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 17, 2010
Posted: June 17th, 2010, 11:00pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Search Forum Recap
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Yahoo Begins Testing Bing Search Results Now, Switch Over Complete August/September
Posted: June 17th, 2010, 3:44pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Microsoft MSN Search
A WebmasterWorld thread points to a recent presentation video by Yahoo and Microsoft of the transition timelines for Bing to begin powering Yahoo on both the organic and paid side of search.
Did you know that Bing is already or will very soon begin testing powering Yahoo's search results? Yes, in Yahoo Search, you should technically see the same organic results that you would see in Bing - possibly any day now. Of course, this is being tested and you and I may not see it, while your neighbor may see it. This should be in testing mode right now.
When will Yahoo switch completely over to Bing? Either in August or September of this year. That obviously assumes that the tests go well. But we are looking for an August or September 2010 transition on the organic side of Yahoo to Microsoft search.
Here is a slide from the presentation that shares those details:
I am tracking several search results on Yahoo and Bing and will report back as soon as I see them matching. Again, if you see it before me, do let me know.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Postscript: Yahoo sent me this update:
Our goal is to transition algorithmic and paid search in the U.S and Canada in 2010 and we will soon start a series of external bucket tests (note: we’re only doing internal tests today). We will be sharing details about these tests (when they start, etc) with our customers first. So while we're not ready to answer your specific questions today, we would be happy to bring you into the loop when the time is right.
In terms of the transition timing outlined on the slide – as we've said prior, our focus is on providing advertisers with a quality transition experience while protecting the all important holiday season. If we don’t believe we can do both in that timeframe, we will wait until 2011. That is the reason why the slide states that "we may adjust transition timing and dates as needed."
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Google's Soft 404 Errors Also Include 5xx Errors
Posted: June 17th, 2010, 3:35pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Google Optimization
Earlier this week, we reported that Google would fix the soft-404 errors that were inaccurate showing up in the new 404-like reports within Webmaster Tools.
Today, I spotted a Google Webmaster Help thread that notes that Google also includes 5xx-like status errors in the soft-404 reports.
JohnMu from Google said in the thread:
Soft-404 errors include server side errors that are shown on your pages which do not result in an error HTTP result code (5xx or 4xx). For example, it could be that some of your pages were showing database errors as part of the content.
I have not seen real life examples in my reports of a 5xx resulting page showing up in my soft-404 reports. But yet, I don't have any soft-404s. But John from Google said it happens. He even showed examples of such pages in the search results.
So what do you do? John from Google offers a suggestion:
These are issues which are hard to diagnose, which is one of the reasons we've started reporting them in Webmaster Tools. A possible solution would be to make sure that all of your content could be fetched from the database before returning it with a HTTP result code. If you run into server errors along the way, you could return a 500 or 503 HTTP result code with the content. This would still allow you to show the error messages to users (and you -- as you are working on your site) but would prevent search engine crawlers from accidentally crawling and indexing those errors. I'd also recommend logging those errors and working to try to find out more about them, so that you can prevent them in the future, making sure that your site is always a great user-experience, even if a bunch of users should come at the same time :).
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
Update from JohnMu at Google:
Hi Barry - We don't directly include 5xx HTTP result code URLs in the soft-404 section; it's more that there are many sites that return server errors within the context of normal pages. For instance, when a database-query fails, it might be that they include the database-error as a part of the content of a page that returns 200 OK (instead of changing the HTTP result code to 5xx).
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Google Doesn't Like Apple's Safari 5?
Posted: June 17th, 2010, 3:27pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Google AdWords
If you login to Google AdWords using Apple's latest update to their browser, Safari version 5, you will get a warning from Google.
The warning reads:
We have detected that you are using an older web browser. For better performance with the AdWords interface, we recommend using a modern browser such as Firefox 3.5, Chrome, Safari 4, or Internet Explorer 8. Learn more.
Here is a picture of the warning:
Yes, Google calls Safari 5, one of the latest and greatest browsers, an "older browser." Clearly, since Safari 5 was just released, this is a new browser. I guess Google just needs to update the logic they are using for browser detection.
Or maybe Google isn't happy Apple continues to update Safari, since Google has their own browser, Chrome - which actually is based off of Safari? That probably isn't it - but figured I seed some of you conspiracy theorists with that.
My big issue is in an Google AdWords Help thread has a Googler, Bindu, telling a Safari 5 user to switch browsers. Seriously?
Forum discussion at Google AdWords Help.
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Bing Creating Their Own Caffeine Indexing Speed?
Posted: June 17th, 2010, 3:14pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Microsoft MSN Search
A WebmasterWorld thread has two webmasters claiming Bing is getting much faster at indexing new content than in the past. One said, the speed is almost, if not, similar to Google's speed of indexing content.
Google made this big stink about Caffeine and they have every right to. Google is the best not just because of their ranking algorithm, but because of the speed of indexing and displaying indexed content in the search results. For Bing to compete with Google head on, they need to get faster - not just better. Getting faster and keeping quality intact is not easy. Any improvements are noticed and I am glad people are noticing improvements with Bing.
Unfortunately, my tests don't show that, but maybe with some sites, Bing is incredibly fast.
For example, I just posted a new blog entry minutes ago here. Searching for the title shows Google has it already, but Bing does not:
Google result:
Bing result:
So is Bing indeed getting faster and they just dislike this incredibly useful and highly authoritative web site?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
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Does Google Give Mahalo A Spam Pass Or Positives Outweigh Negatives?
Posted: June 17th, 2010, 3:04pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Spam
A Sphinn thread links to a post named Was The Google Mayday Update A Complete Failure Then?. The blog post goes through examples on how even though the May Day update was suppose to really downgrade the rankings of sites like Mahalo, that site just doesn't go away.
Mahalo launched in 2007 by Jason Calacanis, who has been known to go at SEOs. So as you can imagine, SEOs are very critical over Calacanis's property. Aaron Wall called the site out as spamming Google's guidelines. Even Danny Sullivan did a detailed analysis of Mahalo and how they push the line of breaking Google's guidelines.
One would have thought that May Day would have put the site to rest but it has not.
Alan Bleiweiss made an interesting and likely correct comment on the Sphinn thread, he said:
I've said this a few times for similar issues - Matt Cutts would say - there's other signals that outweigh any negative. I say this because that's his response to me when I asked him about sites showing up in top organic position even though they distribute "free page counters" that embed links to their site in the footer of thousands or tens of thousands of trash sites. (free page counters by the way, that they promote through AdWords).
In this case, the premise would be that because Mahalo has millions of pages of content, and all those "valid" other signals of "authority", it justifies Google not slapping them for the crud.
Except I would venture to guess there's a million pages of that crud on their site :-)
So, in this case, do you think it is special Google treatment or is the good outweighing the bad?
Forum discussion at Sphinn.