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 11, 2010
Posted: March 11th, 2010, 10:00pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: Search Forum Recap
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Yahoo Search Update: March 2010
Posted: March 11th, 2010, 3:27pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: Yahoo Search Optimization
Yahoo announced a new search update, or what they call a "weather report" for their index. Yahoo said you may notice ranking changes in the Yahoo Search results. They said:
The Yahoo! Search engineering teams are rolling out updates to crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms. Similar to previous updates, you may notice some ranking changes and page shuffling during the process, which we expect to complete over the next few days.
I have not seen any discussion around this but there may be an issue with the Yahoo Search WebmasterWorld forum, so I am not sure.
I did spot two threads discussing an update with Yahoo Site Explorer. One thread was at the Site Explorer Suggestion Board and the other at DigitalPoint Forums.
Update: I was able to post a thread at WebmasterWorld (maybe there was a bug on my side) and now we have a nice amount of feedback on how significant this update is. Here are some posts from the thread:
I'm seeing a small but statistically insignificant increase from Yahoo!
We had been showing a steady increase in traffic until yesterday (March 10th). Today, we've lost about 20% of our traffic from Y!.
This is a pattern that seems to repeat with each update. After the update we drop in ranking but slowly climb back before the next update.
They are showing lots of love for Wikipedia.
I'm seeing huge differences not in the results but the output...5 natural results for some queries instead of the usual 10 and quite frankly I like it shortened like this. Top 5 or go home.......
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Google Forcing Some AdSense Publishers To Select a Local Currency
Posted: March 11th, 2010, 3:18pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: Google AdSense
A WebmasterWorld thread reports that some Google AdSense publishers are being forced to pick a local currency, instead of using the U.S. dollar.
Three publishers claimed it happened yesterday, where they logged into AdSense and had to pick a local currency. Here are some of the messages in the forum thread:
I think it is not possible to skip it any more.
They should have waited untill march 31 or april 1 to let it synchronize with taxes cycles. For those of us living in the EU but not in Ireland, it makes necessary new taxes forms.
This obviously should not impact U.S. publishers and publishers who live in countries where Google cannot pay out in that local currency.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
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Stealing Google Maps & Local Citations
Posted: March 11th, 2010, 3:07pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: Google Optimization
Google Maps has been a extremely important area for SEOs and SEMs to focus on for their clients. Ranking in the Google results that have a maps result is often critical to these businesses and those map results come up more often in the web results at Google on a daily basis. So when you see bugs reported, especially ones that can end up in a competitor claiming your spot, you get worried.
A Google Maps Help thread has an excellent video demo of a possible bug or issue with how Google Maps citations can be poached from competitors. I am not sure what the issue here is, but let me share the video here.
The video is on ScreenCast.com is about 4 minutes long. It was created by the Small Business Online Coach and documents the issue very well.
I am not sure how serious this issue is, what do you think?
Forum discussion at Google Maps Help.
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Three New Bugs With YouTube
Posted: March 11th, 2010, 2:46pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: Other Google Topics
There are three known and confirmed bugs with YouTube. They include not being able to save changes being made to videos, and issues playing and sharing videos in YouTube Groups and Orkut. Here are the three threads created by Liz from the YouTube team:
(1) Known Issue: "Save changes" button doesn't appear on "Edit video" page:
We've seen a lot of reports from you indicating that on the "Save changes" button isn't appearing for you on the edit video page for your uploads (my_videos).
I've reported this situation to our team and they're working on a fix so that you're able to save the edits you make to your videos again without running into this issue.
(2) Known Issue: bug playing videos in YouTube Groups:
We've seen many of you report that videos you've submitted to a YouTube Group are not playing on the page. A grey box appears in place of where the video should appear in the player and sometimes an error message is displayed stating that the video is no longer available. The video is in fact still available (from the uploader's channel and in search), but its just showing as unavailalbe in the Group setting.
This situation has been reported to our Team here in San Bruno, and our engineers are currently investigating the issue and working on a fix.
(3) Known Issue: issues with YouTube videos on Orkut:
Just wanted to let you know that our Team is aware of the issue with sharing YouTube videos to Orkut. Many of you have reported here in the forum that when sharing one of your uploads to YouTube on Orkut, Orkut produces an error message saying that your video doesn't exist / isn't found. Ah!
I've reported this to our engineers and they're currently working with the folks over at Orkut to try and resolve the situation. A big thanks to you all for letting us know about this issue, and we really appreciate your patience as we're working on a fix. Hopefully you should be able to enjoy YouTube videos on Orkut soon.
So those are the three issues.
Forum discussion at YouTube Help Forums.
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Study: Searches Ignore Real-Time Search Results
Posted: March 11th, 2010, 2:37pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: Tracking Conversion Measurements
OneUpWeb released an eye-tracking study that showed how most searches ignore the real time search results. The takeaways from the study, as Greg Sterling recapped nicely include:
- 73% had never heard of real-time results before participating this study
- Only a quarter of the consumers cared for the real-time results compared to 47% of the information foragers
- The majority of the participants surveyed were indifferent to the real-time results
The Guardian notes that these real time results cost Google $15m and Bing $10m - what is the return on investment for that then?
A WebmasterWorld thread has conversation around this where most people say they are not surprised by the study's findings. Just hard to imagine blowing $15 million on something like this.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
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Google Help Forum Search Adds 3rd Party Content
Posted: March 11th, 2010, 2:26pm CET by rustybrick
Tags: Other Google Topics
All of the content published on this site is sourced via discussion forums, that is what makes this site unique from the thousands of other SEO blogs out there. Much of that content is sourced from the Google help forums. So when Google changes something in their help forums, I typically notice.
One thing Google recently changes was the help forum search feature. Now, Google is including content in the help forum search that is from external web sites, not owned or maintained by Google. For example, a search at the Google Analytics Help forum returns several results that are from third party web sites. Here is a screen capture:
Each web site that is not maintained by Google is clearly labeled as such, with a message that reads:
The site you are about to visit is not maintained by Google Inc., but its content might be helpful.
There is then a way to "Report Abuse" on a site listed here.
What I find interesting is that Google labels their own blogs as "not maintained by Google," when indeed, it is maintained by Google. But it does differentiate between what is "user content" versus Google content - so I find that interesting.
A hat tip goes to PizzaSEO.com for letting me know about this new feature.