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)
-
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog (325 unread)
SEO
(4690 unread)
-
Emily Chang (347 unread)
-
Search Engine Roundtable
(4343 unread)
Search Engine Roundtable (6 unread)
-
Daily Search Forum Recap: December 10, 2009
Posted: December 10th, 2009, 10:00pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: Search Forum Recap
-
Google Promises to Speed Up AdSense for GoogleBot
Posted: December 10th, 2009, 2:46pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: Google AdSense
Since Google has released the Site Performance reports in Webmaster Tools and page speed is Google's 2010 ranking factor promise, Webmasters have been somewhat obsessed with speeding up their sites.
Webmasters are concerned with scripts they do not control. Such as Google Analytics slowing down their page load times. In fact, we just reported that Google is going to add a trustworthy indicator to site performance reports in order to alleviate some of the webmaster stress over speed performance.
Now, we see reports that Google AdSense is slow. But instead of Google just telling us not to worry about it, which they have told us for this. Google is actually going to speed up the AdSense load time specifically for GoogleBot.
AdSenseAdvisor said in a WebmasterWorld thread two things. The first was not to worry about it and the second was that they will be improving the speed of AdSense specifically for GoogleBot.
Let me quote AdSense Advisor:
(1) "The Page Speed suggestions on Webmaster Tools are based on the content served to Googlebot. In this case, AdSense serves the javascript uncompressed to Googlebot, but does actually compress it with gzip for regular users. So, the AdSense javascript is already optimized for your site's users. AdSense works very hard at making sure that it doesn't slow down the page load."
(2) "We are changing AdSense to send compressed content to our Googlebot so that the recommendation in Webmaster Central accurately reflects how AdSense works."
Now some may ask if this is a form of serving different content to GoogleBot versus a human - i.e. cloaking. I don't think this falls under that.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
-
Bing Requires 3 MSNBot Crawls To Register 301 Redirects
Posted: December 10th, 2009, 2:40pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: Microsoft MSN Search
I spotted a useful tidbit for SEOs in the Bing Forums today. Brett Yount from Bing Webmaster Center team explained how Bing picks up on 301 redirects.
Brett said it can take two to three crawls from Bing to register a 301 redirect in their index. Brett said:
By design, our crawler usually takes 2-3 crawls before it registers the redirect.
I wonder how many crawls Google takes to do the same thing? I can see why you would want to wait at least for a second crawl to confirm a 301 redirect is indeed legit.
We had some reports recently that Bing is handling 301s much better now than they have in the past.
Forum discussion at Bing Forums.
-
Vote For The Doodle 4 Google UK Winner
Posted: December 10th, 2009, 2:35pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: Other Google Topics
Voting is open for the UK's edition of the Doodle 4 Google competition. Google has run this competition in both the US and UK for four years now.
This years competition:
We're asking young people aged 5–16 from across the UK to design their own doodle. This year's theme is 'My Hero'. We'd love to see the figures young people look up to represented in their doodles, whether family, friends, people in the community, or world figures. We're interested in the people considered heroes for the 21st century and how entrants represent them using images.
To vote, go to this page. You can vote for each of the four brackets, 5-7 years old, 7-11 years old, 11-14 years old and 14-16 years olds.
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
-
Google To Add "Trustworthy Indicator" to Site Performance Tool
Posted: December 10th, 2009, 2:26pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: Google Optimization
A Google Webmaster Help thread has reports of page load time speeds spiking up to ridiculous numbers in the new Google site performance reports. Google's response to these reports was pretty interesting, I'll get to that soon, firs the context.
A Top Contributor in the forum wrote:
After about 6 months of "flat line" Site Performance reports of averagepage load time around 1 or 2 seconds, I am now seeing in Tools a report that: "On average, pages in your site take 83.1 seconds to load (updated on Dec 7, 2009)." and of course the graph has shot up and I'm tol that my site's average page load time is "slower than 100% of sites".
However, the only two pages listed in that report both show load times of 1 to 2 seconds.
Now a Googler with the code name "sreeram" replied saying:
The 83s number is bogus. Your site's toolbar traffic dropped by more than an order of magnitude in the last few days. You should ignore the average for now. We'll soon be showing site owners some indication of how trustworthy the numbers are, so you can decide when to ignore it and when not to.
Not all URLs may have toolbar traffic, so it's possible to have many URLs indexed, and even visited by users, but only a couple may show up on Site Performance. In addition, when there's very little data for a given URL, we won't display it (for privacy reasons), though it will be included in the overall site average.
So in this case, the site's traffic as seen by the Google Toolbar dropped significantly, which caused a weird spike in the webmaster's site performance reports. Thus, Google promised to provide an "indication of how trustworthy the numbers are" in this report.
Clearly, some of these numbers are not trustworthy, such as factoring in Toolbar fluctuations or Google Analytics speed.
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
Update: John Mueller from Google sent me a note about this:
The Webmaster Tools team is constantly working on ways to improve the product as well as the data provided there. In general, we prefer not to comment on possible future releases. The Labs section in Webmaster Tools allows us to easily try out and iterate on new and innovative features, which is one reason we launched the Site Performance tool there. Personally, I found the data provided there quite actionable and have seen a lot of positive feedback from webmasters around this tool. To fine-tune a website with regards to speed, it can be useful to start with the information provided here and then to look into the details using browser-based tools such as Page Speed and Speed Tracer.
We're always looking into ways we can take our products and services to the next level. We appreciate all of the feedback and coverage that you provide! I'll get in touch with you once I have more information that I can share.
-
Google Images "See Full Size Image" Frame Missing For Some?
Posted: December 10th, 2009, 2:18pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: Other Google Topics
A Google Web Search Help thread reports several users not being able to see the frame at the top of the Google Image searches. I initially thought it had to do with frame busters of some sort, but it seems more wide spread than that. Maybe Google is dropping the framed image feature? I am not sure.
I personally see the frame with the "see full size image" option link:
It really seems to be that this is a frame buster type of thing going on. Frame busting is code that prevents other sites from framing you site in their site, like Google Images does after you initially click on an image result.
Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.