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 28, 2009
Posted: December 28th, 2009, 10:00pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: Search Forum Recap
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Google AdWords Paralysis: Advertisers Afraid to Change Campaigns
Posted: December 28th, 2009, 2:55pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: Google AdWords
I've been holding on this topic for after the holiday break. A new and long WebmasterWorld thread has great discussion over the topic of AdWords advertisers being afraid to make change to their accounts. Why are they afraid? Well, they are afraid of being banned or their Quality Score dropping where they cannot compete and so on.
So what do they do? They slowly die out. As one advertiser explained:
We are afraid to do anything. We are not adding ads. We are not taking advantage of the new stuff google is offering. We just delete ads as they drop in QS. We are paralyzed and slowly dying.
The thread moved into the discussion of how Google treats affiliates in the AdWords space. Now, we discussed that often and maybe only affiliates feel paralyzed in AdWords, I am not sure. But I wanted to get a good feel from the AdWords advertiser base, if you feel this way also.
Please take my poll: AdWords Advertiser: Do You Feel Paralyzed?
AdWords Advertiser: Do You Feel Paralyzed?(surveys)
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
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Bing's MSNBot Crawling Fake File Names?
Posted: December 28th, 2009, 2:41pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: Microsoft MSN Search
A WebmasterWorld thread and an older Bing Forums thread has discussion from webmasters over the issue of Microsoft Bing's web crawler, MSNBot, crawling file names that do not exist on a specific site.
This reminders me of the ongoing issue of Bing creating fake referrals in webmaster log files. This has been going on for years, where Microsoft claims they have fixed it, but never really has.
In this specific case, it seems like Bing is creating file names on a specific site to crawl. Wel, they are not creating files, just trying to fetch pages that do not and never have existed on a specific site. I am not sure if this is a Bing issue or a webmaster issue.
A long time WebmasterWorld member explained the issue:
In what is apparently a rather old bad behavior, msnbot has a practice of regularly requesting totally manufactured URIs that appear to be designed to trigger 404 errors. Here are two sample log entries of the two styles of bogus URIs msnbot requests:
'65.55.207.126'¦Tue, 15 Dec 2009 20:39:49 -0500¦'msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)'¦'*/*'¦'/ADBF3C7AB534E8356F30D8AC05291640_00000.temp019f.html'¦''
'65.55.207.28'¦Wed, 16 Dec 2009 05:46:22 -0500¦'msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)'¦'*/*'¦'/000166709_00001.temp00be.html'¦''The requests ALWAYS take on one of the formats above starting with either a 32byte GUID or a nine digit integer.
In the Bing thread, another person said:
For many many years, msnbot has been crawling my sites looking for files that have never existed... i'm trying to figure out why...
the filenames have changed slightly in recent times but they have been similar in structure since the beginning... they are something like 000092601_00002.temp0001.htm... in other words, 9 numbers underscore 5 numbers dot temp 4 numbers dot htm... the search for these is all over my server's directory tree...I'll emphasize once more that these files have never existed on my site and i have no clue how msnbot may have picked them up...
Honestly, I feel bad that I am always beating up on Microsoft. I know they are new to the game, when you compare them to Google. But I have to report these issues.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & Bing Forums.
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60% of U.S. Government's Data on Google Servers? Nope
Posted: December 28th, 2009, 2:25pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: Other Google Topics
Sherri Davidoff posted an article named Our Google Government after seeing one of those Google Docs ads on a site. The ad reads, "Over 60% of the U.S. state governments have gone Google." Here is a picture of it:
Of course this worries many, including myself. But you have to understand that while maybe 60% of the U.S state government has "gone Google" it doesn't mean that the U.S.'s most sensitive data is on Google's servers. It is possible that some small government offices have switched to Google Apps for email or document management. But to house sensitive intelligence on a hosted Google owned server? That has not happened.
How am I so sure? Well, I am not. But I recently watched a 60 minute show (or something like it, I forget, it was a few months back), which was about how countries are hacking into other countries to steal intel and money from each other. One of the concerns was using Google to host the information. A top government official said that while many governments use Google for everyday use, the most sensitive information is stored on government built and maintained hardware and software.
In fact, the official said that they cannot trust hardware or chips made in some countries because they have seen cases where those chips actually are programmed to secretly send over data from the computer to a remote location. So to trust Google with that information, simply doesn't make sense. And that is what the official said. It costs the government a lot more than it would if they outsourced it to Google, but in some cases, it is not about saving money.
Of course, some U.S. offices might receive sensitive information in their Google hosted applications. And the risk of that increases daily as more data is sent back and forth and more offices "go Google." But this all needs to be kept in perspective.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
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Google & Lightbox JavaScript: Can GoogleBot Index Images in Lightbox JS?
Posted: December 28th, 2009, 2:07pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: Google Optimization
A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion around getting Google to index a popular image feature sites use to show off images on their web site. It is called Lightbox JS and it basically uses JavaScript to open up a neat larger view of the image on the page.
I use it on many sites, but you can see a quick example on the RustyBrick Mobile Portfolio. Just click on the image and it opens up a larger picture of that image. Here is a screen capture showing the larger image as it overlays on top of the page:
The issue is, GoogleBot is having a tough time capturing these images in their index. WebmasterWorld administrator, Tedster, explained:
I've been up against the same challenge. Even though regular Google search is aggressively discovering URLs and content by spidering JavaScript, apparently the image bot is not so inquisitive at this point. This surprised me, because there are many images being displayed through Lightbox scripts these days.
Yes, GoogleBot is able to execute JavaScript, but is GoogleImageBot able to at the same pace?
Tedster is exploring other ways to get GoogleBot to index Lightbox JS. He tried the following method, but it doesn't seem to work:
My latest attempt involves making the anchor part of the link a thumbnail image - but the thumbnail is not just a smaller version of the larger image. I use the same exact image file for the anchor, but I resize it on the the page with the HTML width and height attributes. This means that the page loads more slowly, but at least the image bot gets a direct <img src=[url]> style mark-up.
If you have a solution, let us know.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
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Porn on Google Image Search with Strict Search On
Posted: December 28th, 2009, 1:53pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: Google Search Engine
A DigitalPoint Forums thread reports that a search on (beware before you click) [cricket talks] in Google Image search returns a pornographic image. It happens both on standard safe search and strict safe search, but goes away completely when you turn off the safe search feature.
Here is a picture, which I cropped a bit to show the result here:
I personally see the image on the 3rd row when strict search is on and the second row when safe search is in standard or moderate mode.
What is interesting is that it is hosted on a pretty bad domain, i.e. asianteenmovieslesbiananal.info. OpenDNS for me blocks the domain due to the domain and network containing pornography and nudity. I guess Google got mixed up with this one.
On a related note, a Google News Help thread reports that Google News had an image of a PlayBoy teaser on their most viewed section. I personally did not see it, but it would not have been the first time seductive or nude images showed up on the front page of Google News.
Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums & Google News Help.