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 :: December 18, 2009
This week in search, I announce that I am hosting SMX SphinnCon Israel on March 7, 2010 in Jerusalem. Google announced the support for cross domain canonical tags. There may have been a Toolbar PageRank penalty earlier this week. Google may add PDF support to fetch as Googlebot. Google dropped Answers.com for their own definitions. Google is testing infinite scroll in image search. Bing might add "page score" to their toolbar. MSNBot crawls pages twice, - Google to Add PDF Support to Fetch As Googlebot?
A couple months ago, Google released an incredibly useful feature in the Webmaster Tools labs named fetch as GoogleBot. It basically allowed you to see what GoogleBot sees, enabling you to see crawl issues, hacks, injected links and other webmaster related issues as a GoogleBot. But when it came to PDFs, I don't think the tool worked properly (yes, it is in labs). A thread in the Google Webmaster Help forums has one webmaster asking - Google Mixed Up Link Units Earnings With Ad Units
Google sent an email to many publishers yesterday, including myself, explaining a reporting issue with Google mixing up some of the earnings for link units with regular ad units. The email's subject line read, "Update to AdSense link unit reporting" and the email read: As a publisher using link units on your pages, we're writing to let you know about a recently resolved reporting issue that affected your account. We discovered an issue with the - Click Through Rate by Search Engine Result Positions
How much better is a number one organic listing than a number two result? That is often a question webmasters, publishers, site owners ask themselves and others. A WebmasterWorld thread asked that exact question. Tedster, a WebmasterWorld administrator, answered it with AOL's leaked data from 2006. Tedster shared the click-through rate by position: #1 - 47% click-through#2 - 13% click-through#3 - 9%click-through#4 - 7% click-through The SEO Black Hat blog went through this in more - Google To Swallow Yelp For $500 Million?
TechCrunch says that Google is in "advanced acquisition negotiations" with Yelp to acquire them for "at least" $500 million. Many sites are buzzing about these talks. Arrington reported that Yelp earned $30 million in revenue this year and it is expected to jump to $50 in 2010. Yelp is a very popular local search site. It is arguably the best of its kind. If Google buys them, you would have to think they would fold
Other Great Search Forum Threads:
- Twitter Beta Tests 'Contributors' For Business, WebmasterWorld
- Why Conversions Can Be a Messy SEO Metric, Sphinn
- 6 Website Redesign SEO Secrets Your Developer May Not Know, Sphinn
- Creating a text link diversity dashboard, Sphinn
- Do You Have “Linkable Content”?, Sphinn
- How will "foreign" characters in new EU domains behave in Google?, WebmasterWorld
- Parameter REmoved From URL in Search Results, Bing Community
- Twitter was hacked!, WebmasterWorld
