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 AdWords Testing "Bid Simulator"
Some advertisers are noticing a new feature in Google AdWords. The feature is named "bid simulator" and it shows you what number of impressions and position you can expect if you increase or decrease your bid. A Search Engine Watch Forums thread has a picture of the feature from one advertiser. Here is a screen shot taken from the PDF linked to below: This seems to have been released on May 20th to some advertisers. - Bring Back iGoogle's Tabs
A Google Web Search Help thread tells us how to change the iGoogle layout from the new tabs along the left-side of the page to the old style of tabs across the top of the page. To bring back the old top tabs, just go to google.com/ig?hl=all. In the past, bring up the old top tabs worked by going to google.com/ig?gl=all but now google.com/ig?hl=all is how to get there. Here is a picture of the - Google Squared Is Live: What SEOs & Searchers Need To Know
Google Squared made its debut yesterday as a Google Labs project at google.com/squared. Honestly, it is very cool to use and has a lot of potential. But it is also extremely risky and often shows very poor results. Google Squared tries to take the unstructured nature of crawling the web and making it into structure data. In some cases it does a nice job, but in many cases, it fails completely or it shows false - Malware A Growing Issue: Yes, Major Impact on SEO
The Google Security Blog reported that malware is a growing issue. A Google study showed that a single malware source has infected over 60,000 hosts. The chart below shows the number of infected sites over time from the top ten malware sites. Why is this a SEO issue? Well, it might not hurt your rankings but it will 100% hurt your traffic from Google and traffic in general. Google labels malware sites with a big - Google's Dangerous Search Result Snippets
This week, we had two major stories about Google seriously causing trouble with their search snippets. The first is more obvious with The Register reporting a webmaster was sued for his listing in Google showing something that was not even written on the page. Profy reported that Google Squared, which just went live declared the living to be dead. Yet another case of unstructured search, structuring data into a false fact. A new Google Webmaster
Other Great Search Forum Threads:
- Is Your Brand Too Big For SEO?, Sphinn
- WSJ Writes about Google Quality Raters, WebmasterWorld
- "I don't need to walk around in circles"- Give feedback on contacting AdWords support, Google AdWords Help
- After Serverdown for 4 hours google traffic 30% down as well!, Google Webmaster Help
- PR0 Links Are They Helpful?, WebmasterWorld
