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  Daily Search Forum Recap: January 21, 2009

  Posted: January 21st, 2009, 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.

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  Google Maps Says 3 Hour Drive To Go From Staten Island to Staten Island

  Posted: January 21st, 2009, 2:18pm CET by rustybrick

  Tags:  Local Search  

  Let's say you wanted to drive from the zip code 10302 to 10308, which are both in Staten Island, New York. If you plugged that into Google Maps, Google would tell you, you have to be prepared for a three hour or more commute.

  For some unknown reason, a bug in Google Maps, thinks the zip code 10308, which is owned by Staten Island, is in Schenectady, in upstate New York.

  Adam from the Google Maps team confirmed the issue in a Google Maps Help forum thread. He said:

  Turns out this bug is an artifact of a known issue we're working to resolve, so if you haven't reported this yet to Tele Atlas please don't expend the effort.

  So, if you are driving to 10308, be careful when using Google Maps.

  Forum discussion at Google Maps Help.

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  GetListed.org Brings Much Needed Tool for Local Search Marketers

  Posted: January 21st, 2009, 1:59pm CET by rustybrick

  Tags:  Local Search  

  How often to do you hit yourself on the head and say, "why didn't I think of that?" That is how many felt when Patrick Sexton and David Mihm launched GetListed.org. GetListed.org is an incredibly useful and easy to use tool to quickly see how your local search listings play in the local search space.

  Let me show you. First you enter in a business name and zip code. Then GetListed.org polls Google, Yahoo, Live and Best of the Web's local engines to see how your listings are doing in those engines. Here is a look at RustyBrick's local search reach:

  Then you can drill down deeper to see a better overview:

  Also, you can see a to do list, all your reviews and the details of your listing by those four engines. I suspect GetListed.org will continue to add more engines over time.

  Matt McGee posted his review at Search Engine Land and the Sphinn discussion around the new tool is excellent. This tool is an excellent idea and I am glad it was created.

  Forum discussion at Sphinn.

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  Google Blog Search May Not Discover Your New Blog Posts

  Posted: January 21st, 2009, 1:53pm CET by rustybrick

  Tags:  Google Search Engine  

  A Google Groups thread has confirmed reports from Jeremy Hylton of Google, that Google blog search, in some cases, has issues finding and returning new blog posts in Google Blog Search.

  Jeremy explained that earlier on, there was an issue with Google crawling certain blogs. But then at the end of December they fixed that issue. Now, it appears there is an issue with the same type of blogs, where Google is missing random new blog posts from those blogs.

  Here is how Jeremy put it:

  We are having some problems with your blog that we're still debugging. We have most of your recent posts in the index. At the moment, it looks like the two most recent ones are not getting returned. There was an earlier problem that caused us to stop crawling your blog entirely. We fixed that just before Christmas. I was just checking on your blog to confirm that the fix is working when I noticed that we're again missing a few posts. We'll definitely look into it.

  I believe this all started in early November, when Google changed how they index blogs. In early December they vowed to fix it and then in late December, Christmas time, they thought they fixed the bulk of it. However, there are still issues that Google is aware of, including the issue mentioned above.

  Forum discussion at Google Groups.

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  Google Confirms Not Paying Some AdSense Publishers

  Posted: January 21st, 2009, 1:49pm CET by rustybrick

  Tags:  Google AdSense  

  There is an extremely large thread at Google AdSense Help group with publishers complaining that they have not received payment this month from Google.

  Jennifer, a Google AdSense representative, confirmed that Google did not pay some publishers due to a bug of some sort. She said:

  We've been monitoring this thread and I can confirm that we have an issue on our back end that is preventing some publishers from seeing payment holds on their accounts. We are working with the YouTube team to get this issue resolved as quickly as possible. In the meantime, we have been working to contact affected publishers individually. Thank you all for posting in the forum. The faster we can aggregate data on a possible bug, the faster we can fix it, and forum threads like this are hugely helpful in surfacing these issues.

  We appreciate your patience, and I assure you that we hear you and are taking this issue seriously.

  Jennifer makes it sound like this is just impacting YouTube partners, but I am not too sure about that.

  Google is known to have made many mistakes paying publishers in the past.

  Forum discussion at Google AdSense Help.