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Unread items (10)
del.icio.us/varunkrish
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Yahoo! Buzz Index
Posted: July 3rd, 2008, 2:53am CEST by varunkrish
Yahoo! Buzz Index
Search Engine Roundtable
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Daily Search Forum Recap: July 2, 2008
Posted: July 3rd, 2008, 12:00am CEST by Tamar Weinberg
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.
eHub
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Devunity
Posted: July 2nd, 2008, 5:20pm CEST by Emily Chang
Tags: Development andor open source
Online collaborative development platform that aims to be the first social development platform with a focus on simplicity and productivity. Currently accepting alpha signups. URL: Devunity.
Search Engine Roundtable
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Webmasters Report July 2008 Google.co.uk SERP Changes
Posted: July 2nd, 2008, 4:22pm CEST by Tamar Weinberg
Tags: Google PageRankSERP Updates
Last month, we started reporting on Google.co.uk as perceived by webmasters. We may make this a regular column depending on how different Google.co.uk seems to be from Google.com over time.
WebmasterWorld members are reporting extreme "yoyoing" and fluctuations of some rankings on old domains.
Another observation is that the geolocation seems to be shifting -- again. .co.uk pages are showing up on page one, whereas .com pages are showing up on page 2. In other words, improvements are being noted.
Some feel that Google in the UK is penalizing harsher than in the US.
And finally, Google is still not sure about the locations of some posts. A webmaster reports:
Meanwhile G has moved a load of my .coms hosted on a US server back into the Google.co.za results...argh...what are they doing?
Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.
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Secure Your Brand Name on Social Sites
Posted: July 2nd, 2008, 3:06pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Social Search
Debra Mastaler's Grab Your Profile Link Before Some Jerk Does points out almost the obvious, but when you think about it, many brands don't bother with it. I cannot express enough how important it is for you to secure your brand name on all the major social sites and communities, espesially those that may have an impact on your brand.
For example, do you think Paris Hilton secured twitter.com/parishilton or did some savvy web marketer grab it and is using it to promote their own site? But it can get bad or evil even. If someone who hates you grabs your profile and uses it against you, it can get nasty. So it is very important to try to grab all your social networking profiles and register them, even if you don't bother using them.
Which profiles do I recommend you obtain?
- Digg
- Delicious
- Plurk
- Flickr
- YouTube
- Gmail account
- Yahoo Profile
- MSN profile
- FriendFeed
- Bebo
- MyBlogLog
- MySpace
- Netscape
- Pownce
- StumbleUpon
- Niche social sites (aka Sphinn)
I am sure I am missing some, but you should seriously consider securing your brands, names, products, trademarks and so on at these sites.
Forum discussion at Sphinn.
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The Pros & Cons of Google AdSense's Allowed Sites Feature
Posted: July 2nd, 2008, 2:54pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Google AdSense
A WebmasterWorld thread discusses the pros and cons of using Google's allowed sites feature in AdSense. In short, the Allowed Sites feature is a tool to tell Google, where you want your ads to show. For example, if someone steals your content and takes your ads with your content, they are in a sense, showing your ads. You can specify to Google, I only want my ads to display on specific domains or subdomains.
Google began testing this feature back in June of 2007 and based on popular request they launched it in late August. Google then had several bugs in the tool that worried many publishers.
So what are the pros and cons of using this feature:
Pros:
- Control your ads
- Ensure you don't get your account disabled because of someone else's content
- Calm your paranoia
Cons:
- Bugs can prevent your ads from displaying (rare)
- You won't make money on those scraper sites
- Users cant view your ads on translation pages
- You may forget to allow some of your sites
I am sure I missed some items, so feel free to comment.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
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Google Says Blocking Countries Outside of the US is Against Policies
Posted: July 2nd, 2008, 2:40pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Google Optimization
A Google Groups thread has a webmaster who has been receiving a lot of rogue spider attacks from the Africa region. He wants to go as far as ban the whole continent of Africa. But he is concerned that by doing so, he will also hurt his Google rankings.
It is actually not all that uncommon for network administrators to block specific regions of web traffic. In fact, I believe my office blocks the Asia and Africa regions from entering our network (not this site, but my office network). We pretty much banned that whole region, because we have no reason to allow those regions in (in most cases, but things have come up).
Would blocking the whole Africa hurt this guys search rankings in Google?
Googler, JohnMu, stepped in to say that by blocking an entire region, it would "be considered cloaking" and would be against Google's Webmaster Guidelines. Got that, if you block specific regions of traffic, like everyone outside of the US, that is cloaking and against Google's guidelines.
Do I agree with this policy? In many cases, no. If your site is local in nature and having visitors from outside a specific region doesn't make sense for your bandwidth bill, then it is up to the site owner to make that call. Of course, there may be users outside of a specific region that are your target audience, but in many cases people take the route of percentages and are willing to have some collateral damage.
John does give some excellent advice, advice that is not as easy as blocking a whole region via the Router but good advice in any event. He said, instead you should "add blocks based on the user's activity, not based on his location." Of course, then you need to build algorithms and software that detects certain activities and blocks them based on that activity. More tips on that type of detection here.
Forum discussion at Google Groups.
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Google AdSense's Optimization Report Offering Wrong Advice
Posted: July 2nd, 2008, 2:30pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Google AdSense
Google offers automated and often repetitive messages, known as AdSense optimization tips. You get one virtually every month, on the first on the month. Mine have typically said that I should add more AdSense units to my pages.
In this month's release, some AdSense publishers are reporting receiving a tip to add Referral ads to their sites. Here is the message:
Referrals can add incremental revenue to your site.
You are not currently using Referrals on your sites.
Why is this an issue? Well, Google just announced that they are dropping referral ads within the next two months. In fact, Google suggested that publishers remove the referral ads as soon as possible, so why are they automatically suggesting that publishers add them this month?
Automation at its best. :)
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
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Was Google Down in the United Kingdom?
Posted: July 2nd, 2008, 2:24pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Other Google Topics
A Cre8asite Forum thread reports that for some Google searchers in the UK, Google was unreachable for a short period of time. eKstreme summarizes many of the issues noticed. Some people were unable to reach Gmail, Google.com and many other Google services.
If you look at a search at Summarize for google down, you will see many people talking about Google going down.
I scanned the other forums and did not see any mentions of Google going down in the UK.
My assumption is that a major UK ISP had issues and it impacted reaching Google. I doubt Google, itself, was down. But rather, what is more likely, is that the ISP had connectivity issues to certain web sites.
Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forum.
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Google AdWords 35 Character Display URL Limit
Posted: July 2nd, 2008, 2:14pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Google AdWords
I have really never heard complains about Google AdWords having a limit on the characters allowed in the display URL. Today, I found out that the max number of characters you can have in your AdWords display URL is 35. An advertiser ran into this issue and posted the details at Google Groups.
I suspect this wasn't much of an issue before Google began enforcing the display URL policy. Back then, I assume you can use shorter versions of a domain name and get away with it easily.
So, what do you do if you really need more characters in your display URL?
(1) Drop off the www, preceding the host name. I.e. you don't always need www.seroundtable.com/pagename/, you can drop off the www in many cases (especially for the display URL).
(2) AdWordsPro suggests that if those three extra characters don't help, then you should contact an AdWords representative. It seems that maybe Google can either aid you with your issue or bend the rules a bit.
Forum discussion at Google Groups.