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:
- Yahoo Reduces Top Ads & Changes Ad Layout Slightly
Yahoo made small, but significant changes, to the layout of the top search ads. It seems like Yahoo is now showing a maximum of three ads at the top of the page, when they use to show four ads. Plus, they have moved the display URL under the ad description. Here is a sample of the old layout: Notice the display URL is on the same line as the description. Plus, there are four ads - I Rank Too High on Google! Is Something Wrong?
Some webmasters will kill for a top ranking. Others will get it when they least expect it. A WebmasterWorld member talks about how he's ranking above Amazon for his brand new site which has already been fully indexed. He wonders if this is a mistake, since he's doing so much better than the bigger competition. That's a good question. There are a few factors that can influence high rankings. The obvious culprits include domain age - Is Google Perfect? Not Always. Here are 10 Flops.
While everyone talks about Google's market dominance and how it's taken over the world (naturally, because it's good at what it does), most forget that like any business, Google has made erroneous decisions as a company from time to time. PC World explores these flubs, flops, and failures in an article that proves to be a very informative read. Some examples of Google mishaps include Google X (a homage to Mac OS X which mysteriously - Blog Post About Sphinn Demonstrates the Power of Community Within Social Networks
A very cool post by Web Professor was published yesterday about the 11 1 most important stories about Sphinn ever. The post goes into detail about who the big community participants are, what the best posts about Sphinn are, and what kind of Sphinn discussions there have been since its launch last year. This post goes to show the power of "social" media and how we're all united by a community bond of some sort. - Google Offers Advice on Automatic Redirection Based on Geolocation & Language
A Google Groups thread has discussion around how this webmaster should handle redirecting its web visitor to a localized version of their site, based on the IP address information. Since I recently wrote a comprehensive article at Search Engine Land on How Search Engine Redirect Users To Country-Specific Sites, I thought this post was particularly interesting. Googler, JohnMu, was first to respond to the webmaster's question. He explained that as a user, he wants the - Google Reader Suffers Temporary Outage Last Night
I am a heavy Google Reader user and while I was checking my feeds on my iPhone at the Verizon Wireless store (ironic) last night, I noticed that Google Reader began bugging out. Also, throughout the day, the "unread" count was higher then what was being actually shown as unread, earlier in the day. Both issues resolved themselves after a few hours. I did survive without clean access to my RSS feeds for an hour - Google AdWords Updates Billing Page
If you login to your Google AdWords account and visit the billing summary page, under "my account," you will notice that the page looks different. Google's FAQ page says they have updated the page for three reasons, "transparency, flexibility, and performance." The new billing page looks like this: The old billing page, taken from here, looked like this: The main changes are: Advertising costs are broken out by dayOne invoice is created at the beginning
Other Great Search Forum Threads:
- The Greatest Google Sitelink Ever, Sphinn
- An Interview with Linkbait Expert Todd Malicoat, Sphinn
- How Many Google Penalties Are There?, Sphinn
- Sphinn's Sock Puppets Take Post to Frontpage, Sphinn
- Live Interview with Larry Page - Expanding Access to the Internet, WebmasterWorld
- The greatest example of linkbait............ever?!, Sphinn
- Yahoo Claiming a Record With Its Petabyte SQL Database, WebmasterWorld
