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: December 21, 2009
Posted: December 21st, 2009, 10:00pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: Search Forum Recap
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Google One Box Blindness
Posted: December 21st, 2009, 3:02pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: Google Search Engine
An early WebmasterWorld thread is discussing the topic of Google One Box "blindness." Google One Boxes are those enhanced results you see at the top or within the search results of Google. When they first came out, there were hard to miss, but now SEOs and maybe some searchers are subconsciously blocking them out, like they would ads?
Here are some examples of "one boxes":
Get the point?
Do you think all this injection of special "universal search" results, as well as Google owned content (i.e. YouTube, weather, google groups, blogspot, definitions, etc) is going to eventually suffer from "one box blindness"?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
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Introducing The Google Mapping Tool Availability Matrix
Posted: December 21st, 2009, 2:50pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: Other Google Topics
Google Maps has tons of features, but some of those features are not available in all regions due to many reasons. In order to help document what is and what is not available in certain regions, Google created a page named the Mapping Tool Availability to help you see which Google tools are available for mapping your area.
Google breaks the page down by several regions including Africa, Asia, Caribbean, Central America, Europe, Middle East, North America, Oceania and South America. When you open a region, Google shows you a matrix of what features are available in that area, features such as the Local Business Center, Community Edits, My Maps, Map Maker or Building Maker. Here is a screen capture of the North America matrix:
This will come in handy for the folks in the Google Maps forum and for local business consultants.
Forum discussion at Google Maps Help.
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Do You Compete in PPC Bid Wars?
Posted: December 21st, 2009, 2:40pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: Pay Per Click Engines
A WebmasterWorld thread has new discussion around the topic of pay-per-click (PPC) bidding wars. A PPC bidding war is when two or more advertisers want to out bid each other in the search ads in order to either deplete the funds of the competition or to secure a certain position in the search results.
With the PPC ranking models these days, it is often hard to just compete on price for the top search ad - although it is possible. But bidding wars are somewhat more frequent amongst new advertisers and large brands with large budgets.
The question I have for you is, do you do this? Do you ever compete in PPC bid wars? I doubt I got all the possible options below, but try to not use the "other" option if possible.
Do You Compete in PPC Bidding Wars?(trends)
Tell your friends and colleagues to take this quick poll.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
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Rendering Google AdSense on iPhone or Android Has Minor Quirk?
Posted: December 21st, 2009, 2:33pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: Google AdSense
A WebmasterWorld thread reports that when you try to login to Google AdSense using your Android device or an iPhone it rendered the reports all weird. I tried to reproduce this on my side, but I am currently not able to.
What many are reporting is that the report seems to load in an iframe below the login box, after you login. Let me quote one of the reports:
I typed my username and password.
The report appeared just at the place where I typed in username and password.
It seems like the report is in a not scrollable IFRAME starting at the position of the input for username and password
I think I am not having the issue because I am logging in automatically. Google AdSenseAdvisor replied to the thread saying:
I'm investigating. I'll let you know when I hear something back. Thanks for flagging this.
We have no ETA for a fix or even a solid confirmation what type of bug this is.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
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Removing A Competitor's Google Maps Listing
Posted: December 21st, 2009, 2:22pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: Other Google Topics
A local mover reported in a Google Maps Help thread that his competitor has successfully removed his listing from Google Maps by having hundreds of people report his address as "inaccurate" in the Google search results.
Back in October, Google added a link to the map results found in the results to enable users to mark a business listing as accurate or not and this person is claiming that his competitor was able to use that to remove his listing in Google Maps. He said:
He has now used those same fake user accounts to report my addresses as invalid - probably hundreds of times with the number of ID's that he has. The likely automated trigger at Google goes off and the map spammer with the 40 fake address and hundreds, if not thousands, of fake reviews from from bogus accounts wins the day. It's easy to report a bogus address.
Now, I am not sure if this is indeed possible. You can always try to reproduce it, but that might be a bad thing to try to reproduce.
A Google Maps representative, Maps Guide Linda, did reply to this thread saying:
Thanks for reporting this instance of spam to us. We will effectively deal with this user since they are violating our Business Listing Quality Guidelines. Please take a look at our guidelines yourself to make sure your listings comply.
I am not sure if she is referencing the abuse of the "inaccurate" reporting feature or the abuse of this mover posting dozens of duplicate companies in Google Maps.
So can you use the "is this accurate" link to remove competitors from Google?
Forum discussion at Google Maps Help.
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Google Holiday Logos, Also Yahoo, Bing & YouTube Winter Logos
Posted: December 21st, 2009, 2:04pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: Search Engine Industry News
The next two weeks are typically the slowest two weeks in the search industry (and probably most other industries). It is the holiday week, with Christmas and New Years coming, as well as it being the first day of Winter today.
Google already started their holiday logo blast, although Google missed Chanukah this year, they are calling the logos "Holiday logos". You will be able to see a new one every day and Google will archive them at google.com/logos/holidays-2009.html. Here is the first one:
Like I said, Google will have a new logo each day (maybe I will update this post here or make a new one for those).
Google # 2:
Yahoo is running a flash based logo also for the past few days:
But today is actually the first day of Winter here on our side of the world. And for the day, we have a nice theme from Bing, YouTube and from ourselves as well:
Search Engine Roundtable Winter:
Happy holidays, cold winter and relaxing/healthy next two weeks.
Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums and Google Web Search Help.