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
5540 items (5015 unread) in 3 feeds
Google
(325 unread)
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Official Google Webmaster Central Blog (325 unread)
SEO
(4690 unread)
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Emily Chang (347 unread)
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Search Engine Roundtable
(4343 unread)
Search Engine Roundtable (6 unread)
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Daily Search Forum Recap: December 23, 2008
Posted: December 23rd, 2008, 10:03pm CET by Tamar Weinberg
Tags: Search Forum Recap
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Search Engine Roundtable Is Five Years Old - December 2nd
Posted: December 23rd, 2008, 8:30pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: Blog Administration
I totally forgot to write a special article for this site's fifth birthday, which took place on December 2, 2008. We have been writing here for five years! We have written over 9,000 articles, and over 2,300 just this year alone. That makes for over 8 articles per work day this past year and just about seven articles per work day over the course of these past five years. I could not have done it with out our contributors and a special thank you to Tamar Weinberg. This article will be my 6,270th piece at the Search Engine Roundtable - hard to believe. But it is not all about the numbers.
This year we were voted the top SEO blog and also the top conference coverage in the industry. A huge honor, which means a ton to me. I also started doing a weekly SEO video podcast, which I am pretty committed to and gets a nice number of subscribers. Yes, that also takes a lot of time, but I am enjoying it right now - so I will keep it up. Oh and I experienced waiting in line for the iPhone, the night before it went on sale - something I likely would not have done, if I wasn't blogging for five years.
I thought instead of sharing the most visited articles written here over the past year, I thought I go through each post and pull out the most important ones, at least to me. Below, you will find these posts grouped as logically as possible. For me, it helped me look back at the year in search and see what really happened and how significant each change was.
So continue reading below by clicking through:
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Google AdWords API Sandbox Database Refresh Postponed Two Weeks
Posted: December 23rd, 2008, 3:31pm CET by Tamar Weinberg
Tags: Google AdWords
On December 17, we announced Google's plans to push out a data refresh for the Sandbox due to some issues and bugs that users have been encountering.
The initial Sandbox refresh was scheduled for December 19th. Apparently, though, Google has announced that the Sandbox update has been postponed for about 2 weeks. No further information is available.
Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.
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Are Corporations Capitalizing on Google AdWords in the Poor Economy?
Posted: December 23rd, 2008, 3:13pm CET by Tamar Weinberg
Tags: Google AdWords
A WebmasterWorld member is disappointed that he as a Google AdWords advertiser is unable to bid with any reasonable price on any ads because corporations, as he sees it, are greedy and are raising bid prices. He is frustrated that these corporations are not interested in lowering their bids to a profitable level and thus his ads are not appearing given that some big company is driving up the costs.
But is that really what's happening? Perhaps there are corporations that don't care to lower their bid costs, just like the guy says. But perhaps there are corporations that fired their Google AdWords consultants or Internet Marketing type people and they simply forgot to regularly review the Google AdWords accounts. That means there are hundreds of thousands of wasted dollars on ads because the companies are not evolving with the times. That's more likely in this scenario.
What do you think?
Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.
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Poll: I Want A Link In The Top Paragraph Please
Posted: December 23rd, 2008, 1:46pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: Link Building
A couple weeks ago, we ran a poll asking SEOs and link builders where they would prefer their external links show up on a page. Well, the results are in and as expected, most SEOs would like that link in the first paragraph of content on a page.
Here is a breakdown of the hundred or so responses:
:: In First Paragraph of Context said 62 respondents or 63.27%
:: Link On All Pages said 8 respondents or 8.16%
:: Menu said 8 respondents or 8.16%
:: On 5 - 10 Pages said 8 respondents or 8.16%
:: In Last Paragraph of Context said 7 respondents or 7.14%
:: On Links Page said 2 respondents or 2.04%
:: Footer said 1 respondents or 1.02%Then we had two "other" responses, one saying "any link" at all is great and the other said "content of page."
Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.
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Google's Malware Warnings Can Be Subdomain or Subfolder Specific
Posted: December 23rd, 2008, 1:35pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: Other Google Topics
No one likes it when they get malware on their computers due to an infected site. So that is why Google tries to warn searchers when a site may have malware on it. But Google tries to be as specific as possible, when it comes to malware warnings.
In fact, when possible, Google will report malware issues on subdomains or subfolders only and leave the root domain alone. JohnMu of Google said in a Google Webmaster Help discussion thread:
We try to keep malware labels as specific as possible based on our data. If we can see that it's limited to a specific subdomain, we'll do that. If we can recognize that it's limited to a specific subdirectory, even better. The general problem is that it's often not trivial to find the most specific part of a site that is affected by malware - and with CMSs as they are there's often no clear folder-type structure that we can work with.
That is why a specific blogspot.com blog can be reported as having malware, whereas the main domain will be safe.
Safe Browsing Diagnostic page for blogspot.com
What is the current listing status for blogspot.com?
This site is not currently listed as suspicious.Part of this site was listed for suspicious activity 227 time(s) over the past 90 days.
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.