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Google Feet Burners
Fetched: July 27th, 2011, 3:04am CEST by Barry Schwartz
Tags: Search Engine Photo Of The
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Daily Search Forum Recap: July 26, 2011
Fetched: July 27th, 2011, 3:04am 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:
- Goodbye Boost, Hello Google AdWords Express
Google has announced that they are naming Google Boost, which they launched in October 2010 as an easy way for local business to create AdWords listings, to AdWords Express. Any business can create ads and a local listing now within five minutes, Google said... - Buy Google Plus Ones
What took so long? Now, there are companies selling you plus ones. They will have real people, with verified accounts, plus one your stories for you. - Uppercase Google AdWords Display URLs
Reports from WebmasterWorldshow that Google is testing AdWords and AdSense ads with the display URLs in all caps. As you may remember, Google AdWords recently changed their display URL policy to require the display URLs to be lowercase... - Google Plus One Hurting Rankings Or Helping Rankings?
We know that Google has said that plus ones can have a positive impact on your rankings but we also know site speed can have a negative impact on rankings... - Google Feet Burners
Amanda posted a picture on Flickr of the back of an SUV with the writing "Google Feetburner." Apparently it is a a two day 190 mile relay race that Googlers have participated in for 5 years.
Other Great Search Forum Threads:
- Gaming Google - the evolution of our true vocation, WebmasterWorld
- Get Over Yourself And Give Me A Link (please), Sphinn
- How Google Might Rank Pages Based upon Usage Information, Sphinn
- No, Local SEO Isn’t Dead … But It Is a Wee Bit Harder, Sphinn
- Would Google consider adding a crawler schedule to Webmaster Tools?, Google Webmaster Help
- Goodbye Boost, Hello Google AdWords Express
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Goodbye Boost, Hello Google AdWords Express
Fetched: July 27th, 2011, 3:04am CEST by Barry Schwartz
Tags: Google AdWords
Google has announced that they are naming Google Boost, which they launched in October 2010 as an easy way for local business to create AdWords listings, to AdWords Express.
Any business can create ads and a local listing now within five minutes, Google said. Prior, with Boost, you needed a local listing. Now you don't. You can create a local listing and an AdWords listing together by going to google.com/awexpress.
Here is a picture of the basic sign up form:
Here is a video demo:
Forum discussion at Google Places Help and Digital Point Forums.
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Buy Google Plus Ones
Fetched: July 27th, 2011, 3:04am CEST by Ben Pfeiffer
What took so long? Now, there are companies selling you plus ones. They will have real people, with verified accounts, plus one your stories for you.
The site selling these plus ones sell it saying that they can "help your site out by showing Google that the content featured on it." Google has said that plus ones can have a positive impact on your rankings. So an SEO company has come in to monetize it.
Here are the packages they offer:
They promise to deliver quality plus ones, saying:
- All +1's come from people with a google account that has been verified by phone (Phone Verified Accounts)
- All +1's come from real people. No bots are being used!
- All +1's are being given by manually going to your website and clicking the +1 button Itâs untraceble because the +1â²s are being given from different IPâs
- All +1's are given dripped over a couple of days so it looks natural
This is all despite some webmaster removing the plus one button due to site speed issues.
Anyway, I am honestly surprised we haven't seen this sooner. We have text link brokers, content spinners, and now this.
Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.
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Uppercase Google AdWords Display URLs
Fetched: July 27th, 2011, 3:04am CEST by Barry Schwartz
Tags: Google AdWords
Reports from WebmasterWorldshow that Google is testing AdWords and AdSense ads with the display URLs in all caps.
As you may remember, Google AdWords recently changed their display URL policy to require the display URLs to be lowercase.
But some advertisers are claiming, at least on the AdSense side, the display URLs are sometimes being converted to all caps. One said:
I was quite surprised last night to see an ad on my gmail account where the display URL was in all CAPS.
In fact, many advertisers continue to enter the display URLs for their ads in various cases just in case Google changes their mind. Another advertiser explained, "I still cap words in the URL. You never know, they might change their minds about it."
Have you seen it?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
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Google Plus One Hurting Rankings Or Helping Rankings?
Fetched: July 27th, 2011, 3:04am CEST by Barry Schwartz
Tags: Google Search Engine Optimization
We know that Google has said that plus ones can have a positive impact on your rankings but we also know site speed can have a negative impact on rankings.
A WebmasterWorld thread has reports of webmasters pulling the Google Plus One button from their sites because they have been one more element to slow down the page load time of their pages.
One webmaster said:
It was a real pain to add the +1 button and make it fit in layout and get along the other buttons alignment. But what I noticed once I finished spread it all over my site is a horrible slow down in page load.
All page loads fast, but the +1 button is the last one in loading and while it does leaves the page like frozen until it does completely. For instance the main navigation menu (pure css) won't show subitems until the +1 button finally appears.
Truth be told, there are ways to speed up the buttons through some tricks. Michael Butler at RustyBrick (my company) posted an article named JavaScript Hover Effects to Speed Up Page Load Time. Basically, you do not load the buttons until a user places their mouse over the button. Before the user does that, the button is simply an image.
One webmaster claimed that his rankings slipped after adding the plus one button and then shortly after removing it, the rankings came back. Of course, there can be other reasons and factors, but this is what he said:
Just thought I'd add that about 10 days after posting that I removed the +1 buttons from the news articles and within 48hrs the traffic to the news section was back to normal levels (up to about 150/200 uniques a day). Two note: 1) adding +1 was the only change I had made to the news section in months and 2) during all that time, traffic to other parts of the site always remained consistent.
The last time we covered a topic like this was with the Facebook like button where a Googler said it will have no impact on your rankings.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Update: Hours after I posted this, Google announced a faster Google Plus One button. Clearly this post had nothing to do with them releasing it, I am sure it was in development for a while.
