages and variations from the start. There is generally no need to "hide" the duplicates by disallowing crawling in a robots.txt file or by using a "noindex" robots meta tag. However, if you're providing the same content to the same users on different URLs (for instance, if both "example.de/" and "example.com/de/" show German language content for users in Germany), it would make sense to choose a preferred version and to redirect (or use the "rel=canonical" link element) appropriately.

Do you already have a website that targets multiple regions or do you have questions about the process of planning one? Come to the Help Forum and join the discussion. In following posts, we'll take a look at multi-lingual websites and then look at some special situations that can arise with global websites. Bis bald!

Written by John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Switzerland

Daily Search Forum Recap: March 11, 2010

Posted: March 11th, 2010, 10:00pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Search Forum Recap

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.

Yahoo Search Update: March 2010

Posted: March 11th, 2010, 3:27pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Yahoo Search Optimization

Yahoo announced a new search update, or what they call a "weather report" for their index. Yahoo said you may notice ranking changes in the Yahoo Search results. They said:

The Yahoo! Search engineering teams are rolling out updates to crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms. Similar to previous updates, you may notice some ranking changes and page shuffling during the process, which we expect to complete over the next few days.

I have not seen any discussion around this but there may be an issue with the Yahoo Search WebmasterWorld forum, so I am not sure.

I did spot two threads discussing an update with Yahoo Site Explorer. One thread was at the Site Explorer Suggestion Board and the other at DigitalPoint Forums.

Update: I was able to post a thread at WebmasterWorld (maybe there was a bug on my side) and now we have a nice amount of feedback on how significant this update is. Here are some posts from the thread:

I'm seeing a small but statistically insignificant increase from Yahoo!

We had been showing a steady increase in traffic until yesterday (March 10th). Today, we've lost about 20% of our traffic from Y!.
This is a pattern that seems to repeat with each update. After the update we drop in ranking but slowly climb back before the next update.

They are showing lots of love for Wikipedia.

I'm seeing huge differences not in the results but the output...5 natural results for some queries instead of the usual 10 and quite frankly I like it shortened like this. Top 5 or go home.......

Google Forcing Some AdSense Publishers To Select a Local Currency

Posted: March 11th, 2010, 3:18pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Google AdSense

A WebmasterWorld thread reports that some Google AdSense publishers are being forced to pick a local currency, instead of using the U.S. dollar.

Three publishers claimed it happened yesterday, where they logged into AdSense and had to pick a local currency. Here are some of the messages in the forum thread:

I think it is not possible to skip it any more.

They should have waited untill march 31 or april 1 to let it synchronize with taxes cycles. For those of us living in the EU but not in Ireland, it makes necessary new taxes forms.

This obviously should not impact U.S. publishers and publishers who live in countries where Google cannot pay out in that local currency.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Stealing Google Maps & Local Citations

Posted: March 11th, 2010, 3:07pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Google Optimization

Google Maps has been a extremely important area for SEOs and SEMs to focus on for their clients. Ranking in the Google results that have a maps result is often critical to these businesses and those map results come up more often in the web results at Google on a daily basis. So when you see bugs reported, especially ones that can end up in a competitor claiming your spot, you get worried.

A Google Maps Help thread has an excellent video demo of a possible bug or issue with how Google Maps citations can be poached from competitors. I am not sure what the issue here is, but let me share the video here.

The video is on ScreenCast.com is about 4 minutes long. It was created by the Small Business Online Coach and documents the issue very well.

I am not sure how serious this issue is, what do you think?

Forum discussion at Google Maps Help.

Three New Bugs With YouTube

Posted: March 11th, 2010, 2:46pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Other Google Topics

There are three known and confirmed bugs with YouTube. They include not being able to save changes being made to videos, and issues playing and sharing videos in YouTube Groups and Orkut. Here are the three threads created by Liz from the YouTube team:

(1) Known Issue: "Save changes" button doesn't appear on "Edit video" page:

We've seen a lot of reports from you indicating that on the "Save changes" button isn't appearing for you on the edit video page for your uploads (my_videos).
I've reported this situation to our team and they're working on a fix so that you're able to save the edits you make to your videos again without running into this issue.

(2) Known Issue: bug playing videos in YouTube Groups:

We've seen many of you report that videos you've submitted to a YouTube Group are not playing on the page. A grey box appears in place of where the video should appear in the player and sometimes an error message is displayed stating that the video is no longer available. The video is in fact still available (from the uploader's channel and in search), but its just showing as unavailalbe in the Group setting.
This situation has been reported to our Team here in San Bruno, and our engineers are currently investigating the issue and working on a fix.

(3) Known Issue: issues with YouTube videos on Orkut:

Just wanted to let you know that our Team is aware of the issue with sharing YouTube videos to Orkut. Many of you have reported here in the forum that when sharing one of your uploads to YouTube on Orkut, Orkut produces an error message saying that your video doesn't exist / isn't found. Ah!
I've reported this to our engineers and they're currently working with the folks over at Orkut to try and resolve the situation. A big thanks to you all for letting us know about this issue, and we really appreciate your patience as we're working on a fix. Hopefully you should be able to enjoy YouTube videos on Orkut soon.

So those are the three issues.

Forum discussion at YouTube Help Forums.

Study: Searches Ignore Real-Time Search Results

Posted: March 11th, 2010, 2:37pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Tracking Conversion Measurements

OneUpWeb released an eye-tracking study that showed how most searches ignore the real time search results. The takeaways from the study, as Greg Sterling recapped nicely include:

73% had never heard of real-time results before participating this study
Only a quarter of the consumers cared for the real-time results compared to 47% of the information foragers
The majority of the participants surveyed were indifferent to the real-time results

The Guardian notes that these real time results cost Google $15m and Bing $10m - what is the return on investment for that then?

A WebmasterWorld thread has conversation around this where most people say they are not surprised by the study's findings. Just hard to imagine blowing $15 million on something like this.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google Help Forum Search Adds 3rd Party Content

Posted: March 11th, 2010, 2:26pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Other Google Topics

All of the content published on this site is sourced via discussion forums, that is what makes this site unique from the thousands of other SEO blogs out there. Much of that content is sourced from the Google help forums. So when Google changes something in their help forums, I typically notice.

One thing Google recently changes was the help forum search feature. Now, Google is including content in the help forum search that is from external web sites, not owned or maintained by Google. For example, a search at the Google Analytics Help forum returns several results that are from third party web sites. Here is a screen capture:

Each web site that is not maintained by Google is clearly labeled as such, with a message that reads:

The site you are about to visit is not maintained by Google Inc., but its content might be helpful.

There is then a way to "Report Abuse" on a site listed here.

What I find interesting is that Google labels their own blogs as "not maintained by Google," when indeed, it is maintained by Google. But it does differentiate between what is "user content" versus Google content - so I find that interesting.

A hat tip goes to PizzaSEO.com for letting me know about this new feature.

Daily Search Forum Recap: March 10, 2010

Posted: March 10th, 2010, 10:00pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Search Forum Recap

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.

Chuck Norris Turns 70 Today, No Google Doodle?

Posted: March 10th, 2010, 3:14pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Other Google Topics

Google and Chuck Norris have a long history. If you go to Google.com and search for [find chuck norris] and hit, "I'm feeling lucky" button you will be taken to this result that reads:

Google won't search for Chuck Norris because it knows you don't find Chuck Norris, he finds you.

So it is surprising to see that on the 70th birthday of Chuck Norris, Google doesn't have a special Google Doodle up. Chuck Norris was born on March 10, 1940 and 70 years later, I would have thought he would deserve a special Google logo.

I am not the only one who feels he deserves a logo. There is a large Google Web Search Help thread with complaints from Chuck Norris fans. In all honesty, I find this all very humorous.

Happy 70th Chuck!

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

The UK Bing Ads : Here Is a Video

Posted: March 10th, 2010, 3:02pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

As many of you know, Microsoft is conducting a major ad blitz in the UK in order to capture market share for Bing, their search engine.

Bing's product manager sent me a link to one of the new commercials, which is now on YouTube. Here is a video of the new commercial:

What do you think? It looks similar to the US commercials, just with UK accents.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

MSN's New Portal Now Live

Posted: March 10th, 2010, 2:57pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

If you visit MSN.com today, you may notice a new look and feel for the site. The beta design is now the new official look for MSN. Like it or not, this is the new look for now.

Greg Sterling reports that about 50% of the Bing search queries are driven from the MSN portal. So this new design may or may not have an impact on that. 50% is major and clearly Microsoft is aware of that.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google Shuts Down "Site Performance" Tool While Upgrading It

Posted: March 10th, 2010, 2:52pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Google Optimization

An updated Google Webmaster Help thread has confirmed reports from Google's "sreeram" that Google is updating the Site Performance reports in Google Webmaster Tools.

During this update, Google has temporarily stopped updating the existing reports. The Googler said:

We are making some changes to the algorithms and pipeline behind the site performance feature and so had stopped updating it for a bit. We'll resume the updates soon, hopefully within a day or two. Do stay tuned and keep giving us feedback.

One new feature I am expecting is a trustworthy indicator to be added to the tool. I also suspect the tool to update more frequently and possibly offer better explanations of what can be improved.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Google Directing You To Wrong Country? Report The Issue

Posted: March 10th, 2010, 2:47pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Google Search Engine

I am finally back from my trip to Israel and one thing that kind of bothered me while I was there was that whenever I went to Google.com, it redirected me to Google.co.il. I know, that is how it should work, but imagine being in a country, like the U.S. and being directed to a localized or regional version of Google. It happens every now and then, to both Google and even Bing.

But there is something you can do about it at Google. A Google Web Search Help thread has a Googler named Rubie saying there is a specific form to fill out at Google to report the issue. Rubie said:

We have a nifty tool you can use if you think your IP address is not being detected correctly. Click on the link below to report your issue.

The link below takes you to this page that can be used for this specific issue. So if you run into this issue, you can report it to Google and hopefully they will fix it.

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

Googlers Testing TV Search Android Enabled Devices With Dish Network

Posted: March 10th, 2010, 2:40pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Other Google Topics

Android powered TV search boxes are being tested by Googlers, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Google Inc. is testing a new television-programming search service with Dish Network Corp., according to people familiar with the matter, the latest development in a fast-moving race to combine Internet content with conventional TV.
The service, which runs on TV set-top boxes containing Google software, allows users to find shows on the satellite-TV service as well as video from Web sites like Google's YouTube, according to these people. It also lets users to personalize a lineup of shows, these people said.

Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land has some analysis around the news. A WebmasterWorld thread has some feedback from webmasters.

Might be fun if "on demand" but not all that fun if just a list of "what's on". Meanwhile several tv schedule sites give me the same thing.

I predict the TV will be just another web-providing device, and people will watch as much web-content as cable-content. Point in hand, the RSS agregator built in the latest TiVo. Basically, you can make your custom RSS-fed TV channel with that.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google Maps Adds Bike Directions & Route Layers

Posted: March 10th, 2010, 2:35pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Other Google Topics

A long time requested feature, bike directions, have been added to Google Maps. Both the Google Blog and Google Lat Long Blog have details about the addition.

First, here is a video demo:

Dark green indicates a trail;
Light green indicates a dedicated bike lane along a road;
Dotted green indicates roads without bike lanes but are more appropriate for biking, based on factors such as terrain, traffic, and intersections.

To try it out, go to [maps.google.com] and to submit more biking routes or report issues, go here.

Forum discussion at Google Maps Help.

Welcome to MacJournal!

Posted: March 10th, 2010, 7:37am CET by Emily Chang

Tags: Uncategorized

Welcome

To get started, create a new entry by clicking on “New Entry” in the toolbar or choosing “New Entry” from the File menu. You can also drag files from the Finder in to the Sidebar or the Entries list to import them as an entry. Show the Inspector from the View menu to see settings for the current entry, journal, and document.

What’s new in version 5?

All new interface, built for Mac OS X Leopard.
Add any kind of content, not just text. Drag PDFs, QuickTime movies, images, and more into the Sidebar to create an entry with anything on your computer.
Open more than one MacJournal document at a time and save them wherever you want, or just use the default document and never worry about saving.
Create Smart Journals from searches you perform.
Create aliases to entries that you can store in other journals.
Assign each entry a rating, status, and priority, and sort any journal by those values.
Record video from your iSight and attach it to any entry.
Performance enhancements for working with large numbers of entries.

Daily Search Forum Recap: March 9, 2010

Posted: March 10th, 2010, 2:29am CET by rustybrick

Tags: Search Forum Recap

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.

Microdata support for Rich Snippets

Posted: March 9th, 2010, 6:51pm CET by Maile Ohye

Tags: crawling and indexing

Webmaster Level: All

HTML5 is the fifth major revision of HTML, the core language of the World Wide Web. The HTML5 specification includes a description of microdata, a new markup standard for specifying structured information within web pages.

Today, we’re happy to announce support for microdata for use in rich snippets in addition to our existing support for microformats and RDFa. By using microdata markup in your web pages, you can specify reviews, people profiles, or events information on your web pages that Google may use to improve the presentation of your pages in Google search results.

Here is a simple HTML block showing a section of a review of “L’Amourita Pizza”:

Here is the same HTML with microdata added to specify the restaurant being reviewed, the author and date of the review, and the rating:

Microdata has the nice property of balancing richness with simplicity. As you can see, it’s easy to add markup to your pages using a few HTML attributes like itemscope (to define a new item), itemtype (to specify the type of item being described), and itemprop (to specify a property of that item). Once you’ve added markup to a page, you can test it using the rich snippets testing tool to make sure that Google can parse the data on your page.

As with microformats and RDFa, the vocabulary that we support -- including which item types and item properties are understood by Google -- is specified in our rich snippets documentation as well as on data-vocabulary.org. Marking up your content does not guarantee that rich snippets will show for your site; Google will expand the use of microdata markup gradually to ensure a great user experience.

To get started, here are some helpful links:

Written by Siddhartha Chattopadhyay, Kavi Goel, Ramanathan V. Guha, Pravir Gupta, Othar Hansson

Microsoft Aims To Capture UK Search Market Share with Ads

Posted: March 9th, 2010, 1:55pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

There are reports that Microsoft is going to do a huge ad push in the UK in an effort to capture market share there. Currently, Microsoft's Bing has a 3% share of search, whereas Google holds about a 90% share.

Here is the news:

Microsoft is to launch a multimillion-pound TV ad campaign for its search engine Bing, as part of a major marketing push designed to challenge Google's dominance of the UK search market, MediaGuardian.co.uk can reveal.
Microsoft will certainly have its work cut out winning over consumers – it currently holds about a 3% share of the search market while Google controls about 90%.

"This is a big moment – we are taking out our slingshots and taking on Goliath," said the managing director and vice-president of consumer and online at Microsoft UK, Ashley Highfield, adding that he believed Bing met a real desire from both consumers and advertisers.

A WebmasterWorld thread has some comments, here is one:

In the UK I believe there is a large number of people who do not like Microsoft and unless they can hide their identity as far as Bing is concerned, I doubt they will make any great inroads however much money they pour into Bing. And that mention of taking out their slingshots and taking on Goliath is a joke! Who is the real Goliath between the two companies?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google Public Data Explorer, Private Data Soon?

Posted: March 9th, 2010, 1:52pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Other Google Topics

Google announced a new feature named Google Public Data Explorer. What it does is allow you to mash up data from the public sectors into neat charts and graphs.

Google explains:

With the Data Explorer, you can mash up data using line graphs, bar graphs, maps and bubble charts. The visualizations are dynamic, so you can watch them move over time, change topics, highlight different entries and change the scale. Once you have a chart ready, you can easily share it with friends or even embed it on your own website or blog.

A WebmasterWorld thread mocks the announcement, where one member said:

Next up, Google unveils "Private Data Recorder" which makes large datasets of private information easy to explore, visualize and communicate.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." ... "But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And [...] we're all subject, in the US, to the Patriot Act, and it is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities."

Kind of funny - but heck, this isn't too far off, we have Google sourcing traffic data from your mobile device for use on Google Maps traffic layer.

In any event, this is neat stuff.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Do You Use Search Operators To Find Link Opportunities?

Posted: March 9th, 2010, 1:23pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Link Building

A WebmasterWorld thread started by forum administrator, engine, wrote:

A webmaster I spoke to today was after a simple way to find new link opportunities. I mentioned something to him, which was to try using Google's related: feature
It worked for him, does it work for you?

The single response so far said that they do not use search operators anyone. They have other strategies to get links. This one, in particular, said he creates "a list of the biggest, baddest websites in my niche and find a way to get a link from them." Can't you use advanced search operators to discover those sites? I guess you don't need to.

My question to you, do you use search operators, such as related and so on, to find linking opportunities?

Do You Use Search Operators to Discover Link Opportunities?poll

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google's International Women's Day Logo at Google Russia Only?

Posted: March 9th, 2010, 6:34am CET by rustybrick

Tags: Google Search Engine

I was browsing the various Google forums and spotted several complaints in the Google Web Search Help forums and Google Webmaster Help about there being no International Women's Day Doodle on March 8th, yesterday.

There are literally dozens of complaints, some calling Google anti-women. Google is a very women friendly company, I know that. So what is going on, why no Doodle for International Women's Day?

I initially thought Google just doesn't always celebrate every event every day. They are human, they can forget. But then I saw someone mention that a logo was live on Google Russia. It linked to 8 марта, which is March 8 but in the URL parameter it had "&ct=womensday10-hp&oi=ddle", i.e. a doodle for women's day. Here is a picture of the doodle:

What is weird is that I don't see it live on Google.com. But I do see it linked to at google.com/logos/womensday10-hp.gif - so why not on the main Google.com?

In any event, I wrote this post on March 8th and scheduled it for tomorrow. I hope by then, the logo would have been posted. But I won't be able to check until later, because I will be on a plane.

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help and Google Webmaster Help.

Daily Search Forum Recap: March 8, 2010

Posted: March 8th, 2010, 10:00pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Search Forum Recap

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.

Have Google Index Your AJAX, Here Is How

Posted: March 8th, 2010, 1:56pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Google Optimization

In October 2009, Google proposed a way to index AJAX. Back then, all it was, was a proposal, but it was not implemented. However, last week, Vanessa Fox reported that the AJAX feature for Google is now live and well.

I am not going to get into the technical details of how it works again. In fact, you can read about that over here and begin implementing it as soon as you like. We currently have no real feedback on how well it works yet, so I will keep my eyes open on that in the forums.

However, Vanessa Fox did see signs of Google crawling AJAX earlier this year and wrote up some of the pros and cons related to that.

In any event, I may want to give this a try myself on some of our sites and let you know how well it works or not.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Bing: We Know About Your Images & Choose Not To Show Them

Posted: March 8th, 2010, 1:46pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

We rarely ever talk about Bing's outstanding image search, but I spotted a thread today in the Bing Community forums on that topic.

In short, one webmaster complained that Bing had about 50% of the images from his site, when compared to Google. So Google had about 50 pictures from this guys site in their index, coming up for a site command. Bing had about half that.

Brett Yount forwarded the complaint the the image search team at Bing and when he received a response, he copy and pasted it in the forums. This is what they said:

All in all I would say we have ok coverage for this site. We do not include all images that we know about in our index -- it is quite plausible that we decided to not include certain images from this site due to better relative ranking of other sites during crawl time. We should see its image search rank go up (and our coverage of it improve) as the site gets more popular and the images get reused and referred to by more sites.

This is really no different than web search - Google, Bing and other search engines may not consider a page worthy of crawling or indexing due to it's popularity or lack there of. This works the same way with images, according to Bing.

Forum discussion at Bing Community.

Permalink for 'Official_Google_Webmaster_Central_Blog/2010/03/08/Fetch_as_Googlebot_Mobile_and_Claim_your_Sidewiki_comment___added_to_Webmaster_Tools_Labs_'

Fetch as Googlebot Mobile and Claim your Sidewiki comment - added to Webmaster Tools Labs!

Posted: March 8th, 2010, 1:03pm CET by Jonathan Simon

Tags: webmaster tools

Webmaster Level: All

Last October, we launched Webmaster Tools Labs and it has been a huge success. Malware Details have helped thousands of users identify pages on their site that may be infected with malicious code, and Fetch as Googlebot has given users more insight into our crawler.

Today, we're happy to announce two additional Labs features:

Fetch as Googlebot-Mobile
Create your Sidewiki page owner entry

Fetch as Gooblebot Mobile (developed by Ryoichi Imaizumi)

After we launched Fetch as Googlebot, many users with mobile-specific sites asked if we could provide the ability to fetch their pages as Googlebot-Mobile. We thought it was a great idea, and added it as an option to our Fetch as Googlebot feature. We have two mobile options: cHTML (primarily used for Japanese sites), and XHTML/WML.

Create your Sidewiki page owner entry (developed by Derek Prothro)

Sidewiki allows users to contribute helpful information to any webpage using a sidebar in Google Toolbar or a Chrome extension. Webmasters can create a special entry, called a page owner entry, that appears above all entries written by users.

After Sidewiki launched webmasters kept asking, "How can I put a Sidewiki page owner entry on all pages of my site quickly?" With the feature that we're introducing today, you can now create these page owner entries directly within Webmaster Tools for any site you own.

We're really happy about these new features, and hope you enjoy them as much as we do. Let us know what you think!

Written by Sagar Kamdar, Product Manager, Webmaster Tools

Google Help Forums To Change Member Ranking System

Posted: March 8th, 2010, 1:03pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: SEO Forum News

The Google Web Search Help, Google News Help & Google Merchant Center Help forums all are announcing new changes coming to how forum members are ranked in these forums.

Currently, the member titles or levels are from Level 1 to Level 4. Some users get special titles, such as top contributors and/or certified professionals, or even Googler's get a special label, labeling them as Googlers. I do not believe the labels will be changing, but the levels will.

Instead of the 4 levels, there will be 20 levels. Your level will increase based on"

Posting an answer
Having your answer selected as the "best answer"
Having your post rated as helpful
Rating a post (either as helpful or not)
Correctly marking a question or answer as spam.

I believe the levels determine what rights you have in the forums. By rights, I mean, can the profile show an avatar? Can they have clickable links? Stuff like that. Each forum sets the rights per level themselves and how hard it is to reach a level as well. So while the Google News forum might be easier to get to a higher level, it might take longer to post a clickable link.

The levels are by forum, so if you have a Level 15 in the Google Webmaster forum, it doesn't mean you have the same level in the Google AdWords forum.

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help, Google News Help & Google Merchant Center Help.

Yahoo Releases Search Marketing Desktop Just In Time To Kill It

Posted: March 8th, 2010, 12:34pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Yahoo Search Marketing

Yahoo announced they have removed the BETA from the Yahoo Search Marketing Desktop client.

Yahoo Pete, Yahoo's search ad representative, said in both a WebmasterWorld & Search Engine Watch Forums thread:

Just wanted to make you aware that our desktop editing tool, Search Marketing Desktop, is now available to most of our advertisers (eligibility is based on minimum monthly spend and a few other factors). Using SMD, it takes just a few clicks to modify multiple campaigns, ad groups, keywords and ads at the same time.
For more details, please visit our blog [ysmblog.com] or the SMD sign-up page [advertising.yahoo.com]. We're also hosting a free webinar about SMD this coming Thursday--you can sign up through the link in the blog post.

Obviously, towards the end of this year or early next year, this tool will be terminated due to the Microsoft Yahoo deal - but hey, remove the beta label, why not.

For more information about the tool, please see here and for Thursday's webminar click here.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & Search Engine Watch Forums.

SMX's SphinnCon Israel 2010 Recap

Posted: March 8th, 2010, 11:49am CET by rustybrick

Tags: Search Engine Conferences

Yesterday was the second ever SphinnCon event, a small Search Marketing Expo, ever. The first one took place about two years ago in Israel and the second took place yesterday in Israel. The second event was a bit larger than the first in terms of the number of sessions, speakers and attendees. Overall, the networking and educational event was a huge success and we look forward to hosting one again next year.

The even took place in the Jerusalem College of Technology's new lecture rooms. The rooms hard larger capacity than the first time we held the event there but we were still limited to only about 200 or so attendees. In any event, the university was incredibly welcoming to us, they not only partnered with us for this event by giving us a place at their home, but also had their own speakers at the event.

We had sold out the event a couple months prior to yesterday and had a waiting list of about a hundred people, hoping to get a spot. We also had people show up at the door, waiting to see if they can get in. Ultimately, I believe we began letting people in an hour or so after the show began. I honestly believe we could have had 400 or more people at this event. So for next year, I hope to work that out the accommodations with JCT to make this possible.

We started off the event with Avi Kay from the university, who introduced me to give the welcome address. In my five minute welcome, I thanks the sponsors, which included Compucall Web Marketing, Answers.com and Whired Rhino. We had additional requests for sponsors, but we had to turn additional sponsors away at a certain point.

I also thanked all the volunteers who put tons of hours into the event. They either ran around getting the caterer scheduled or printing the conference banners and handouts. Or they dealt with helping formulate the conference agenda and organizing the 30+ speakers. Acted as the front door bouncer and speaker organizers during the event. Or they helped organize the after hours party or provided Israeli hospitality to our out of town speakers. They include, but are not limited to Olivier Amar (@olivier_amar) of WhiteWeb, Ophir Cohen (@ophirco) of Compucall, Eli Feldblum (@Feldbum) of RankAbove, Roi Hildesheimer of Tens Technology, Charlie Kalech (@charliekalech)of J Town, Itay Paz (ItayPaz)of Affilicon, Mayer Reich (@mayerreich) of RankAbove, Branko Rihtman (@neyne) of WhiteWeb, and Gilad Sasson (@algoholic) of Nekuda. So thank you again, from the bottom of my heart.

There were four speakers, at least that I am aware of, that came from outside of Israel, excluding myself, to make it to this event. Vanessa Fox of Nine By Blue came all the way from SMX West (but native to Seattle), with what appeared to be bronchitis. Dixon Jones from Receptional and Magestic SEO flew from the UK to speak about one of his favorite topics, links. Ariel Sumeruk from Click2Customers came from SMX West (but native to South Africa) to speak on paid search. Finally, Tomer Honen from Google, came from the Ireland Google office to represent the Google Webmaster team in Israel. Thank you all for coming from so far to make it to this special event - the Israeli SEM industry deeply appreciated it and you all made a huge impact yesterday.

I would also like to thank all the speakers. I heard some great, unique and fun presentations yesterday. This was event definitely lived up to the quality of the SMX name. Here is a list of our speakers for SphinnCon Israel 2010:

Adir Regev, CEO, GO Internet Marketing
Ariel Ozick, WiredRhino
Ariel Sumeruk, Head of Business intelligence & CTO, Clicks2Customers
Barry Schwartz, RustyBrick, Inc.
Branko Rihtman, Whiteweb
Charlie Kalech, Director, J-Town Productions
Dan Gerstenfeld, Lecturer at JCT & CEO of Interteam
Dan Perach, Co-Founder, PPCPROZ
Daniel Waisberg, Head of Analytics, Easynet
Debra Askanase, Owner, Community Organizer 2.0
Dixon Jones, Managing Director of Receptional Ltd.
Eli Feldblum, CTO & Founder, RankAbove
Gab Goldenberg, SEO ROI
Gil Reich, Answers.com
Gilad Sasson, Search Marketing Analyst at nekuda.co.il
Itay Paz, ItayPaz.net
Menachem Rosenbaum, TENS-Technology
Michal Neufeld, Account Strategist, Google Israel
Miriam Schwab, CEO, illuminea
Naomi Sela, Media Director, Compucall Web Marketing
Olivier Amar, WhiteWeb
Ophir Cohen, CEO Compucall Web Marketing
Oren Shatz, Chairman, SEO Israel Technologies Ltd.
Pavel Israelsky, blogger & SEO expert, AskPavel SEO Blog
Roi Carthy, Writer, TechCrunch
Sam Michaelson, Five Blocks
Shira Abel, Abel Communications
Shlomi Aizenberg, Director of SEM, Easynet Search Marketing
Tomer Honen, Search Quality Strategist, Google
Uri Breitman, TBWADIGITAL
Vanessa Fox, Nine By Blue
Yuli Dasiatnikov, SEO, Compucall Web Marketing

After the presentations, some of the attendees travelled up to Tel Aviv to hit the party at the Dancing Camel. The party was sponsored by 888.com and Gammon Empire. Here is one of my favorite pictures from that event:

Thank you all so much for making this such a successful event! If some of you were unable to make it, there were tons of tweets and pictures of the event. We have some greatest hit recaps and live blogging of the event. Here are some of the pictures from people mentioned above, including a Flash embed from TENS Web Marketing.

Daily Search Forum Recap: March 5, 2010

Posted: March 5th, 2010, 10:00pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Search Forum Recap

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.

(Text) Recap of Weekly Search Buzz :: March 5, 2010

Posted: March 5th, 2010, 1:40pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Search Buzz RoundUp

I am still in Israel, so no video recap this week again, I apologize but here is the text alternative.

Google dropped SearchWiki for Starring search results, which makes me very happy. Yahoo celebrated it's 15th birthday. We posted the March Google webmaster report. Is there such a thing as a seven day indexing delay with Google? Google Webmaster Tools added better notifications, sharing capabilities, Sidewiki control, but had bugs with setting the crawl rate and verification through AdSense. Bing recommends validated HTML for better indexing and dislikes chain redirects. Google is showing "related commercial searches" in the AdWords spot. AdSense publishers from Brazil may not get paid this month. Google Maps has an avoid tolls feature that doesn't fully work every where. Google posted a Doodle for St Davids Day & Vivaldi. Finally, SMX West was this week and Keri and Brian did a great job with the excellent coverage. That was this past week at the Search Engine Roundtable.

Select Topics For This Past Week:

Google Search:

Good, Google Killed SearchWiki, Adds Stars

Yahoo News:

Yahoo's 15th Birthday Logo : March 1, 2010

Google SEO:

Bing SEO:

Google AdWords:

Picture: Google "Related Commercial Searches"

Google AdSense:

Brazilian Google AdSense Publishers May Not Be Paid This Month

Google Maps:

Google Maps Avoid Tolls Feature May Cost You

Google Doodles:

SEM Industry:

SMX West 2010 Live Blogging Recap

Please do subscribe via iTunes or on your favorite RSS reader. Don't forget to comment below with the right answer and good luck!

Google Adds Sidewiki Control to Google Webmaster Tools

Posted: March 5th, 2010, 12:58pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Google Optimization

If you login to your verified web sites at Google Webmaster Tools and go to the "labs" section, you may notice a new feature to help you control your Sidewiki messages.

Here is a picture:

The feature basically let's you control the message you show to users who use that Google Sidewiki within the Google Toolbar. In the past, webmasters had to use the Google Toolbar to add a site owner message. Danny has a great article on how that worked at Search Engine Land.

Now this can be done directly in Google Webmaster Tools. I do not believe Google announced this feature yet.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld& DigitalPoint Forums.

Google Maps Avoid Tolls Feature May Cost You

Posted: March 5th, 2010, 12:48pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Other Google Topics

There are some reports at the Google Maps Help forum that the "avoid tolls" feature for Google Maps driving directions does not always work right.

The issue spans as far as Australia and as close as Pennsylvania.

Brian B., a Googler, from the Google Maps help forum said:

Just wanted to give an update here that there are folks looking into this "avoid tolls" issue, and I'll post an update here when there's a resolution.

I am not sure when or if it has been fixed, but at least Google is aware of it.

Forum discussion at Google Maps Help.

The Google 7 Day Index Delay?

Posted: March 5th, 2010, 12:40pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Google Optimization

There is a new Google theory going around, possibly a penalty or possibly a Google bug - no one is sure. There are a couple threads on the topic, one at HighRankings Forums and Google Webmaster Help.

In short, webmasters are claiming that they will post content and it would take seven full days for Google to index the content and rank it in the search engine. I can't seem to replicate this on any site that I run. But there are several webmasters complaining about the issue.

Is it possible that this type of behavior is some sort of penalty? Can it be a delay based on data center issues? Can it be an indexing bug on certain types of sites or code sets?

There are many examples of URLs and domains claiming they have this issue in the Google Webmaster Help thread.

So what do you think?

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

.TV Domains Can't Set Crawl Rate in Google Webmaster Tools

Posted: March 5th, 2010, 12:27pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Google Optimization

A Google Webmaster Help thread reports that there is an issue with some domains setting the crawl rate in Google Webmaster Tools.

The report came in from an owner of a .TV domain. The person said:

I have registered www.themediagroup.tv and themediagroup.tv with Webmaster tools and I want to change the crawl rate. But I keep getting an error 'Setting is restricted to root level domains only'.

JohnMu from Google confirmed the issue and said:

This looks like a bug -- thanks for bringing it up! If you want to change the crawl rate in the meantime, you can request the change through the problem-report form linked from the "learn more" text.

There is currently no ETA for a fix.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

AdSense Data Link With Google Webmaster Tools Failure

Posted: March 5th, 2010, 12:21pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Google AdSense

A Google Webmaster Help thread has confirmed reports of an issue with authenticated your site via Google Webmaster Tools to allows AdSense's bot to crawl password protected sections of the web site.

One of the steps of authenticating AdSense to allow the AdSense crawler to access pages that are behind a login is to verify your site with Google Webmaster Tools. The data feed to pass over the authentication authorization between Webmaster Tools and AdSense was offline for a few days.

Dennis G. from the Google Webmaster team said:

Our data feed from Webmaster Tools to AdSense slowed down significantly for a few days. It's getting back to normal now; please try again, and post back here if it's not working by tomorrow. Sorry for the inconvenience.

We have not had any real confirmations from publishers that this has been fixed, but hopefully it has.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

SMX West 2010 Live Blogging Recap

Posted: March 5th, 2010, 12:14pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2010 West

The past three days was three days filled with great SEO and SEM related content from the SMX West show. I am happy to say we had two outstanding and giving volunteer bloggers to help bring a piece of the show to you via this site.

Keri Morgret of Strike Models and Brian Ussery of Beu Blog spent a tremendous amount of time and energy live blogging the event. Please give them a huge thank you - and please also thank the SMX conference for allowing us to provide this coverage.

Here is a recap of the sessions we covered. I believe one of the sessions had a technical quirk where all the notes were some how lost, so I apologize.

Thanks Keri and Brain! See you at the next one!

Daily Search Forum Recap: March 4, 2010

Posted: March 5th, 2010, 12:24am CET by rustybrick

Tags: Search Forum Recap

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.

SMX West: Conversion Ninja Toolbox

Posted: March 4th, 2010, 11:30pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2010 West

Below is live coverage of the Conversion Ninja Toolbox from the SMX West conference.

This coverage is provided by Keri Morgret of Strike Models.

We are using a live blogging tool to provide the real time coverage, please excuse any typos. You can also interact with us and while we are live blogging, so feel free to ask us questions as we blog. We will publish the archive below after the session is completed.

Conversion Ninja Toolbox

SMX West: Ask The SEOs

Posted: March 4th, 2010, 10:15pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2010 West

Below is live coverage of the Ask The SEOs from the SMX West conference.

This coverage is provided by Brian Ussery of Beu Blog.

Ask The SEOs

SMX West: Analytics Action Plans

Posted: March 4th, 2010, 10:15pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2010 West

Below is live coverage of the Analytics Action Plans from the SMX West conference.

This coverage is provided by Keri Morgret of Strike Models.

Analytics Action Plans

SMX West: Ask The Search Engines

Posted: March 4th, 2010, 8:15pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2010 West

Below is live coverage of the Ask The Search Engines from the SMX West conference.

This coverage is provided by Brian Ussery of Beu Blog.

Ask The Search Engines

SMX West: PPC Tune Up Clinic

Posted: March 4th, 2010, 8:15pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2010 West

Below is live coverage of the PPC Tune Up Clinic from the SMX West conference.

This coverage is provided by Keri Morgret of Strike Models.

PPC Tune Up Clinic

SMX West: Bringing SEO In House

Posted: March 4th, 2010, 6:45pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2010 West

Below is live coverage of the Bringing SEO In House from the SMX West conference.

This coverage is provided by Keri Morgret of Strike Models.

Bringing SEO In House

Google Grades Themselves on Their SEO Skills

Posted: March 4th, 2010, 1:22pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Google Optimization

The Google Webmaster Central Blog posted a Google SEO Report Card as a detailed PDF document. The document breaks down the SEO report on the following areas:

Search result presentation
URLs and redirects
On-page optimizations

Google said:

The project looked at the main pages of 100 different Google products, measuring them across a dozen common optimization categories. Future iterations of the project might look at deeper Google product web pages as well as international ones. We released the report card within Google last month and since then a good number of teams have taken action on it or plan to.

Tedster said in a WebmasterWorld thread:

What I'd say is it is an ingenious way of spreading the word about SEO basics to a world that is far from understanding them at this point.

Either way, SEO audits for any site can always prove to help SEOs learn a tidbit or two - so read it over, it is fun.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Bing Doesn't Like Redirect Chains, No One Does Really

Posted: March 4th, 2010, 1:15pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

A Bing Community thread talks about Bing's crawlers and indexers ability in following chains of redirects. A redirect chain is when you have two or more URLs that are being redirects to another URL. For example, if I have domain.com/pageA redirect to domain.com/pageB and then from domain.com/pageB to domain.com/pageC - that is a redirect chain.

Search engines typically crawl them fine, if they are done using 301 redirects. But it takes them a longer time to figure multiple redirects in a chain of redirects. I believe most search engines can handle them, but your job as an SEO is to make sure to limit the number of redirects to one or so, so there is not a long chain.

Brett Yount from Bing even said they do not like redirect chains. In the Bing Community, he said:

While we do not like redirect chains, we are able to follow them. But if you have a 302 redirect in the chain--even if there is a 301 after it--expect that the page may not get all of the potential rank or may not get indexed at all.

Forum discussion at Bing Community.

Good, Google Killed SearchWiki, Adds Stars

Posted: March 4th, 2010, 1:09pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Google Search Engine

Google announced they have added stars to the search results for sites you have starred in the past. Google said:

With stars, you can simply click the star marker on any search result or map and the next time you perform a search, that item will appear in a special list right at the top of your results when relevant. That means if you star the official websites for your favorite football teams, you might see those results right at the top of your next search for [nfl]. Here's what the new "Starred results" feature looks like:

Here is my picture:

I don't always say, "I told you so" but here, I got to say it. When Google made SearchWiki the default, I thought they were crazy. As part of this announcement, Google said:

Stars in search replace SearchWiki. In our testing, we learned that people really liked the idea of marking a website for future reference, but they didn't like changing the order of Google's organic search results. With stars, we've created a lightweight and flexible way for people to mark and rediscover web content.

I really knew it and I am glad Google made the decision to remove this feature. Kudos.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

March 2010 Google Webmaster Report

Posted: March 4th, 2010, 12:45pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Google Optimization

Our monthly Google webmaster report based on the ongoing WebmasterWorld thread is now pretty large enough for me to give you an status update. The thread is actually pretty long now, which is not always the case this early in the month. Here are the key points discussed in the current thread:

Site command showing less results (less pages being indexed)
Crawl rates in Webmaster Tools go flat for some
Fluctuations on search results for the positions 2 and 3
Very old Cache dates

Here are the key topics we covered webmaster related to Google in the past month:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Vivaldi Gets A Google Doodle

Posted: March 4th, 2010, 10:20am CET by rustybrick

Tags: Google Search Engine

If you visit Google today, you will see a special logo for Antonio Lucio Vivaldi. Vivaldi was born today, 332 years ago, on March 4, 1678. He was a Venetian baroque composer and priest, as well as a famous virtuoso violinist and nicknamed il Prete Rosso ("The Red Priest").

Here is the Google Doodle for Vivaldi:

So far there are no complaints about the Google Doodle in the Google Web Search Help forums, but I suspect there will be. Yes, we often have lots of controversy around Google Logos or Doodles as Google refers to them.

It is a very nice and artistic Doodle, don't you think?

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

Picture: Google "Related Commercial Searches"

Posted: March 4th, 2010, 10:00am CET by rustybrick

Tags: Google AdWords

A few days ago, we reported on rumors of Google Showing Commercially Related Keywords In AdWords Positions. Well, it turns out to be true. A long time friend from the industry, Darrin Ward sent me a screen shot of this image the other day. Here it is:

As you can see, in the position of where Google's search ads go, the AdWords ads, are "related commercial searches." I guess the query searched for here is not commercial oriented enough for Google to validate showing search ads for, so they are pushing people to be more commercially oriented when searching.

What do you think of this?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

SMX West: Optimizing Your Content on YouTube

Posted: March 4th, 2010, 1:30am CET by rustybrick

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2010 West

Below is live coverage of the Optimizing Your Content on YouTube from the SMX West conference.

This coverage is provided by Keri Morgret of Strike Models.

Optimizing Your Content on YouTube

SMX West: Free Ways to Market on Facebook

Posted: March 3rd, 2010, 10:15pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2010 West

Below is live coverage of the Free Ways to Market on Facebook from the SMX West conference.

This coverage is provided by Keri Morgret of Strike Models.

Free Ways to Market on Facebook

Daily Search Forum Recap: March 3, 2010

Posted: March 3rd, 2010, 9:02pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Search Forum Recap

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.

SMX West: Paid Search Bullseye

Posted: March 3rd, 2010, 7:30pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2010 West

Below is live coverage of the Paid Search Bullseye from the SMX West conference.

This coverage is provided by Keri Morgret of Strike Models.

Paid Search Bullseye

Brazilian Google AdSense Publishers May Not Be Paid This Month

Posted: March 3rd, 2010, 1:19pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Google AdSense

Found via a WebmasterWorld thread, a Google AdSense Brasil thread has a note from Marcelo from the Google AdSense team that some Brazilian publishers won't be paid this month.

The translated version of what he said is:

Due to a problem in the payment process, some publishers will not be paid in February, but their gains have accrued and paid at the end of March. As some publishers may have seen, we send an email to all those affected about what happened. Please be advised that this was an exceptional occurrence, and not repeated.
We appreciate your understanding and patience.

This has happened before with publishers both in the U.S. and outside of the U.S. It has also happened to mass numbers of publishers and individual publishers.

So if you do not get paid this month, this is why.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & Google AdSense Brasil.

Bing Recommends W3C Compliant Code For Better Indexing

Posted: March 3rd, 2010, 12:46pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

A Bing Community thread has a Microsoft Bing representative telling SEOs that W3C complaint code can help with indexing content.

Brett Yount, the program manager at Bing Webmaster Center, said:

Clean code can help quite a bit in indexing on all the SEs. If you are just starting out, I suggest finding a W3C compliant template.

We all know that Google said time and time again that validated code does not get a ranking boost, but they never said it wouldn't help with indexing and crawling. Clean code, which can be validated through the W3C's tools, can make for more efficient crawling and possibly faster indexing.

This is at least according to Bing.

Forum discussion at Bing Community.

SMX West: The Current State Of Social Search

Posted: March 3rd, 2010, 1:15am CET by rustybrick

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2010 West

Below is live coverage of the The Current State Of Social Search from the SMX West conference.

This coverage is provided by Brian Ussery of Beu Blog.

The Current State Of Social Search

SMX West: Supercharging your Descriptions with Sitelinks

Posted: March 3rd, 2010, 1:15am CET by rustybrick

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2010 West

Below is live coverage of the Supercharging your Descriptions with Sitelinks from the SMX West conference.

This coverage is provided by Keri Morgret of Strike Models.

Supercharging your Descriptions with Sitelinks

SMX West: Google's Personalized Search Revolution

Posted: March 2nd, 2010, 11:45pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2010 West

Below is live coverage of the Google's Personalized Search Revolution from the SMX West conference.

This coverage is provided by Brian Ussery of Beu Blog.

Google's Personalized Search Revolution

SMX West: Keyword Research: Beyond the Ordinary

Posted: March 2nd, 2010, 11:45pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2010 West

Below is live coverage of the Keyword Research: Beyond the Ordinary from the SMX West conference.

This coverage is provided by Keri Morgret of Strike Models.

Keyword Research: Beyond the Ordinary

SMX West: Not Your Father's AdWords

Posted: March 2nd, 2010, 10:00pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2010 West

Below is live coverage of the Not Your Father's AdWords from the SMX West conference.

This coverage is provided by Keri Morgret of Strike Models.

Not Your Father's AdWords

Daily Search Forum Recap: March 2, 2010

Posted: March 2nd, 2010, 9:30pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Search Forum Recap

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.

SMX West: Mobile Paid Search Ads

Posted: March 2nd, 2010, 7:30pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2010 West

Below is live coverage of the Mobile Paid Search Ads from the SMX West conference.

This coverage is provided by Keri Morgret of Strike Models.

Mobile Paid Search Ads

SMX West: Keynote Conversation: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer

Posted: March 2nd, 2010, 5:50pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2010 West

Below is live coverage of the Keynote Conversation: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer from the SMX West conference.

This coverage is provided by Brian Ussery of Beu Blog.

Keynote Conversation: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer

Sharing the verification love

Posted: March 2nd, 2010, 5:47pm CET by Sean Harding

Tags: webmaster tools

Webmaster Level: All

Everything is more fun with a friend! We've just added a feature to Webmaster Tools Site Verification to make it easier to share verified ownership of your websites.

In the past, if more than one person needed to be a verified owner of a website, they each had to go through the meta tag or HTML file verification process. That works fine for some situations, but for others it can be challenging. For example, what if you have twenty people who need to be verified owners of your site? Adding twenty meta tags or HTML files could be pretty time consuming. Our new verification delegation feature makes adding new verified owners a snap.

Once you're a verified owner of a website, you can view the Verification Details page (linked from Webmaster Tools or the Verification home page). That page will show you information about the site as well as a list of any other verified owners. At the bottom of the list of owners, you'll now see a button labeled "Add a user...". Click that, enter the user's email address, and that person will instantly become a verified owner for the site! You can remove that ownership at any time by clicking the "Unverify" link next to the person's email address on the Details page.

There are a few important things to keep in mind as you use this feature. First, each site must always have at least one owner who has verified directly (via meta tag or HTML file). If all of the directly verified owners become unverified, the delegated owners may also become unverified. Second, you can only delegate ownership to people with Google Accounts. Finally, remember that anyone you delegate ownership to will have exactly the same access you have. They can delegate to more people, submit URL Removal requests and manage Sitelinks in Webmaster Tools, etc. Only delegate ownership to people you trust!

We hope this makes things a little easier for those of you who need more than one person to be a verified owner of your site. As always, please visit the Webmaster Help Forum if you have any questions.

Sean Harding, Software Engineer

Google's SEO Report Card

Posted: March 2nd, 2010, 5:02pm CET by Maile Ohye

Tags: feedback and communication

Webmaster Level: All

How many of Google's web pages use a descriptive title tag? Do we use description meta tags? Heading tags? While we always try to focus on the user, could our products use an SEO tune up? These are just some of the questions we set out to answer with Google's SEO Report Card.

Google's SEO Report Card is an effort to provide Google's product teams with ideas on how they can improve their products' pages using simple and accepted optimizations. These optimizations are intended to not only help search engines understand the content of our pages better, but also to improve our users' experience when visiting our sites. Simple steps such as fixing 404s and broken links, simplifying URL choice, and providing easier-to-understand titles and snippets for our pages can benefit both users and search engines. From the start of the project we also wanted to release the report card publicly so other companies and webmasters could learn from the report, which is filled with dozens of examples taken straight from our products' pages.

The project looked at the main pages of 100 different Google products, measuring them across a dozen common optimization categories. Future iterations of the project might look at deeper Google product web pages as well as international ones. We released the report card within Google last month and since then a good number of teams have taken action on it or plan to.

We hope you find our SEO Report Card useful and we'd love to hear your feedback in the comments below or in the Webmaster Central Help Forum. And if you'd like to do your own SEO tune up, a good place to start is by reading our free SEO Beginner's Guide.

Written by Brandon Falls, Adi Goradia, and Charlene Perez, Search Quality Team

Google's St Davids Day Logo Insults Welsh

Posted: March 2nd, 2010, 10:13am CET by rustybrick

Tags: Google Search Engine

Yesterday, Google has a special logo up on one of their local portals to celebrate St Davids Day. Here is a picture of the cute and fun looking doodle (logo).

But one person found the doodle insulting and distasteful. He said, "its like celebrating the Hanukkah with a picture of Auschwitz."

He goes on to explain:

While it is very nice that Google celebrates St David's Day by adapting its front page, its very insulting that it uses a castle built by the English king who wanted to prove his power over the Welsh!
The castle looks very similar to Caernarfon castle, which was one of a series built by Edward 1. While most people know that Wales is full of castles, it is not the Welsh that built them - it was the English!

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help forums.

Google Explaining Why Some Sites Do Not Qualify For AdWords

Posted: March 2nd, 2010, 10:02am CET by rustybrick

Tags: Google AdWords

A WebmasterWorld thread has an updated discussion on the mass banning of AdWords advertisers that has seemed to slow in the past month or so. It appears from the updated conversation that Google is now going to specific advertisers and not banning them outright, but now lowering their quality score and emailing them warnings.

Not only that, Google is being very specific and detailed about the issues with the destination pages, as to why they do not belong on the Google AdWords network. One advertiser said:

I had received a QS 1 on some campaigns relating to three sites and had put the campaings (three sites) in pause mode.
The mail said clearly that paused ads also violated the landing page guidelines. The LPQ team had reviewed same and found the sites unacceptable.

So the first thing I did , was DELETE all the campaings with QS 1 on the keywords without any delay and wrote back saying that I had deleted all suspect campaigns and would be grateful if I was not banned for life. I did mention that my e comm site was also QS 1 which did seem a little odd..

Surprise.. surprise.. the LPQ team wrote back with a detailed explanation as to WHY the three sites were given a QS 1 ! Was I surprised at this major upgrade in their communications skills.

Not only is Google giving out warnings to some advertisers before banning them, they are also giving some of these advertisers detailed tips on why they are getting these warnings. He goes on to explain:

It seems almost any site with adSense on landing page is immediatley suspect and is categorized as MFA.. yes.. they actually called it MFA.. I did point out the argument reg.. unique content etc.. but it seems that the LPQ team has total DISCRETION w.r.t. what is MFA and what is not.. They can decide what is OK and what is not....
They gave me a chance to respond.. They told me categorically I can advertise my sites, if I remove all the ads.. ( I said no thanks). I deleted the campaigns instead. Relying on organics.

Supposedly, this is what many advertisers are seeing in their most recent communications with Google AdWords representatives.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yes, Google Has Rich Snippet Product Info

Posted: March 2nd, 2010, 9:48am CET by rustybrick

Tags: Google Optimization

Google has been supporting Rich Snippets for a while now. Most recently, they added a more types of markups to add to your HTML in order for Google to provide richer descriptions in the search results.

One of those additions is product data and a WebmasterWorld thread now has discussion around it. There is a lot of technical detail on the Products microformats or RDFa labels at Google.

Here are the fields allowed:

brand
category
description
name (fn)
price
photo
url

Forum discussion WebmasterWorld.

Yahoo's 15th Birthday Logo : March 1, 2010

Posted: March 2nd, 2010, 9:27am CET by rustybrick

Tags: Yahoo Search Engine

March 1, 2010 was Yahoo's 15th birthday. 15 years - wow! Yahoo has a special doodle up for the day, a birthday cake. Here it is:

Yahoo has several blog posts about the birthday. One from Jerry & David, the founders, plus they posted a Twitter challenge for the birthday.

Happy Birthday Yahoo!

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Hat tip to Michel.

Daily Search Forum Recap: March 1, 2010

Posted: March 1st, 2010, 10:00pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Search Forum Recap

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.

Is your site hacked? New Message Center notifications for hacking and abuse

Posted: March 1st, 2010, 4:00pm CET by Michael Wyszomierski

Tags: feedback and communication

Webmaster Level: All
As we crawl the web, we see bad content inserted on to thousands of hacked sites each day. The number of sites attacked is staggering and the problem is only getting worse. Hackers and spammers target and successfully compromise any sites they can - small personal sites, schools and universities, even multinational corporations. Spam attacks against forums and user content sections of sites, though not as shocking, are even more widespread.
You may have read in an earlier post that we've begun notifying webmasters about new software versions via Webmaster Tools to help protect their sites. Continuing with our effort to provide more useful information to webmasters, we're happy to announce that we'll soon be sending even more notifications to the Message Center.
Starting this month, we will notify more webmasters of more potential issues we've detected on their websites, including:

Spammy or abused user-generated content
Abused forum pages or egregious amounts of comment spam
Suspected hacking

These notifications are meant to alert webmasters of potential issues and provide next steps on how to get their sites fixed and back into Google's search results. If it pertains to a hacking or abuse issue, the notification will point to example URLs exhibiting this type of behavior. These notifications will run in parallel with our existing malware notifications.
A notice of suspected hacking, for example, will look like this:

We've been notifying webmasters of suspected hacking for years, but a recent upgrade to our systems will allow us to notify many more site owners that have been hacked. We hope webmasters will find these notifications useful in making sure their sites are clean and secure, ultimately providing a better user experience for their visitors. In the future, we may extend this effort even further to include other types of vulnerabilities or abuse issues.
Just as before, webmasters who have not already signed up for Webmaster Tools may still do so and retrieve previously sent messages within one year of their send date. And if you don't want to miss out on any important messages, remember to use the email forwarding feature to receive these alerts in your inbox.
If you have any questions, please feel free to ask in our Webmaster Help Forum or leave your comments below.
Posted by Jessica Wong and Jason Morrison, Search Quality Team

Google Adds "Nearby" Search Option

Posted: March 1st, 2010, 11:01am CET by rustybrick

Tags: Google Search Engine

Google announced they added a new search refinement to "show options" section. The refinement allows you to filter results by results relevant to being nearby your location. Google explained:

Location has become an important part of the way we search. If you're a foodie looking for restaurant details, food blogs or the closest farmer's market, location can be vital to helping you find the right information. Starting today, we've added the ability to refine your searches with the "Nearby" tool in the Search Options panel. One of the really helpful things about this tool is that it works geographically — not just with keywords — so you don't have to worry about adding "Minneapolis" to your query and missing webpages that only say "St. Paul" or "Twin Cities." Check it out by doing a search, clicking on "show options" and selecting "Nearby."

I personally do not see it, maybe because I am in Israel right now. But here is a picture from the Google blog:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google API Bug: Traffic Estimate For proximityTargets

Posted: March 1st, 2010, 10:52am CET by rustybrick

Tags: Google AdWords

For those heavy Google AdWords API users and developers, did you know that the proximityTargets do not work properly for traffic estimation?

A Google AdWords API Help thread has Eric Koleda from the Google AdWords API Team who confirmed the issue. He said:

There is a known issue where proximityTargets aren't processed correctly for traffic estimation. I don't believe this problem will be fixed in the near term, so I would recommend you look into other geo targeting options.

So Google is aware of the issue, but clearly it is not a priority to fix.

Forum discussion at Google AdWords API Help.

Google Showing Commercially Related Keywords In AdWords Positions?

Posted: March 1st, 2010, 10:46am CET by rustybrick

Tags: Google AdWords

A somewhat hard to read thread at WebmasterWorld describes Google as testing showing a related keywords type of box in the position where Google would show their AdWords search ads.

From what I understand is that the initial query was not commercial enough to drive search ads. Google offered up related keywords that seemed to be more commercially oriented. If someone refines their search by clicking on those related keywords, Google would then show an search ad for that commercial intended query.

Tedster, the WebmasterWorld administrator, tries to make heads and tails of this as well. He said:

So in the usual Adwords position, instead of ads you saw links to related Google searches -- searches that happen to have commercial results. In other words, those "related" links themselves aren't ads at all except for the fact that Adwords might be present on the SERP you get if you do click.
Google tests a lot of things - sounds like a rather complex one.

I cannot find it now, but I believe a long time ago, I do remember seeing screen captures of related keywords shown above and to the right of the search results, above the search ads.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

How Does One Remove Info From Google's Chile Earthquake Person Finder

Posted: March 1st, 2010, 10:37am CET by rustybrick

Tags: Other Google Topics

A few days ago, there was a tremendous tragedy in Chile, a massive earthquake. Google put together a tool to help family and friends locate missing people due to this earthquake. The tool is located at [chilepersonfinder.appspot.com].

At this tool, you can either submit a case of a missing person or search for a case of a missing person. There are currently about 35,700 records, or missing people in the database, some accounted for and some not.

Two people asked how they can remove a person they added to the list, after that person has been found? The thread of these questions are at a Google Webmaster Help thread. The people ask:

I would also like to know how to delete my personal information now that my person has been found, even if the profile remains up.

John from Google said you can update the status in the application under "Status of this person" and set it to perhaps "I have received information that this person is alive" and provide the information that you have. But that is not exactly what these people want to do, they want to delete their personal information, as the person who submitted the information.

John said:

I'll check with the team to see what can be done in a situation like that.

So far, there is not update on how to do that.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

"0 Indexed URLs" In Google News Sitemaps Bug

Posted: March 1st, 2010, 10:32am CET by rustybrick

Tags: Google Optimization

A Google News Help thread has some reports of publishers reporting that their Google News Sitemaps are reporting "0 Indexed URLs" in Google Webmaster Tools.

I too saw this issue and I thought that perhaps there was a bug in my sitemap file. But Google did not report any issues with my sitemap file, plus, I saw my articles were being indexed within Google News. So I figured, it was a reporting glitch in Google Webmaster Tools. It appears I was right.

Inbal from the Google News team said in a Google News Help thread:

Just a heads-up that the issue with Google News Sitemaps is showing "0 Indexed URLs" is a known issue. This number does not reflect the accurate number of the URLs indexed from your site. The correct number is the number of all the articles you've submitted within your sitemap minus the articles that show News-specific crawl errors under Diagnostics.

I assume this error is being fixed, but there is currently no estimate time for the fix.

Forum discussion at Google News Help.

Daily Search Forum Recap: February 26, 2010

Posted: February 26th, 2010, 10:00pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Search Forum Recap

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.

(Text) Recap of Weekly Search Buzz :: February 26, 2010

Posted: February 26th, 2010, 10:04am CET by rustybrick

Tags: Search Buzz RoundUp

This week, I am currently in Jerusalem, Israel, so I won't be producing a video. Here is a text recap instead of the video recap.

The European Union has opened an investigation to make sure Google isn't stepping over their boundaries by penalizing potential competitors in the web results. Google said they will launch the Caffeine index in the upcoming months. Google had a Webmaster Tools bug in the index URL report. Google may verify your web site in Webmaster Tools without you specifically requesting it. Google has updated the Jazz interface slightly and more people are seeing it. MySpace (and also Facebook) is now in Google's real-time search results. Bing is having trouble with their spiders again. Twitter users don't click on AdSense. Google AdWords has a new "target" CPA feature. AdWords is closing their old API in less than 60 days. Yelp was sued for allegedly removing negative reviews. SMX West is next week, I won't be there, but we got the coverage for you. That was this past week at the Search Engine Roundtable.

Select Topics For This Past Week:

Please do subscribe via iTunes or on your favorite RSS reader. Don't forget to comment below with the right answer and good luck!

Google May Verify Your Sites in Webmaster Tools Without You Clicking Verify

Posted: February 26th, 2010, 9:47am CET by rustybrick

Tags: Google Optimization

A Google Webmaster Help thread has a report that someone noticed their site was verified in Google Webmaster Tools without them actually clicking the "verify" button. How did this happen?

Well, first of all, the www version of the site was verified. The non-www version they did not manually click verify for. So, Googler, Dennis G. explained in the thread:

Sometimes we can tell that you have a site verified even if it does not show up in your site list in Webmaster Tools. Usually this is because you verified the site a while ago and removed it from the list, or because the verification bot detected that its the same site (common for www/non-www URLs) and had the same verification tokens in place. That latter check doesn't happen in most cases any more, so you're more likely to have to explicitly add and verify the non-www site. You can then delete the site from Webmaster Tools if you like; we'll know you're still verified. On the other hand, sometimes there is useful feedback about your "other" site, so it's not a horrible idea to leave it there and check on it every now and then.

Pretty neat, at least I think so.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Twitter Users Don't Click on Google AdSense Ads?

Posted: February 26th, 2010, 9:37am CET by rustybrick

Tags: Google AdSense

A WebmasterWorld thread has Google AdSense publishers talking about how well traffic from Twitter converts in terms of clicks on AdSense ads.

The overall consensus from the thread is that Twitter users are too cool to click on AdSense ads. One person even kept tabs on that, saying:

Created about 500 targeted follows, got 120 followers, this converted in about 40 visits to my sites and 1 click.

I can tell you that for both this blog and my personal blog, which receives traffic from Twitter in the top ten of their referrals, that traffic does not convert into the top ten referrals for AdSense revenue. Let me explain again. For this site, Twitter is within the top 5 sources of traffic to this site. However, if I sort that traffic by top referrer by revenue earned with AdSense, Twitter is not in the top ten list.

Do you agree?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google 302 Redirects Secure iGoogle To Unsecure iGoogle

Posted: February 26th, 2010, 9:29am CET by rustybrick

Tags: Other Google Topics

If you visit https://www.google.com/ig, it will redirect you to [www.google.com], without the https for secure. Yes, Google is making sure no one can access the secure version of iGoogle.

Here is a server header check from SEO Consultants:

#1 Server Response: https://www.google.com/ig
HTTP Status Code: HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Location: http://www.google.com/ig
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
Date: Fri, 26 Feb 2010 08:29:08 GMT
Server: igfe
Content-Length: 221
X-XSS-Protection: 0
Redirect Target: http://www.google.com/ig

There are several complaints about not being able to access the secure version of iGoogle at the Google Web Search Help forums. Paul from Google explained why this is the case. In short, the gadgets on the secure iGoogle were not always secure, which led to confusion. Here is the detailed explanation:

As you noticed, we've recently started redirecting any users who attempt to visit an iGoogle page using "https" to an "http" page. The "https" on the iGoogle page that some users visited may have caused these users to believe that any activity performed on their page was protected by https, when in fact only gadgets that are built to support https provide the corresponding encryption protection to users. We made this change to clarify that only activity using gadgets that support https is transmitted over a secured https connection on iGoogle.
For example if you're using Google's official iGoogle gadget for our free email service, Gmail, you can continue to use it with https protection unless you have turned off the default setting on your Gmail settings page.

Valid excuse, but what would be nice (I know it is more work) would be to give gadget developers a way to create https enabled apps. If they are enabled, they work on the secure iGoogle, if not, Google explains why they are not working on the secure iGoogle.

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

Yelp Sued Over Accepting Money For Removing Negative Reviews

Posted: February 26th, 2010, 9:21am CET by rustybrick

Tags: Local Search

A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion around the allegations that Yelp has been burying negative reviews in exchange for advertising dollars.

MediaPost writes:

A California veterinary center has sued review site Yelp for allegedly promising to bury bad reviews in exchange for purchasing $3,600 worth of advertising on the site.
"Yelp frequently exercises its control over the Yelp.com listing application to modify business listing pages to the advantage of businesses that purchase Yelp advertising subscriptions, and the disadvantage of those that decline," Cats and Dogs Animal Hospital owner Gregory Perrault alleges in a complaint filed in federal district court in the central district of California.

Greg at Search Engine Land writes:

Two class action law firms have filed suit in Los Angeles federal court claiming that Yelp has attempted to “extort” money from small businesses by offering to remove negative reviews in exchange for payment.
The truth will out of course but I would be stunned if these claims were based in truth rather than the frustrations and misunderstandings of the plaintiff in this case.

I hope Greg is right - we covered reports of this via the forums back in November 2008. Back then, I was told it:

Reviews are purely algorithmic and that only one positive review can be emphasized. Reviews can come down if the person writing the review closed his/her account or the account was terminated due to violations. A third reason why reviews would be hidden is due to suspect behavior; the review is removed from the actual business but not from the reviewer's profile page.

I guess time will tell us if this is true - unless this is settled out of court and no one really finds out the truth.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Report: Google To Launch Caffeine Index In Upcoming "Months"

Posted: February 26th, 2010, 9:10am CET by rustybrick

Tags: Google Optimization

Search Engine Land's Matt McGee reports Google will be launching the Caffeine index update, the one many believe is already live, in the upcoming months.

He received a statement from Google saying:

We expect to roll it out to all data centers over the coming months.

Why didn't it launch after the holidays? What is the hold up with Caffeine launching? Google sent a statement about that:

We run lots of tests with this big a change to our infrastructure. We want the new system to meet or exceed the abilities of our current system, and it can take time to ensure that everything looks good.

Again, many people will swear it is live. It is live, but only in one of the many Google data centers. So just be patient and hopefully it will go live before Bing powers Yahoo fully.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Google AdWords Now Allows Only VIPPS & CIPA Pharmacy Ads

Posted: February 26th, 2010, 8:58am CET by rustybrick

Tags: Google AdWords

Google announced they are now allowing certain pharmacy and drug ads on their search results. Google AdWords will only accept advertisements from VIPPS and CIPA certified pharmacies, and that these pharmacies can only target ads within the countries where they are accredited.

Of course, for those running ads on the topic of pharmacy and drugs and health, that may have been running ads in the realm of those topics - may also be hit by some algorithm that blocks these ads.

A WebmasterWorld thread has at least one complaint from an advertiser:

Once again, Google used an automated process to "clean house" it appears.
I had no idea that I ran an "Online Pharmacy"

To be honest, I always thought that Google disallowed all pharma ads - I guess I was wrong?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Daily Search Forum Recap: February 25, 2010

Posted: February 25th, 2010, 10:00pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Search Forum Recap

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.

Google Jazz Slightly Updates It's Look

Posted: February 25th, 2010, 1:55pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Google Search Engine

Google has been experimenting with the Google Jazz Interface (I know Google doesn't call it Jazz internally) since November of last year. It appears that Google has slightly updated that look from what we originally saw.

A Google Blogoscoped Forums thread has a picture from one user of the new Jazz look.

Here is the new look:

Here is the old Jazz look:

They are very similar but there are slight differences.

In the thread, they also share how you can get this user interface on your Google. Here is how:

Go to Google.com (Press Go to Google.com if you are brought to a localized version of Google, this won't work for localized versions evem if you change the code to .google.ie or whatever instead of .google.com)
Put
javascript:alert(document.cookie="PREF=ID=496cfd992ab9f273:
U=a77c3a4da3815c1d:LD=en:CR=2:TM=1260896352:
LM=1267013388:DV=8atQZBunt08B:GM=1:IG=1
:S=1ebLUyXkRkBnJMYi;path=/;domain=.google.com")

into your addressbar (NOT the Google Search Box) and press return.

Searches on Google.com should now use the new layout.

Forum discussion at Google Blogoscoped Forums.

Hat tip to Michel.

Daily Search Forum Recap: February 24, 2010

Posted: February 24th, 2010, 10:00pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Search Forum Recap

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.

Google Webmaster Tools Bug In Indexed URLs Report

Posted: February 24th, 2010, 12:26pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Google Optimization

There was a brief time where Google Webmaster Tools was reporting the wrong number of indexed URLs for a web site. JohnMu from Google confirmed the issue in at least two Google Webmaster Help threads. He said:

We recently had a small issue with the indexed URL counts in Webmaster Tools for some sites. This should be resolved now and back to normal for most sites that experienced this issue (it might take a day or two to catch up everywhere).
Thanks for your patience!

So if you feel your index count is wrong, it certainly may be wrong.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Note: I just landed in Jerusalem, after an 11 hour flight. I am typing as fast as I can, so please excuse typos, grammar and any non-sense.

Wired Article Implies Google Caffeine Is Live But It's Not

Posted: February 24th, 2010, 12:21pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Google Optimization

An article at Wiredhas a ton of details about how Google's search algorithms, index, crawlers and so on evolved over the years. I highlighted many of the points in my Search Engine Land write up on it.

A WebmasterWorld thread quotes a piece on the Google Caffeine index, asking if that means it is live.

"The most recent major change, codenamed Caffeine, revamped the entire indexing system to make it even easier for engineers to add signals."

One webmaster asked, "Does this mean that Caffeine is now live:)?"

We thought it was live dozens of times, but nothing really has changed since then. I fully believe that when it goes live beyond one data center, Google will let us know. I just don't think that the quote above can fully mean it is live. I believe Search Engine Land will post a statement from Google on this topic later today - but as far as I know, it is not live.

Meanwhile, reading the Wired piece is both fun and educational.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Note: I just landed in Jerusalem, after an 11 hour flight. I am typing as fast as I can, so please excuse typos, grammar and any non-sense.

60 Days Left on Old Google AdWords API

Posted: February 24th, 2010, 12:16pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Google AdWords

There is only 60 days left to migrate off the old AdWords API and to version v200909.

Jason for the AdWords API team posted a thread at the AdWords API Forum warning API users once again about this upgrade.

Jason said:

Last month we reminded you that on April 22 most v13 services will be turned off. In 60 days, the following v13 services will no longer be accessible (read more over here)
- CampaignService
- AdGroupService
- CriterionService
- AdService
- InfoService
- KeywordToolService
- SiteSuggestionService

Jason Shafton, Product Marketing Manager

Forum discussion at AdWords API Forum.

Note: I just landed in Jerusalem, after an 11 hour flight. I am typing as fast as I can, so please excuse typos, grammar and any non-sense.

Xerox Wants To Copy Some of Google's Money

Posted: February 24th, 2010, 12:09pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Other Google Topics

I covered the news that Xerox is suing Google & Yahoo over an alleged patent infringement. In short, Xerox has two patents they feel Google and Yahoo is using, in some form, and they want money.

Xerox is known for their copy machines, by the way and that business, as I understand it, is not doing too well. For more about the law suit, see my article linked to above.

Here are comments from WebmasterWorld on the lawsuit:

There are two sides to every side of the story.

Wreaks of Xerox trying to do a cash grab.

xerox ... isn't that a printer company?! ;-)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Note: I just landed in Jerusalem, after an 11 hour flight. I am typing as fast as I can, so please excuse typos, grammar and any non-sense.

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