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
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Official Google Webmaster Central Blog (305 unread)
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Search Engine Roundtable
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Daily Search Forum Recap: July 15, 2009
Posted: July 15th, 2009, 11:00pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Search Forum Recap
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CNET Calls Link Exchanges Poor Man SEO
Posted: July 15th, 2009, 3:42pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Link Building
Link exchanges: The poor man's SEO from CNET discusses the pros and cons of link exchanges. The article isn't bad, overall.
What I personally find funny is that CNET quoted Evan Duffield after Evan emailed CNET with a link exchange request. Evan got a lot more than a simple link exchange, he got a whole article with clean links to his sites on the News.com domain.
Anyway, the article is being discussed at WebmasterWorld now, so if you are somewhat new to the SEO space, you should read the article and see the discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld
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Before Google News Removes Source, They Often Email Publication
Posted: July 15th, 2009, 3:33pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Google Search Engine
I am pretty fascinated with how Google News works and how the workflow runs there. I recently spotted a thread at the Google News Help forum which shows how not only does Google review publications periodically, but before removing publications, they may email those publications.
One site owner was upset his site no longer showed up in Google News. Inbal, a Googler, informed this site owner that after receiving some complaints from Google News users, the site was reviewed and removed. Inbal said:
The reason why we stopped crawling your content since July is that we periodically review news sources, particularly following user complaints, to ensure Google News offers a high quality experience for our users. When we reviewed your site we found that we can no longer include it in Google News at this time.
We currently only include articles from sources that could be considered organizations, generally characterized by multiple writers and editors, availability of organizational information, and accessible contact information. When we reviewed your site we weren't able to find this evidence of an organization.
What was more interesting was that Inbal said they do try to contact the publication before removing it, to get more facts about the complaints. Inbal said:
Please be assured that we tried to contact Eritrea Daily via email before removing it from Google News to offer the necessary remedy, however, alas, our emails bounced back, and due to some user complaints about no evidence for an organization behind the source we took this action, as we weren't able to find multiple writers and editors and accessible contact information on your site.
In this case, the publication was restored and placed back in Google News after being removed for a couple weeks. But learning about this process, I admit, does fascinate me a bit.
Forum discussion at Google News Help.
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Google News RSS Searches Having Issues
Posted: July 15th, 2009, 3:26pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Google Search Engine
For several weeks, Google News has been tinkering with their RSS feeds. We have a thread at Google News Help where Googler, Inbal, said it should be fixed in a week or so, well, it has been a week.
We have a new Google News Help thread with an example of foreign language searches via RSS not working. Let me show you.
A Google News search for [фармацевтический] which means pharmaceutical returns several results on the web version but when I flip to the RSS version, I get no results. Here is a picture of the RSS version using Safari's RSS reader:
I am not sure when this will be fixed, but Inbal from Google said, "Thanks for taking the time to report this issue. Our engineers are on top of it."
Forum discussion at Google News Help.
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Google Maps Bubble Info For Longitude & Latitude Coordinates Workaround
Posted: July 15th, 2009, 3:15pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Other Google Topics
Starting a few weeks ago the Google Maps Help forum reports that when you want to display text in the bubble of a Google Map pin mark, using the longitude and latitude of the location, it would no longer work.
For example, you can see it live at this link but here is a screen copy.
The issue is, the only way to get this to work is by appending [&iwloc=A&hl=en] to the end of the URL, if you remove it, the info bubble disappears. It works fine without that extra parameter in the URL for a standard address match, i.e. here but not sure why it doesn't work for the longitude and latitude version.
Forum discussion at Google Maps Help.
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Google Recommends Not Looking at Site Command Results
Posted: July 15th, 2009, 3:04pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Google Optimization
The site command (site:www.domain.com) is often used to determine the health of a web site in a search engine. The thing is, Google's site command is far from accurate and too many SEOs look at it too closely. We discussed this before and I just want to cover it again.
Googler, JohnMu, said in a Google Webmaster Help thread:
Focusing on the site:-query rough approximations will not lead to useful results.
Did he just say that the site command results are not useful? Are you surprised? I'm not. Like I said, we said this before.
For example, a site:www.seroundtable.com command returns for me over 17,000 pages. When I look at Google Webmaster Tools, I see indexed URLs at 9,921. So who do I believe?
We discussed the site command dozens of times here over the course of about 6 years. It is interesting to see how this has changed over the years.
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.