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
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Emily Chang (347 unread)
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Search Engine Roundtable
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Search Engine Roundtable (6 unread)
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Daily Search Forum Recap: April 14, 2009
Posted: April 14th, 2009, 11:00pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Search Forum Recap
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How Google Treats Affiliates in the Web Search Results
Posted: April 14th, 2009, 3:24pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Google Optimization
A detailed Google Webmasters Help thread has discussion around how Google perceives affiliates and how they need to go above and beyond to warrant ranking well in the Google search results.
Googler, JohnMu, answers one affiliate, as to why he is not ranking as high as he would have liked:
I believe one of the issues that you might want to work on is to make sure that your site provides unique and compelling content to the web. It's important for us that the site not only contains "rewritten" descriptions and articles, but that it actually provides something more than just "different words" for the same content. In other words, given the choice between your site and the company providing the products, what could your site offer to make Google want to show your site instead?
John then links this webmaster over to a Google document on Affiliate programs for webmasters. The document explains how you can make your site stand out from the other affiliates:
- Affiliate program content should form only a small part of the content of your site.
- When selecting an affiliate program, choose a product category appropriate for your intended audience. The more targeted the affiliate program is to your site's content, the more value it will add and the more likely you will be to rank better in Google's search results and make money from the program. For example, a well-maintained site about hiking in the Alps could consider an affiliate partnership with a supplier who sells hiking books rather than office supplies.
- Use your website to build community among your users. This will help build a loyal readership, and can also create a source of information on the subject you are writing about. For example, discussion forums, user reviews, and blogs all offer unique content and provide value to users.
- Keep your content updated and relevant. Fresh, on-topic information increases the likelihood that your content will be crawled by Googlebot and clicked on by users.
Does this mean you must do this to rank your affiliate site well? Not necessarily but for the long term, it might be best to follow these strategies.
Forum discussion at Google Webmasters Help.
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Video SEO: Host Internally or on YouTube?
Posted: April 14th, 2009, 3:11pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Search Engine Optimization
A HighRankings Forum thread asks if one should host videos on their own server or host them on YouTube.
I do a lot of videos here in my Search Buzz Video Recaps, which are weekly digests of what we covered here over the course of the week, so I have some experience with this topic.
Let me start off by saying that Google and most search engines have a very tough time understanding the content within the video. Yes, they are testing out speech recognition and other factors, but right now, these search engines don't rank videos based on the words spoken in a video. They determine the relevancy of the video based on meta data, content around the video, links to the video, the video title and so on.
That being the case, duplicate content is not really much of an issue in videos then it is with standard content on the web. Why do I say this? I publish our videos both on YouTube and on my own server because I am not currently worried about duplicate content in the video search space.
YouTube videos simply rank incredibly well. I also want my videos hosted internally so that I can publish an iTunes feed and gain subscribers not only to YouTube but also to my video feed, which can be subscribed to on your favorite RSS reader or via iTunes or other video/podcast readers.
If you had to make a decision on where to host your videos, I would tell you to host them both on YouTube and on an internal server (I use Amazon S3).
Here is my process for syndicating my videos:
- Upload video to YouTube and write descriptive title and description, plus link to my blog via YouTube
- Upload video to S3
- Create blog post, embed both YouTube video and a link to the raw video on S3.
- Create video XML feed file for iTunes and other podcast readers, which includes the YouTube video in description, but also S3 download URL for readers
- I make sure the XML file contains description, title, S3 URL, YouTube embed, link to blog post and other meta data
You can see my latest video on April 3rd, you can subscribe directly on iTunes or via your favorite RSS reader on watch it on YouTube or on my blog. Yes, I give a bunch of options and they all work well.
Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.
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Google Creates Local Business Center User Guide
Posted: April 14th, 2009, 3:07pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Other Google Topics
Google has created a comprehensive user guide for the local business center. You can via the user guide over here.
It is broken down in seven sections:
- Getting started
- Adding a listing
- Adding more than 10 listings
- Verifying a listing
- Your Local Business Center homepage
- Editing or removing a listing
- Other features
Here is the user guide's introductory video:
Forum discussion at Google Maps Help.
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April 2009 Google Webmaster Report
Posted: April 14th, 2009, 3:03pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Google Optimization
Every month we report on a monthly WebmasterWorld thread that discusses the current state of the Google web search index. This month, the WebmasterWorld thread has very little to report. If you want to see last month's report click here.
Instead, I thought I highlight the most important posts here over the past couple weeks, in relation to Google's web search changes.
- Google Gets Generic on Local Web Search Queries
- Google Releases Major Blog Search Blogroll Algorithm Update
- Google Blog Search Updates Link Query Algorithm
- See Google "Classic" Sitelinks In Action (One Line Sitelinks)
- Google Still Showing Different Results Based on Query Case
- April Fools Google PageRank Update
- Google Adds More Search Refinements & Detailed Snippets
- Google Pushing More Search Options On Searchers?
Those are some of the more important Google related updates over the course of the past few weeks.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
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Google Blog Search Updates Link Query Algorithm
Posted: April 14th, 2009, 2:57pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Google Optimization
A few weeks ago, we reported that Google released a major blog search update. That update fixed the issue with Google Blog Search finding content in the blogroll and thus showing irrelevant search results. It directly impacted the "blogroll detector" aspect of the algorithm.
Today I learned via a Google Groups thread that Google has finally updated the link operator aspect of that algorithm in Blog Search. That means, if you come up in the blogroll as a link, you won't be shown in a link operator on Blog Search every time that blog writes a new blog post.
Jeremy Hylton explains:
We deployed our latest improvements for blogroll detection late last week. The change affects link: queries. We now drop most or all of the links that occur in the blogroll or in other parts of the page that are just boilerplate. I'm sure there are lingering problems, but our internal metrics suggest that its a big increase in quality for link: queries. We've got a few more improvements in the works, but I think this recent change fixed the biggest part of the problem.
As always, please send me specific examples where things have gone wrong. We'll do our best to fix them.
The link command and blogroll issue with Google Blog Search has been an issue since November 2008 and I hope this update resolves it. Honestly, over the past day or so, it does seem to have been removing many (what I call) false positives in the search results.
Forum discussion at Google Groups.