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:
- Google Says Use Spammy Looking AdSense Unit
In the first of many Google AdSense optimization tips, Google AdSense representative Ashley recommends in a Google Groups post to use the 300x250 medium rectangle unit. Not only that, when you use it, make sure to place it above the fold. Plus opt-in to both text and image ads. Why? Ashley says it is "one of our best performing ad units." Here is a live sample ad (RSS readers, click through to see the ad): - The Implications of the nofollow Tag, Illustrated
The eVisibility guys, who gave out a super cool shirt at SMX West (see photo below), wrote an interesting post about the implications of the nofollow tag. They use an illustration that describes how nofollow works by not passing juice onto the pages. It's actually an easy to understand diagram that explains how some juice passes to certain pages and others don't pass on to other pages, thereby allowing you to control the amount of - How to Take Advantage of Local Search Engine Optimization
In a post entitled Does Your Business Qualify for Local SEO?, Cre8asite forum member SEOigloo poses the question about whether your business website can take advantage of local SEO. Here's what's necessary: If the business serves only within a fixed geographic region, Local SEO is a no-brainer for you. You need to optimize the tags, footer, on-page copy for that magic combination of product/service + location, and you need to register your business with the - Yahoo Search March 2008 Update?
Yahoo Search announced an update will be taking place today. They wrote the typical line: We're in the process of rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms. While we expect the update will be completed soon, as you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index. Update: With this weather update, you might also experience spikes or drops in crawl traffic for the - Why Link Pages & Directories Might Not Work
A WebmasterWorld thread touches on a simple topic, the topic of link pages. Many sites have them, a page that contains links to link partners. Some of these pages are labeled "resources," some are labelled "partners," some are "directory," and some even "links." The characteristics of the page look a lot like the ones you find for a search on resources page in Google. They have tons of links on them, sometimes they are organized - Google Testing Unverified Local Results in Web Search?
Blended Local Results with Unverified Listings by Eric Lander digs deep into a GrayWolf question about Google Maps plus signs in web search (from a while back actually). But something I did not know was, according to Eric, Google only showed verified listings in the Google search results. As Eric explained, a search for sushi santa clara not only brings up verified listings but also non-verified listings. Honestly, as I write this, I am fairly - Increase in Reports of Google Caching Wrong Pages
We now have three different threads in the past week that report Google has the wrong site in its cache for a query. We have seen this before, where we said Google Slow to Update Cache Data? In that case, a cache command for a site was showing a different site in the Google cache. Why would that happen? Could be how Google is handling redirects, could be just a out of sync cache showing
Other Great Search Forum Threads:
- Google Sitelinks: The Ultimate FAQ, Sphinn
- SEO Is The Worst Thing Ever Invented, Sphinn
- Adwords Down For Maintanence, WebmasterWorld
- AdWords4r Ruby Client Library 11.1.0 Release, Google Groups
- How Do You Choose a Search Marketing Vendor?, Search Engine Watch Forums
- Danny's Moving Back To California, Sphinn
- Forget about anchor text start building trust, Sphinn
