Mar 14
Daily Search Forum Recap: March 14, 2008
in Search Engine Roundtable
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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.

Mar 14
SearchCap: The Day In Search, March 14, 2008
in Search Engine Land
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Below is what happened in search today, as reported on
Search Engine Land and from other
places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:


  • Search In Pictures: American Airlines Google Billboard, Yahoo’s Birthday Party & Chris Gardner @ Yahoo
    In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more….

  • Yahoo And Microsoft Hold Informal Talks About Combining Companies
    In what may be a sign that Yahoo is starting to accept the very real possibility of being acquired by Microsoft, various sources, including the Wall Street Journal and CNET, are reporting that informal discussions were held between the companies on Monday in Silicon Valley. According to the WSJ’s report,…

  • The Google Quality Raters Handbook
    Brian Ussery has discovered a revised copy of the Google Quality Raters Guidelines, which he archived on his own site. The documents are used by Google Quality Raters to aid them in classifying queries, measuring relevancy and rating the search results. To do so, the Quality Rater must understand how…

  • Google Sky Now Viewable From Any Web Browser
    Google announced that they have taken Google Sky from Google Earth and now made it viewable on the web at sky.google.com. Many of the Google Sky features found within Google Earth are also available on the browser version. You can: SearchBrowseChange the video between infrared, microwave, ultraviolet, or x-rayTelescope galleries…

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

Business Issues

Local, Maps & Mobile

Link Building

Paid Search & Contextual

Searching

SEM Industry

SEO & SEM

Social Media

Video, Music & Image Search

Web Analytics

Other Items

Recent Hot Items From Sphinn, Our Social News Sharing Site:

Mar 14
Stop Press 2: Hitwise Data Shows Google News UK Unbiased
in Search Engine Watch
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Based on these Hitwise UK numbers, Google News UK is so unbiased that it is even sending traffic to its competitors.

Mar 14
Weekly Search Buzz Roundup - 03/14/08: Google Acquires DoubleClick, YouTube’s New API, and Google Search Quality Guidelines
in Search Engine Roundtable
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search-buzz-roundup.gifI am back from SXSW in Austin, TX and somehow I am still alive. I have no idea what really happened in search this week because I’ve been so immersed in the southwest, but thankfully Search Engine Roundtable is keeping me up to speed. :)

Happy 3/14

Until earlier this week, I’ve never heard about Pi day. Do people really celebrate it? I guess Search Engine Roundtable does. But that’s news to me. Barry? ;)

Google Owns the Internets

Google’s acqusition of DoubleClick has been finalized this week. Now Danny Sullivan suggests that they divest of Performics to make it more fair for others. As many people say, Google has an unfair advantage.

All Your [Military] Base Are Belong to Google the Government

Well, one thing Google didn’t win this past week: the battle of keeping military installations in Google Street view has been lost. Too bad. I kind of wanted to see what they looked like.

Google PageRank = Abstract

Here’s why you shouldn’t live on Google PageRank: toolbar data is abstract. It’s not updated frequently enough to be a metric that you should worry about that much. Calm down, everyone.

Digg’s Algorithmic Changes Reduce Front Page Stories by 38%

After doing a pretty in-depth study, Pierre Far discovered that Digg’s algorithmic change from late January reduced front page promotions by 38%. That makes me sad. :(

Do You Want a New Link or an Old Link?

When polling our readers, we learned that 65% of you would prefer links from old pages than newer ones. Tell us why in the comments!

Give the Google Content Network a Try

How many of you have never used the Google content network in your Google AdWords campaign? You’re in good company. :) But Google is pushing for their advertisers to try the content network probably because of low AdSense earnings.

Welcome AdSenseAdvisor!

A new face has appeared in WebmasterWorld: Google AdSenseAdvisor has made his/her way into WebmasterWorld. Nice to have you join us! :)

Speaking of which, AdSenseAdvisor wants your AdSense wish list, so contribute right away! Also, what would you do if you had an AdSense account manager? I have to say that the new ASA is doing a great job with a lot of interesting questions to ponder.

Google Slap Reversed…for a Little Bit

What an emotional roller coaster. Google reversed the Google Slap on advertisers earlier this week, but then they switched back. Too bad :(

MSNBot Fails Reverse DNS Test

In case you’re wondering who is crawling your site, it’s probably MSNbot. Some IP addresses are not resolving properly, but it looks like some of us noticed.

YouTube Gives Great Opportunity to SEOs with Developer API

We learned this week that YouTube has expanded its API to add and edit titles and descriptions, upload videos to your site (without the need to host the videos), and more. This is a terrific opportunity for anyone really looking to dive into the video realm.

Google Search Quality Guidelines Leaked

Want to know if your page is relevant, vital, spammy, malicious, or perhaps unratable? Google’s Search Quality Guidelines can give you some tips. A few very keen SEOs discovered this document this week, and it’s a useful read.

Fun Stuff

If you like SEO, you’ll love Steve’s new license plate. I think that’s awesome.

You can use the Show IP Firefox extension to see what datacenter you are on when you surf Google. It’s a great extension in general. Get it!

Also, Google Sky is now an in-browser experience. Why does it rocks? In a place like NYC where there’s light pollution, I can now see the sky without a lot of effort. :)

SES NY 2008: Next Week

We’re headed to Search Engine Strategies 2008 in NYC next week (which is really not too far away) and we’ve posted our coverage schedule. For the record, Jeff Quipp has agreed to cover Thursday morning’s keynote. It’s not on that schedule, but Jeff, don’t let me down. ;)

By the way, there’s no video this week. (Yay!) Barry is too busy on this lovely Friday.

Mar 14
Weekly Search Buzz Roundup - 03/14/08: Google Acquires DoubleClick, YouTube’s New API, and Google Search Quality Guidelines
in Search Engine Roundtable
Comments Off

search-buzz-roundup.gifI am back from SXSW in Austin, TX and somehow I am still alive. I have no idea what really happened in search this week because I’ve been so immersed in the southwest, but thankfully Search Engine Roundtable is keeping me up to speed. :)

Happy 3/14

Until earlier this week, I’ve never heard about Pi day. Do people really celebrate it? I guess Search Engine Roundtable does. But that’s news to me. Barry? ;)

Google Owns the Internets

Google’s acqusition of DoubleClick has been finalized this week. Now Danny Sullivan suggests that they divest of Performics to make it more fair for others. As many people say, Google has an unfair advantage.

All Your [Military] Base Are Belong to Google the Government

Well, one thing Google didn’t win this past week: the battle of keeping military installations in Google Street view has been lost. Too bad. I kind of wanted to see what they looked like.

Google PageRank = Abstract

Here’s why you shouldn’t live on Google PageRank: toolbar data is abstract. It’s not updated frequently enough to be a metric that you should worry about that much. Calm down, everyone.

Digg’s Algorithmic Changes Reduce Front Page Stories by 38%

After doing a pretty in-depth study, Pierre Far discovered that Digg’s algorithmic change from late January reduced front page promotions by 38%. That makes me sad. :(

Do You Want a New Link or an Old Link?

When polling our readers, we learned that 65% of you would prefer links from old pages than newer ones. Tell us why in the comments!

Give the Google Content Network a Try

How many of you have never used the Google content network in your Google AdWords campaign? You’re in good company. :) But Google is pushing for their advertisers to try the content network probably because of low AdSense earnings.

Welcome AdSenseAdvisor!

A new face has appeared in WebmasterWorld: Google AdSenseAdvisor has made his/her way into WebmasterWorld. Nice to have you join us! :)

Speaking of which, AdSenseAdvisor wants your AdSense wish list, so contribute right away! Also, what would you do if you had an AdSense account manager? I have to say that the new ASA is doing a great job with a lot of interesting questions to ponder.

Google Slap Reversed…for a Little Bit

What an emotional roller coaster. Google reversed the Google Slap on advertisers earlier this week, but then they switched back. Too bad :(

MSNBot Fails Reverse DNS Test

In case you’re wondering who is crawling your site, it’s probably MSNbot. Some IP addresses are not resolving properly, but it looks like some of us noticed.

YouTube Gives Great Opportunity to SEOs with Developer API

We learned this week that YouTube has expanded its API to add and edit titles and descriptions, upload videos to your site (without the need to host the videos), and more. This is a terrific opportunity for anyone really looking to dive into the video realm.

Google Search Quality Guidelines Leaked

Want to know if your page is relevant, vital, spammy, malicious, or perhaps unratable? Google’s Search Quality Guidelines can give you some tips. A few very keen SEOs discovered this document this week, and it’s a useful read.

Fun Stuff

If you like SEO, you’ll love Steve’s new license plate. I think that’s awesome.

You can use the Show IP Firefox extension to see what datacenter you are on when you surf Google. It’s a great extension in general. Get it!

Also, Google Sky is now an in-browser experience. Why does it rocks? In a place like NYC where there’s light pollution, I can now see the sky without a lot of effort. :)

SES NY 2008: Next Week

We’re headed to Search Engine Strategies 2008 in NYC next week (which is really not too far away) and we’ve posted our coverage schedule. For the record, Jeff Quipp has agreed to cover Thursday morning’s keynote. It’s not on that schedule, but Jeff, don’t let me down. ;)

By the way, there’s no video this week. (Yay!) Barry is too busy on this lovely Friday.

Mar 14
Search In Pictures: American Airlines Google Billboard, Yahoo’s Birthday Party & Chris Gardner @ Yahoo
in Search Engine Land
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Search In Pictures
In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more.

Click to continue reading…

Mar 14
Ask.com Sings a Sad Song and Nine Inch Nails’ Album on Internet
in Search Engine Guide
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by Sage Lewis

Whether you’re a hard-core newspaper reader or an avid obtainer of news on the Internet, results from a Reuters’ study show that 70% of people are disillusioned with traditional journalism and that 50% of them are turning to Internet news sources. Online news sources such as the New York Times inform us 17% of people who click on paid links are more likely to buy. Ask.com denounces speculation about becoming a Q&A site for women, firmly stating they will remain a search engine, just a slightly smaller one after their 40 person lay off. Don’t bother looking for the new Nine Inch Nails album on shelves at the store because you won’t find it. According to paidContent.org, the band continues the trend of using the Internet to launch their new album, allowing them to remain record-label-free.

Learn something from this post?
Come and experience Search Engine Guide style teaching in person! Join us for our first ever Small Business Marketing Unleashed Conference in Houston, Texas on April 21st and 22nd.

Mar 14
Google’s Internal Search Quality Rating Guidelines Leaked
in Search Engine Roundtable
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Aaron Wall discovered a Google Spam document that he then shared with his readers. Brian Ussery archived the entire spam recognition guide for our perusal (here) and explains that while he had initial doubts about the authenticity of the document, it looks like it has some legitimacy. He notes that relevancy isn’t necessarily the most important issue. Sometimes, other concerns will impact how Google perceives your page, especially if a social networking profile is maintained by an owner. (Google considers this not just relevant but “vital”.)

Barry takes the document the next step and talks about it over at Search Engine Land where he explains the three types of queries (navigational, informational, and transactional), provides details into quality rating (vital as discussed earlier, useful, relevant, not relevant, off topic), discusses the categories that cannot be factored in (can’t load, foreign language, unratable), and gives us Google’s spam categorizations (not spam, maybe spam, spam). There are also 2 other flags for pornographic or malicious content that Google apparently ties to pages.

While the document is dated April 2007, I don’t think much has changed. The information seems incredibly useful and should be taken into account when generating content for a website (especially if Google is important to you!)

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Watch Forums and Sphinn.

Mar 14
Yahoo And Microsoft Hold Informal Talks About Combining Companies
in Search Engine Land
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In what may be a sign that Yahoo is starting to accept the very real possibility of being acquired by Microsoft, various sources, including the Wall Street Journal and CNET, are reporting that informal discussions were held between the companies on Monday in Silicon Valley. According to the WSJ’s report, Microsoft representatives pitched their vision for a combined company and “Yahoo executives mostly listened.”

Click to continue reading…

Mar 14
Yahoo And Microsoft Hold Informal Talks About Combining Companies
in Search Engine Land
Comments Off

In what may be a sign that Yahoo is starting to accept the very real possibility of being acquired by Microsoft, various sources, including the Wall Street Journal and CNET, are reporting that informal discussions were held between the companies on Monday in Silicon Valley. According to the WSJ’s report, Microsoft representatives pitched their vision for a combined company and “Yahoo executives mostly listened.”

Click to continue reading…

Mar 14
Google Launches Google Sky
in Search Engine Roundtable
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Who needs a telescope when there’s Google Sky? You can now view galaxies and stars from your browser without the need of Google Earth, the application that this tool previously required. Take a look and let me know what you think. :)

Google Sky

In case you’re wondering, you can now search the skies, browse a constellation, change the video between infrared, microwave, ultraviolet, or x-ray, see historical data, and access a podcasts gallery among other cool tools.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Mar 14
Google Launches Google Sky
in Search Engine Roundtable
Comments Off

Who needs a telescope when there’s Google Sky? You can now view galaxies and stars from your browser without the need of Google Earth, the application that this tool previously required. Take a look and let me know what you think. :)

Google Sky

In case you’re wondering, you can now search the skies, browse a constellation, change the video between infrared, microwave, ultraviolet, or x-ray, see historical data, and access a podcasts gallery among other cool tools.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Mar 14
The Google Quality Raters Handbook
in Search Engine Land
Comments Off

Brian Ussery has discovered a revised copy of the Google Quality Raters Guidelines, which he archived on his own site.

The documents are used by Google Quality Raters to aid them in classifying queries, measuring relevancy and rating the search results. To do so, the Quality Rater must understand how Google works and this document has a bunch of that. Let me pull out for you some of those details in easy to read bullet points.

Click to continue reading…

Mar 14
AOL Acquires Bebo for $850 Million
in Search Engine Roundtable
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In an extremely unexpected move, AOL has acquired social site Bebo for $850 million. Bebo currently has over 40 million members, but nobody realized that AOL would go the acquisition route — until it did.

Was it worth it? Some people think that the approach is the most important thing:

If they push for international recognition (AOL was mainly based in the US) they should be alright in the long run. If they are trying to promote it in the US more than they should, waste of money.

But in the UK, apparently, Bebo is a great social network, and as long as AOL focuses its efforts on where Bebo is big, it can work for them.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Mar 14
Google Sky Now Viewable From Any Web Browser
in Search Engine Land
Comments Off

Google announced that they have taken Google Sky from Google Earth and now made it viewable on the web at sky.google.com.

Many of the Google Sky features found within Google Earth are also available on the browser version. You can:

  • Search
  • Browse
  • Change the video between infrared, microwave, ultraviolet, or x-ray
  • Telescope galleries from Hubble and others
  • Up-to-date planet positions and constellations
  • Lots of custom KML content
  • And the podcasts gallery

Click to continue reading…

Mar 14
Google Sky Now Viewable From Any Web Browser
in Search Engine Land
Comments Off

Google announced that they have taken Google Sky from Google Earth and now made it viewable on the web at sky.google.com.

Many of the Google Sky features found within Google Earth are also available on the browser version. You can:

  • Search
  • Browse
  • Change the video between infrared, microwave, ultraviolet, or x-ray
  • Telescope galleries from Hubble and others
  • Up-to-date planet positions and constellations
  • Lots of custom KML content
  • And the podcasts gallery

Click to continue reading…

Mar 14
Google Ad Manager Adds Special Icon to AdSense Ads
in Search Engine Roundtable
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Yesterday Google announced a new product named Ad Manager. In short, it is a hosted ad management solution, like OpenAds (aka PHPAdsNew) but OpenAds is not hosted. So the benefits of the Google Ad Manager product is that you don’t have to use your server resources to serve up ads, you can use Google’s. You can see a tour of the product, if you are interested.

I actually started experimenting with it yesterday on our forums. The top four ad ads, (first two rows) are served via Open Ads, while the bottom row (last two ads) are served by Google Ad Manager. I selected one ad to show my Google AdSense ads and one ad to show some test banners. Here are the ads that are generated for me now (keep in mind, I keep testing them, so they may change):

Google Ad Manager Special AdSense Ads

Let’s zoom in on the Google AdSense ad:

Google Ad Manager Special AdSense Ads

Notice the little icon at the bottom left of the AdSense ad? It is not clickable or anything, but I think it symbolizes that the ad is served by Google Ad Manager. Why? Because no other Google AdSense ads have that icon.

I will be testing this out in detail and then I hope to provide an easy step by step walk through on how to set up ads that rotate in our blog ad format (which is the typical ad format for most new blogs these days). So if you are wanting to play with it, hold off a bit until I get the kinks worked out and so I can simply guide you through the process (or you can do it yourself).

Of course the discussion about trusting Google, Google owning the world, the Internet and now DoubleClick…

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld,DigitalPoint Forums and Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Mar 14
Google Teases Advertisers By Reversing March 2008 “Google Slap” For Half Day
in Search Engine Roundtable
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On March 5th, Google came down hard on many many advertisers serving them the March 2008 Google Slap, where AdWords advertisers saw their minimum CPC prices sky rocket overnight. Hundreds of advertisers were impacted by the “slap,” and we still have forum threads discussing ways to reverse it.

Yesterday, I noticed two different threads, one at WebmasterWorld and the other at DigitalPoint Forums reporting that Google has shown their kind side by reversing the Google Slap. In short, many advertisers saw their March 5th minimum CPC prices spikes drop down to previous March 5th prices. Here are some posts of joy from the threads:

Same here, most of my $10.00 “inactives” went way down in price!
Enjoy it while it lasts…

I got three words unslapped today, and I followed every guidelines the annoying specialists told me. I didn’t touch the campaign except for the landing page changes. Hopefully they will fully unslap my campaign by tomorrow.

Let’s not do too much noise about this hehe…. hopefully Google won’t notice it :)

Unfortunately, it did not last too long. About 9 hours after the first report of Google dropping the prices, people started reporting that Google has once again increased the prices on those keywords. I guess Google noticed? ;-)

AdWordsAdvisor said “notice what?” and added:

At this point, I chalk it up to the quality-based bidding system at work. I am not aware of anything else behind it.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.