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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Google
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Official Google Webmaster Central Blog (325 unread)
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Search Engine Roundtable
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Daily Search Forum Recap: June 30, 2010
Posted: June 30th, 2010, 11:00pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Search Forum Recap
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Getting Your Blog In Google Blog Search
Posted: June 30th, 2010, 3:47pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Google Optimization
A Google Webmaster Help thread has advice from Googler, JohnMu, on how to help get your blog included in the Google Blog Search index. John said to basically manually ping Google with their pinging service.
To do so, go to [blogsearch.google.com] and add your blog.
John said:
We use blog-search pings to pick up blogs. From what I heard back, at the time of the last ping there were some small technical issues with your site, making us abort the fetching for Blog-Search. A simple solution to that is to just do a manual ping via the web-interface ( http://blogsearch.google.com/ping ), which is what I did yesterday. Apparently it's been picked up now and should be trickling through the pipeline soon'ish :-). This is usually not a problem, especially when the blog regularly adds content, then missing a single ping won't break things. But if we really rarely see blog-search pings, then missing any of them can cause hiccups like this.
So my recommendation to sites in a similar situation is to do a manual "ping" (and double-check to make sure that you're really pinging Google's Blog-Search automatically), and generally to work on regularly adding content to your blog. That said, keep in mind that your content will be available through our web-search regardless of whether or not it's seen as a blog or also indexed in Blog Search :)
The pinging service launched in October 2006 and Google Blog Search in general launched September 2005.
To be honest, it seems to me that Blog Search is slowly being phased out in exchange for a focus on real time search. The last time we really wrote about Google Blog Search was just about a year ago. So I am just under the impression that Google is not caring much about blog search and focusing efforts in other areas - which is fine.
Do you think this is true and if so, is it a bad idea?
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
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Google's Matt Cutts Says Again, Don't Use Nofollow For Internal Links
Posted: June 30th, 2010, 3:35pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Google Optimization
Google's Matt Cutts posted a video yesterday on the topic of PageRank sculpting using the nofollow attribute and/or using the nofollow attribute on internal links. Here it is:
In short, Matt says do not use it for internal links - never.
But do you agree? Some webmasters do and some don't. Here is one SEO on Twitter that said no:
.bbpBox17357614309 {background:url(http://s.twimg.com/a/1277242272/images/themes/theme4/bg.gif) #0099B9;padding:20px;} p.bbpTweet{background:#fff;padding:10px 12px 10px 12px;margin:0;min-height:48px;color:#000;font-size:18px !important;line-height:22px;-moz-border-radius:5px;-webkit-border-radius:5px} p.bbpTweet span.metadata{display:block;width:100%;clear:both;margin-top:8px;padding-top:12px;height:40px;border-top:1px solid #fff;border-top:1px solid #e6e6e6} p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author{line-height:19px} p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author img{float:left;margin:0 7px 0 0px;width:38px;height:38px} p.bbpTweet a:hover{text-decoration:underline}p.bbpTweet span.timestamp{font-size:12px;display:block}
Don't follow his advise :) @mattcutts from @google on nofollow used for internal links [youtu.be] /via @rustybrickless than a minute ago via TwitterrificTomy Lorsch
tomylorschBut in a WebmasterWorldthread, Tedster said it does work and shared a story. He said:
Last year I was asked to look at a site that had major ranking troubles. They had used nofollow extensively, trying to sculpt PageRank to go only to those pages they wanted to see in search results. Even some main menu items had nofollow!
At the time they were below 10% of total traffic from search. I suggested they remove all of the nofollows and they did. One month later they were up to about 30% traffic from search. I haven't checked in with them lately, but I'd guess they continued to improve - unless they got tricky again.
Do you use it at all? Take my poll below:
Do You Use Nofollow on Some Internal Links?online survey
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
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GoogleBot Acting Weird
Posted: June 30th, 2010, 3:21pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Google Optimization
Around June 15th, GoogleBot reportedly slowed crawling of web pages and documents. Then ten days later, GoogleBot started crawling again. Today, I am seeing new reports of sporadic, somewhat spastic crawl behavior.
A WebmasterWorld thread has reports that GoogleBot stopped crawling some sites late June 28th and then started again early this morning. It seems that maybe GoogleBot gets stuck on some sites or something has changed.
Maybe this is the new behavior since Caffeine launched or maybe there is a bug, I am not sure. But the reports come from obsessed SEOs and webmasters that track Google like they would their own daughter.
Are you seeing weird crawl (or lack there of) patterns from GoogleBot?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
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BingBot Is Coming, BingBot Is Coming: Bye MSNBot
Posted: June 30th, 2010, 3:13pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Microsoft MSN Search
The Bing Blog announced that Microsoft is retiring MSNBot in place of BingBot on October 1, 2010.
So instead of MSNBot showing up in your log files, you should see BingBot in your log files. It should look something like:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0 +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)
Microsoft said that BingBot will continue to respect and honor the msnbot directives in the robots.txt file, so you do not need to update your robots.txt files yet. But if you are doing more advanced checking, you may need to update your personal scripts. It is also to note that if Microsoft "detect separate sets of directives for bingbot and for any of the older versions of Microsoft search bots (such as msnbot) or a set of directives for all crawlers, the directives for bingbot will take precedence."
WebmasterWorld's Bing moderator said, "So anyone herding msnbot using .htaccess or other means will need to start adjusting your software accordingly."
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
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Google AdWords Showing Seller Rating For Highly Rated Merchants
Posted: June 30th, 2010, 3:00pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Google AdWords
Google announced they have launched a new product extension for Google AdWords named seller extension rating.
You can see the feature show up in the live search results if you are English-language searchers, searching on Google.com. Not only that, it will only show if the merchant has 30 or more ratings and the ratings average higher than 3 stars, i.e. 4 or higher rating.
Try a search for [ipod touch] and you will see it come up at the top and on the right:
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.