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.
Feeds
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Google
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Official Google Webmaster Central Blog (325 unread)
SEO
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Emily Chang (347 unread)
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Search Engine Roundtable
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Search Engine Roundtable (9 unread)
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Daily Search Forum Recap: December 22, 2008
Posted: December 22nd, 2008, 10:00pm CET by Tamar Weinberg
Tags: Search Forum Recap
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Search Engine Land Does Major Revamp: Becomes More News Formatted
Posted: December 22nd, 2008, 6:15pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: Search Engine Industry News
Search Engine Land has a new look as of this morning. The new look really makes the site look more "news" oriented. Stories are no longer in chronological order all the time. We (I am the news editor) have the ability to control which sections the content shows up and for how long. This is great flexibility that Danny, Greg, Matt and the rest of the team will use.
In addition, my favorite feature is that readers can comment directly at Search Engine Land. This way, if you hate what I wrote, you can blast me right there. Instead of having to submit the story to Sphinn, or sending me hate mail. This should make for good times.
There is also a new premium membership, which I recommend you sign up for. You get a lot in return and it is your way at giving back to the community. I personally do this at many sites, including WebmasterWorld and SEOmoz, amongst others.
Huge kudos to the team who worked for months and months to get the new design, features and format live. It totally is impressive and makes me want to redo the Search Engine Roundtable - which would mean scrap Movable Type for a custom built CMS (I will never go with WordPress).
Anyway, I hope you like the new features - I sure do!
Forum discussion on the new design and features at Sphinn.
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2008 Holiday Season Logos From Google & Search Engine Roundtable
Posted: December 22nd, 2008, 3:54pm CET by Tamar Weinberg
Tags: Search Engine Industry News
Last night, those of us who celebrated Chanukah lit the first candle. This means it's holiday season officially! Google is also building momentum with their holiday festivities with two new images:
And given that there are 8 days of Chanukah, we're doing something special at Search Engine Roundtable. Every night around the time the Daily Search Rountup comes out, we'll have a new theme. Here's our first logo which is live until later this afternoon:
Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums and Cre8asite Forums.
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Google Image Search Enhancement: Search By Style
Posted: December 22nd, 2008, 3:46pm CET by Tamar Weinberg
Tags: Other Google Topics
The Official Google Blog announced on Friday that a new option is available for searchers: the ability to search for images by a specific style. For example, line art is obviously not the same as a photograph -- and now Google can distinguish this for you.
Here's a screenshot. Click for a larger size:
As you can tell, you can now drill down to news content, faces, clip art, line art, and photo content.
I like. Do you?
Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.
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Google AdSense Hiccup Reported on December 19
Posted: December 22nd, 2008, 3:38pm CET by Tamar Weinberg
Tags: Google AdSense
On Friday, a number of Google AdSense publishers reported that AdSense was down. The cause was unknown and Google officially never actually volunteered more information about it.
Google AdWordsAdvisor was able to provide the publishers with information -- mostly ensuring them that Google was prioritizing the issue -- but there is no further information on behalf of Google's actual AdSense team.
AdWordsAdvisor does say, though, on a completely side point, that "In the AdWords side of the world, though, the stats that advertisers see in their account are delayed by up to three hours as a matter of course, under normal circumstances." We're not entirely sure how this factors into reporting on Google AdSense's side, but this is interesting information regardless.
Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.
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Google's Search Quality Team Says They Don't...
Posted: December 22nd, 2008, 2:19pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: Google Search Engine
In response to an upset webmaster's post in the Google Webmaster Help forums, Googler JohnMu wrote down four things that some people suspect Google of doing, which he says he has never seen since working at Google. These include:
- Googlers changing crawling, indexing or ranking of content they don't agree with. As a data point, check the search results for http://www.google.com/search?q=jew as well as the explanation at http://www.google.com/explanation.html.
- Large companies being able to encourage Google to change crawling, indexing or ranking of a site they don't like. Yes, they contact us, but no, they don't get any results.
- A site being damaged with regards to crawling, indexing or ranking, by someone else on the outside. I've seen sites run into troubles for getting hacked, but I've never seen them run into trouble because of something someone other than the owner did outside of the site.
- A spam report being taken seriously if the site itself was abiding our Webmaster Guidelines. 42,000 spam reports wouldn't change a thing, regardless of who filed them, if the site is compliant.
Do I believe John here? Yes, 100%. Do I think Google has ever done any of these without John knowing about it? I think it is possible. To be fair, John does add:
Obviously, any of these things could theoretically happen, but I haven't seen it happen, and I don't believe it's something a webmaster has to worry about. If it ever became obvious to Googlers that one of these things happened, it would be resolved immediately -- so if you feel that it has happened, please take the time to submit a spamreport with the details. We take these reports very seriously.
Do you think Google is 100% honest about these topics?
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
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Google Search Not Working For Some On Mobile Safari (iPhone)
Posted: December 22nd, 2008, 2:12pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: Google Search Engine
Google recently optimized for the hundredth time, the Google Search experience on the iPhone and also Android. But it seems like ever since the upgrade, many iPhone and iPod Touch users are having issues searching at Google on mobile Safari.
A Google Mobile Help discussion thread has bug reports from several iPhone/iPod Touch users complaining they can no longer conduct searches in Safari on Google.
Rebooting the devices did not help.. Supposedly, some users have noticed a JavaScript bug on line 21. The error is "TypeError: undefined value".
I tried this on my iPhone and it worked fine for me. So hopefully it is now fixed.
Forum discussion at Google Mobile Help.
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Christmas & Holiday 2008 Google PageRank Update?
Posted: December 22nd, 2008, 1:57pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: Google PageRankSERP Updates
Over the weekend, I have noticed several threads mentioning updates to Google's Toolbar PageRank scores. The reports are not as widespread as a typical Toolbar PageRank update warrants, which leads me to ask, is this a true Toolbar PageRank update or did Google conduct a Toolbar PageRank penalty for sites not playing nice with their terms of service?
Necessary Disclaimer: Google Toolbar PageRank is a visual indicator that has no direct impact on ranking well at Google. The Toolbar PageRank is often months outdated and can be very confusing to new SEOs on how it matters. So just be warned.
We have threads at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums and Google Webmaster Help all discussing updates to Toolbar PageRank.
Our last coverage of such an update was in the first week of October, which was a possible rollback of the Google Rosh Hashanah 5769 PageRank Update. Since then, it has been pretty quiet on the Toolbar PageRank front.
Last week, Google did update the link reports in Google Webmaster Tools.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums and Google Webmaster Help.
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Google Blog Search Fixes Link Issue But Asks For Additional Help
Posted: December 22nd, 2008, 1:50pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: Google Optimization
In early November, I reported an issue with Google Blog Search scanning blogrolls, which was then confirmed later on. The confirmation told us that Google would fix the issue, where Google Blog Search would continue to index and use more than just what RSS feed, but would try to exclude blogrolls and navigational elements of the blog.
The issue was, if you conducted a link command in blog search, such as link:www.seroundtable.com (which I do all the time to find new posts commenting on posts I write here), Google Blog Search started to show blog posts not mentioning your posts. Why? Cause many blogs out there have this blog on their blogroll and Google considered that post to have a link within their post, but all it was, was a link in the Blogroll.
Since then, Google Blog Search has really made big improvements in this area. I have witnessed it first hand. But it is not perfect and Google knows that. Google is asking for examples of issues with the link command in Blog Search in the Google Groups area. So if you see issues, go to Google Groups and let Google know.
What has Google changed specifically? Jeremy Hylton of Google Blogsearch said:
The basic approach is to analyze each blog to look for text and markup that is common to all of the posts. Usually, these comment elements include the blogroll, any navigational elements, and other parts of the page that aren't part of the post. This approach works well for a lot of blogs, but we're continuing to improve the algorithm. The search results should ignore matches that only come from these common elements. The indexing change to implement it is deployed almost everywhere now.
How is that for transparency?
Forum discussion at Google Groups.