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
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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 (7 unread)
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Daily Search Forum Recap: April 6, 2009
Posted: April 6th, 2009, 11:00pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Search Forum Recap
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Tracking Search Bot Activity
Posted: April 6th, 2009, 5:08pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Tracking Conversion Measurements
Back in the day, tracking how bots accessed your site was a bit of a crave. Now, you don't hear about it much. The old Google Analytics, aka Urchin, had a section for displaying bot activity on your site. It did this because Urchin also analyzed your log files, in addition to the method Google Analytics uses to track based on JavaScript. Since most spiders don't load JavaScript, popular analytical software, such as Google Analytics, won't track the bot activity.
To track bot activity, you need to use analytic software that analysis your log files. There are other methods, including writing your own database script to track all bot activity. Back in the day, Darrin Ward (founder of SEO Chat, who sold it years ago) created a script that looked for bot activity and stored the data in a MySQL database. I forgot the name of the software, but I bet it is still out there now or there are plenty of alternatives.
If you don't want to instal anything but you still want to track bot activity, there are ways.
In Google Webmaster Tools, you can go to the "Crawl Stats" section under "Statistics" and get data from Google on how active GoogleBot is on your site. Google will show you data and time based graphs for:
- Number of pages crawled per day
- Number of kilobytes downloaded per day
- Time spent downloading a page (in milliseconds)
Here is a screen shot of our graphs:
If spiders are not crawling your site, you might have to worry. Otherwise, this is often a metric not discussed often by SEOs.
Forum discussion at HighRankings Forums.
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Google's Tips on Unranking For Keywords
Posted: April 6th, 2009, 4:00pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Search Engine Optimization
Reverse search engine optimization - unranking for keyword or keyword phrases you work well for. Why in the world would you want to rank less in the search engines? Well, people have their reasons. We actually covered this topic twice in the six plus years of writing about SEO topics:
A recent Google Webmasters Help thread has a question from an SEO blogger named Gab Goldenberg of SEO ROI. He said he ranks too well for [advertising presentation] in Google and wants to not rank as well.
Why does he want to rank lower? He feels that his page that ranks well for advertising presentation is not what people are really looking for. This leads to those readers being dissatisfied with what they see and also leads to a high bounce rate. Some believe bounce rates influence rankings of the entire site, so it might be detrimental the rest of the site to have a high bounce rate on a specific page (I don't believe that). But the main reason Gab wants to rank lower is because he only wants happy readers.
Googler, JohnMu, offered advice on how to rank lower in Google. John said:
If you rank for a phrase that you don't want to rank for, there's not much you can do other than make sure that your content does not include this phrase. Adjusting the description meta-tag and the title element to give more information about what you are really writing about can be helpful as well, although this may not affect your ranking for that phrase. Adding a "not" qualifier won't really help to change the ranking, but it might help users who are looking for something particular.
One trick you could try is to replace individual letters with alternate glyphs that look very similar. For instance, you could replace a lower case "L" with the number "1" (or use cyrillic characters that look very similar, eg "e"/"е", "r"/"г", "i"/"і", etc.). While this would make it harder for us to understand your content (say if someone wanted to use Google Translate to read it in their own language), it would likely also prevent your content from ranking for those words.
Simply, complete unoptimize that page. Or try to target the page towards a more relevant keyword phrase.
Forum discussion at Google Webmasters Help.
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Getting PageRank Without Getting Links
Posted: April 6th, 2009, 3:42pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Link Building
A WebmasterWorld thread has interesting discussion around the topic of pages earning Google PageRank with little or no links to those pages.
The discussion was started by a webmaster who asked, how can his page have a PageRank score of four, when Google webmaster tools reports the page has zero links? The obvious answer is that Google is not reporting all the links yet and it is very possible the page has links, but just not being reported yet. But that might not be the full answer.
WebmasterWorld administrator, Tedster, feels that Google gives "mom and pop" sites an artificial PageRank boost, in some cases. Let me quote Tedster:
My assumption is that this unusual PR boost is one of the ways that Google helps "mom and pop" sites compete - something that Matt Cutts made a side comment about on his blog a few years ago. He never said WHAT Google does specifically, only that they do a few things.
It seems like many top names in the thread believe in this "artificial PageRank boost." The question is, what is the artificial part? Is it the score shown, how the score is made up, or how Google sees the page in terms of trust and popularity?
In any event, do you believe in the artificial PageRank boost? Take the poll below:
Is There a Google Artificial PageRank Boost?
( online polls)Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
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Bad Idea: Google AdSense Twitter Units: Twitter Streams in AdSense
Posted: April 6th, 2009, 3:29pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Google AdSense
On Friday, I reported on an AdAge article that showed Google was testing incorporating Twitter streams in AdSense units. The first test, which was confirmed by Google as a limited beta, would show TurboTax's Twitter stream in AdSense units, likely on pages about taxes.
If you scan the recent @turbotax communication via Twitter, you can see why I am nervous about this implementation. If it was purely marketing speak, showing promotions or helpful tax tips, then I would understand it. But as you can see from the stream, TurboTax is having disconnected conversations with other Twitter users. If you see the latest five Tweets from TurboTax in an AdSense unit on a page on taxes, you would have no clue what the ad meant - in this case.
I have asked Google to provide a sample of what this ad unit looks like, but they did not comply. They did give me this statement:
To provide more marketing opportunities for our advertisers to reach users in moments that are relevant and useful to them, we are currently testing different ways that allow advertisers to better update their ads in real time. We are currently in a limited test with a small number of advertisers and publishers.
I understand that Intuit wants to grow a following for @TurboTax on Twitter, but is this the best way to do it? A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion around this news. Many are skeptical, but skeptical for the wrong reasons. I am fairly confident I understand Twitter well, I have been on it very early, before most people and I am fairly active on it, under @rustybrick, but using it in this manner, at least the way I understand how it is being used, seems off.
Problems with showing your last five or so Tweets in an AdSense unit?
- The Tweets may not be relevant to the content of the page
- You may display disconnected conversations that the public won't be able to understand
- Many people still are clueless as to what Twitter is
- Followers are great, but will it lead to sales (many cases, yes, it will)
In this case, I am very skeptical that this type of ad unit will work for Google and advertisers. I am sure publishers won't like to see someone else's Twitter stream on their pages.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
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Ultimate URL Shortening Guide
Posted: April 6th, 2009, 3:22pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Link Building
Danny Sullivan's Analysis: Which URL Shortening Service Should You Use? has an excellent overview of the various URL shortening services available. In Danny's write up, he goes over about 15 different services and rates them based on how they handle the following:
- Redirect
- Tracking
- Client Support
- Domain Chars
- Custom URL
- Sharing
- Path Chars
- Total Chars
- Country
- Service
There is some very good discussion around the piece at Sphinn and in the comments area in the article.
Forum discussion at Sphinn.
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Google AdSense Bug Still Holding Payments For Publishers
Posted: April 6th, 2009, 3:15pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Google AdSense
It has been about five to six months now of us reporting that Google has a bug that holds payments to some publishers. In fact, many publishers have been waiting months to be paid and some seem to still be waiting.
A Google AdSense Help thread has confirmation from Googler, Obair, who is still manually removing the hold status on publisher accounts.
It is sad to see that publishers are still experiencing major slow downs in being paid. In fact, if they don't reach out to Google via the help section, they may never get paid. The issue goes back months and months, but was initially confirmed in January 2009.
Forum discussion at Google AdSense Help.