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:
- Newbie Thread of Week: Alphabetized META Tags
Sometimes I seriously wonder where some of these SEO theories come from. One that caught my eye this week was found in a Google Webmaster Help thread, asking if it can hurt your SEO efforts if you do not alphabetize your META tags. The thread creator wrote: Can anyone tell me if it hurts indexing sites that the meta tags have been alphabetized? But my editor tends to alphabetize them. This webmaster asked a valid - Poll: Do You Like Video Thumbnails Near Google Search Results?
Ever since Universal Search hit Google, we have been noticing flavors of video thumbnails and static images left aligned on the Google search results. A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion around this latest format and some are happy with it, while others are not. Here is a picture of a subset of a Google search results: You tell me, which one will catch your eye first? Likely the one with the image next to it on - Google & Date Formats : US vs UK Date Formats
A Google Webmaster Help points out that Google handles most date formats in US format. So if a site has a date in the format of 04/06/2007, Google will read that as April 6, 2007, but in UK format, it might be known as June 4, 2007. Here is a screen capture of one such result: And here is the date on the actual page: You can see more details on this at Google Webmaster - Google Warns About Social Media "Schemes" in SEO Guide
Remember a few months back when Google published their internal SEO guide? Well, Michael Gray asked if Social Media links is an easy way to SEO death row. Michael pointed out that on page twenty of the guide, under the "Good practices for promoting your website" section Google writes you should avoid: involving your site in schemes where your content is artificially promoted to the top of these services Michael feels we will soon see - Have a Question For Google? Using Google's New Discussion Area Might Not Help
A few months ago, Google opened up new interactive discussion areas to help improve Google's communication between Google and the people who use Google's products and services. In fact, the Google Webmaster Help area moved over a month ago today. Everyone was excited to see a quicker, more efficient and more responsive area to get answers to their questions. The only issue is that many folks are posting questions and their questions are not being
Other Great Search Forum Threads:
- Blog reported as attack site but no suspicious content listed in safe browsing diagnostic, Google Webmaster Help
- Browser War Hots Up: Google plays favorites, Firefox hits 20% market share, WebmasterWorld
- Domain Age Importance in Google Algorithm, WebmasterWorld
- Google OS Android to Run on Net Books by q1 - 2010, WebmasterWorld
- Translation URLs bring 1,500 unreachable URL's in 1 day, Google Webmaster Help
- Site moved to new servers, but updated pages not picked up by crawler, Google Webmaster Help
- Reddit Offerring Ads, Cre8asite Forums
- Redirect 301 /jane.html, Sphinn
- Urgent - need to delete google result for a deleted blog, Google Webmaster Help
