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:
- Evidence of Page Level Google Penalties?
Richard at SEO Gadget showed how Google seemed to have penalized specific pages of his site from ranking in the Google index. The penalty seemed to be fair, in that there were nasty comments that slipped through his comment spam filter. The drop in traffic can be seen by the keyword phrases that page ranked well for. He noticed a ~70% drop in traffic for that phrase, which in his case resulted in a 15% - Google AdSense Gives US Font Size Control
Back in February, Google gave us font type selections for our AdSense ads. Now Google announced the ability to control the size of those fonts. Here is a screen shot of the three sizes you can pick: Google has been testing both larger fonts sizes and smaller ones here and there, so this was expected, and it is now here. To learn more about this, see the AdSense blog post and chat about it at - Google's Top Search Quality Supports Question Google's Team
I have been watching a Google Webmaster Help thread for about a week now. The thread was started by a 3rd party individual who volunteers a lot of his time helping webmasters in the Google Webmaster Help forum. He was even promoted (no pay of course) to the position of "Webmaster Help Bionic Poster" as a top contributor. Autocrat, the name this person goes by, questioned Google's search quality team, to give them more insight - Are AdSense Publishers Losing Out from Google Translate & Cache
A WebmasterWorld thread reports that in some cases the Google AdSense ads will not render when using Google Translate or viewing the page on Google Cache. We reported about the Google Cache issue about a year ago, and back then I believe it was temporary. The issue is that in some cases, people use Google Translate to view web pages and if Google doesn't show the ads, these publishers (as well as Google) is missing - Google News Hit By Spammers
Google News is the life blood for many people who try to stay on top of news. It is also fairly hard to be included in the Google News index. So when Google News gets infected with spam, people take notice. We have a WebmasterWorld thread with complaints and ShoeMoney posted specific details with the Google News spam. Here is the reaction from the person who posted at WebmasterWorld: Recently I noticed spammy news in
Other Great Search Forum Threads:
- Casino link on Google main page, Google Web Search Help
- Facebook Tests New Search To Selected Users, WebmasterWorld
- Google Apps Sync Appears to Disable Outlook Search, WebmasterWorld
- I'm pissed. Dear Google, please go vaporize yourself!, Sphinn
- Interesting Review Visit from the Googleplex, WebmasterWorld
- U.S. May 2009 Search Share Rankings, WebmasterWorld
