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: October 28, 2010
Posted: October 28th, 2010, 11:00pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Search Forum Recap
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Google Pleases Local Optimizers & Upsets AdWords Optimizers With Place Search
Posted: October 28th, 2010, 3:23pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Google Search Engine
Yesterday, Google officially announced Place Search. We have seen signs of this coming with some tests in the past.
In short, if your search contains anything that might signal local intent, Google may show a map above the AdWords ads on the right, and then automatically include some local results within the organic results. Plus, they added a "Places" link on the left hand navigation bar in Google's search results.
If you don't see it yet, then you can try it out by clicking here or looking at this screen shot:
Greg Sterling has a nice review at Search Engine Land. Greg said "the changes reflect Google’s commitment to local." It does and many local optimizers are really happy with this and can't wait to start messing around and seeing how they can get their local results top.
But AdWords advertisers are not too happy. The map in the top right position moves down their ads that would have shown up otherwise. They are not happy. Plus, they feel it is merging the organic results with the paid results by having an organic map above on the right, of the ads.
Forum discussion at Google Places Help, DigitalPoint Forums, WebmasterWorld, HighRankings Forum, Search Engine Watch Forums and Google Web Search Help.
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Google Confirms Major AdWords Quality Score Reporting Bug
Posted: October 28th, 2010, 3:15pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Google AdWords
If you visited any Google AdWords help forum in the past day or so, you would have seen dozens of complaints in the form of threads and posts from advertisers worried about their quality score. As you know, quality score is a major factor in determining the AdWords ad rank and price.
Google confirmed the bug in a couple threads, including one at the Google AdWords Help forum and one at WebmasterWorld. Google said it is just a reporting glitch and ad serving, I assume pricing and placement, have not been impacting by the reporting glitch.
The confirmation comes in two parts.
AdWordsPro said:
Many accounts are experiencing an unexpected drop in quality score for high performing keywords, starting around the 24th/25th of October 2010. This appears to be a reporting only issue, meaning that we display the quality score as incorrectly low in the account interface, while ad serving itself is not affected.
Please know that our engineers are looking into this as a top priority.
I will update this thread when I have further information.
The key word above was "appears," where program manager of AdWords, Adam, confirmed later on saying:
As earlier reported by AdsWordsPro, I can confirm that this issue did not impact serving (i.e., the system has been correctly computing auction-time Quality Score this entire time for ranking and pricing purposes).
This issue was limited to the reporting of Quality Score, and the fix should be live for all within the next 24 hours. For those keywords with a status of Low search volume, the fix should be live within the next few days.
Thank you all for your patience as we resolve this.
Things should be getting back to normal and you should not have been impacted, unless you made changes to your campaigns based on the reporting glitch. If so, put things back.
Forum discussion at he Google AdWords Help and WebmasterWorld.
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Gobble Gobble: Microsoft Bing/adCenter Swallows Yahoo Completely In US & Canada
Posted: October 28th, 2010, 3:00pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: MSN Microsoft adCenter
As you know, Yahoo was planning on migrating everyone in the US and Canada over from their search ad platform to Microsoft adCenter by the end of this month. As Yahoo said, mission accomplished, Yahoo has successful handed themselves over to Microsoft on a platter. Ironically, well before the Thanksgiving holiday, which was their goal. Gobble Gobble!
I summed up the news and what this means at Search Engine Land but I'll bullet point it here.
- US/Canada organic and paid search on Yahoo now fully powered by Bing.
- CPC prices will increase, as we have seen, on Microsoft adCenter due to increased competition
- You will be able to access your Yahoo reports in read only mode for 5 months at Yahoo
- Historical data will remain for 13-months
- Those spending a nice amount still will have their Yahoo reps, everyone else gets managed by Microsoft
- Mobile ads will be migrated by the end of this month, which is now
Those are the key points.
I do have to commend Yahoo and Microsoft for completing this transition smoothly and well before the major holiday shopping season. But as you all know, I am still bitter about the whole deal.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
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Google Creates Chrome Extension To Report Search Spam
Posted: October 28th, 2010, 2:53pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Google Optimization
Google loves when webmasters and SEOs report search/web spam to them. Although 70% of SEOs won't report spam to Google, there is still a huge number of people who would. To make it easier for those spam reporters, Google has created a Chrome Extension named the Google Webspam Report.
I don't know for sure who made the extension at Google, but maybe it was Matt? Maybe?
There is a Google presentation on how it works, which I will embed below. The extension has:
- Adds links to search result and web history pages to report spam quickly.
- Prepopulates the spam report form where possible.
- Select a spam url from your Chrome history.
- Cycle through your recent Google searches to fill fields of the spam report page.
- Options page to enable/disable features individually.
More on spam reporting:
- Reporting Spam: Is It Ethical
- How Can I Report Spam to Google?
- Google Spam Reporting Working
- Does Google Investigate Spam Reports?
- Quick Spam Reporting Tool
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.