+ The pulse of the search marketing community

Another Friday, another rainy day. For what it's worth, though, today is a special day, as we are celebrating the first laser. I don't know if lasers are viewable through cloudy skies, though. Do you?

Mother's Day

First things first. Did you have a happy Mother's Day? (Did you even surf the internet on Mother's Day?) We did. By the way, Chris Boggs, the Search Engine Roundtable design was inspired by our graphic designer, Mabe. Glad you liked it. :)

The First Laser

Today is the 48th anniversary of the first laser. How did I know that? Google told me. Interesting logo choice for sure.

UK Yahoo Users Getting Geo-Targeted Search Page

Want to visit Yahoo.com while you're in the UK? You may be directed to uk.yahoo.com instead. Does this have anything to do with geo-targeted Yahoo ads? It's possible, as Barry suspects.

What Background Do You Like Better?

Are you a fan of green? Blue? Yellow? Well, it looks like Google is testing out green backgrounds on the sponsored results. I'm not sure I like it; it's a little "bolder" than the standard yellow. In my opinion, it sticks out like a sore thumb even though it's still a pastel green.

Get Creamed by Your Competitor?

According to a recent poll we had on Search Engine Roundtable, most SEOs believe that their competition can hurt their rankings. My question: are you saying this from experience or are you paranoid?

Google Will Let You Buy Alcohol

Okay, just kidding. Google has a rule that disallows hard liquor to be sold, and guess what, they sell materials related to vodka and hard liquor, but since their policy prohibits indexing hard liquor content, Google is not indexing the actual alcohol itself. If you want to buy Vodka on the internet, go to another search engine. Better yet, just go to your local liquor store, flash them your ID, and you'll be fine.

Is the Yahoo Search Ambassador Program Gone?

Forum members have spotted notifications that the Yahoo Search Ambassador program is being discontinued. Why now? Does it have something to do with Google?

Tomorrow: Google AdWords System Maintenance

If you use any tools based on the Google AdWords API, bear in mind that the Google AdWords system will be down for a few hours tomorrow, May 17th. That's okay. Go out and have fun. It's the weekend, after all.

Are you a developer? You may be interested in SearchMonkey, Yahoo's new open developer platform, which was released to all developers yesterday.

The concept behind SearchMonkey is to empower developers to build applications that increase relevancy of search results. Developers can build Enhanced Results or Infobars under the Search Monkey API which can pull data from CitySearch, StumbleUpon, eBay, Epicurious, and more. According to the announcement, "Enhanced Results replace the current standard results with a richer display. All the links in the Enhanced Results must point to the site to which the result refers. Infobars are appended below search results and can include metadata about the result, related links or content, or links for user actions (such as adding a movie to a Netflix queue)."

Yahoo is also holding a contest that enables developers to create their own tools using the new API. Winners can receive up to $10,000.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

An interesting phenomenon is occurring within Yahoo Search Marketing that has been expressed pretty intensely by affected advertisers at WebmasterWorld. According to the impacted advertisers, the quality of their campaigns have gone down because of false impressions that have been generated for long tail keywords that were often never searched upon. In the case of one advertiser, his ad campaign served nearly 120,000 new impressions (triple what it was before) because of these obscure keywords in the campaign. After digging into his statistics, he disabled these low-performing keywords, but the damage had already been done, and the overall campaign effectiveness was reduced.

In other words, "a competitor found a low traffic keyword that [was being] advertise[d] on and searched tens of thousands of times to skew your CTR, thus lowering the quality of [the] entire campaign."

Only two Yahoo PPC users have been impacted by this shift thus far. According to one Yahoo rep, it is probably due to "market fluctuations," but typically, those who run the campaigns themselves would be most abreast of any market fluctuations (am I right?) It seems, to both affected individuals that there may be something else going on here, perhaps in the sense of fraud.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

If you've ventured to Google today, you may be wondering what in the world that logo resembles.

Fortunately, all you need to do is click on the logo for the answer. Today, Google is celebrating the anniversary of the first laser, which, according to Wikipedia, was demonstrated on May 16, 1960. Today, then, marks the 48th anniversary of the laser.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

Google updates their search algorithms and indexes fairly often. Results change all the time. The goal for Google is to make this transparent for searchers by providing relevant results. But when a change happens, typically the webmaster will notice and may be impacted strongly by the update. So what are the Google processes and thoughts behind an update?

Google's JohnMu has an interesting post at a Google Groups thread in response to a webmaster being upset with a recent change in which results Google is showing for a particular term. In JohnMu's response, he explains why Google makes changes, for how long the changes may appear and so on. Let me explain that we do not learn much about how the changes work technically, but we do learn the thought process behind Google making these changes.

The premise behind all Google algorithm and index updates are to "improve the users' experience on our [Google's] sites." Google's "engineers are constantly working on" that, day in and day out. So Google is often trying "new things and run experiments" to collect data to help Google come up with new ideas on how to "improve" the search experience.

John explains that these "experiments" and "new things" can "run for a day or for many months." The thing is, these experiments "generally evolve over time," so although the experiment may do one thing, it can evolve to do other things (hence the constant Google flux). These changes to the experiments are "mainly based on that data" Google collects as they run tests.

Google is constantly changing their algorithm because "world around us is changing
rapidly, our users' expectations are changing equally," as John explains. John adds that "sometimes," these experiments can "lead to changes which not everyone likes." "Not every site can be listed in all search results, or even in the top 10," John adds.

I personally don't have much to add to this. It all makes logical sense, but I thought it would be good to document and have for later.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Google's Malware Review form, which was added back in August of last year had some technical issues this week. First reports came via Google Groups at about 1am on May 15th.

Webmasters trying to utilize the form received a "oops, not working" error when they tried to access it. Google partners with StopBadware.org for malware detection and handling. Reportedly, www.stopbadware.org was also having issues at the same time and they were reporting errors that read "500 - Internal Server Error" throughout the day.

Googler, JohnMu, suggested that webmasters can also submit Malware Reviews directly at StopBadware.org at this form, if the Google form does not work.

The Google form is now working, about 24 hours later. I am actually amazed at the number of complaints about the form not working. It seems like the form is used more often then I would have thought. JohnMu said, if you submitted a review, they likely re-submitted it anyway, but double check to be sure. He said:

We went through all the failed requests and submitted them again, but you may want to double-check your sites just to be sure.

Here is a picture of the malware review form:

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

The iCrossing Blog posted screen captures of Google experimenting with green in the Google user interface. In addition, Google has changed from the yellow background color for their ads to green, within the Google Directory. iCrossing actually reported this two weeks ago but I I missed it until I spotted a Search Engine Watch Forums thread on his findings.

Here is a screen capture of a search on ipods at the Google Directory:

I see that green user interface myself, but I don't see the green look at a normal Google web search, like iCrossing showed for a search on car insurance.

Here is what I see:

Here is what iCrossing sees:

It may be that iCrossing has a browser cache issue from moving from the directory to web search? Maybe? I am not sure.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A Google Groups thread reports that the numbers reported from the traffic estimator tool within Google's AdWords API interface is reporting different numbers based on the IP calling the data.

The AdWords advertiser said that depending on which IP is requesting the traffic data, Google will show a different traffic estimation for the same keyword.

For example, if the AdWords advertiser wants to know how much traffic to expect for the keyword [car], if he/she uses the API to request the data, the data might be wrong. If the API is requesting the data from IP address xx.xx.xx.xxx, it might return one number. If the API is requesting the same data from IP address yy.yy.yy.yyy, it might return a different number.

Jeff Posnick from the AdWords API Team said he will investigate the issue:

Thanks for letting us know; our engineering team is currently investigating to see if there is anything that might have changed recently that could lead to varying results from the Traffic Estimator API calls. I'll update this thread with what I hear back.

I'll update you when I hear more information.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

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: May 15, 2008"

United States ISP Charter Communications announced that it will start looking at your surfing behavior to find you relevant ads.

While continuing to deliver the same fast and reliable Internet service you’ve always received, innovative new technology in the field of online advertising enables Charter to provide you with an enhanced online experience that is more customized to your interests and activities. As a result of this service, the advertising you typically see online will better reflect the interests you express through your web-surfing activity. You will not see more ads – just ads that are more relevant to you.

While Charter is probably the first ISP to do this, it's already being contested as a heavy invasion of privacy as well as something heavily questionable since any ISP can swap out AdSense IDs for their own and monetize off their members' clicks.

Will anything be done? That's the question. Will Charter get away with it? Perhaps websites will need to block Charter Communications from overriding their own ads (and consequently "defacing a third party website") -- by not letting Charter in at all.

Legally, this can be a problem as well. It may be copyright infringement if they're taking a website served by another company and just replacing ads.

But this may also cause another problem for publishers: if this gains traction, more users will start using ad-blocking solutions that may not necessarily bode well for those who are trying to make a buck off of their hard-earned work. As a statement to Charter, they may install some software to circumvent the ads, but other people will end up suffering as a result.

Overall, the forum members are appalled and think that it won't pass in a court of law. I'm not a Charter Communications user (thankfully), but I'd hope they don't get away with this myself.

Forum discussion continues (and it's long and more informative than this post!) at WebmasterWorld.

Need help with Google AdWords? If you're afraid of picking up the phone and find email to take too long, you have another alternative: live chat.

This URL may be specific to the UK (or may fit both UK and US queries), but if you ever have a quick question related to Google AdWords, you can click here to start your chat with an AdWords representative.

Life just got a lot easier. :)

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

David Eaves reports that UK based users who go to yahoo.com are now being redirected from the .com version to the Yahoo UK domain.

David said this is brand new behavior from Yahoo. 24 hours earlier, if a UK internet user went to Yahoo.com, it would keep them on Yahoo.com. Now, Yahoo is sending UK users off to Yahoo UK.

I honestly have a feeling this has to do with Yahoo Now Showing Geo-Location Under Search Ads from two days ago. Yahoo told me that they rolled out that feature last "week with the roll out of a new “geo labels” feature." I would not be surprised if the same geo-technology was applied to this.

I am going to post screen captures of this at Search Engine Land, with the behavior of how Yahoo, Google and Live handle UK users.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread is reporting a possible bug with the Yahoo Site Explorer tool.

The webmaster reports that when trying to delete the https URLs of his site from the Yahoo index via Yahoo Site Explorer, it tries to delete the http version as well.

As many SEOs and Webmasters know, having both the https and http version of the same content in the search results can hurt you a bit in terms of link equity. SEOs and Webmasters want to ensure that the links they obtain go specifically to one URL and not two, and since https is a different url then http, search engines may consider them as two different pages with exactly the same content.

So when some webmasters see that Yahoo indexed both pages, they may want to force the removal of one of those pages in Site Explorer. But according to this webmaster, if you try removing https, it will remove the http versions as well.

That brings up an interesting logical observation. If removing an https version, will remove the http version, then maybe Yahoo considers https urls to be the same as http. Maybe https://www.mysite.com/abc.html is the same as http://www.mysite.com/abc.html in the eyes of Yahoo. Maybe all links pointing to the https version are automatically moved over to the http version, in terms of the link popularity component used in Yahoo? Maybe... Or Maybe not?

Maybe, it is a bug in Site Explorer as one member suggests.

I've pointed out to Yahoo that http and https are just different protocols. They suggested that this was a bug in SiteExplorer.

I would think it is a bug and Yahoo doesn't treat https URLs as http.

The quick and easy fix, 301 the https version to http, if possible. But that is not always possible.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

An interesting discussion is taking place at WebmasterWorld on the topic of the robots.txt file. One webmaster did not want his robots.txt file to be indexed by Google, but has no way of delisting in in Google.

The only ways of removing content is Google includes:

• Via meta tags
• Via robots.txt command
• Return a 404 server status
• Use the Remove URLs feature in Webmaster Tools
• Password protect the page
• Some more ideas on how to remove content in Google can be found there.

But if you implement any of those, Google will likely remove your robots.txt, and it won't follow the rules you have implemented in that file. Which can be very upsetting for webmasters. So if you block you block your robots.txt file in your robots.txt file, does Google really see the robots.txt file to block it? (Okay, that was a bit of a joke, but it makes the point).

That brings up the question, should Google list robots.txt files in the search results? In most cases, they do not contain any useful content for searchers. Well, with the exception of Brett Tabke's robots.txt blog, which is a hilarious idea. But outside of that, how is it useful?

As Tedster notes, Google has indexed plenty robots.txt files, should they?

Let me ask you, here is a poll. Should Google display robots.txt files in the search results (even for searches like [inurl:robots.txt filetype.txt])?

There is an "other" option, but try not to use it. :)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: Google's JohnMu commented below explaining how to block your robots.txt file from showing up. News to me, this is excellent news:

Hi guys, there are two ways to block your robots.txt from showing up in search results:

- disallow it in your robots.txt (don't worry, we'll still check it); you can then use the Webmaster Tools URL removal tool to have it taken out of the index if it's indexed.

- use the x-robots-tag HTTP header tag with "noindex"

On the other hand, robots.txt URLs generally would not show up in any search results where you have more relevant pages within your site, so this is probably not something you'd want to spend all too much effort on :-).

Frank Watson, AKA AussieWebmaster, has written a blog post at Search Engine Watch complaining that Google basically indexes content on hard liquor, such as vodka. Frank's specific complaint is that vodka results come up in Google Product Search for a search on vodka. His argument is that since Google AdWords has a policy against showing ads for hard liquor, Google should not show it in the "Google Checkout listing."

I have to be frank with Frank (bad joke). Frank, even though I respect you and we are friends, you are dead wrong in my opinion.

(1) These are not "Google Checkout" listings, it is Google Product Search results.
(2) These are not AdWords results and the rule does not apply to Google Product Search.
(3) Google does not get paid to show the Google Product listings.
(4) People searching in vodka, should see results about vodka. Do you want a blank search page?

Ask Danny says in his comment at Sphinn, if Google Checkout merchants are selling Vodka using Google Checkout as a payment mechanism, then that is against Google Checkout's terms of service, as you can see here. But let's take a look at the merchants who are selling real vodka and accept Google Checkout. Of the first five pages of results, no Google Checkout merchant is selling vodka. They are selling vodka books, vodka DVDs, vodka shot glasses and so on. But not real vodka.

Most of the feedback in the thread supports my opinion on this. But some do argue and take Frank's side.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.