Search Engine Roundtable

Daily Search Forum Recap: May 21, 2013

Barry Schwartz — Tue, 21 May 2013 16:00:00 -0400

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 AdWords Launched Keyword Ad Planner
Google announced a new keyword tool named the Keyword Planner. The tool can be found under the Tools & Analysis tab when you are logged into your Google AdWords account. The tool combines the benefits of the Keyword Tool and the Traffic Estimator into an integrated workflow...
6 New Data Types Now Supported By Google's Data Highlighter Rich Snippet Tool
The Google Data Highlighter tool, which initially launched in December with support for just marking up pages that had event data...
Search Google & Get Google Now Reminders
Google Now is now more baked into Google Search. For example, if you do a search for [when is fathers day 2013 or other factual dated queries...
Yahoo Spends $1.1 Billion To Be Cool (Buy Tumblr)
I'm sure you heard the news by now, Yahoo has acquired Tumblr for a cool $1.1 billion in cash. Seriously...
Google On How To Avoid AdWords Ad Disapproval
Google AdWords support representative, Charvi...
Homer & Bart Mooning The Google Street View Car
This is funny, Homer and Bart from the The Simpsons mooning the Google Street View Car crew. Notice, the G is missing, with two large Oos. Too funny.

Other Great Search Forum Threads:

March 15 Update: Who Got Hit for "Paid to Pass PageRank"?, WebmasterWorld
Browser history flooding with new maps preview, Google Maps Help
For those impacted by the devastating tornado in Oklahoma…, Google - Google+
Interested in developing a better understanding of our…, Google AdSense - Google+
Update Or Link Network?, Cre8asite Forums

Google AdWords Launched Keyword Ad Planner

Barry Schwartz — Tue, 21 May 2013 08:43:00 -0400

Google announced a new keyword tool named the Keyword Planner.

The tool can be found under the Tools & Analysis tab when you are logged into your Google AdWords account. The tool combines the benefits of the Keyword Tool and the Traffic Estimator into an integrated workflow. The tool basically lets you find new keyword and ad group ideas, get performance estimates for them to find the bids and budgets, and then add them to your campaigns.

Here are some screen shots:

For more details on how to use this tool, see the help documents.

Forum discussion at Google+.

6 New Data Types Now Supported By Google's Data Highlighter Rich Snippet Tool

Barry Schwartz — Tue, 21 May 2013 08:35:00 -0400

The Google Data Highlighter tool, which initially launched in December with support for just marking up pages that had event data, now has quietly added six more data support types.

+Kenichi Suzuki notified me of this change after spotting the additional data types listed on the data highlighter help page.

Like I said, previous, the data highlighter rich snippet tool only supported event data. Now, Google has added Articles, Local Businesses, Movies, Products, Software Applications and TV Episodes to the list.

To learn more about these data types and how to use them with this tool, see the links below:

TV Episodes

Forum discussion at Google+.

Search Google & Get Google Now Reminders

Barry Schwartz — Tue, 21 May 2013 08:28:00 -0400

Google Now is now more baked into Google Search. For example, if you do a search for [when is fathers day 2013 or other factual dated queries, Google will not just show you the knowledge graph answer but also let you set a reminder via Google Now.

The Google Now reminder shows up directly below the answer box and says "Google Now will reminder you 1 week before." There is also a cancel link.

Here is a screen shot from Stacie Dauffenbach on Google+.

Pretty neat, don't you think?

Forum discussion at Google+.

Yahoo Spends $1.1 Billion To Be Cool (Buy Tumblr)

Barry Schwartz — Tue, 21 May 2013 08:15:00 -0400

I'm sure you heard the news by now, Yahoo has acquired Tumblr for a cool $1.1 billion in cash.

Seriously, everyone is talking about it - just see techmeme.

A WebmasterWorld thread talks about how we want this to make Yahoo cool and relevant. We want $1.1 billion to turn the company around. We do wish the best for Yahoo.

The concern is will Yahoo mess up Tumblr or will Tumblr clean up Yahoo?

What do you think?

Yahoo did some neat stuff with Flickr yesterday - so that is a good sign, I think.

Forum discussion at Webmaster World.

Google On How To Avoid AdWords Ad Disapproval

Barry Schwartz — Tue, 21 May 2013 08:05:00 -0400

Google AdWords support representative, Charvi, said in a Google AdWords Help thread some tips on how to avoid AdWords ad disapprovals.

Google offered four tips and posted two videos with advice on this topic.

Here are the four tips:

Your ad should lead to a website that works for all users regardless of browser, location or device
Your ad can't lead to a website thatâs under construction or an error page
Your landing page's domain must match the domain of your ad's display URL; For e.g., if the website you're advertising uses "example.com," your display URL must also contain "example.com"
Each Ad Group can have only one Display URL Domain

Here are those two videos:

Forum discussion at Google AdWords Help.

Homer & Bart Mooning The Google Street View Car

Barry Schwartz — Tue, 21 May 2013 08:00:00 -0400

Daily Search Forum Recap: May 20, 2013

Barry Schwartz — Mon, 20 May 2013 16:00:00 -0400

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:

Nofollow Your Links? How Long Until Google Notices
A WebmasterWorld thread has one SEO/Webmaster asking how long will it take for Google to show him the fruits of his efforts after nofollowing a bunch of links on his site. He wanted to know how long will it take Google to notice the nofollows and see those results in the Google search results...
Google AdWords Ads Take 24 To 72 Hours To Be Approved
A Google AdWords Help thread has Google's Charvi explaining how long an AdWords ad can take to be approved. Typically...
Google Maps Business Ratings Now Up To Five Stars
Remember when Google took over Zagat and then announced they are dropping the star reviews for businesses...
Google Slaps Sprint For Spammy Community Forum
The next large brand to be penalized by Google is Sprint, the large U.S. wireless provider. A Google Webmaster Help thread has Kent Van Deusen, the Sprint website support representative...
#ifihadglass Winners Soon To Get Invites To Pick Up Glass
It seems as if the second batch of Google Glass Explorers will soon be getting invites to pick up their Google Glass...
Light Saber Google Robots
At any conference there are always a few people who light to cause trouble, and I bet there are even more at Google I/O. To patrol the Google I/O event, Google hired light sabers wilding robots. Or

Other Great Search Forum Threads:

New Google+: Stream, Hangouts, and Photos, Google+ Help
April 1st YouTube Reporting Change, Google AdSense Help
Differences in Estimated versus Finalized YouTube Earnings, Google AdSense Help
Reclaiming your Google Referral Data, Threadwatch.org
Report: Google + Still Failing to Win Brands Over, WebmasterWorld
Payday loans spam and why its going to costs us all, blackhatworld.com
Poll: Would you buy SAPE for client's sites?, blackhatworld.com

Nofollow Your Links? How Long Until Google Notices

Barry Schwartz — Mon, 20 May 2013 09:12:00 -0400

A WebmasterWorld thread has one SEO/Webmaster asking how long will it take for Google to show him the fruits of his efforts after nofollowing a bunch of links on his site.

He wanted to know how long will it take Google to notice the nofollows and see those results in the Google search results. He asked, "How long does it take for Google to notice that we added the nofollow and do we need to tell them somehow?"

For Google to notice the nofollow, all they need to do is crawl the page. For them to take action on the nofollow, by not counting that link, well, I am unsure how long it will take. Is it based on the recency of the crawl? Based on Google updating internal scores? Based on that signal going into a special index? Based on different algorithms, like Penguin, to rerun? Again, I am unsure.

What do you think?

Please take the poll and have your friends take the poll.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google AdWords Ads Take 24 To 72 Hours To Be Approved

Barry Schwartz — Mon, 20 May 2013 09:02:00 -0400

A Google AdWords Help thread has Google's Charvi explaining how long an AdWords ad can take to be approved.

Typically, new or modified ads are approved within 24 hours but it can take as long as 3 days.

The Google representative said:

All new ads are submitted to us for review. We reviewed these as quickly as we can - usually within 3 business days and most often within 24 hours! If your ad complies with our policies and guidelines, it should be approved automatically. Sometimes, we need a human to confirm that your ad can be served.

In addition, edits to ads may require approval, even small edits. Google says edits to ads will be "treated like a completely new ad." And when you edit an ad, all the statistics for that ad are reset to 0.

The tip offered?

To avoid any down-time in which your ad isn't running, create a new ad with the changes you need and pause the old one once the new one is approved!

Forum discussion at Google AdWords Help.

Google Maps Business Ratings Now Up To Five Stars

Barry Schwartz — Mon, 20 May 2013 08:43:00 -0400

Remember when Google took over Zagat and then announced they are dropping the star reviews for businesses? Well, Google announced on Google Business Help that the five star system is coming back to the new Google Maps interface.

Jade Wang, a Google Maps representative, said "today, with the launch of the new Google Maps, we announced a change to the way people rate businesses on Google on the Google and Your Business blog."

Google uses a 30 point scale for rating businesses but now instead of using the text representation of it, they will be using stars. Here is how it is converted.

Forum discussion at Google Business Help.

Google Slaps Sprint For Spammy Community Forum

Barry Schwartz — Mon, 20 May 2013 08:30:00 -0400

The next large brand to be penalized by Google is Sprint, the large U.S. wireless provider.

A Google Webmaster Help thread has Kent Van Deusen, the Sprint website support representative, asking where is this "user-generated spam" on Sprint.com?

Before you get all excited that Sprint.com is penalized and banned from Google, stop. They are not.

This is exactly like Mozilla's penalty and the BBC penalty. All three of these sites had/have very granular penalties, in the Mozilla and BBC case, only one specific page was penalized out of all their millions and billions of pages.

With Sprint's web site, it is likely the community discussion forum that was hit and probably only very specific forum threads.

Google has not responded to Sprint about this penalty and I am not sure if they will.

Clearly this continues to show how scary and misdirected some of these Google Webmaster Tools notifications can be. That being said, Google does say they will improve them this year. So hang tight on that.

What should Sprint do? They should probably nofollow any links that were generated by non-official reps. Or hire an SEO company to dig into the details here.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Update: Google's Matt Cutts did reply in the forum thread saying:

Hi Kent, when you see a message like this, it's a good idea to check around for various forums, bulletin boards, and community areas where users can leave comments. We typically send this message when we see a lot of spam in those areas. Rather than Google removing those pages from our index, it's usually better if you can remove the pages on your side so that they don't show up in other search engines either.
I just took a quick look; try doing a Google search like [site:community.sprint.com/baw/message/ watch] to see some examples where spammers are posting a bunch of messages. I noticed that older pages with this sort of spam are mostly gone or removed--which is great. You might just look into some ways to try to catch the spam a little faster or see if there are some ways to make it a bit harder for the spammers to post a large amount of messages on the community pages.
Hope that helps, Matt

#ifihadglass Winners Soon To Get Invites To Pick Up Glass

Barry Schwartz — Mon, 20 May 2013 08:13:00 -0400

It seems as if the second batch of Google Glass Explorers will soon be getting invites to pick up their Google Glass.

TechCrunch reports that all of the Google I/O 2012 attendees who signed up last year were offered to purchase Google Glass by either picking them up at Google or having them shipped to them. Google's Steve Lee said the 8,000 #ifihadglass will "getting theirs soon," by "theirs" he means invitation to pick up Google Glass.

Jesse Stay on Google+ was one of those I/O sign ups and he was upset that some #ifihadglass winners ended up receiving their Google Glass before the I/O 2012 folks. Truth is, some did but only a select few.

Google's Sarah Price (who recently had a birthday, happy birthday) explained that some had special partnership agreements with Google. She wrote:

Hi Jesse Stay we're working really hard to get invitations out to all the people who signed up at I/O last year and we haven't started on invitations for #ifihadglass - although there are a very small number of people who have gotten Glass for partnership reasons, like Andrew. I know it's frustrating to wait. Thanks for hanging in there so far.

Jesse ended up getting his invite on May 14th or so. So he has his Google Glass.

Folks like myself, who are part of #ifihadglass still anxiously await.

Forum discussion Google+.

Light Saber Google Robots

Barry Schwartz — Mon, 20 May 2013 08:00:00 -0400

Daily Search Forum Recap: May 17, 2013

Barry Schwartz — Fri, 17 May 2013 16:00:00 -0400

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 :: May 17, 2013
Very busy week at Google, mostly because of I/O but a lot of other things going on - it didn't help that I was offline for two days. We first discuss the ten changes coming to Google related to SEO, including softening Panda...
Your Rankings Drop Around May 15th? May Be Due To Link Networks Google Busted
On May 15th, Google's head of search spam, announced on Twitter that Google has taken "action on several thousand linksellers in a paid-link that passes PageRank network." Google has done this time and time again...
Google Maps Will Allow You To Move Reviews To A Different Listing
Jane Wang from Google announced in the Google Business Help forums that you can now make a request for Google to move your businesses reviews from one listing to another...
Google Drops The "Translated Foreign Pages" Search Filter
Google has dropped yet another search filter option from the search results. This one is named "Translated Foreign Pages...
Google Adds Organization Schema Markup For Knowledge Graph Logos
Google has announced they've added support for the schema.org markup for organization logos within the search results, specifically not the search snippets but within the knowledge graph...
Gaining Access To The New Google Maps
As we expected, Google introduced the new Google Maps interface and features at Google I/O. The new maps are no longer a "static map" but now the maps are "immersively interactive" said...
Google+ Blimps
Many of us are missing out of the excitement of being at Google I/O but we can always live through the eyes (or Google Glass) of others. Melissa Daniels from Google posted on Google+ pictures of Goog

Other Great Search Forum Threads:

A common mistake people make is that they NoIndex a page,â¦, Eric Enge - Google+
Bing uncloaks Klingon translator, WebmasterWorld
Food Recipe SERPs and Thumbnail Photos, WebmasterWorld
German Court Rules Google Must Remove Autocomplete Entries If Defamatory, WebmasterWorld
YouTube Live Access Expanded!, YouTube Help
EMD - Case Study, blackhatworld.com