+ The pulse of the search marketing community

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.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: July 23, 2008"

Greg Sterling shares a blog post from the Patent Law Blog that says that "the Patent and Trademark Office has now made clear that its newly developed position on patentable subject matter will invalidate many and perhaps most software patents, including pioneering patent claims to such innovators as Google, Inc."

Does this mean that PageRank and search algorithms are going to be dissolved under these new restrictions -- since the claim is that they may inhibit future development? Yesterday, during the Daily Search Cast, Danny Sullivan said that the Google PageRank patent has changed so much that this is a nonissue, so perhaps not.

It's really hard to say that this will happen. I suppose that where there is no wiggle room, the patents will be revised to avoid being invalidated.

With regards to Google PageRank, if it ever does go away due to governmental restrictions, will they lose much? It won't be a competitive disadvantage, forum members say. PageRank is not that substantial in the grand scheme of things.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

Many people who use Google AdWords will opt out of the content network because they feel that since people are not actively searching when they find ads in the content network, they conversion rates will be lower. But in a recent WebmasterWorld thread, Roger Montti explains that the content network isn't as bad as it's hyped up to be. The important thing is that it's really different from the search network.

Roger points out that there are different types of ads in the content network. Some blend in and can resemble navigation. Even contextual ads are different, he notes. But it's similar to the search network too, because some pages have more quality conversions than others:

Some sites convert better than others, sometimes sites you never thought would convert. That's why I am bidding on a wide assortment of sites, then removing those that refuse to convert regardless of the different approaches. In this regard, it's similar to the search network

Better yet, cost per conversion is lower than on the search network. This is probably because advertisers who currently use the content network aren't really acknowledging the differences between the content network and the search network as Roger has done.

The issue is really that a lot of advertisers are a lot lazier -- some may "set it and forget" -- and this is a tactic that won't yield the conversions they're looking for.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Did you know that Google has a search engine related to governmental queries? Google's Uncle Sam search engine includes White House news, top governmental stories, American Forces Information Services, the Washington Post, and more. The search engine also searches .gov sites only.

It's pretty useful for "official" information, and one forum member who is a political science student is particularly thankful for a search engine that is targeted to such queries that are related to official government pages.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

CNET and a number of other blogs report that Google may buy social news site Digg for approximately $200 million. This has been something we've been eying for awhile, with Reuters photographing Digg CEO Jay Adelson with Larry Page of Google (as seen in Valleywag). As a former Digg addict myself (with an emphasis on the "former"), I guess I wonder what Jill Whalen wonders on a Sphinn submission: why would they want it?

Many other forum members are a little baffled by this. In my opinion, it is happening way too late. An acquisition last year would have been more beneficial with the dedicated userbase. One forum member calls this another "fascinating toy for Google guys" and that Google is pulling what Microsoft did years ago: they're acquiring without stopping.

Several forum members across many forums, however, say that they thinks Digg could do better than $200 million. Actually, I think Google could do better than $200 million....

Others think that the search engine takeover was a matter of time, especially since Google has been testing voting features within the search engine for some time. But is Digg really profitable? It might be, and that's because they force you to click twice to get to a page you want to vote upon (which was an issue of contention last September when it was implemented -- but they never responded to this -- since they were aiming for the monetary gain).

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums, and Sphinn.

A WebmasterWorld thread had reports that Google had all old cache dates for most sites on the web. By old, I mean, the last time Google said they "retrieved" the site was on the 15th or 16th and it was already the 22nd before Google showed new cache dates.

Here is a screen capture of what the cache date looked like on many sites:

Google is known for having fairly frequent cache dates and crawling patterns on most sites, even sites that do not update all that frequently.

Last night, senior member Atomic noticed Google started to update the cache dates with fresher dates. But until then, Webmasters were really worried. One even joked, "maybe they've ran out of room."

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Conduct a search for educating in Google and you will see an image of a teacher standing over a student holding a small rod, with the student's pants down leaning over a desk. This is not what one would expect to be seen for a search on educating. At least, I would not want to see this for a search like that and I would not want your kids to see it.

Clearly I find this image 'clean' enough to post here in small format

Now this is far from the first time Google placed images that might not be appropriate on the ordinary Google web search results. This is by far not even close to the most inappropriate image I have seen come up. But Google added a report images feature, so I decided to test it out.

When I first spotted this image for this search result, via DigitalPoint Forums, I immediately used the "report image" feature. That was just about three days ago. So when I decided to check the status of this report, I was a bit upset to see the image still there. I was hoping it would be gone after reporting it 3 days ago!

This is the only reason I am blogging it, to document it can take more than 3 days for an image to be pulled. I assume if Google received hundreds of reports then they would act faster. I wonder what that threshold is?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

An interesting thread at WebmasterWorld has discussion on the topic of less small businesses using Google AdWords. The thread create, senior member, annej, said:

I have a hobby related site and use AdSense. Ads from small online businesses were especially interesting to my visitors as they sell the hobby supplies. These small business ads have decreased.

I'm wondering if there is a reason. Have recent changes in AdWords affected small businesses? Or is the sinking economy the cause?

Have you also noticed a drop in small business competition in your AdWords sector? Let us know by taking this quick poll:

Many of the responses agree, but do you? As to why, many suspect it has to do with all the advanced features bundled into AdWords. Now, these are all features we have been asking for over the course of the years. But these advanced features simply make it hard for new advertisers to get started.

Senior member netmeg added that Google does have a starter edition but the issue with the starter edition is it is a form of "Budget Optimizer, and that lumps Search in with Content, no geo targeting, and sets an absurd maximum CPC amount." So small business allegedly are stuck paying a premium for not having the time to become an expert. I guess that is the price you pay - you either learn it yourself, pay someone to do it for you or pay the cost of competing against more seasoned advertisers.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Just to liven things up a bit, we decided to put up a special theme for today. Today is supposedly National Hot Dog Day, so hence, the hot dog theme. Here is a picture for archive purposes:

Doesn't that make you hungry?

Last year we celebrated the day with a theme as well, which can be seen over here.

Happy Hot Dog Day!

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

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.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: July 22, 2008"

The very smart Sarah Bird at SEOmoz has recently blogged about the importance of managing client expectations when working in this area. She says that it's normal for people to overpromise and underdeliver. If you run into a client who has extremely high expectations, what are you to do when they aren't getting what they want?

She says that it's important to have something in writing (a warranty):

Including solid warranty language in your client contracts serves two important purposes. First, it helps manage client expectations. Clients forget and/or misinterpret verbal conversations. If it is written down, your client is more likely to remember that you didn't promise the moon and the stars. Thus, your client will be less upset on the day their rankings drop by five results for no apparent reason.

This is a great way to manage expectations and keep yourself out of any possible legal entanglement.

If you manage SEO clients at all or operate a consulting business, this jargon is very important and it can make sure you have covered yourself in the event of any problems.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

A WebmasterWorld member is working on a site and is running into difficulty with rankings that are dropping. When checking Google Webmaster Tools, the big issue is that the pages have the same meta tags, descriptions, and titles.

What kind of options does the webmaster have to recover his falling rankings?

As Tedster reports, sometimes it may be better not to index paginated pages -- it can cause confusion. Many people agree that indexing the first page may be the best option and then disallowing the second page and subsequent pages from being ranked.

Another proposal from Tedster is to think about the user experience.

The need is to have alternate click paths, beyond offering just one set of paginated results . The key to creating that is to forget about databases autogenerating the entire website, and in fact forget all about technology for the moment. Just think like a visitor. How many ways can you help them find what they might want?

To achieve this, you can categorize the results if possible.

Other people have tried "noindex, follow" and that has worked well for them.

There are many ways to go about it. You need to find the solution that's best for you.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Everyone emphasizes that content is king. But does the amount of content make a difference? This is the issue that is currently being discussed at High Rankings Forums.

Well, contrary to what they usually say, size doesn't matter this time. The number of pages is insignificant. Content still is king, but the amount is up for discussion.

When it comes to content, quantity is not the concern. Instead quality is of utmost importance. As forum member Torka puts it, the most valuable sites to search engines (and users, of course) are those that offer useful and original content, provide a useful service, and sell products that people want or need.

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forums.

There is an excellent thread at WebmasterWorld discussing if Google will ever fully "forgive" a site after it has been penalized.

For example, let's say you have been slapped with a link penalty, and you remove all those bad links. Will Google every rank you as well as you once ranked? The thread has some excellent experience to quote:

Senior member, netmeg, said that Google does completely forgive:

one of my clients was completely banned from Google for a spammy link exchange program; we cleaned 'em all up and filed a reinclusion request, and they are currently #1-3 for just about every relevant search phrase you could think of. They're ranking higher now than they ever did before the penalty - but it did take about a year to work their way up to that point.

Yes, I agree that it takes a long time to earn back your trust from Google.

But WebmasterWorld administrator asks a key question, Google may forgive, but do they forget? Tedster said:

I do think Google always has a record of the past penalty somewhere, and any future infractions might be dealt with quite harshly.

I am very confident Google records each and every penalty for a website, historically. This is incredibly important data for Google to have when manually reviewing a reconsideration request. Does Google have a three-strikes and your out rule? I doubt it, but all this information is 100% relevant for the process.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I have a client with a very large database driven site. The site is extremely crawlable, which makes for a really nice amount of pages for very specific search terms. I cannot share the site I am talking about, because I do not have client approval. But I did want to share a new Google Webmaster Tools message that this client received, that, in a sense, warned the webmaster that Googlebot may "consume much more bandwidth than necessary."

The subject line of the error reads: Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site

The body of the message reads:

Googlebot encountered problems while crawling your site http://www.domain.com/.

Googlebot encountered extremely large numbers of links on your site. This may indicate a problem with your site's URL structure. Googlebot may unnecessarily be crawling a large number of distinct URLs that point to identical or similar content, or crawling parts of your site that are not intended to be crawled by Googlebot. As a result Googlebot may consume much more bandwidth than necessary, or may be unable to completely index all of the content on your site.

More information about this issue
Here's a list of sample URLs with potential problems. However, this list may not include all problematic URLs on your site.

Here is a picture of the message:

Google goes on to list 20 or so URLs that they found to be problematic. A few of those URLs are 100% already blocked by the robots.txt file on the site, so I am not sure why they show up. The others, I can see why Google might consider them to be "similar content," but technically, they are very different pieces of content.

In any event, I had two major questions:

(1) Do you think this means Google will trust this site less? I don't think so.
(2) To me, this makes me feel that Google is giving us the option of blocking these URLs or Google will simply drop them from the index. Google does this all the time already, dropping what they believe to be duplicate URLs. Why does this require a specific message? Does it mean that Google won't drop them but warns that the crawlers will crawl and your bandwidth will just spike?

I have never really seen a discussion on this specific Webmaster Tools message from Google, so let's start one. Please comment here or join the Search Engine Roundtable Forums thread.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.