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:
- Yahoo Search 404 Handling Poor Again?
A WebmasterWorld thread has several webmasters complaining about how Yahoo Search handles 404s. There is a really good analysis by Frank Rizzo, a senior member from 2002 at WebmasterWorld, who shows how Yahoo is doing three weird things on his site, in regards to 404s. He said Yahoo is showing: Genuine 404s from pages which were deleted a while ago.404s from what seems to be badly configured software404s from what seems to be attempts at - Google Says Soft 404s Don't Result In Penalty, But Do They Hurt?
Last week, I wrote how Google was fixing the issues with the new soft 404 errors showing now in Google Webmaster Tools. I also went off a bit on a rant about how this is a big concern for me. I wrote: Honestly, this really concerns me. Google clearly was using soft-404s behind the scenes for a long time. Providing this data to webmasters resulted in many claiming Google was soft-404ing pages that should not - Article Too Long Errors On Google News? Get Special Consideration
A year ago, Google News started showing errors in Google Webmaster Tools named article too long. For these errors, Google would not include your article in Google News because it was too long. Sounds a bit crazy, but I guess there is some logic to it. Articles that are too long may not be articles at all, they may be privacy policies and so on. It may be hard for Google to determine what is - Hitwise: Google Search Share Grew, Back at 72%
Hitwise released the May 2010 Search Market Share report claiming Google's search share grew 1% from April, bringing them back up to 72% of share on search queries. Here are the charts: By Industry: By Query Length: As Matt notes, take it with a grain of salt. Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld. - Google Bug Prevents Clicking On Second Search Results
There seems to be a weird bug with Google's search results, which highly discourages people from clicking on the second search result. Typically, a searcher will search for search for something, go to the first result and if unhappy with that result, they will click the back button. After they click the back button, they may try to click on the second search result. In this case, Google is making it a bit hard for
Other Great Search Forum Threads:
- 2010 Sphinn Member Survey: Now Open, Sphinn
- A Turning Point In The Field Of SEO, Sphinn
- British RIAA Asks Google to Pull Search Listings of Pirate Sites, WebmasterWorld
- link: operator in google alerts - not working?, WebmasterWorld
- Doodle Konrad Zuse, Google Blogoscoped Forum
- Not synced since iOS4 update, Google Mobile Help
- What forums does everyone participate in?, Google Webmaster Help
