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Daily Search Forum Recap: October 15, 2010

Posted: October 15th, 2010, 11:00pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Search Forum Recap

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.

Video Recap of Weekly Search Buzz :: October 15, 2010

Posted: October 15th, 2010, 8:30pm CEST by rustybrick

This week at the Search Engine Roundtable I covered some important search related news. Most importantly, Bing partnered with Facebook to add a social element box to the Bing results based on your Facebook friends and what they like. Google's Marissa Mayer is changing roles, no longer vp of search products, she is moving to location and local services. Google updated their link reports in Webmaster Tools. Google also added more features to the parameter handling in Webmaster Tools. Google is testing blue mouse over events in the search results and AdWords at the bottom of the search results. Yahoo is rumored to be looking to sell again, they even went offline for an hour yesterday and are closing the UK directory next month. Google had a great third quarter, at leaser fiscally. Google Maps in Antarctica has Peguins as the Pegman. SES Chicago is next week and we will be offering live blog coverage. That was this past week at the Search Engine Roundtable.

Make sure to subscribe to our video feed or subscribe directly on iTunes to be notified of these updates and download the video in the background. You can also watch this live and ask questions during the show, typically Friday mornings around 9:30 (EST) at seroundtable.com/live, follow @rustybrick to be notified when we air. Here is the YouTube version of the feed:

For the original iTunes version, click here.

Search Topics of Discussion:

Please do subscribe via iTunes or on your favorite RSS reader. Don't forget to comment below with the right answer and good luck!

Google Testing AdWords At Bottom Again

Posted: October 15th, 2010, 3:20pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Google AdWords

Google is apparently testing placing AdWords ads at the bottom of the search results, again. A WebmasterWorld thread has two people reporting seeing this recently.

One said:

I never noticed this before maybe it's not new. I see 3 Adwords Ads on top of the serps as usual and 3 at the bottom directly below the 10th result. There are no Ads at all to the right side of any keywords I check.

Scott added:

Saw this once today. I really wish they'd stop testing.
Whatever layout changes they're making impressions for the same spot are down 25% again today. This may explain that.

Google has tested this in the past. Back in 2005 and 2008. Here is a screen shot from 2005:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: Here is a picture from @everfluxx:

Plus there are more pictures from readers in the comments below.

Surprise: Google's Q3 2010 Earnings Up

Posted: October 15th, 2010, 3:05pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Other Google Topics

Fine, maybe not a surprise, but Google released their third quarter earnings for 2010 yesterday. Here are the highlights:

Revenues of $7.29 billion for the quarter ended September 30, 2010, an increase of 23% compared to the third quarter of 2009.
GAAP operating income in the third quarter of 2010 was $2.55 billion, up from $2.07 billion previous year.
GAAP net income in the third quarter of 2010 was $2.17 billion, compared to $1.64 billion in the third quarter of 2009
Google Sites Revenues - Google-owned sites generated revenues of $4.83 billion, or 67% of total revenues, in the third quarter of 2010. This represents a 22% increase over third quarter 2009 revenues of $3.96 billion.
Google Network Revenues - Google’s partner sites generated revenues, through AdSense programs, of $2.20 billion, or 30% of total revenues, in the third quarter of 2010. This represents a 22% increase from third quarter 2009 network revenues of $1.80 billion.
Paid Clicks – Aggregate paid clicks, which include clicks related to ads served on Google sites and the sites of our AdSense partners, increased approximately 16% over the third quarter of 2009 and increased approximately 4% over the second quarter of 2010.
Cost-Per-Click – Average cost-per-click, which includes clicks related to ads served on Google sites and the sites of our AdSense partners, increased approximately 3% over the third quarter of 2009 and increased approximately 2% over the second quarter of 2010.
Cash – As of September 30, 2010, cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities were $33.4 billion.
Headcount – On a worldwide basis, Google employed 23,331 full-time employees as of September 30, 2010, up from 21,805 full-time employees as of June 30, 2010.

Lots of coverage of this on Techmeme.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & Google Blogoscoped Forums.

Google Product Search Adds Advanced Usage Settings

Posted: October 15th, 2010, 3:00pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Google Optimization

Those of you who submit product feeds to Google Product Search, aka Google Merchant Center may want to know about a new advanced usage setting they just released.

As Ronald from Google describes in a Google Merchant Center Help thread:

In order to give you more control over your feeds and items appearing in Google Product Search, Adwords product extensions and Google Commerce Search, we’re launching some advanced feed usage settings in the Merchant Center. For merchants who are only using Google Product Search, there is no need to change any settings; those who are using either Google Commerce Search or product-based ads formats can use the new "Set advanced feed usage settings" link within the Data Feeds tab to exclude or include a feed for a particular destination. For item-level control, merchants can use the new "exclude destination" attribute in their feed. To find out more about these changes, see this article in our Help Center.
You can visit here for more information on this feature.

There has not been that much discussion on this topic but with the value of product extensions, it seems like a no brainer for many advertisers to look at this a bit more closely.

Forum discussion at Google Merchant Center Help.

Yahoo Was "Down a Bit" Yesterday Afternoon

Posted: October 15th, 2010, 2:51pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Other Yahoo Topics

What else can go wrong for Yahoo, I mean, seriously kick them when they are down? Yesterday afternoon, Yahoo.com - the main web site - was offline for just about an hour. It technically seemed to be up, but incredibly slow, taking me personally close to a minute for it to load at times.

I wrote about it at Search Engine Land as soon as I saw people Tweeting about it. During the outage, I was amazed there was no note about this outage on the @Yahoo Twitter account, but later on they did admit to being "down a bit" yesterday.

.bbpBox27385127262 {background:url(http://a3.twimg.com/profile_background_images/108563399/Twitter_BG_060419.png) #642D8B;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}

As some of you noticed, Yahoo.com was down for a bit this afternoon. We're back up and running-sorry for the interruption!less than a minute ago via web Yahoo!
Yahoo

I do believe this is the first time I have ever seen Yahoo.com down in my life time. I really cannot remember Yahoo every being down before, at least not their home page.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

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