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:
- Does Google Index Flex Content?
Web pages that are designed with Flex Content, that is, using "a module that allows for flexible display of introductory text, title, and an image from any content item," are not spidered by Google, from reports in Google Groups. What are the options, then, if you're a Flex content developer? Just like Flash content, it seems, you should make the same content available in standard HTML for the search engine spiders. This would also help - Performics Dropped by Google, Acquired by Publicis
The Washington Post reports that Google has sold Performics, its search marketing division of DoubleClick. Because of the conflict of interest, this was promised, as stated by Barry both here and over at Search Engine Land. Is there surprise in the industry? Not so much. Most people consider this "fairly expected" and that Google really only needed an affiliate network. Nobody seems particularly moved by the news reports, and they're happy that Google has ridden - A Deep Analysis of Google SERP Click Through Rates
The Searchlight Digital Blog has an interesting post that illustrates the percentage of click-throughs you'd get based on a specific Google ranking. The analysis performed by Searchlight covers over 36 million queries and more than 19 million clicks. The interesting data comes from the explanation from Pete, the blog post's author: Where this gets really interesting though is when you look at what can happen if you own most of the real estate on a - SEOs Like Links From Blog
A week or so ago, I wrote a piece named Are Links From Blogs As Valuable These Days? In short, some SEOs are now against buying or obtaining links from most blogs. They feel that Google may be devaluing the once golden, blog link (yes, I am generalizing). So I decided to run a poll to see how our readers perceive links from blogs. The results are in and we have 141 responses from SEOs - Did Google Stop Crawling Blogger Blogs on Personalized Domains?
There are threads at Google Groups and DigitalPoint Forums with multiple reports of Google not crawling Blogger hosted blogs, that are on custom or private domains (i.e. not on blogspot.com domains). Many have reported that the Googlebot crawling has stopped as of July 30th. I asked Branko to help me see any pattern to the issue and we found a couple things. Both domains listed in the thread have similar patterns. (1) They both have - Google Fixes Search Volume Bug in AdWords Keyword Tool
Yesterday, we reported on the Google keyword tool outage, where the reports were missing search volume data. The problems actually persisted throughout the day, causing major headaches for advertisers looking to research possible keywords. In any event, a Google representative posted in the WebmasterWorld thread that it would be fixed very soon. The Google rep said at about 2pm (EST): This is very much a known issue, and while I have learned to never say
Other Great Search Forum Threads:
- Anyone seeing a lag in adsense stats today? Aug. 6th 2008, WebmasterWorld
- Best way to get rid of thousands of pages, WebmasterWorld
- Earnings down 50% Aug. 5th 2008, WebmasterWorld
- Google Sitemaps - help or hurt? (2008 edition), WebmasterWorld
- Google Stopwords Patent, Sphinn
- Link Building is Dead! Long Live Content Promotion, Sphinn
- New to AdSense? Check out the Inside AdSense blog on Fridays, Google Groups
