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:
- Google to Host Third Webmaster Chat Event on Wednesday at Noon
Adam Lasnik of Google announced in a Google Groups thread that they are going to be hosting the third webmaster live chat event this Wednesday, October 22nd and noon (EST) or 9am (PST). I am personally upset at the time. It is a Jewish holiday and I can not be online to participate, which means I cannot provide a recording and commentary after the session is done. I am sorry about that, but there is - Google Webmaster Tools is Incorrectly Displaying Keyword Positions
A WebmasterWorld member reports that he was dependent on the Top Search Queries report in Google Webmaster Tools and has found it to be providing incorrect data. After all, using another rank checker proved to see no results and there were no visitors to that page. This is likely to be a bug, according to Tedster: Webmaster Tools reports of all kinds are known to contain wrong information at times. This kind of wrong information - Google Accounts Terminated: What Can You Do?
Sphinn features the unfortunate story of a guy named Loren Baker who woke up one morning to find that his Google Account -- Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Reader, Google Talk, and all -- terminated. He has no idea why this has happened and has written an open letter to Google to assess the damage that was done, since now Loren cannot communicate with his clients and his business activity has been halted. It's deeply upsetting - When Can We Block SEOmoz's Linkscape Tool?
At SMX East, SEOmoz launched Linkscape, a powerful tool that will give you competitive analysis of linkage data. The tool has been lauded as extremely powerful though there have been some criticisms. In the Smackdown blog, Michael VanDemar attacks the credibility of the tool and claims that there is no way to block the user agent, at least not now. Therefore, we're still waiting to hear from SEOmoz on how to block the Linkscape tool - Tips On Getting a Perfect 10 on Google Quality Score
Ever since Google launched the real time quality score metric, where Google rated keywords between 0 and 10, 10 being the highest, I have rarely seen threads on documenting how to receive a 10 out of 10. Tamar blogged about How To Ensure That Your Google Quality Score is 10/10 based on an experiment by abbotsys. Back then, it was simply about matching the domain name to the keyword phrase, but can it be achieved - Why Does Google Try To Crawl When My Site Is Not Public?
A typical thread I see from time to time in the forums are from webmasters who see Googlebot trying to access their site, but their site is not publicly available. For example, a Google Groups thread has a webmaster from davenjudy.org asking why does he see GoogleBot requests to his fubar.local.davenjudy.org when that page won't resolve? The simple answer is because there may be links still pointing to that address. In fact, in this case, - Google Image Search October 2008 Update
A WebmasterWorld thread has users noticing changes over at Google Image Search. The changes may be a filter or may be a full-blown image index update, hard to tell at the moment. The last Google Image update seemed to be an image filter update in September. But now, the update seems a bit more outside of the scope of what we would classify as a filter. WebmasterWorld administrator, tedster, observed: I started seeing some really - Webmasters Discuss Google's "First Click Free" Program for Web Search
Google's JohnMu from the Webmaster Central team has done a blog post named First Click Free for Web Search where he clarifies that the First Click Free program is allowed to be used for web search as well. In short, the First Click Free program allows Googlebot and users who click from Google to your site, see your content for free, on the first click from Google to your site. It was designed originally for
Other Great Search Forum Threads:
- Does Google Have A Glass Ceiling?, Sphinn
- AdWords Advertisers - A Worldwide Conference?, Search Engine Watch Forums
- How high will these link purchases bring my PageRank?, WebmasterWorld
- Super Google doesn't Worry about Economy!, DigitalPoint Forums
- Should Sphinn Close Comments?, Sphinn
