The Search Engine Blog

Archive for June, 2008

If you try to go to the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool, you won’t get it. Instead you get a permanent redirect to Advertising Your Business with Yahoo! Search Marketing. It wasn’t without warning. The tool has been off and on again for some time.

Some cool apps for Google are coming. Google has finally released an API for Google Webmaster Tools. This has been long awaited and we look forward to how people use this to everyone’s advantage. The tools are limited at the moment, but we look forward to Google expanding the API.

Developer’s Guide – Google Webmaster Tools API – Google Code

Yes, if your robots.txt file is unreachable, you may not be in Google. I have seen it happen and here’s a discussion on Google Groups about that very topic. Make certain you have a robots.txt file and that it’s reachable by the outside world.

Site Disappeared from Google & Reconsideration.Request – Crawling, indexing, and ranking | Google Groups

Searchviews has an article that reinforces warning signs from SEO hustlers. While the weekly meetings recommendation is overkill for small and even most medium size customers, the warning signs portion of the article is good old news worth repeating.

In general, if they offer guarantees, run. Silly to be in a business where the only guarantee you can offer is that you’ll do everything realistic to help a business, but this is marketing.

SEO: Would You Buy Optimization From This Man? How Not to Get Hustled by SEO Slicksters | Searchviews – Daily insights on Search Marketing, Social Media and SEO by Reprise Media.

Occasionally Google emails me a message stating that certain customer accounts need attention. I appreciate being kept informed of changes that I should make to customers for whom I manage PPC campaigns for, but I’ve always been suspicious of the ones that want me to increase the daily budget. Here’s one that really got my attention.

This campaign met its daily budget of USD $15.00 on 14 of the last 15
days. Increasing the budget to USD $13.09 would allow the ads to show
more often and get approximately 31% more clicks per month.

Of course it’s hard to increase a budget when the increase is lower than the current amount. If you receive messages like this for your PPC campaigns, do your homework. Don’t just increase your spend. Examine your bids and phrases. See how your ads are performing. Make the dogs inactive and experiment a bit before parting with hard earned cash. Obviously their formula is flawed so use some common sense.

Finally some documentation from Google including an improved definition of doorway pages, a guide to robots.txt files, and an explanation of the infamous nofollow tag. Good reading. It’s about time someone pulled out their thumb.

Improved SEO documentation galore!

Ok, it’s not technically search related, but it’s a nice deviation from work. Go to Disney without leaving your desk.

Official Google Blog: Explore Walt Disney World^® Resort in 3D

YouTube adds video annotations so you can add speech bubbles to your video. If you aren’t doing videos to help market your site, you could be missing out on a large potential audience. Now with the ability to annotate your video, you can add that comic book flair to your presentation.

YouTube – Broadcast Yourself.

Google did testing on you. They shared the results here telling us what we should already know. We are too impatient. We want it now. Give us faster page loads even if it means less information. Make things easier to find even though it means the information is now split among many pages rather than all at once. Give us white space and soft yellows. Read on to learn how white space is your friend…..provided you follow it up with a copyright notice.

We’re all guinea pigs in Google’s search experiment | Tech news blog – CNET News.com