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:
- Video Recap of Weekly Search Buzz :: January 9, 2009
We have paused our text based weekly recaps, in lieu of the video edition. As always, I will sum up in a paragraph the topics I discuss at greater length in the video and provide links to more details below. Do let us know how much you may miss the weekly text based recaps. In this weeks recap, I go on a three-minute rant about Yahoo not only changing their policy giving them the right - Poll: Most SEOs Say PageRank Data in Google Webmaster Tools is Useless
On Tuesday, we ran a poll asking if Google's PageRank data reports in Webmaster Tools useless or useful. The results are in and the majority of SEOs believe those reports are completely useless. I am one to agree with the masses here, not because I don't think Google doesn't want to provide useful information here. But more because of the issues I have seen with the reports in Webmaster Tools over the years and how - Who's To Blame For Faster Indexing? Google Sitemaps or FeedBurner
An SEOMoz post charts the positive impact having a Sitemap file can have on the speed of Google and Yahoo crawling and indexing your web pages. The report seems pretty impressive and I myself feel that Sitemaps are important to have, for more sites. In fact, I recently added a Sitemap for this site, although, I really don't think it will help much with indexing this site any faster due to us being in Google - Report: Yahoo Site Explorer Updated Link Values
A DigitalPoint Forums thread reports that folks are noticing that Yahoo Site Explorer has updated the link counts for the tool. I do not typically track these numbers, but many do. So if you do, definitely take a look and see if you are doing any better. Here is a screen capture of our most recent Yahoo Site Explorer link count: The 250,000 value shows all links to seroundtable.com, excluding internal links, but to the - SEOs Finally Looking at Page Segments (Blocks)
David Harry has an excellent write up on the SEO implications of page segmentation. In short, the piece goes over how search engines can, and probably do, look at each web page and segment the page into components. For example, they can pull out the navigation, footer, ad blocks, and so on from the main body copy. This concept is far from new, it goes way back and we even covered it back in mid-2004 - Yahoo Has The Nerve To Change Advertisers Campaigns After Outcry
This week I reported how Yahoo notified advertisers of a change to their terms and conditions, which explicitly gave Yahoo legal rights to change advertisers campaigns and keywords without permission from the advertiser. In fact, this has been the case since June of last year, but it wasn't noticed by the masses until now. This caused a major outcry by SEMs this week. Andy Beal felt embarrassed for Yahoo, that they would do this. Loren
Other Great Search Forum Threads:
- AdWords system maintenance on January 10th, Google AdWords Help
- Basic Seo Tools Each Webmaster Should Have!, Cre8asite Forums
- Building Links on Your Offline Time, Sphinn
- Google & Baidu apologizes for adult links, DigitalPoint Forums
- Google Earth Helps Find Missing Child, DigitalPoint Forums
- how do i unsubcribe for receiveing mobile alerts for new, sports etc and sender number is 919870807070, Google Mobile Help
- Introducing Google Reader Help Videos!, Google Groups
- Mystery Of Why Site Is Gone From Google's Rankings, Cre8asite Forums
