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:
- Webmasters Report July 2008 Google.co.uk SERP Changes
Last month, we started reporting on Google.co.uk as perceived by webmasters. We may make this a regular column depending on how different Google.co.uk seems to be from Google.com over time. WebmasterWorld members are reporting extreme "yoyoing" and fluctuations of some rankings on old domains. Another observation is that the geolocation seems to be shifting -- again. .co.uk pages are showing up on page one, whereas .com pages are showing up on page 2. In other - Secure Your Brand Name on Social Sites
Debra Mastaler's Grab Your Profile Link Before Some Jerk Does points out almost the obvious, but when you think about it, many brands don't bother with it. I cannot express enough how important it is for you to secure your brand name on all the major social sites and communities, espesially those that may have an impact on your brand. For example, do you think Paris Hilton secured twitter.com/parishilton or did some savvy web marketer - The Pros & Cons of Google AdSense's Allowed Sites Feature
A WebmasterWorld thread discusses the pros and cons of using Google's allowed sites feature in AdSense. In short, the Allowed Sites feature is a tool to tell Google, where you want your ads to show. For example, if someone steals your content and takes your ads with your content, they are in a sense, showing your ads. You can specify to Google, I only want my ads to display on specific domains or subdomains. Google - Google Says Blocking Countries Outside of the US is Against Policies
A Google Groups thread has a webmaster who has been receiving a lot of rogue spider attacks from the Africa region. He wants to go as far as ban the whole continent of Africa. But he is concerned that by doing so, he will also hurt his Google rankings. It is actually not all that uncommon for network administrators to block specific regions of web traffic. In fact, I believe my office blocks the Asia - Google AdSense's Optimization Report Offering Wrong Advice
Google offers automated and often repetitive messages, known as AdSense optimization tips. You get one virtually every month, on the first on the month. Mine have typically said that I should add more AdSense units to my pages. In this month's release, some AdSense publishers are reporting receiving a tip to add Referral ads to their sites. Here is the message: Referrals can add incremental revenue to your site. You are not currently using Referrals - Was Google Down in the United Kingdom?
A Cre8asite Forum thread reports that for some Google searchers in the UK, Google was unreachable for a short period of time. eKstreme summarizes many of the issues noticed. Some people were unable to reach Gmail, Google.com and many other Google services. If you look at a search at Summarize for google down, you will see many people talking about Google going down. I scanned the other forums and did not see any mentions of - Google AdWords 35 Character Display URL Limit
I have really never heard complains about Google AdWords having a limit on the characters allowed in the display URL. Today, I found out that the max number of characters you can have in your AdWords display URL is 35. An advertiser ran into this issue and posted the details at Google Groups. I suspect this wasn't much of an issue before Google began enforcing the display URL policy. Back then, I assume you can
Other Great Search Forum Threads:
- 5 Common Crawlability Mistakes That Kill Your SEO Success, Sphinn
- Adcenter Improvements, Search Engine Watch Forums
- Back to the Basics 2008: Keyword Research, Search Engine Watch Forums
- Delayed or Down Stats July 1, 2008, WebmasterWorld
- Domain Tasting Crackdown, Search Engine Watch Forums
- Back-button on Opera broken with Ad Manager-served ads, Google Groups
- Google Ad Manager Release Notes - June 2008, Google Groups
- It's Official: Anti-Trust Scrutiny of Yahoo/Google Deal is Underway, WebmasterWorld
- Microsoft Acquires Semantic Search Engine, Powerset, WebmasterWorld
