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: March 8, 2010
Posted: March 8th, 2010, 10:00pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: Search Forum Recap
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Have Google Index Your AJAX, Here Is How
Posted: March 8th, 2010, 1:56pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: Google Optimization
In October 2009, Google proposed a way to index AJAX. Back then, all it was, was a proposal, but it was not implemented. However, last week, Vanessa Fox reported that the AJAX feature for Google is now live and well.
I am not going to get into the technical details of how it works again. In fact, you can read about that over here and begin implementing it as soon as you like. We currently have no real feedback on how well it works yet, so I will keep my eyes open on that in the forums.
However, Vanessa Fox did see signs of Google crawling AJAX earlier this year and wrote up some of the pros and cons related to that.
In any event, I may want to give this a try myself on some of our sites and let you know how well it works or not.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
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Bing: We Know About Your Images & Choose Not To Show Them
Posted: March 8th, 2010, 1:46pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: Microsoft MSN Search
We rarely ever talk about Bing's outstanding image search, but I spotted a thread today in the Bing Community forums on that topic.
In short, one webmaster complained that Bing had about 50% of the images from his site, when compared to Google. So Google had about 50 pictures from this guys site in their index, coming up for a site command. Bing had about half that.
Brett Yount forwarded the complaint the the image search team at Bing and when he received a response, he copy and pasted it in the forums. This is what they said:
All in all I would say we have ok coverage for this site. We do not include all images that we know about in our index -- it is quite plausible that we decided to not include certain images from this site due to better relative ranking of other sites during crawl time. We should see its image search rank go up (and our coverage of it improve) as the site gets more popular and the images get reused and referred to by more sites.
This is really no different than web search - Google, Bing and other search engines may not consider a page worthy of crawling or indexing due to it's popularity or lack there of. This works the same way with images, according to Bing.
Forum discussion at Bing Community.
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Google Help Forums To Change Member Ranking System
Posted: March 8th, 2010, 1:03pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: SEO Forum News
The Google Web Search Help, Google News Help & Google Merchant Center Help forums all are announcing new changes coming to how forum members are ranked in these forums.
Currently, the member titles or levels are from Level 1 to Level 4. Some users get special titles, such as top contributors and/or certified professionals, or even Googler's get a special label, labeling them as Googlers. I do not believe the labels will be changing, but the levels will.
Instead of the 4 levels, there will be 20 levels. Your level will increase based on"
- Posting an answer
- Having your answer selected as the "best answer"
- Having your post rated as helpful
- Rating a post (either as helpful or not)
- Correctly marking a question or answer as spam.
I believe the levels determine what rights you have in the forums. By rights, I mean, can the profile show an avatar? Can they have clickable links? Stuff like that. Each forum sets the rights per level themselves and how hard it is to reach a level as well. So while the Google News forum might be easier to get to a higher level, it might take longer to post a clickable link.
The levels are by forum, so if you have a Level 15 in the Google Webmaster forum, it doesn't mean you have the same level in the Google AdWords forum.
Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help, Google News Help & Google Merchant Center Help.
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Yahoo Releases Search Marketing Desktop Just In Time To Kill It
Posted: March 8th, 2010, 12:34pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: Yahoo Search Marketing
Yahoo announced they have removed the BETA from the Yahoo Search Marketing Desktop client.
Yahoo Pete, Yahoo's search ad representative, said in both a WebmasterWorld & Search Engine Watch Forums thread:
Just wanted to make you aware that our desktop editing tool, Search Marketing Desktop, is now available to most of our advertisers (eligibility is based on minimum monthly spend and a few other factors). Using SMD, it takes just a few clicks to modify multiple campaigns, ad groups, keywords and ads at the same time.
For more details, please visit our blog [ysmblog.com] or the SMD sign-up page [advertising.yahoo.com]. We're also hosting a free webinar about SMD this coming Thursday--you can sign up through the link in the blog post.
Obviously, towards the end of this year or early next year, this tool will be terminated due to the Microsoft Yahoo deal - but hey, remove the beta label, why not.
For more information about the tool, please see here and for Thursday's webminar click here.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & Search Engine Watch Forums.
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SMX's SphinnCon Israel 2010 Recap
Posted: March 8th, 2010, 11:49am CET by rustybrick
Tags: Search Engine Conferences
Yesterday was the second ever SphinnCon event, a small Search Marketing Expo, ever. The first one took place about two years ago in Israel and the second took place yesterday in Israel. The second event was a bit larger than the first in terms of the number of sessions, speakers and attendees. Overall, the networking and educational event was a huge success and we look forward to hosting one again next year.
The even took place in the Jerusalem College of Technology's new lecture rooms. The rooms hard larger capacity than the first time we held the event there but we were still limited to only about 200 or so attendees. In any event, the university was incredibly welcoming to us, they not only partnered with us for this event by giving us a place at their home, but also had their own speakers at the event.
We had sold out the event a couple months prior to yesterday and had a waiting list of about a hundred people, hoping to get a spot. We also had people show up at the door, waiting to see if they can get in. Ultimately, I believe we began letting people in an hour or so after the show began. I honestly believe we could have had 400 or more people at this event. So for next year, I hope to work that out the accommodations with JCT to make this possible.
We started off the event with Avi Kay from the university, who introduced me to give the welcome address. In my five minute welcome, I thanks the sponsors, which included Compucall Web Marketing, Answers.com and Whired Rhino. We had additional requests for sponsors, but we had to turn additional sponsors away at a certain point.
I also thanked all the volunteers who put tons of hours into the event. They either ran around getting the caterer scheduled or printing the conference banners and handouts. Or they dealt with helping formulate the conference agenda and organizing the 30+ speakers. Acted as the front door bouncer and speaker organizers during the event. Or they helped organize the after hours party or provided Israeli hospitality to our out of town speakers. They include, but are not limited to Olivier Amar (@olivier_amar) of WhiteWeb, Ophir Cohen (@ophirco) of Compucall, Eli Feldblum (@Feldbum) of RankAbove, Roi Hildesheimer of Tens Technology, Charlie Kalech (@charliekalech)of J Town, Itay Paz (ItayPaz)of Affilicon, Mayer Reich (@mayerreich) of RankAbove, Branko Rihtman (@neyne) of WhiteWeb, and Gilad Sasson (@algoholic) of Nekuda. So thank you again, from the bottom of my heart.
There were four speakers, at least that I am aware of, that came from outside of Israel, excluding myself, to make it to this event. Vanessa Fox of Nine By Blue came all the way from SMX West (but native to Seattle), with what appeared to be bronchitis. Dixon Jones from Receptional and Magestic SEO flew from the UK to speak about one of his favorite topics, links. Ariel Sumeruk from Click2Customers came from SMX West (but native to South Africa) to speak on paid search. Finally, Tomer Honen from Google, came from the Ireland Google office to represent the Google Webmaster team in Israel. Thank you all for coming from so far to make it to this special event - the Israeli SEM industry deeply appreciated it and you all made a huge impact yesterday.
I would also like to thank all the speakers. I heard some great, unique and fun presentations yesterday. This was event definitely lived up to the quality of the SMX name. Here is a list of our speakers for SphinnCon Israel 2010:
- Adir Regev, CEO, GO Internet Marketing
- Ariel Ozick, WiredRhino
- Ariel Sumeruk, Head of Business intelligence & CTO, Clicks2Customers
- Barry Schwartz, RustyBrick, Inc.
- Branko Rihtman, Whiteweb
- Charlie Kalech, Director, J-Town Productions
- Dan Gerstenfeld, Lecturer at JCT & CEO of Interteam
- Dan Perach, Co-Founder, PPCPROZ
- Daniel Waisberg, Head of Analytics, Easynet
- Debra Askanase, Owner, Community Organizer 2.0
- Dixon Jones, Managing Director of Receptional Ltd.
- Eli Feldblum, CTO & Founder, RankAbove
- Gab Goldenberg, SEO ROI
- Gil Reich, Answers.com
- Gilad Sasson, Search Marketing Analyst at nekuda.co.il
- Itay Paz, ItayPaz.net
- Menachem Rosenbaum, TENS-Technology
- Michal Neufeld, Account Strategist, Google Israel
- Miriam Schwab, CEO, illuminea
- Naomi Sela, Media Director, Compucall Web Marketing
- Olivier Amar, WhiteWeb
- Ophir Cohen, CEO Compucall Web Marketing
- Oren Shatz, Chairman, SEO Israel Technologies Ltd.
- Pavel Israelsky, blogger & SEO expert, AskPavel SEO Blog
- Roi Carthy, Writer, TechCrunch
- Sam Michaelson, Five Blocks
- Shira Abel, Abel Communications
- Shlomi Aizenberg, Director of SEM, Easynet Search Marketing
- Tomer Honen, Search Quality Strategist, Google
- Uri Breitman, TBWADIGITAL
- Vanessa Fox, Nine By Blue
- Yuli Dasiatnikov, SEO, Compucall Web Marketing
After the presentations, some of the attendees travelled up to Tel Aviv to hit the party at the Dancing Camel. The party was sponsored by 888.com and Gammon Empire. Here is one of my favorite pictures from that event:
Thank you all so much for making this such a successful event! If some of you were unable to make it, there were tons of tweets and pictures of the event. We have some greatest hit recaps and live blogging of the event. Here are some of the pictures from people mentioned above, including a Flash embed from TENS Web Marketing.