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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Daily Search Forum Recap: September 9, 2009
Posted: September 9th, 2009, 11:00pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Search Forum Recap
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Google's 09/09/09 Logo (Doodle)
Posted: September 9th, 2009, 5:21pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Other Google Topics
At 09:09:09 today on 09/09/09, Google posted a special logo for the special occurrence.
Here is the logo, not sure how much longer it will be live:
The official logo is also at google.com/logos/090909.gif.
Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.
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Stop Spiders From Crawling Your Site on Shabbat, Including GoogleBot
Posted: September 9th, 2009, 3:57pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Search Engine Optimization
A Google Webmaster Help thread has an interesting discussion around blocking your site from coming up for both visitors and search engine crawlers on Shabbat (the Jewish Saturday). This is not a new topic, we discussed using cloaking for religious Shabbat purposes in the past.
In short, some observant Jews do not want their site to be accessible on Shabbat, which is sundown Friday night, to nightfall Saturday night. The issue on the SEO front is if you turn off your site, then what happens to the search engine crawlers? Do they get 404 pages and drop your site from the search index?
Phil Payne posted an answer to how one can handle this, which Googler JohnMu said was a good answer. Phil said:
Yes - a 503 is the correct server response for "We're closed". If you substitute a normal HTML page saying "We're closed" and serve a 200 it's very likely to get indexed by Google.
If you give the Googlebot a 503, it will just go away and come back later without indexing what you give it.
For humans, you can serve a custom 503 page that explains the situation. Are there no other Orthodox sites you can ask, to see how they do it?
Now, Friday night here, is not the same as Friday night by you. So detecting the location of a visitor is key here. There are services like Saturday Guard that do this for you, but I am not sure how they handle search bots.
Technically, the issue, as far as I understand it (I am not a Rabbi, but I am an observant Jew) is that they do not want to earn money on Shabbat or Jewish holidays. Some hold that since the money doesn't transfer from the merchant account to the bank that day, then there is no money being earned technically that day. But some do not hold that way or some want to be extra careful. If it is a matter of money, then just turn off the "add to cart" and shopping cart features for the site.
If they do not want any activity on their site by potential customers, then I guess a 503 is a good answer. But are search engine bots customers? No. I suspect, most Rabbis would be okay with spiders or automated crawlers using the site on Shabbat. The issue then is, are you allowed to serve up a 503 page to a visitor and not to a crawler - that might be against Google's terms of service and fall within the bad cloaking policies.
If the issue is about the server actually working on Shabbat. Then a 503 cannot really be served up at all, because you would technically need to power down the server and without a server to send the 503 response code - then you got nothing.
This is a complex issue that I personally never had to deal with on sites that we have built. But it would be interesting to see what to do in the case of turning off a web server. There isn't much Google can do here.
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
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Bing Not Honoring Robots.txt Directives?
Posted: September 9th, 2009, 3:45pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Microsoft MSN Search
Over the past few weeks, I have been noticing threads pop up in the Bing forums with complaints from webmasters that Bing's bot, aka MSNBot is not honoring their robots.txt directives.
It was not just one thread, but at least four. They include one from yesterday over here, one started on September 3rd over here, one from September 1 over here and one started on August 25th over here.
I ignored the first three, trying to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt. Hoping it is a webmaster issue or someone spoofing MSNBot. But four threads on the same topic, all within a few weeks of each other does stand out as a possible issue.
I have personally not confirmed the issue, since I have no interest in blocking MSNBot from crawling any parts of my sites - but others don't like Bing as much as I do.
Forum discussion at Bing Forums here, here, here and over here.
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Google Webmaster Tools Keywords Report Showing Blank Lines?
Posted: September 9th, 2009, 3:36pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Google Optimization
A webmaster reported in a Google Webmaster Help thread that in his Google Webmaster Tools Keyword report, he noticed that Google is displaying a blank line as one of his more popular keywords used within the site.
The blank line is [_______________] and he has no idea why it shows up not just once, but twice. The first one is in the second most popular keyword used on the site and the second one is the eleventh most popular keyword used on the site. If you think about it, the underline or line is weird, but even if it technically was a keyword, wouldn't it be the same keyword (i.e. only show up once in the keyword list)?
In any event, the webmaster posted a screen shot in the thread - because honestly, I thought he was on crack or something. Here it is:
Why is this showing up? No idea! In fact, if you search for the line using a site command, nothing comes up.
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
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Google AdWords VistaPrint Coupon Codes Invalid
Posted: September 9th, 2009, 3:28pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Google AdWords
A Google AdWords representative posted a thread at the Google AdWords Help forum. In that thread, Bindu, the Google rep, said that the recent marketing blitz from VistaPrint had the wrong coupon codes on them.
If you received a VistaPrint AdWords offer code, the code was misprinted. Specifically, the code was "accidentally abridged" so the code won't work. To get them to work, you will need to contact AdWords support - according to Bindu. Bindu said:
Recent VistaPrint Coupon Codes seem to be invalid because they were accidentally abridged. If you have received a VistaPrint code and it does not seem to work, you will have to write in to AdWords support and request the correct version of the code.
For more information on how to contact Google AdWords support, click here.
Forum discussion at Google AdWords Help.
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Longer Domain Registration Does Not Increase Google Search Engine Rankings
Posted: September 9th, 2009, 3:14pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Google Optimization
It seems that Google has finally gone on the record that longer domain name registration has no impact on your search engine rankings, at least not at Google. A Google Webmaster Help thread has a post from Googler, JohnMu, who said outright that it doesn't make sense for Google to use this as a ranking metric.
Let me quote John:
A bunch of TLDs do not publish expiration dates -- how could we compare domains with expiration dates to domains without that information? It seems that would be pretty hard, and likely not worth the trouble. Even when we do have that data, what would it tell us when comparing sites that are otherwise equivalent? A year (the minimum duration, as far as I know) is pretty long in internet-time :-).
I think that is pretty convincing that Google doesn't use the domain expire date as a metric.
What is funny is that we discussed this topic a few times in the past. Each time, we never really came to a conclusion. But it didn't stop domain registrars from using this as a marketing tactic.
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
