Happy Friday! It's almost June -- can you believe it? Next week, we're heading to SMX Advanced! This week, we celebrated Memorial Day and observed a lot of interesting search happenings.
Memorial Day
Monday marked Memorial Day in the states, and most of you had a long weekend. The search industry celebrated Memorial Day with numerous logos -- but Google was noticeably absent. The reason why, as the Google team responds, is that a Memorial Day design would be challenging and Google does not want to offend anyone.
Yahoo Experiences Subtle Update
Readers are reporting that they're getting interesting rankings on Yahoo as a result of a subtle update that occurred earlier this month. Some people are seeing extremely good rankings even though they apparently don't deserve it.
Blogspot and .info Domains Temporarily Penalized by Google
Google temporarily penalized all blogspot and .info domains earlier this week -- all of these sites didn't show up in the index. It was a bug, but it's a bit outrageous to penalize all of these domains. Sure, some are spammy, but not every single one of them is.
How Many of You Would Buy Links with a Nofollow Attribute?
Take our poll about whether you'd buy a link with a nofollow attribute. So far, the results are interesting. In the end, even if search engines do not see the nofollow, that link could bring targeted traffic that can really help you. As some people say, they're not looking for PageRank; this is how paid links work nowadays, and that's the nature of what you're buying.
Your YouTube Video May Help Boost Your Rankings
With Google Universal Search, it's possible that embedding YouTube videos may boost your rankings. A forum member discovered that his pages with YouTube videos embedded within them performed better than pages that didn't have video. Interesting. Maybe I need to start using video. Blech.
Google May or May Not Support Abbreviation and Acronym Tags
There are some HTML markup tags for abbreviations and acronyms, but are they supported by Google? We don't know. We are following a discussion in Google Groups but nobody from Google has commented. Upon first glance, though, Google probably does not support them.
Keyword Insertion in a Google AdWords URL? No
Google does not recommend keyword insertion in a display URL, according to a recent discussion. Why? Because you may have so many keywords that they probably don't work with that format. In other words, be absolutely certain that it fits.
Google Gets New Ugly Favicon
I hate to say it, but Google's new favicon is unappealing. I liked the big G a lot better than the little g. What is the reason behind this change? Google, you have a strong brand. Stop changing it on us. In fact, our 4 commenters this morning all don't like it. Now you have Barry and me -- that's six of us who don't. Change it back please kthx.
Google AdSense Ads Performing Disappearing Act
I just installed Google AdSense ads on a new site, and I think I experienced the same problem that has been reported in forums that Google AdSense ads are sporadically disappearing. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to this; it just is what it is. Oh, and for Michael VanDeMar -- yes, you should be aware that we often display ads on our content to test out theories. Usually we do give a disclaimer. ;) In this case, the ads weren't showing up (initially), so I suppose that may be why there was none.
We're Going to Seattle, Baby!
Finally, after 2 months of silence and lots of busy work, the Search Engine Roundtable team is headed to Seattle for SMX Advanced. We're going to have full SMX Advanced conference coverage with our team of excellent reporters. Stay tuned! And if you're there, say hello!
