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 Grades Themselves on Their SEO Skills
The Google Webmaster Central Blog posted a Google SEO Report Card as a detailed PDF document. The document breaks down the SEO report on the following areas: Search result presentationURLs and redirectsOn-page optimizations Google said: The project looked at the main pages of 100 different Google products, measuring them across a dozen common optimization categories. Future iterations of the project might look at deeper Google product web pages as well as international ones. We released - Bing Doesn't Like Redirect Chains, No One Does Really
A Bing Community thread talks about Bing's crawlers and indexers ability in following chains of redirects. A redirect chain is when you have two or more URLs that are being redirects to another URL. For example, if I have domain.com/pageA redirect to domain.com/pageB and then from domain.com/pageB to domain.com/pageC - that is a redirect chain. Search engines typically crawl them fine, if they are done using 301 redirects. But it takes them a longer time - Good, Google Killed SearchWiki, Adds Stars
Google announced they have added stars to the search results for sites you have starred in the past. Google said: With stars, you can simply click the star marker on any search result or map and the next time you perform a search, that item will appear in a special list right at the top of your results when relevant. That means if you star the official websites for your favorite football teams, you might - March 2010 Google Webmaster Report
Our monthly Google webmaster report based on the ongoing WebmasterWorld thread is now pretty large enough for me to give you an status update. The thread is actually pretty long now, which is not always the case this early in the month. Here are the key points discussed in the current thread: Site command showing less results (less pages being indexed)Crawl rates in Webmaster Tools go flat for someFluctuations on search results for the positions - Vivaldi Gets A Google Doodle
If you visit Google today, you will see a special logo for Antonio Lucio Vivaldi. Vivaldi was born today, 332 years ago, on March 4, 1678. He was a Venetian baroque composer and priest, as well as a famous virtuoso violinist and nicknamed il Prete Rosso ("The Red Priest"). Here is the Google Doodle for Vivaldi: So far there are no complaints about the Google Doodle in the Google Web Search Help forums, but I - Picture: Google "Related Commercial Searches"
A few days ago, we reported on rumors of Google Showing Commercially Related Keywords In AdWords Positions. Well, it turns out to be true. A long time friend from the industry, Darrin Ward sent me a screen shot of this image the other day. Here it is: As you can see, in the position of where Google's search ads go, the AdWords ads, are "related commercial searches." I guess the query searched for here is
SMX West 2010 Coverage:
- SMX West: Conversion Ninja Toolbox
- SMX West: Ask The SEOs
- SMX West: Analytics Action Plans
- SMX West: Ask The Search Engines
- SMX West: PPC Tune Up Clinic
- SMX West: Bringing SEO In House
- SMX West: Optimizing Your Content on YouTube
- SMX West: Free Ways to Market on Facebook
Other Great Search Forum Threads:
- Facebook to automate ad buying through Omniture, WebmasterWorld
- SEO without the SEO, Sphinn
- Google Sync outage information (1st March), Google Mobile Help
- I've done a Google Doodle I'd like to donate.., Google Webmaster Help
- Top 24 Things I Learned at Online Marketing Summit 2010, Sphinn
- Tracking Adwords Sitelink, WebmasterWorld
