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:
- MSN Groups to Close in February 2009
It's been confirmed by Microsoft: MSN Groups is closing on February 21, 2009. Microsoft, in turn, will be moving over to Multiply for all of its community needs. As for why Microsoft has opted to close its own service, their reasoning is simple: they want to provide the best technology and offerings. Microsoft believes that by using Multiply this will happen. Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Roundtable Forums. - Yahoo Advertisers Complain of Bids Being Invalidated
At Search Engine Watch Forums, Discovery has a gripe. He has noticed that the top performing keywords on Yahoo Search Marketing are no longer top-performing. Yahoo is invalidating them and making them inactive due to minimum bid requirements. He wonders why Yahoo is wasting its time doing this at all: Why let bids go inactive at all? What does it hurt to just let them hang around at the 16th position until the marketplace shifts - Google's Blogger Best Practice Guide Released
Saad Kamal notes on his blog that Google has released a blogger's best practices guide in the Webmasters/Site owners help forum. The ideas behind the blogger's guide are pretty self-explanatory: write great content often. Make sure it's discoverable. And finally, add your blog to Google Webmaster Tools for more insights. Of course, this is basic information, but as many note, it's a good refresher in case we have our minds stuck in the advanced details - Does Randomizing Content Help Search Rankings Or Hurt Rankings?
A Google Groups thread has a webmaster asking if it helps for him to rotate content on his site. He believes it might help for three reasons: Revised content will encourage GoogleBot to recrawl his pages more often.Revised content makes the pages look newer, which may help improve rankings.It can't hurt to do, so why not. Are any of these reasons a valid reason to rotate content on a page? Nope. You really need to - Is Microsoft Live Search Crawling More But Indexing Less?
I spotted two thread this month discussing how little Microsoft is indexing their sites but how often Microsoft's bot, MSNbot, is crawling their sites. A WebmasterWorld thread and DigitalPoint Forums thread has details of the newish behavior from MSNbot. BillyS at WebmasterWorld explains: I was just looking through my logs and noticed that msnbot was crawling our site pretty hard, grabbing about 10% of the site in the last half hour or so. I just - Was There a November Yahoo Update?
The Yahoo Search blog announced there would be an update over the weekend at Yahoo Search. The thing is, there are currently no comments at that Yahoo blog post on the update nor do I see many threads discussing any update at Yahoo. We do have a WebmasterWorld thread talking about the announcement. Maybe one or two are noticing some slight changes in the Yahoo search results. Maybe Yahoo is updating and maybe SEOs have - Video Recap of Weekly Search Buzz :: November 23, 2008
In this week's recap, Yang steps down from Yahoo. Google launches SearchWiki. What are Google search results like. Google launches new keyword tool. Google doesn't cap AdSense. AdWords tests new interface. Yahoo lets you block more domains. Google splashes ads every where. Yelp gets some nasty forum discussion. Text Link Ads launches inLinks and link debate starts again. Google Sitelinks now appearing on sub domains. Videos are rocking the search results. Check out Google's voice
Other Great Search Forum Threads:
- Google SearchWiki 101: An Illustrated Guide by Danny Sullivan, Sphinn
- Is BrowseRank The New PageRank?, Sphinn
- Is this still true?, Google Groups
- How do I see who embed a YouTube video in Facebook?, YouTube Help
