Search Banter

Have you ever been to Google maps and seen street names listed incorrectly or not at all? Have you ever typed in a business name or place and Google Maps pointed you to the wrong place? I definitely have, but I never took the time to find out if there was a way I could tell Google about the error. Well, now I know and for all of you out there who would help Google fix these errors if you only knew how, here you go:

NavTeq Error Reporting

TeleAtlas Error Reporting

These are the map systems that Google uses for their maps. If you report the error here, the next time Google updates their maps, your adjustment will be updated.

If you find other errors, questions, or suggestions for Google maps you can tell them directly here: Google Maps Contact Form.

Everyone needs a quick laugh in their day. Go to the Hello Mom blog for all the mixed-up craziness posted there.

Search US Vital records - birth, marriage, death to find your ancestors.

MSN has a labs website with a bunch of demos and prototypes of tools that can be very insightful and just plain fun to play around with. I know they have had this for a while now, but I have never really looked at any of these tools before, until recently.

One of the tools I have really enjoyed playing around with is the Keyword Forcast which forecasts the impression count and demographic predictions of keywords. Here’s one of the searches I did on SEO to see what the “forecast” is on this industry:

Judging by the forecast, it doesn’t look like I’ll need to be looking for another job anytime soon (at least within the next month of so )

There have been a few spottings of Google Adwords ads with italicized titles in the last little while. Google must be beta testing this feature because it definitely isn’t in any of my adwords accounts. Italicized titles doesn’t seem like too bad of an idea. I wonder if italicizing your ad titles will be an option or if there is some type of algorithm that decides for you. I’m guessing it’s the former. This isn’t groundbreaking news, but its always nice to see new innovations that make online marketing even more effective and targeted.

A common quesiton I receive from prospective clients is, “Can I get too many links to my site?” or “Will the search engines penalize me if I get too many links too quickly?”

The answer to the first of these questions is no. You can’t have too many links to your site. The more links you have the better, and the better the links the better off you are. I have heard that you can get penalized by being linked to from bad link farms (here the only purpose of the websites are link building), but I highly doubt that you could be penalized too harshly for such an act because otherwise competitors could get links in these bad link farms for their competition and have them penalized (sounds like a good idea eh? well, don’t do it).

The answer to the second question is yes. You can get too many links too quickly and be penalized for it in all of the major search engines. The real question here then is how many links can you get within a certain period of time without being penalized? I don’t beleive the answer to that question will ever be known because of the potential problems that could cause. I’m also guessing that it wouldn’t be the same amount for every site on the web because there are plenty of major sites that get thousands of links a day and other smaller sites that get zero to a few a month.

My recommendation would be to make it a continual process so that you never have a huge surge of links to your site, but instead feels like natural growth.

So…I made it. My first goal has been accomplished. I’m now showing up for “Utah SEO” in MSN in the first position. My site has officially been up for 44 days now and I have a #1 position for my top keyword. Granted it’s only showing up well in MSN right now, but the general trend seems to be MSN, then Yahoo, and then Google. Yes, I probably do sound a bit prideful about showing up so quickly, and yes, I am a little proud of myself, but again, the MAIN purpose of this post is to show all of you out there that it’s not extremely difficult to show up for the keywords you want to show up for if you follow the simple guidelines of SEO. Granted, “Utah SEO” isn’t searched on as much as “SEO” or “Real Estate” or some other very popular terms, but it reaches a targeted audience and it’s a great beginning for a bigger end goal.

Aaron Wall wrote an interesting post today to anyone that posts or writes anything that will be visible on the internet. He recommends sticking your neck out there and putting your name (or a fake one if you don’t want to stick your neck out there too far) on everything you write. The two main benefits he gives to using a name when you write are these:

1. People will be more confident in quoting you. 

2. Using a name adds credibility and personalization in a world of too much anonymity.

I agree completely with Aaron on this point and so in an effort to make Search Banter a little more personal, I have posted my name next to every post in my blog. Another reason I did this is because I want to see if I will start showing up for my name - just for fun. 

Google announced Friday that all Adwords accounts now have the ability to pause individual keywords. This is something I have been waiting for for quite a long time. I will create a huge Adwords campaign after extensive research and then when I go through to optimize the campaign, I either have to lower individual keyword bids or delete the keyword entirely. I have been frustrated countless times at this because there are keywords that, although they may not be working currently, will work at a later time because of the time of year, or something similar.

The same thing goes for Ads in Adwords. Now you can create season-specific ads such as ads for christmas, new years, etc., or ads that are time specific such as hot deals, discounts, and coupons and not have to recreate the same ads the next time you would like to use them. You will also be able to retain the data from that ad inside your account.

This may seem unfair to many people and quite obvious to others, but if, for whatever reason, your site is down when Google comes around to index your site, your site will get deindexed because of it (or at least your rankings will drop significantly). The reasoning for this is fairly obvious: Google’s job is to give people the most relevant results to their searches and if the number one ranked site is down, it would seem they failed on giving relevant results.

You don’t need to worry too much about this though unless you find your site down quite frequently. If, on rare occasion, your site experiences a few seconds/minutes of downtime, the liklihood of the search engine indexing your site at that precise moment is very small, and Vanessa Fox from Google says “Googlebot will try a few times before the pages drop from the index. As for how long it takes for a page to get back in once the site is back up, that really depends on a number of factors, such as how often the site is crawled in general.”

Do I need to request reinclusion if this happens to me?

No. Reinclusion is only for sites that have been deindexed for not following regulations or guidelines. You just have to wait for a bot to come by and index your site again.

Bottom line: If you find your site is constantly down, get new hosting.

I just ran a small ranking report on my site for some of the keywords I am attempting to show up for and have some good news:

Although these key phrases aren’t the most searched on terms, I am getting traffic from each of these phrases. I also just wanted to be able to show you that it is fairly simple to get a site to show up in the search engines if you practice the right form of search engine marketing. Again, you have to remember that this site has only been up for a month and a few days. It was a brand new domain name with 0 backlinks and 0 indexed pages. It now has 71 pages indexed in Google and 387 backlinks indexed in Yahoo. I haven’t done any linking myself yet either.

Anyway, this isn’t anything to show off about. I just wanted people to see how simple it is to show up in the search engines when you optimize your site.

Google just launched a new feature in Adwords for site targeted ads. Now you will be able to pay on a cost per click basis just like anywhere else on Google except you will be able to specify the sites you want your ads to show up on. Previous to this beta release, you had to pay per thousand impressions on targeted websites.

Personally I think this is a great move toward more accurate target marketing. You will be able to choose the exact sites you want your ads shown on and you only have to pay per click now.

Again, this change is in beta right now and Google is asking for signups for the beta testing and then in the next week or so, they are going to invite a few people to test it out.