The Search Engine Blog

Archive for December, 2007

Google is now the proud owner of DoubleClick. How would you like to buy yourself a $3.1 billion Christmas gift? DoubleClick is best known for serving up all those ads that are in your face on so many sites. Not much on the forums for comments. I guess everyone expected it to be approved.

Federal Trade Commission Closes Google/DoubleClick Investigation

Microsoft very quickly responded and fixed the issue of PPC ads from Google showing in their search results. Kudos to MS for this quick fix. It seems Google changed the way they display ads and MS was sleeping and didn’t catch it.

Live Search Webmaster Center Blog : Listing Google Ads In Live Search (D’oh!)

The Google supplemental index is dead? It appears so. The four years of supplemental index has officially ended. The supplemental index is where Google put pages that would be less likely to needed in a search. This could occur for many reasons including obscure topic, old information in need up updating or just poor content. It made sense as supplemental results did still appear should a search not return enough results from the primary index. It also should have made things faster for Google.
Now that the supplemental index is officially over, does it mean that Google will treat these pages any differently. Will it now spider that content more regularly instead of rarely as it did in the past? I would bet that Google has something similar in place that it isn’t discussing and is cleverly hiding. The supplemental index just made sense when dealing with such a large volume of data. The ones that hated it where the ones trapped there. Gee….stop your complaining and fix the site?

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: The Ultimate Fate of Supplemental Results

Google does have nofollow on their ads, yet Microsoft indexes them anyway. This has got to mess up CTR and I wonder how Google is handling it?

Raven SEO Tools: Live Search Is Returning Google AdWords Ads In Their Natural Search Results

Get your barebones Google profile! While it isn’t a Facebook killer yet, Google has made no secret that it intends to rule the Internet. One Google to rule them all….. Like Microsoft, it appears that they are out to do what everyone else is doing, only do it better. Will they do social networking better?

About the Google Profile

Google claims to be encouraging people to contribute their knowledge. Coming late to the game of having an online knowledge center (can we say Wikipedia?), Google is finally offering a limited release of Knol (or is it Knols). You can post articles containing tidbits of your wisdom, let Google post ads on them and let them earn the revenue. Gee, sign me up.
The only benefit I can see is if Google ranks this content artificially above the existing content. Why would anyone want to publish their content on Google’s servers, give them complete rights to use it for their profit, and the author receive nothing but bragging rights in return. What is Google up to? Time will tell. In the meantime, will you be donating your content to a multi-million dollar corporation? Will you work for free for Google?

Official Google Blog: Encouraging people to contribute knowledge

Google is now making it easier to view which ads will display on your pages displaying their ads. This feature is being rolled out slowly so don’t panic if you don’t see it yet. Basically you get to preview which ads are currently displaying on your site. If you want to ban them, you can do so and provide a comment to the advertiser as to why you are banning them. This could help them improve their ad campaign. (I have one site where the reasons will be “crappy, misleading and worthless product”. The only way to improve that will be to find a new career.)

Inside AdSense: Introducing the Ad Review Center

A new tool on Google’s Webmaster Central gives a search engine’s view of your site’s pages. Of course there are a lot of issues with any site that aren’t worth the time to fix, but this tool may help you pinpoint some issues you weren’t aware of. It’s a terrific tool that so far isn’t getting the press it deserves. This is definitely worth a look see.

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: New: Content analysis and Sitemap details, plus more languages

Yes, it was very irritating. For a month now Google has been telling us that our phrases weren’t appearing in results. Now the error seems to be repaired. Full discussion for the past month can be found on this forum.

Sudden change in keyword analysis in campaign? Are there any issues?

When you search for sites, your query, IP address and other information is stored by the search engine. Ask.com is now giving you a way to not have that information stored. While it won’t erase past data, it won’t store any data while you have the eraser on. The name may be a bit misleading but technically it is accurate. The information is temporarily stored in order to deliver your information.
This comes in handy when you need to do searches outside of your normal routine. You don’t want that information clogging up your preferences or saved history. Keep in mind that if you want that customized experience, you’ll need to shut it off.

Ask.com Launches AskEraser Giving Searches Ability To Search Anonymously