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:
- Why Google May Not Find Your Sitemap File
I'll be honest, I am pretty technical, but I simply do not fully understand the issue here. Franz Enzenhofer posted a thread at Google Webmaster Help claiming Google cannot access his XML Sitemap no matter what he does. After much debugging and testing, he wrote a blog post explaining why he and maybe your servers won't serve up your XML sitemap file to Google. He wasn't able to see a GET request by Google, so - Don't Use Pipes In Your URLS | Says Google
A Google Webmaster Help thread has one webmaster asking if it is a bad idea to use pipes in the URL. A pipe is this: |. They asked if it is a bad idea to use it in your URL, such as www.seroundtable.com/my|awesome|page.html. He said when he plugged in a URL with a pipe in it using the Google Keyword Tool, Google return an "invalid website" error response. Google's JohnMu said he doesn't recommend you - Google Improves Parameter Handling For Faceted Navigation Control
About a week ago, we reported on the new percentage change reporting in the Google Webmaster Tools query report. As a side note to that, I mentioned the parameter handeling feature was moved to a new section. I did not notice that new features were added to the parameter handeling tool. Google wrote about the changes and explained what is new for parameter handling. Google is basically giving us more control over SEO issues with - Google Logos: Canadian Thanksgiving, Turkey's Cahit Arf & Korea Hangul Day
I don't cover all the Google Logos they release, so I'd recommend you subscribe to the Google Logos page if you don't want to miss any. That page is normally a few days behind what they do, but either way, it documents all of the special logos. Over the weekend and today there are some nice logos I wanted to share. Our Canadian readers are celebrating their Thanksgiving day and Google Canada has a special - Many GOOG-411 Users Feel Disconnected
On Friday, Google announced they are discontinuing the 1-800-GOOG-411 service as of November 12, 2010. Many of the loyal GOOG-411 users are feeling very upset about the decision. Google is hoping their users switch to the newer services on the smart phones, such as Android and iPhone. In addition, you can still use the SMS search service by Google. As Gary Price mentions, Bing still has a 800 number service for voice searching. It is - I Can't Wait For Auto-Driving Cars, Thanks Google
Google announced they have been working on auto-driving cars for a while now and they hope this technology becomes available to real cars on the road in the future. The news was all over the Internet yesterday about this announcement. The most detailed and revealing article was at the NY Times piece which had a digram and video. Here they are: Personally, I would love to have one of these cars. Not for the safety
Other Great Search Forum Threads:
- How is Google Indexing More Search Results?, Sphinn
- Google Suddenly Ignores My Noodp Meta Tag, HighRankings Forums
- Canonical Issue from Joomla's <base> Tag, WebmasterWorld
- Ex FTC Employee Files Complaint Over Google Privacy, WebmasterWorld
- Google Labs: Intersection Explorer and Walky Talky, Google Blogoscoped Forum
- Middle of the title tag gets a bigger boost than the beginning?, WebmasterWorld
- Political Organizations Manipulating SERPs - can Google combat that?, WebmasterWorld
- Another different SERPs layout, WebmasterWorld
- Customer success stories with AdWords from around the world, Google AdWords Help
- (Almost) Automatically Reveal A Site’s Directory Structure Using Excel, Sphinn
- Obscured Google Camera, Google Maps Help
