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  Daily Search Forum Recap: April 3, 2009

  Posted: April 3rd, 2009, 11:00pm CEST 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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  FeedBurner Subscriber Reports Bug: Major Drops In Counts

  Posted: April 3rd, 2009, 3:19pm CEST by rustybrick

  Tags:  Tracking Conversion Measurements  

  FeedBurner is having a reporting failure yet again. I have received at least four emails and several IMs since April 1st from concerned bloggers that their FeedBurner subscribers numbers have dropped. I personally saw this myself, where FeedBurner is reporting only 8,000 or so subscribers to this site, when in fact, we normally have 20,000+.

  The issue? Googler Matt S. confirmed the issue in a Google Groups thread, saying that FeedBurner is having problems retrieving the accurate numbers from Google Feedfetcher. Google notified the Google Feedfetcher team and they hope it is corrected soon. Here is a screen shot showing the huge discrepancy between March 31st and April 2nd, in terms of the numbers reported from Google Feedfetcher, typically people's most popular RSS syndication service. The difference is 9,842 subscribers versus 18 subscribers.

  March 31st:
  

  April 2nd:
  

  Here is Matt's post:

  If you compare individual days (e.g., March 31 vs. April 1) in Analyze > Feed Stats > Subscribers, I'm guessing most of the missing subscribers are from Google Feedfetcher. We've notified that team of the temporary drop in subscribers we're seeing reported by them and will work with them to resolve the issue.

  These issues happen fairly often, so when you see it, don't worry. It is very rare that you would lose 50% of your subscribers overnight, even if you did touch the Queen of England.

  Forum discussion at Google Groups.

• 

  Google Docs Fixes Unpublished Bug

  Posted: April 3rd, 2009, 3:13pm CEST by rustybrick

  Tags:  Other Google Topics  

  Christine from the Google Docs team posted an announcement in the Google Docs Help discussion area that two bugs have been fixed.

  • The first bug was that published Google spreadsheets were becoming unpublished by themselves. This should now be resolved.
  • The second bug was that 'Share with the world'/''Let anyone view without signing in' did not work, now it does.

  Google Docs is very often plagued with bugs, some minor and some serious. The last major security bug shared private documents with others. Yet, Google and the US Government wants you to use Google Health to share your private medical history with others.

  Forum discussion at Google Docs Help.

• 

  Google AdWords API Suffering From 502 Server Errors

  Posted: April 3rd, 2009, 3:07pm CEST by rustybrick

  Tags:  Google AdWords  

  AdWords API users out there, you may have noticed that Google is returning errors for some of your operations and calls. Reports came in on April 1st at a Google Groups thread, which has been confirmed by Google.

  Googler, Jeff Posnick from the AdWords API Team said:

  I'm sorry that you're running into this. Our core engineering team has noticed a recent spate of 502 errors in our Production services, and are taking steps to isolate and resolve the problem.

  502 "Bad Gateway" errors are most common in our environment when one of our backend servers has trouble communicating with another internal server, and is normally not something that you as an end user can do to avoid. There shouldn't be any connection to whether you're running your code in the debugger or not, though if you code hits a different set of backend servers in between calls you may or may not see the errors.

  There have not been many complaints. That can be because of three possible reasons:

  1. This is not a major issue and is only impacting a few people.
  2. Few people use this feature
  3. People have not yet looked at their automated reports to see these errors yet.

  Forum discussion at Google Groups.

• 

  Is There a Keyword Phrase Specific Penalty?

  Posted: April 3rd, 2009, 2:58pm CEST by rustybrick

  Tags:  Spam  

  Throughout my many years (makes me sound old) in the search industry, I have heard about many filters and penalties, including a filter or penalty to prevent a site from ranking well for a specific keyword phrase. For example, if I want to rank well for big blue pineapple chair and I create a page about a big blue pineapple chair but Google never ranks me for that term, I may consider my site to be penalized from ranking well from that specific term.

  A HighRankings Forum thread has a couple webmasters asking about such a filter. They say they rank well for everything they want, but not for a single keyword phrase that they once ranked well for. The question they asked does a search engine, such as Google, penalize a site for a specific keyword phrase?

  Here is a poll, let me know what you think about this topic:

  Does Google Penalize For Specific Keyword Phrases?
  ( surveys)

  As you can see from the poll, I have two Yes answers and one No. You can select all or none. Yes algorithmically means that Google has a filter that is automated. Yes Manually means Google does filter for keyword phrases, but a human does it. No, means, no, Google does not penalized in this way.

  I'll vote but I won't tell you what my thoughts are until after I post the results.

  Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.