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: June 15, 2010
Posted: June 15th, 2010, 11:00pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Search Forum Recap
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U.S. Government Wants To Classify Search Marketers
Posted: June 15th, 2010, 3:54pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Search Engine Industry News
Hillary from Onward Search reports that the U.S. government, Department of Labor (DOL) is trying to classify Search Marketers.
By classify, the DOL wants to be able to figure out the skills and criteria that make up a search marketer's profile. They are asking search marketers to fill out a "occupational expert questionnaire" at this URL so they can gather enough data to built the proper classification for search marketing professionals.
The good news is that SEMPO is involved and Hillary interviewed Dana Todd from SEMPO about this.
A WebmasterWorld thread has some people who are against this process. But honestly, I think it is a good thing for this industry. If accountants have a classification, why shouldn't search marketers.
We are growing, maturing and becoming established in this business world and we deserve a classification with the U.S. Department of Labor.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
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Google AdWords Traffic Slowing?
Posted: June 15th, 2010, 3:34pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Google AdWords
A WebmasterWorld thread has two advertisers claiming that Google AdWords is sending them less traffic then they are accustomed to.
Here is one complaint from one AdWords advertiser:
I have been running this Adwords account for 4 years and since two months the amount of traffic from this account (2000+ keywords) has been steadily declining. The Quality Score and AVG position remain unchanged. I have been changing the keywords bids here and there but mostly bidding up.
Another advertisers had a similar complaint, but netmeg suggested they take look at the "impression share report."
Take a look at the impression share report (campaign report with the IS stuff checked) to see how often your ads are running as a percentage of how often they could be running.
Are you experiencing a a decline in your AdWords traffic?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
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Bing Winning Hearts of Children In UK?
Posted: June 15th, 2010, 3:28pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Microsoft MSN Search
A WebmasterWorld thread has grassroots reporting from parents in the UK about Bing's market share.
It seems like many UK children are really loving Bing, Microsoft's search engine. From the parent's perspective, the kids are coming home and talking about Bing, not Google. They are also telling their parents that Bing is what the home pages are set to on their school computers.
Here are some quotes from the thread:
My 11 year old was using my computer at the weekend and I noticed they used bing.com without any prompting from me for or against. A friend said that is because bing.com is the default search engine in schools at the moment. My kid seems perfectly happy with it.
Watch out google, this is how the revolution begins!
I think I can help here. Many years back, I am pretty sure I heard on the BBC that Bill (Gates) made a deal with the British government to give computers to every school in the UK. Now i don't think they are in any way mandated to use Bing, but I expect they are set up that way by default.
But on top of that (not that I count for much) all five of the PC's in my house have Bing as the home page, and certainly, my kids (aged 9 and 10) use it by default. they certainly KNOW Google and use it alot as well, but they are the next generation - and the pretty picture counts.
As the moderator of the forum says, Bing is "Winning the hearts and minds" of these children.
Something for Google to worry about or this is just a few schools with Bing set as the default search engine?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
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Google To Fix Soft 404 Reporting in Google Webmaster Tools
Posted: June 15th, 2010, 3:19pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Google Optimization
Last week, Google added 404-like soft 404s reporting to the Google Webmaster Tools reporting engine. As soon as Webmasters got their hands on this tool, they started to notice issues.
Many reported that Google was thinking that their real pages should be 404 (page not found) pages. This was obviously a concern to webmasters. Why would Google consider their real pages to be pages that should return a page not found response.
Googler Jonathan Simon confirmed the issue and promised the report will improve over the next two weeks or so. Jonathan Simon said:
Based on a quick check of the URLs you list it looks like these pages are being incorrectly flagged as soft 404 pages. Since this feature was just released we are still working on improving our detection of true soft 404 pages. In the near term you should see the number of legitimate pages on your site disappear from the soft 404 crawl errors report. So please check back in with Webmaster Tools over the next few weeks and if you continue to see a high number of pages on site improperly listed as soft 404s you can post the details to this thread and we'll investigate further.
Honestly, this really concerns me. Google clearly was using soft-404s behind the scenes for a long time. Providing this data to webmasters resulted in many claiming Google was soft-404ing pages that should not be 404ed. Now, with webmaster feedback, Google can address the issue. This is just concerning.
I guess providing the report to webmasters is a win-win for both webmasters and Google. I assume Google will only continue this route.
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
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Google News Hasn't Crawled News Sitemaps For 2 Weeks By Accident
Posted: June 15th, 2010, 3:09pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Google Optimization
All that fuss about upgrading to the new News Sitemap format and now we see Google News has not crawled or indexed any new News Sitemaps files since June 3rd.
A Google News Help thread has a single post from Googler, Inbal. Inbal is responding to a lot of questions in the Google News help forum about them indexing the News Sitemap file.
Inbal said:
We've recently noticed that at least since June 3rd we haven't added any new News sitemaps to our crawl. Please be assured that our engineering team is working to find a solution. We apologize for any inconvenience and hope to resolve this issue in the near future.
I don't know how big of an issue this is in terms of crawling but some new publishers are also complaining at WebmasterWorld. So I think this only impacts new publishers or even old publishers with new Sitemap files but everyone else should be fine.
Forum discussion at Google News Help.