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  Subdomains: Hubpages Way Out Of Google Panda Purgatory?

  Fetched: July 14th, 2011, 3:44pm CEST by Barry Schwartz

  Tags:  Google Search Engine Optimization  

  Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal blog posted an article named Site Claims to Loosen Google "Death Grip".

  The article describes how Hubpages was hit hard by Google's Panda update and finally, after five months, they are noticing a recovery. They cite the main reason for their recovery is the strategy of moving their low-quality content from the main www of their site to subdomains, essentially bring up the important quality content they have on the www. This would make Google believe that the site is no longer Panda worthy and move the Panda penalty or filter to the subdomains and remove it from the main www.

  As I explained at Search Engine Land, subdomains can be seen by Google as a completely different domain and thus this can make sense.

  I followed up with Google and Google said:

  Subdomains can be useful to separate out content that is completely different from the rest of a site - for example, on domains such as wordpress.com. However, site owners should not expect that simply adding a new subdomain on a site will trigger a boost in ranking.

  Clearly, Google is warning many webmasters hit by Panda to not try this method unless they are the size of a WordPress type of site.

  That being said, do I really believe Hubpages has seen a Panda recovery?

  A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion around the story and many believe this can't be a Panda recovery because of the dates. The article said, "the HubPages subdomain testing began in late June and already has shown positive results."

  The issue is, we know Google's latest Panda update was on June 16th or so, i.e .Panda 2.2. So if they began their subdomain test in late June, how could they see improvements now? Especially since Panda is updated manually. There are some rumors there was an update in the past couple days to Panda, but I am not convinced. Even if there was an update, the story takes time to research.

  Anyway, I am not convinced - what about you?

  For more on Panda, see our Panda page.

  Update: David Harry has some additional insight into this story over here.

  Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

  
  

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  Google Ignoring Your Page Titles?

  Fetched: July 14th, 2011, 3:44pm CEST by Barry Schwartz

  Tags:  Google Search Engine Optimization  

  For the past month, I've been seeing sporadic reports that Google is ignoring the webmaster's title tag and rewriting it to a Google made up title tag.

  There are four different threads on this topic at WebmasterWorld since June on the topic.

  This new change seems to be a limited test since around June and for the most part, webmasters are not happy about it.

  We know Google may opt to change your meta description and use something different in the search result snippet area but page titles?

  Anyway, this does not seem to be fully rolled out. I assume if it does, Google will only change your title tag based on the search query used and when they think it makes most sense. Are you comfortable giving Google the keys to your titles in the search results?

  Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

  
  

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  YouTube Video Stop Uploading? No Need To Start Again!

  Fetched: July 14th, 2011, 3:44pm CEST by Barry Schwartz

  Tags:  Other Google Topics  

  David from YouTube announced a new feature for the YouTube video upload tool at the YouTube Help forums.

  David said they have implemented a new feature to let users continue their video upload even after it fails. Yes, it has happened to me several times where I have begun uploading a video and either my internet connection dropped or computer restarted or I accidentally closed my browser and I had to start all over again. In the old days, It took me several hours to upload my videos and it was incredibly frustrating when this happened.

  Now, if you use Chrome of Firefox 4 or higher, the YouTube uploader will let you resume your upload.

  David explained yesterday that "today we are beginning 100% resumability support for the XHR uploader." He added that they are removing the old Java uploader which was one of the methods to do this, which rarely worked for me anyway:

  This means if you have a supported browser (Chrome or FF4+), you can upload, pull the plug, resume, and expect it to pick up from where it left off. In our testing the resumability is consistently more reliable than the java uploader.

  As I have mentioned before, we plan to get rid of the Java uploader entirely once we are truly confident in the effectiveness of this. Anyway, I will provide some updates once this is actually live later today.

  Larry from YouTube added:

  The XHR uploader (which is the mechanism used if you access the upload interface with Chrome or Firefox 4+) supports unlimited file sizes. Notice that if you access the uploader with one of these supported browsers 2gb will not be listed as a restriction.

  The uploader will run a checksum against previously attempted uploads. So, if you upload to 50% and experience a crash, when you attempt to upload the same video again the progress bar will jump back to 50%, and your upload will continue. Keep an eye out for this around 5 PST and let me know if you have positive or negative experiences with it.

  I for one am very happy about this enhancement!

  Forum discussion at YouTube Help.

  
  

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  Google Maps Removes Driving With Traffic Estimates

  Fetched: July 14th, 2011, 3:44pm CEST by Barry Schwartz

  Tags:  Google Maps  

  I am not sure exactly when this happened, but Google Maps has dropped one of the more useful features. The feature is, estimating how much time it would take to drive somewhere with traffic, either live traffic or predictive traffic based on day/time.

  Now, the feature is gone.

  A Google Maps Help thread has a Googler explaining they removed it because it wasn't accurate enough. Daniel from Google explained:

  We have decided that our information systems behind this feature were not as good as they could be. Therefore, we have taken this offline and are currently working to come up with a better, more accurate solution. We are always working to bring you the best Google Maps experience with updates like these!

  Personally, I found Google's traffic data more accurate than any other live traffic information. Google croudsourced phones for real time traffic data and I thought it worked well.

  Old:

  New:

  Google launched traffic estimates back in 2007.

  The thing is, the traffic estimates still do work, just not on Google Maps. You can use your iPhone and get the details. I am not sure if it still works on Android as well.

  Hope they don't remove it from the iPhone because I use this feature a lot.

  Forum discussion at Google Maps Help.

  
  

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  Who's The First Google + User

  Fetched: July 14th, 2011, 3:44pm CEST by Barry Schwartz

  Tags:  Other Google Topics  

  Brian White, an engineer at Google who deeply involved in Google's search quality, posted a Google + post with some detective work.

  Brian White wanted to see who "Profile Zero" on Google + is. So he decided to sniff around the Google robots.txt file and found a sitemap file at gstatic.com/s2/sitemaps/profiles-sitemap.xml. The first sitemap file referenced there listed the first profile as Raj Pudota.

  Truth is, and Brian White said it, "I actually don't know if this is a "canonical first profile" or anything--it's just the first one listed."

  Technically, this is extremely not likely. The first Google + user was probably a Googler working on the project.

  If you look at Facebook, you can see profile number 4 is Mark Zuckerberg. Just try facebook.com/profile.php?id=4, notice the id=4. Who is number one? Someone named Rosa Angelica Alba.

  Anyway, any ideas who has the first Google + profile?

  Forum discussion at Google +.

  
  

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  YouTube Beach Bar

  Fetched: July 14th, 2011, 3:44pm CEST by Barry Schwartz

  Tags:  Search Engine Photo Of The  

  
  

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  Daily Search Forum Recap: July 13, 2011

  Fetched: July 14th, 2011, 6:30am CEST by Barry Schwartz

  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.

  Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

  • International Ad AdWords Tips? Google's New Contest
    Google AdWords representative, Mini, posted a new contest in the Google AdWords Help forum for advertisers to win Google Schwag. The contest is to post some of your best tips for advertising internationally within the AdWords ad market.
  • Scoble Tells SEO Industry He Was Wrong
    Before I even start this article, let me be clear that I know this is as much as a link bait from Scoble as for the reason he is sorry - but it is important to document on a site that covers the SEO industry and news around it...
  • Plus One Google Doodles?
    Why can't we plus one Google Logos? I don't think we need the Google Plus or other social sharing buttons on the Google home page, when the Doodle is live. But I do
  • Google Chrome Cut
    Can you imagine walking around with this hairdo? The "Chrome Cut" is a haircut and styling that takes the shape and color of the Google Chrome logo. The picture was posted by Mayhem Chaos on Flickr.

  Other Great Search Forum Threads:

  • Google To Open Photo Sharing Service, Photovine, WebmasterWorld
  • Temporary Access For AdWords Professionals?, WebmasterWorld
  • The Heart Of SEO: 8 Everlasting Truths, Part 1, Sphinn
  • What Will Google Plus Google Places Equal?, Sphinn

  
  

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  International Ad AdWords Tips? Google's New Contest

  Fetched: July 14th, 2011, 6:30am CEST by Barry Schwartz

  Tags:  Google AdWords  

  Google AdWords representative, Mini, posted a new contest in the Google AdWords Help forum for advertisers to win Google Schwag.

  The contest is to post some of your best tips for advertising internationally within the AdWords ad market.

  Mini from Google said:

  What are some tips for international advertising? What works well and what doesn't? What are some of the must-dos?

  Share your best practices on 'International Advertising' and receive some cool Google schwag. Early birds and best answers will be highlighted!

  So far there are two tips, one on how to structure you AdWords campaigns to differentiate between countries and the second is a tip on how to add country specific information to your ad descriptions and titles.

  Forum discussion at Google AdWords Help.

  
  

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  Scoble Tells SEO Industry He Was Wrong

  Fetched: July 14th, 2011, 6:30am CEST by Barry Schwartz

  Tags:  Search Engine Industry News  

  Before I even start this article, let me be clear that I know this is as much as a link bait from Scoble as for the reason he is sorry - but it is important to document on a site that covers the SEO industry and news around it.

  Robert Scoble, one of the more famous bloggers and social personalities on the Internet, has made a public apology to the SEO industry. He apologized for bashing the SEO industry on how they manipulate Google and also Google. You can read about his claims back in 2007 over at SEOmoz. Today, Scoble says he was wrong.

  Scoble explained:

  I showed an example where SEO techniques had put stuff into Google searches that just wasn't very good and compared that to where Mahalo had done a better job.

  Anyway, it's 2011 now and itâs clear that the Google way of doing things is still better for most people. Itâs instructive to go back and see where I went wrong.

  The funny part to me is one of the reasons he bashed the SEO industry was for the "link bait". He even admitted it, "I went for cheap SEO tricks. Truth is, if you bash the SEO world they will all link to you, argue with you, etc. (Bloggers even have a name for this: âlink baitâ)."

  But if you think about it, apologizing to the SEO industry is also a cheap SEO trick and gets you lots of links - maybe not as many as apologizing, but still plenty of links.

  As a side note, Robert Scoble is a good person. He probably doesn't remember it, but I emailed him out of the blue asking for advice on a Israeli Consulate backed Blogger trip that he went on the year before. He spent a nice amount of time talking to me over the phone about the pros and cons of the trip and what I should look out for. Rare to see someone with such a busy schedule take time out of their day to help a single person, they typically like helping the masses with their time - which totally makes sense.

  Forum discussion at Sphinn.

  
  

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  Plus One Google Doodles?

  Fetched: July 14th, 2011, 6:30am CEST by Barry Schwartz

  Tags:  Other Google Topics  

  I spotted a smart request in the Google Web Search Help forums asking why can't we plus one Google Logos?

  A good question!

  I don't think we need the Google Plus or other social sharing buttons on the Google home page, when the Doodle is live. But I do think adding them to the Google Logos gallery makes sense.

  Maybe something like this:

  While they are at it, they should document how many clicks each Google Doodle received. Would be awesome to see which are the most "popular" Google Doodles.

  Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

  
  

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  Google Chrome Cut

  Fetched: July 14th, 2011, 6:30am CEST by Barry Schwartz

  Tags:  Search Engine Photo Of The  

  
  

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  Daily Search Forum Recap: July 12, 2011

  Fetched: July 14th, 2011, 6:30am CEST by Barry Schwartz

  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.

  Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

  • YouTube Tests New Channel & Video Design
    Last week, YouTube announced a new design experiment for the channel and YouTube video watch pages. The new look is code named Cosmic Panda.
  • Google Images Source URL Via &surl=1
    Kelly from Google posted a technical document explaining how you can know the URL of the source image Google crawled via Google Images. Kelly posted the explanation in a Google Document but let me repeat most of it here...
  • Google Updates Product Search Feed Specs - September 22
    Google has announced very important and potentially costly changes for merchants who submit their feeds to Google Product Search. As of September 22, 2011...
  • Google Logo For 450th Anniversary Of St. Basil's Cathedral
    Today on many but not all Google properties is a special logo for the 450th anniversary of the St. Basil's Cathedral. It is a is a Russian Orthodox church built on the Red Square in Moscow in 1555â"61...
  • The Office 365 Car
    @steveplunkett spotted a Microsoft Office 365 car on the street and notified me. This isn't 100% search related but Microsoft runs Bing and Google creeps into office applications.

  Other Great Search Forum Threads:

  • Doodle independence day Argentina, Google Blogoscoped Forum
  • Google 1 strategies, WebmasterWorld
  • Why SEO Experiments Are Almost Always Invalid, Sphinn
  • Seeing a black box and unable to play Youtube videos?, YouTube Help

  
  

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  YouTube Tests New Channel & Video Design

  Fetched: July 14th, 2011, 6:30am CEST by Barry Schwartz

  Tags:  Other Google Topics  

  Last week, YouTube announced a new design experiment for the channel and YouTube video watch pages. The new look is code named Cosmic Panda.

  You can test it out at youtube.com/testtube and learn more about this specific experiment over here.

  Here are screen shots of the channel and watch pages:

  Hate it? Love It? Let us know.

  Want to complain to YouTube, let them know at the YouTube Help thread.

  
  

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  Google Images Source URL Via &surl=1

  Fetched: July 14th, 2011, 6:30am CEST by Barry Schwartz

  Tags:  Google Search Engine  

  Kelly from Google posted a technical document explaining how you can know the URL of the source image Google crawled via Google Images.

  Kelly posted the explanation in a Google Document but let me repeat most of it here.

  It is now easy for you to know the URL of the source image that we crawled simply by inspecting the URL of our small-size thumbnail of that image.

  In short, if you include &surl=1 in the URL of the HTTP request to the Google Images search results page, then we will include the URL of the image we crawled as part of the small-size thumbnail URL.

  So you can make a GET request using "GET /images?hl=en&source=imghp&biw=1147&bih=753&q=sunset&gbv=2&aq=f&aqi=g10&aql=f&oq=&surl=1 HTTP/1.1" and then you can find something that looks similar to "http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTz81QcOqyI9z3Gs5gAA93zudW5-6eTTe5a26CoCMYC9SA9Ed0u2JgFcQVh4w:kedarphotography.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/sunset-switzerland.jpg". The later part is the source image.

  If you have additional questions on how this works, join the thread.

  Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

  
  

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  Google Updates Product Search Feed Specs - September 22

  Fetched: July 14th, 2011, 6:30am CEST by Barry Schwartz

  Tags:  Google Search Engine Optimization  

  Google has announced very important and potentially costly changes for merchants who submit their feeds to Google Product Search.

  As of September 22, 2011, there will be a new feed specification and an updated policy for those feeds in place.

  The changes impact most of you who submit feeds to Google Product Search. The key U.S. changes are below but you can find all the changes for each country and region over here.

  Google said:

  • Availability: Weâd like a user to be able to find your products even when they are out of stock. For this reason, the [availability] status of all your items will be required.
  • Google Product Category: We have added a new required high-level attribute called [google product category] that contains the category of the item in Googleâs taxonomy (currently only required for a select number of categories). This is in addition to the current [product type] attribute.
  • Images: Weâre making [image link] required and we encourage you to submit up to 10 additional product images through [additional image link]. This way, you can improve the visual representation of your products.
  • Apparel: In order to create a better experience for product variants such as dresses or shoes that are available in multiple colors or sizes, we ask you to include information like [size] and [color] in your product feed. In addition, we require you to provide [gender] and [age group].
  • Data Freshness: We will continue to regularly check feeds for accuracy of pricing, availability, and general product information, and take action against accounts that violate our standards.

  Ronald from Google said in the Google Merchant Help forums:

  We understand that Google Merchant Center users will have a lot of questions, comments, suggestions and feedback about these changes. In order to collate all these in one place, we are creating a new category in the Google Merchant Center help forum called "Products Feed Specification changes." Please post your questions, comments, suggestions and feedback about these changes in this category.

  For more details, see the Google Merchant Blog.

  Forum discussion at Google Merchant Help.

  
  

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  Google Logo For 450th Anniversary Of St. Basil's Cathedral

  Fetched: July 14th, 2011, 6:30am CEST by Barry Schwartz

  Tags:  Logos  

  Today on many but not all Google properties is a special logo for the 450th anniversary of the St. Basil's Cathedral. It is a is a Russian Orthodox church built on the Red Square in Moscow in 1555â"61. It is also known as the Cathedral of the Protection of Most Holy Theotokos on the Moat or in Russian as Ð¡Ð¾Ð±Ð¾Ñ Ð'аÑÐ'лÐ'Ñ Ð'лаженного. The church has 9 domes and 2 spires. They first started building it in 1555 and completed it in 1561 under the order of Ivan IV of Russia. For more details about the church, see Wikipedia.

  Over the years there have been many complaints, especially around the Google Christmas logo, that Google doesn't have special logos for Christian days. So it is hard to get more Christian than that logo, it even has a cross at the top of the logo.

  There are forum threads talking about the logo, including a few at Google Web Search Help and Google Blogoscoped Forums.

  The logo is not on localized versions of Google where the population is not mostly Christian, such as Google Egypt, Google Pakistan, Google Israel and others.

  Do you like this logo?

  Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help and Google Blogoscoped Forums.

  
  

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  The Office 365 Car

  Fetched: July 14th, 2011, 6:30am CEST by Barry Schwartz

  Tags:  Search Engine Photo Of The