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 :: October 9, 2009
This week, I got sick during SMX East, which made for a pretty poor sounding video - so I apologize for my voice. We did cover 33 or so sessions at SMX East, which had a ton of useful and fun materials presented. I also posted the October 2009 Google Webmaster report. Google will allow cross domain canonical tag use. Did Google give the White House a "hand job" in the search results? AdSense login - Wired Pushed Google To Fix Old Google Groups Search Bug
Wired reports that an article they published publicly embarrassed Google about a bug with Google Groups search that has been an issue for over a year now, that was fixed in a matter of a day, after Wired wrote about it. Wired wrote: Google has pulled its Google Groups development team out of the basement broom closet and begun patching up its long-broken Usenet library, in response to our story Wednesday highlighting the company's neglect - Google Fixes Webmaster Tools Verification Issue With Google Sites
Last week Google updated their verification process for Webmaster Tools. A known issue was that it broke the ability for Google Sites to verify in Webmaster Tools. Yesterday, Google resolved the issue and now Google Sites can be verified without an issue. An updated Google Webmaster Help thread there are a couple webmasters who have confirmed it is now working. I personally thought it would take longer than a week to fix, but I was - Google Turns Off Parameter Handling For Some Sites?
About three weeks ago, Google added parameter handling to Google Webmaster Tools. It basically gave webmasters another tool to help communicate to Google any duplicate content or URL issues. I spotted two threads from the same webmaster, one at HighRankings Forum and the other at Google Webmaster Help where one webmaster is not allowed to use this feature. When he goes to the parameter handling page, he gets this message: Parameters for this site can - Trailing Slashes: Root Domain Same Page But File Names Can Be Different Pages
A Google Webmaster Help thread has confirmation from Google on an old topic in SEO, the trailing slash. Here is the quick answer: seroundtable.com is the same as seroundtable.com/seroundtable.com/page is not the same as seroundtable.com/page/ I believe the last time we touched on URL normalization was back in 2004. In fact, in 2005, we spotted Google appending double slashes to URLs in their search results. So there you have it. The root, slash or no - HTML Sitemap vs. XML Sitemap: Google Says HTML Comes First
In one of Matt Cutts' videos on SEO questions, he answers a question about if you should build an HTML or XML Sitemap. An HTML sitemap is an old school landing page for users to find all (or most) of your pages on your web site via single page. In many cases, for large sites, a site would require many HTML sitemaps to make this useful, but for smaller sites (see RustyBrick's sitemap), it makes - Google's "Quick View" PDF Also Does OCR Conversion For Many Languages
Google recently announced a feature that they have implemented just a couple weeks ago in the search results named "Quick View." Quick View basically shows you a PDF in a web based PDF viewer on Google. It takes the PDF from the host, typically the owner of the PDF, and does all the conversion on the Google's server. The neat part is that this feature gives you OCR for virtually all of the languages Google
Other Great Search Forum Threads:
- Matt Cutts Interview: Google Search Quality and Web Spam, WebmasterWorld
- Interview: Amit Singhal, Head of Google's Core Ranking Team, WebmasterWorld
- Google is Truth - British Seconday School Research, WebmasterWorld
- seopenalty.com reported my site has a high penalty from Google, DigitalPoint Forums
- Why can't I view all the articles associated with a google news search?, Google News Help
- Adsense Logon page just updated, WebmasterWorld
