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:
- U.S. Government Wants To Classify Search Marketers
Hillary from Onward Search reports that the U.S. government, Department of Labor (DOL) is trying to classify Search Marketers. By classify, the DOL wants to be able to figure out the skills and criteria that make up a search marketer's profile. They are asking search marketers to fill out a "occupational expert questionnaire" at this URL so they can gather enough data to built the proper classification for search marketing professionals. The good news is - Google AdWords Traffic Slowing?
A WebmasterWorld thread has two advertisers claiming that Google AdWords is sending them less traffic then they are accustomed to. Here is one complaint from one AdWords advertiser: I have been running this Adwords account for 4 years and since two months the amount of traffic from this account (2000+ keywords) has been steadily declining. The Quality Score and AVG position remain unchanged. I have been changing the keywords bids here and there but mostly - Bing Winning Hearts of Children In UK?
A WebmasterWorld thread has grassroots reporting from parents in the UK about Bing's market share. It seems like many UK children are really loving Bing, Microsoft's search engine. From the parent's perspective, the kids are coming home and talking about Bing, not Google. They are also telling their parents that Bing is what the home pages are set to on their school computers. Here are some quotes from the thread: My 11 year old was - Google To Fix Soft 404 Reporting in Google Webmaster Tools
Last week, Google added 404-like soft 404s reporting to the Google Webmaster Tools reporting engine. As soon as Webmasters got their hands on this tool, they started to notice issues. Many reported that Google was thinking that their real pages should be 404 (page not found) pages. This was obviously a concern to webmasters. Why would Google consider their real pages to be pages that should return a page not found response. Googler Jonathan Simon - Google News Hasn't Crawled News Sitemaps For 2 Weeks By Accident
All that fuss about upgrading to the new News Sitemap format and now we see Google News has not crawled or indexed any new News Sitemaps files since June 3rd. A Google News Help thread has a single post from Googler, Inbal. Inbal is responding to a lot of questions in the Google News help forum about them indexing the News Sitemap file. Inbal said: We've recently noticed that at least since June 3rd we
Other Great Search Forum Threads:
- Google Earth with browser, Google Blogoscoped Forum
- Blogger of the Week: Warren with his answer to General Keywords? Specific Keywords?, Google AdWords Help
- Google music store could launch this fall, Google Blogoscoped Forum
- Googlebot only crawling my home page now, WebmasterWorld
- Improper display of odd and even pages, Google Books Help
- Removing Date From Serp Descriptions, HighRankings Forums
