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:
- Preparing to Hoard New Top Level Domain Names?
Last week there was a lot of buzz generated by the ICANN announcement that they would open up the web to allow for an "unlimited number" of new Top-Level-Domains (aka TLDs such as .com or .org or .info, for example) to be created. The initial information from Wall Street Journal was that these could cost anywhere from $100,000 to $500,000, although another report directly from ICANN states that they would be free, and require the - Webmasters Report July 2008 Google SERP Changes
WebmasterWorld members are already beginning to notice some issues with the Google SERPs this month, though it has only just begun. In one instance, a very highly targeted one-page website which used to perform well for short and long tail terms lost all traffic in the short and long tail. This month, the webmaster reports that short tail searches are starting to creep back up but long tail results are nowhere to be found. Many - How Can You Determine the Competency of an SEO?
The Google Webmaster Central blog announced that they recently rewrote an article about whether Google recommends SEOs. To summarize, the article says that there are benefits, but there are also things you should look out for in an SEO and in your selection of one. For example, when choosing an SEO, you might want to ask some questions: Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories? Do you follow - Google & Yahoo Begins to Index Some Flash Files (SWF Files)
The news that Adobe announced that Google and Yahoo are indexing SWF Flash files has overtaken the front page of Techmeme this morning. It is also the dominate discussion in all the major search forums. In any event, Google and Yahoo is now able to crawl the textual elements within SWF files, including discovering links within those SWF files. The Google Webmaster Central blog discusses the details but here are the takeaways as I see - Predicted: Google Drops PPA Program, AdSense Referrals & Adds DoubleClick Affiliate Network
Some major news hit the presses last night, where Google announced on the AdWords Blog and AdSense Blog that they are retiring the pay-per-action program, putting an end to Google AdSense's referral program. I cannot say I am surprised, we reported that the future of Google's PPA program was uncertain and that they were "having second thoughts of the product." So this comes as no surprise. The news is that Google is launching a new - Yahoo's June Search Update Goes Unnoticed, For Now
Yahoo has announced yet another Yahoo Search index update. Yahoo notified us that we "may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index." But as of this morning, no SEO has noticed any significant changes with their rankings. In fact, there isn't much discussion around the Yahoo Search engine at all, right now. We have a WebmasterWorld thread discussing the announcement, but all posts in that thread say no one noticed anything. We - Search Engine Watch Forums Goes Offline: Hack? Server Issue?
For the past few hours, Search Engine Watch Forums has been returning a server starter page from Red Hat Linux. It seems like many, if not all, the internal forums, such as the Google forum page are returning 404 not-found server status codes. A true shame to see. Here is a picture of what I see when I go to SEW Forums: I was emailed by a few concerned forum members, but I honestly don't
Other Great Search Forum Threads:
- Google Analytics Data Drop?, Google Groups
- AdWords API Bad Gateway(502), Google Groups
- How to report Business CLOSED in Google Maps?, Google Groups
- I've Added Quality Content Pages , Now What ?, Cre8asite Forums
- Notice of Change of Legal Name for Microsoft Online, LP., DigitalPoint Forums
