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)
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Official Google Webmaster Central Blog (325 unread)
SEO
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Emily Chang (347 unread)
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Search Engine Roundtable
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Search Engine Roundtable (6 unread)
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Daily Search Forum Recap: January 21, 2010
Posted: January 21st, 2010, 10:00pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: Search Forum Recap
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A Real Yahoo Search Update for January 2010?
Posted: January 21st, 2010, 3:13pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: Yahoo Search Optimization
Earlier this month, we reported on a rumored Yahoo Search update. Although it appeared to be an update, the consensus was that what people were seeing was the paid inclusion being weeded out of the organic search results.
But the thread at WebmasterWorld has been updated by BillyS, who often tracks Yahoo. Billy thinks that Yahoo is now updating, for real, this time. He said:
Yahoo tweaked something today around 1:30 until 3:00 Eastern time. We had a huge spike in traffic. Anyone else see this?
Yahoo updates typically don't get as much reaction as a Google update. And over the past year or so, Yahoo updates have received a lot less attention then they have in the past. This is likely due to them losing search market share and giving up to Bing.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
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Yahoo Search Advertisers Rejoice Over New Network Distribution Feature
Posted: January 21st, 2010, 3:06pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: Yahoo Search Marketing
Ever since Yahoo launched their new search marketing platform in 2006, advertisers wanted more control of where their ads were showing.
Yesterday, Yahoo launched a feature named Network Distribution that gives advertisers that control. I wrote up a detailed analysis of the new feature about a week ago at Search Engine Land. Here is a copy of that:
The network distribution settings can be found in a couple places, such as under campaign settings. When you go to those settings, you will see the “Network Distribution” settings above the targeting settings. When you click on that it breaks out the options by content and search networks, in addition to breaking it out by the entire network versus Yahoo Search or Yahoo Partners only. It will also show you the past 30 days of campaign activity based on those sections, to see how many clicks, impressions and costs were associated to those areas. From that screen you can adjust your bid, plus or minus, a specific percentage for each area.
Here is a video from the YSM Blog explaining it a bit more visually:
New Year, New Search Enhancements @ Yahoo! VideoThreads at DigitalPoint Forums & WebmasterWorld seem to be very happy with this addition. One person said:
This really makes my day.
Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums & WebmasterWorld.
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SEOmoz Builds Open Site Explorer, Community Likes
Posted: January 21st, 2010, 2:49pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: Search Engine tools
SEOmoz announced the launch of a new valuable tool named Open Site Explorer. I will not go over the features, every other blog did that.
The tool is extremely powerful, but it is not completely "open" or "free" as the name implies. Either way - the tool is impressive and for the most part, the SEO industry is very pleased with it. That includes Aaron Wall who called it slick, despite being Rand Fishkin's biggest critic.
Read more about the tool at the SEOmox blog and test it out at opensiteexplorer.org.
Forum discussion at Sphinn.
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Disabling Right Clicking Should Not Hurt Your Google Ranking & SEO
Posted: January 21st, 2010, 2:41pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: Search Engine Optimization
A new HighRankings Forum thread asks if there is any downside in terms of SEO for using JavaScript that disables the ability to right-click on the page. The thread asks:
One of my company's sites has right-click functions disabled (yes, I realize this doesn't really stop people from stealing content - it wasn't my choice). I've noticed when I use a spider emulator (seo-browser.com) that our image alt tags appear to be invisible to the spiders. I can see the alt tags on the actual site, and I've verified that they are in the code, but they don't seem to show up for spiders. Could this be caused by our right-click disabling?
Most people in the thread say that it should have no impact on spiders crawling the site.
I then saw an older thread from Google Webmaster Help where Googler, JohnMu, said the same thing. He said and I bolded the key point:
Personally, I find the use of right-click-blocking JavaScript slightly annoying because there are many legitimate reasons why you might want to use the context menu (eg to bookmark the page) and it doesn't really stop people from viewing the source (Ctrl-U brings it up if you don't want to use the main menu). That said, this is not something that would bother Googlebot :-).
Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum & Google Webmaster Help.
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Bing's Auto Search Suggestions Gets More Current
Posted: January 21st, 2010, 2:32pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: Microsoft MSN Search
The Bing Search Blog announced that they have now made their search suggestions more current. Now, Bing will update the search suggestions every 15 minutes or so, to take into account breaking news and current trends.
For example, the Australian Open is going on right now and here is me typing [aus] into Bing:
Google already does this with their search suggestions, so it is nice to see Bing go this route as well. Now, Bing will have to deal with questions about censorship of trending topics.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.