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Daily Search Forum Recap: October 2, 2009

Posted: October 2nd, 2009, 11:00pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Search Forum Recap

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.

Video Recap of Weekly Search Buzz :: October 2, 2009

Posted: October 2nd, 2009, 9:00pm CEST by rustybrick

Google has been banning AdWords advertisers and warning advertisers of bans for low quality landing pages, but I think something is wrong with Google. Google fixed a low share of voice AdWords bug. Google has an image search update in September 2009. Google updated their search options with neat new filters. Google confirmed adding deeper links and named them forum Sitelinks. Bing added a link to their Visual Search on their home page. Google updated their site verification process in Webmaster Tools. Did the Google Sandbox exist? We polled our users on that. Google launched Merchant Center to help with Google Base product uploads. Google might add tons of ads to Google Maps. Google Maps got foggy over New Delhi. The fake Yahoo employee is real, but might not have Yahoo's approval to post. Google celebrated their 11th birthday on September 27th. Google celebrated also Confucius' birthday with a doodle and Gandhi's birthday with a doodle. That was this past week at the Search Engine Roundtable.

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Google's Happy Birthday Gandhi Logo

Posted: October 2nd, 2009, 3:45pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Google PageRankSERP Updates

If you visit Google.com today, you may see a Google logo or 'doodle' with the picture of Gandhi. Today, is Gandhi's 140th birthday, he was born today in 1869.

Here is a copy of the logo:

With virtually any Google Doodle, there are some upset with Google picking one event over another. One Google Webmaster Help thread has a person noting that this is also International Day of Non-Violence. But it is this day, because it is Gandhi's birthday. So far, I have not seen complaints about the logo.

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help and Google Webmaster Help.

Google Adds More Search Options & Cleans Up Verticals

Posted: October 2nd, 2009, 3:39pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Google Search Engine

Google announced they have added some search refinements to the various Google search properties. The additions include past hour, specific date range, more shopping sites, fewer shopping sites, visited pages, not yet visited, books, blogs and news. To see them yourself, do a search on Google and then click "Show options" at the top.

Danny Sullivan goes through these changes in detail over here, so I won't bother with that.

Some Google users are a bit taken back and confused by the changes. One frequent Google News searcher was confused in a Google News Help thread as to where certain features were, when in reality, they were just moved. But overall, I think the additional filters and refinements are useful.

Jaime at Google posted a thread at the Google Web Search Help thread asking for comments and feedback on these new changes.

Forum discussion at Google News Help and Google Web Search Help.

Google Updates Webmaster Tools Verification Process: Google Sites Verification Breaks

Posted: October 2nd, 2009, 3:25pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Google Optimization

Google announced that they have updated the verification process for Google Webmaster Tools. The main changes include:

(1) META Tag verification is no longer tied to the email address on file, i.e. you can change your email and it won't de-verify your site.

(2) The HTML file verification process required that you set up your 404 pages properly by returning a proper 404 server status code. The issue was, many webmasters don't do this and come into the forums complaining they cannot verify. So Google gave up and decided to just allow the verification without requiring a proper 404 status code being returned on non-existing pages. Personally, I feel they should have kept it - it helps webmasters configure their site properly in the long run. But this will reduce a headache for Google in the support forums.

(3) The screens and look of the HTML verification process was updated also. Here is the new look:

The issue is, it broke many of the systems that had automatic verification in place. Google confirmed that Google Sites verification process is currently not working. But others are also reporting issues with verifying other sites. Overall, these issues will be addressed and people will be happy again.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Google Responds To Mass Google AdWords Advertiser Banning & Warnings

Posted: October 2nd, 2009, 3:15pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Google AdWords

On Sunday we reported that Google was banning AdWords advertisers in the masses for "poor quality landing pages." In some cases, Google was sending out stern warnings to advertisers that they will be banned and in other cases, they just banned these advertisers outright.

After a few days, Google finally responded. The response, to most advertisers, is not satisfactory. Here is the official response in its entirety:

The suspensions and final warnings that are referenced in this thread are due to account level actions taken against advertisers who've submitted multiple sites that violate our landing page quality guidelines. This is an existing policy to discourage repeat offenders by taking account level action. These final warnings and suspensions were only applied to sites with multiple violations which were manually reviewed to ensure that our policies were being applied correctly.
Certain kinds of websites (ref1) are not allowed per our policies because the user experience is of low quality or we consistently receive negative feedback from our users about these kinds of pages. These sites include:

* Data collection sites that offer the false promise of free items, etc., in order to collect private information.
* Arbitrage sites that are designed for the purpose of showing ads
* Affiliates who provide limited value by being a bridge page with the intent of solely driving traffic to another site or who are framing an affiliate site
* Malware sites that knowingly or unknowingly install software on a visitor's computer

You can find more information on this topic in the AdWords help center, under Landing Page Quality (ref2)

Landing page checks happen continuously, even after an ad has been approved, through both manual and automated methods. You can evaluate whether or not your site is in line with our landing page quality guidelines (ref3) If not, you can make the appropriate changes to your site or delete all ads that point to the low quality sites. Paused ads will still accrue violations against them.

We apply the same standards to all the sites that we check so violations are evaluated regardless of spend, keywords bids or history of the account.

Also note, some accounts have both allowed sites and not allowed sites. For these accounts, if you received a warning please remove the low quality sites from your account by deleting the ads pointing to these sites.

We constantly try to improve the quality of the ad experience which we believe helps both the consumer and advertiser when users can trust the quality of the site they reach when they click on an ad.

----------------------------

Referenced pages as noted above:

1) Are there any types of websites that merit low landing page quality scores?
http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?answer=66238 (NOTE: this was also posted earlier in the the thread)

2) Landing Page Quality
http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/topic.py?topic=16348

3) Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines
http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?answer=46675

Got all of that? Happy with it? I personally was not banned or warned, but I am still not happy with that response. Neither are many advertisers. Just scanning through the really long WebmasterWorld thread, you will find many angry and upset responses to AdWordsAdvisor's reply.

Personally, I think some automated penalty score algorithm was tweaked and got a bit stronger. I think something is just wrong or needs to be looked into.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

SEO News » Search Engine Roundtable » October 2, 2009

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