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: June 15, 2009
Posted: June 15th, 2009, 11:00pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Search Forum Recap
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Google AdSense Publishers: What Do You Call Yourself?
Posted: June 15th, 2009, 3:48pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Google AdSense
A WebmasterWorld thread is asking AdSense publisher what they call themselves. They said, often when they met people or speak to people, they are not sure what to say when people ask them what they do. Are they are publisher? Maybe a webmaster? How about an online marketer?
I am sure on many levels, AdSense publishers are all of the above. So I decided to create a poll to allow you publisher to answer anonymously what you would call yourself. Feel free to pick more than one choice or add "other."
AdSense Publishers: What Is Your Title?(opinion)
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
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NY Post "Fear Grips Google" Mocked By SEOs
Posted: June 15th, 2009, 3:37pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Other Google Topics
The NY Post, in NY Post style, went with an over the top title for their latest article about Google, which read Fear Grips Google. Here is the introductory paragraph:
You'd think nothing would get under the skin of search giant Google.
But co-founder Sergey Brin is so rattled by the launch of Microsoft's rival search engine that he has assembled a team of top engineers to work on urgent upgrades to his Web service, The Post has learned.
The NY Post has a history of going a bit (to say the least) over the top with their reporting. Mashable said, "the Post has a knack for spin, and while Google may not be gripped by fear, we’d think it only prudent for the search leader to consider what threat, if any, Bing poses to its dominant market position... The bottom line: we’d be more concerned if Google was not paying attention to new competitors."
It doesn't appear that SEOs and Webmasters are fooled by the title either.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
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Bug: Google Sitemaps "Invalid XML Tag" Warning
Posted: June 15th, 2009, 3:32pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Google Optimization
If you are currently seeing a warning in Google Webmaster Tools that reads, "Invalid XML tag," don't worry. There are many webmasters reporting the issue and Google has confirmed it is a bug. Google said in an announcement post:
Some Blogspot / Blogger sites have reported seeing a warning "Invalid XML Tag. This tag was not recognized. Please fix it and resubmit. Parent tag: author." This message is just informational and does not affect our parsing of your RSS feed for Sitemaps, nor does it affect your site's crawling and indexing.
I personally saw this error presented on a site that was not Blogspot or Blogger on Thursday or Friday and the error is now gone.
Googler, JohnMu said:
As mentioned in the other thread, you can safely ignore this message. It's more of a warning and the URLs in your feed will still get processed normally. No need to worry :-))
Forum discussion at two Google Webmaster Help.
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Google Removes File Size From Search Results Page
Posted: June 15th, 2009, 3:23pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Google Search Engine
It appears that Google has quietly removed the file size figure from the search results. I am not sure when this happened, it could have been a year ago, but it did happen.
A year and a half ago I took a screen capture of a search result for my company rustybrick and it had the file size of the page listed in the search results.
Now, the same search, does not return the file size:
A WebmasterWorld thread recently noticed this go missing from the search results. Most people are in favor of removing the file size label, being that many people have broadband connections these days. They rather see other information listed in the search results, such as if the site is in flash or if there is video or PDFs on the page, as opposed to the file size of a given web page.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
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Bing's Instant Translation Gets Webmaster Approval
Posted: June 15th, 2009, 3:16pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Microsoft MSN Search
Bing added instant translation as a smart answer or instant answer to their search. For example, if you search for how do you say search in spanish you get the answer "búsqueda."
Google also has some form of translation OneBox results, but they are not as discoverable as Bing. That means, you can't just type, how do you say something, or translate X for me.
Even more importantly, Webmasters approve of how this instant translation works in Bing. Not only is the translation pretty good, the way the translation shows up in the search results are "neat."
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.