This is a strategy some link builders use when it might be easier to get a webmaster to link to a 3rd party site versus directly linking to your site. The pros are that it might be easier, you can use your link power to other sites and not just yours, you will benefit from the link building, plus it isn’t a direct link so if Google catches it, it might not directly hurt you.

The cons are that the link building you do to a page you don’t own can back fire. Competitors can get links on those pages, the webmaster can eventually drop the link or the page completely, or Google can figure out the pattern and penalize you.

Finally, focusing on your own site is easier than focusing on all the 3rd party sites linking to you. PlanetSEO at WebmasterWorld said if you are going to go about it this way, then “look for a page / site that has great content, links to you naturally, and where it looks like the webmaster of that site has never heard the term SEO.”

Source:-http://www.seroundtable.com/

The image to the right show off the new all blue Google Favicon. You can see it at google.com/images
/google_favicon_128.png as well, to prove this is something Google is hosting.

It looks the same structurally as the colored one most of us see today – but this is one is all blue. Here is an enlarged colored favicon:

That launched in January 2009, between May 2008 – January 2009 we had the blue lowercase G, and from who knows when till May 2008 we had the classic G with colored box. Here is the history of those icons in the URL bar.

I am not sure if Google will go all blue soon or if this is for a specific Google property only.

Forum discussion at Google Blogoscoped Forums.

Source:-http://www.seroundtable.com/

Bing now will show you the full article and content from some partner third-party sites directly on Bing. Bing adds a link to “Read the full article by Mayo Clinic” and links to a Bing Health web page, which is content licensed and paid for by Bing.

Here is a screen shot of the Bing Search Results:

Here is a screen shot of the landing page on Bing Health:

A WebmasterWorld thread has BingDude, an official Microsoft Bing representative explaining the rational for this:

Source:-http://www.seroundtable.com/

John said not only should it not happen, he has never seen it happen. He said:

To be clear, I have never seen a case where bad links pointing to URLs that return 404 have ever caused a website any noticeable problem in web-search. 404s are a part of the internet, they’re expected to be seen when a non-existent URL is crawled, there’s no reason that I can think of where it would make sense to count 404s against a site.

This is an important point, if you have a super heavy robots.txt file, and it is beyond 500KB, then
GoogleBot can get confused. If GoogleBot gets confused with your robots.txt it can cause serious issues with your site’s health in the Google results.

Google’s John Mueller said:

102 of the things to keep in mind when working on a big website: If you have a giant robots.txt file, remember that Googlebot will only read the first 500kb. If your robots.txt is longer, it can result in a line being truncated in an unwanted way. The simple solution is to limit your robots.txt files to a reasonable size .

Source:-http://www.seroundtable.com/

There are several threads where webmasters claim GoogleBot didn’t crawl their sites at all yesterday. Google said they “slowed” the crawling behavior of GoogleBot but I guess in some cases, they stopped crawling for some sites completely. You have to assume they continued to crawl news sites?

A Google Webmaster Help thread and WebmasterWorld thread have webmasters and SEOs claiming they saw zero GoogleBot activity on their sites at all.

One webmaster said:
For some reason, googlebot is not accessing my site since 3 hours ago. Normally, I get thousands of googlebot visits per hour (and that ok for me), but since las 3 hours I’m not getting any googlebot visit.

Another said
Well Googlebot seems to have all but disappeared on my main site. It may be on all sites then?

In response, Google’s Pierre Far explained again:
We realize many webmasters are concerned about the medium-term effects of today’s blackout. As a precaution, the crawl team at Google has configured Googlebot to crawl at a much lower rate for today only so that the Google results of websites participating in the blackout are less likely to be affected.

In any event, things should be back to normal today.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help and WebmasterWorld.

Source:-http://www.seroundtable.com/

The most shared article of the year wasn’t really an article at all, but a series of sliding before-and-after satellite pictures of the devastation caused by the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, posted by CNN.com. Ten of the top 40 most shared articles were from CNN, second only to Yahoo, with 12.

The Complete List of Facebook’s Most Shared Articles of 2011

1. Satellite Photos of Japan, Before and After the Quake and Tsunami (New York Times)
2. What teachers really want to tell parents (CNN)
3. No, your zodiac sign hasn’t changed (CNN)
4. Parents, don’t dress your girls like tramps (CNN)
5. (video) – Father Daughter Dance Medley (Yahoo)
6. At funeral, dog mourns the death of Navy SEAL killed in Afghanistan (Yahoo)
7. You’ll freak when you see the new Facebook (CNN)
8. Dog in Japan stays by the side of ailing friend in the rubble (Yahoo)
9. Giant crocodile captured alive in Philippines (Yahoo)
10. New Zodiac Sign Dates: Ophiuchus The 13th Sign? (The Huffington Post)
11. Parents keep child’s gender under wraps (Yahoo)
12. How to Talk to Little Girls (The Huffington Post)
13. Stop Coddling the Super-Rich (New York Times)
14. Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior (Wall Street Journal)
15. (video) – Twin Baby Boys Have A Conversation! (Yahoo)
16. Man robs bank to get medical care in jail (Yahoo)
17. Why You’re Not Married (The Huffington Post)
18. A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs (New York Times)
19. Ryan Dunn Dead: ‘Jackass’ Star Dies In Car Crash (The Huffington Post)
20. Scientists warn California could be struck by winter ‘superstorm’ (Yahoo)
21. Notes From a Dragon Mom (New York Times)
22. A Message to Women From a Man: You Are Not “Crazy” (The Huffington Post)
23. Obama’s and Bush’s effects on the deficit in one graph (Washington Post)
24. Penn State, my final loss of faith (Washington Post)
25. Golden-Voiced Homeless Man Captivates Internet (Yahoo)
26. The most typical face on the planet (Yahoo)
27. Widespread destruction from Japan earthquake, tsunamis (CNN)
28. Permissive parents: Curb your brats (CNN)
29. A father’s day wish: Dads, wake the hell up! (CNN)
30. (video) – Laughing Baby Loves Ripping Paper! (Yahoo)
31. Epic Cover Letter: How To Get Hired For Your Dream Job (PICTURE) (The Huffington Post)
32. New Zodiac sign dates: Don’t switch horoscopes yet (Washington Post)
33. Things Babies Born in 2011 Will Never Know (Yahoo: Money Talk News)
34. The Psychology of Revenge: Why We Should Stop Celebrating Osama Bin Laden’s Death (The Huffington Post)
35. (photo gallery) – ‘Where Children Sleep’ (New York Times)
36. Quake moved Japan coast 8 feet, shifted Earth’s axis (CNN)
37. Steve Jobs, Apple founder, dies (CNN)
38. China’s latest craze: dyeing pets to look like other wild animals (CNN)
39. Grant Hill’s Response to Jalen Rose (New York Times)
40. Steve Jobs’s Patents (New York Times)

Social News

Facebook has been working on expanding sharing and, with the implementation of Open Graph and their “new class” of apps, making Facebook the place users go to curate everything in their lives: what they are cooking, watching, listening to, or is this case, reading.

Yahoo News and The Washington Post were among the first five publications involved in Open Graph social news apps in beta, as announced at the f8 developer conference. The Huffington Post and Wall Street Journal have since joined their ranks, while CNN.com and NYTimes.com have opted out… for now.

In September, former NYTimes.com developer Michael Donohoe explained why, at least in part, the New York Times decided to forgo frictionless sharing via a social reader app. From his blog:

The Washington Post has an Editor’s Note. Its says many things including: “All you have to do is read, just as you normally do. No “recommending,” “liking” or “sharing” — just read and we’ll do the rest of the work. The app gets better the more friends you have using it.”

Thats a very nice spin on it.

Earlier this year when I was still at the Times we talked to Facebook about a news app. Facebook had a whole set of new features in the pipeline (presumably just launched) and this passive reading action was one of them and they were looking for us to use it. It came up in conference calls and on-site meetings. I believe Facebook is very eager to catch-up or even displace Twitter as a go-to place for news, and this is how they think they can do that.

To their credit the newsroom shelved the idea. The consensus was that this was intrusive and potentially an invasion of privacy. I think after that was repeatedly communicated that Facebook lost interest in doing anything at all.

Are you using social reader apps on Facebook to share news articles, or to keep up with the interests of friends? Let us know about your experience in the comments!

“Earlier [in November], Twitter began testing self-service advertising with a handful of existing advertisers,” a spokesperson for the San Francisco-based Internet firm wrote in an e-mailed statement. “These advertisers can now set up and run their own Promoted Products campaigns and pay via a credit card, without working with our in-house staff…As with all of our advertising efforts, we’re starting small, testing carefully and making improvements on [it] as we learn what works. We will slowly roll this capability out to more advertisers in the coming weeks and months.”

Since Twitter launched Promoted Tweets in April 2010, marketers wanting to buy the ad units – or Promoted Trends or Promoted Accounts – have had to fill out an online form and wait for the site’s sales team to contact them. A self-service platform – first mentioned by Costolo in September 2010 – would seem to be a boon to both marketers and Twitter itself.

Research firm eMarketer predicts Twitter’s ad revenue will hit nearly $140 million in 2011, which is up from $45 million last year. The New York researcher forecasts that Twitter ads sales will reach $400 million in 2013.

Sources

So instead of navigating to the other Google services at the top bar, you mouse over the Google logo and click on the drop down menu. Here is a bigger look at that, with the “more” section expanded.

Source: seroundtable.com/google-new-bar-14389.html

]]> http://webtosearch.wordpress.com/2011/12/01/goodbye-black-google-bar-welcome-google-drop-down-menu/feed/ 0 new-google-bar webtosearch new-google-bar http://webtosearch.wordpress.com/2011/11/09/google-gets-fresh-with-algorithm-update-affecting-35-of-searches/ http://webtosearch.wordpress.com/2011/11/09/google-gets-fresh-with-algorithm-update-affecting-35-of-searches/#comments Wed, 09 Nov 2011 05:16:45 +0000 webtosearch http://webtosearch.wordpress.com/?p=108 Continue reading →]]> A new Google algorithm update designed to pick and choose which queries demand fresher results impacts about 35 percent of searches. Where their Caffeine architecture allows Google to quickly crawl the mass and complex contents of the Web, this latest update is meant to select which queries require the most recent results.

In a post on the Official Google Blog, Amit Singhal lists recent events, hot topics, recurring events, or topics with frequently updated information as the types of searches that will benefit from the freshness update. Queries on sports teams, for example, should bring back results on the latest scores, whereas recipes understandably have a longer shelf life in search.

Here’s what a search for [groupon ipo] returned as of the time of this writing. Note that the oldest item is a day old:

Users looking for older information on topics Google may mark as requiring fresher results, like the Olympic games or annual conferences, can still set a custom date range to bring back results from previous years.

“Different searches have different freshness needs,” Singhal wrote. “This algorithmic improvement is designed to better understand how to differentiate between these kinds of searches and the level of freshness you need, and make sure you get the most up to the minute answers.”

This may initially add a bit of fuel to the fire in the debate surrounding how often websites should be updated and whether Google penalizes those that don’t update on a regular basis. Many webmasters/publishers struggle to create new, engaging contenton a regular basis. Remember, though, that quality, evergreen content can hold its value for years; keep the topic and immediacy of searches in mind when creating new content.

A brewing equipment manufacturer, for example, probably doesn’t need to run out and generate new content as often as a camera retailer. The industry is slower to evolve; people searching for information on cameras most likely want to learn about the latest models in a rapidly changing niche.

Bing has also been working on Tiger, their improved back-end infrastructure, expected to be completed by the end of the year. Their plans include a cloud storage and computational engine called Cosmos that uses a high-level language called SCOPE. A job posting from October explained a bit about Bing’s mission with Tiger:

“We are chartered with complicated problems such as finding, crawling, processing and serving any interesting and emerging web page in a matter of seconds; It doesn’t matter if it’s a new New-York times article, an posting to Facebook or an update to someone’s personal blog, we want that page in the index the moment it’s available.”

It sounds like Google’s plan to differentiate between searches requiring immediacy and those with less urgency may keep them one step ahead of Bing once again. What do you think of Google’s latest update?

Source:-http://searchenginewatch.com