Happy July 4th my American friends! While most of you are sleeping in, having BBQs, or enjoying the day, the Search Engine Roundtable authors are still keeping you abreast of what's new in the search world. So take a look in case you missed out this week!
July 4th in the Search Industry
Today is America's Independence day. And guess what? A lot of search engines and other sites actually participated in redesigning their logos for the party. Dogpile must've forgotten, but all other expected search engines (including Ask!) participated.
Give It Up Released
We covered SMX Advanced 2008's Give It Up last month, and now it's live for your viewing and learning pleasure. Enjoy it while it's up on the interwebs. :) It's dangerous information!
Blocking Countries is NOT Cloaking
Google initially made a statement that said that blocking regions is considered cloaking. However, they rectified their statement to say that it's not cloaking, and if you block the entire country of China, for example, it's actually called geolocation. JohnMu who made the original post retracted his statement and all is well. If Googlebot sees the same things that regular visitors see in a particular region, you're doing just fine.
Google SERPs Findings for Google.co.uk
Every month, we report on Google SERP observations from webmasters -- fluctuations in rankings, loss of rankings entirely, strange results in the search results, and more. We started reporting Google.co.uk SERP results as well after realizing it's not the same as Google.com and there are different algorithms driving the results. In fact, we reported a day later that there are a number of Australia TLDs on page one of the Google.co.uk SERPs, which is a bit strange.
Yahoo Makes Search Update, Nobody Notices
This week, Yahoo changed its search algorithm and alerted us to the possibility of reshuffling and different results. But after the change was supposedly implemented, there was silence. I guess they didn't change much.
Your Flash Files May Start Getting Indexed
Got contextual content in your SWF file? The search engines may start to crawl them. Your SWF files are safe as long as they have textual elements, but your FLV files won't be crawlable. Either way, it's a huge step forward for anyone who has a flash-heavy site--as long as there's text!
Google Folds PPA Program, Starts DoubleClick Affiliate Network
Results on the Google Pay Per Action program must have been dismal enough to cause Google to fold the entire program. But that doesn't mean that there's no hope for you. Google has started a DoubleClick Affiliate Network.
Google's Content Removal Tool is Not Specific to HTTPS/WWW
If you ever remove content from Google Webmaster Tools because you think it's a duplicate page (e.g. https://mydomain.com/blah.html versus http://mydomain.com/blah.html) be advised that you will be removing the entire page off search results. Google's removal tool is not prefix-specific. Be forewarned.
YouTube to Violate Privacy as Ordered by US Judge
A judge who I think doesn't really understand the Internet has ordered Google to turn records of YouTube users over to Viacom in a move that has incensed much of the internet community. Hopefully Google will win an appeals on this!
Secure Your Name Brand -- Fast!
If you have a company name that you want to keep clean, secure it on social networking sites before others do it for you. It's for your own safety.
Have a happy holiday weekend!
