SEO Werkt!

This week, Google pushed out the knowledge graph worldwide, adding a carousel feature in instant knowledge to the search box. Your Gmail emails can now show up in your search results, if you want. I showed an example of why you really can’t let Google handle canonical issues. Google gave advice on how to do A/B testing and not mess up your rankings. Google also gave advice on how to handle multilingual web sites. Google is testing a smartphone optimized icon in the search results. Google AdWords may have their own internal campaign building tool.s Google Translate added a nifty feature taken from Google Goggles. Google AdSense is discontinuing paying by check for many publishers. Google now lets you merge your Google+ Local page with your Google+ Business Page. You must check out the Google logos this week for the Olympics, they are a lot of fun. That was this past week at the Search Engine Roundtable.

Make sure to subscribe to our video feed or subscribe directly on iTunes to be notified of these updates and download the video in the background. Here is the YouTube version of the feed:

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Search Topics of Discussion:

• Google Knowledge Graph: Worldwide, Carousel & Instant
• Gmail In Search Results Test Concerns Users
• Here Is Why You Need To Manage Your Canonicals Right
• Google: A/B Testing? Don’t Cloak, Use 302s & Use Rel Canonicals
• Google: Do Not Force Users To A Specific Language
• Google Smartphone Optimized Icon In Search Results
• Google’s Internal Campaign Builder Tool
• Google Translate Now Translates Pictures
• Google AdSense Discontinuing Payments By Check
• How To Merge Google+ Business Page With Google+ Local
• Google’s Hurdles & Curiosity Olympics

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Google announced plans to discontinue paying AdSense publishers by check in all countries where they officially support paying by electronic funds transfer (EFT).

Google said “EFT payments are free of charge, less error prone…

Google announced plans to discontinue paying AdSense publishers by check in all countries where they officially support paying by electronic funds transfer (EFT).

Google said “EFT payments are free of charge, less error prone, more efficient and the most environmentally-friendly payment method.” In fact, Google has recommended EFT since before 2007, just two years after the EFT option within AdSense went out of beta.

Now, Google is going to require most publishers to receive payment via EFT. For most of you, this is not a big deal. Personally, I’ve always received them via check, but switching to EFT is not a big deal for me.

Google wrote:

With these changes, please note that the new system wonât support check payments in countries where we offer EFT as a form of payment. If youâre located in a country where we offer EFT payments and you currently receive check payments, please be advised that youâll need to complete a few steps once your account is upgraded. However, no immediate action is required on your part at the moment. Once your account is transitioned to the new system, youâll receive an email notification with detailed instructions on setting up EFT payments.

To see if you are effected, see the list of countries on this page.

Here is a video Google made on EFT AdSense payments in 2009:

Is this going to be an issue for you?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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 :: July 20, 2012
  Fun week in search, led off by Google’s 20th employee after 13 years leaving Google to become the CEO of Yahoo, oh…
• Google Sends Out New Batch Of Unnatural Link Notifications
  In July 2011, just about a year ago, Google first started sending out notifications of unnatural links pointing to your web site. Then in March of this year, Google ramped up this notifications and tons of webmasters received them…
• SEOs: Google Penguin Leads To 42% Increase In Paid Clicks
  Last night, Google announced some pretty good earnings, beating expectations, making more money than ever with really nice profits. You can read the highlights here.

  In short, revenues up about 35% from previous second quarter in 2011…

• Want Me To Remove That Link? Pay Me $500!
  A Google Webmaster Help thread has a webmaster claiming (and he is 100% correct) that in order for him to get some of the sites linking to him to remove the link…
• Google AdSense Publishers Need To Chill
  A typical topic of discussion I will see in the forums related to AdSense is that the “stats are stuck.”

  Stats are stuck in the AdSense community means that the earning reports have stalled and are either not updating or slowly updating.

  But when there is a real outage…

• Google Bus Breaks Down
  Cinthya Yukari Urasaki from Google posted a picture of one of the Google Buses breaking down on the Bayshore Freeway, which is part of U.S. Route 101 in the San Francisco Bay Area. I guess even Googl

Other Great Search Forum Threads:

• Fire Stations – Automatically Pushing Text/Email Pages to Google Maps = Responding to Calls Faster, Google Maps Help
• How to escalate a 1,000,000usd problem to appropriate person in Google, WebmasterWorld
• How To Handle Seo Companies Spamming Your Clients?, HighRankings Forums
• Our Q212 earnings call begins at 1:30pm PT / 4:30pm ET…., Google – Google+
  • Google 2Q 2012 Revenues $12.21, Up 35pct, WebmasterWorld
• Microsoft Reports First Loss Ever, WebmasterWorld

A typical topic of discussion I will see in the forums related to AdSense is that the “stats are stuck.”

Stats are stuck in the AdSense community means that the earning reports have stalled and are either not updating or slowly updating.

But when there is a real outage, publishers go nuts. I don’t blame them, they make their money day to day from people clicking on their ads. And with all that smart pricing and AdSense banning going around, when a hiccup happens in the system, the publisher wonders if it is only them or others.

So when there is an issue, they flock to the forums and complain.

Always, always, I get tweets, emails and so forth from really concerned publishers if this is a wide spread issue. It almost always is.

This time, Google posted the issue in the known issues area, and it is resolved by now. But they wrote:

We’ve experienced a temporary reporting outage in AdSense accounts. Our engineers have been working to resolve this as quickly as possible. Sorry for any alarm caused, and thanks for your patience.

There is a lot of discussion around this outage but I think everyone has calmed down.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums & WebmasterWorld.

Finally, after years and years of requests from Google AdSense publishers, Google announced you can now control user access to Google AdSense…

Google has time and time again warned publishers that blocking ads will result in lower ad income. That is nothing new.

But now when some publishers are blocking ads, Google is issuing a warning in the AdSense account telling them they are making a grave mistake.

The warning says, “You have rejected ad requests, which will result in lost revenue.”

A publisher posted the warning in a WebmasterWorld thread saying:

When you click on the details link – it says “Rejected ad requests”

Ad unit “UNIT NAME” has been shown on “Incorrect sites”, and the site is: “googleads.g.doubleclick.net”

This user is really not sure why he received this message and he is worried.

Is this a bug or a real warning?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This week the BBC tested out Facebook advertising by running a campaign for the Facebook page of a fictitious small business called VirtualBagel. The investigation was headlined “Facebook ‘likes’ and adverts’ value doubted”. During the week over 3,000 people Liked the ads even though the company doesn’t exist and simply shows you a picture of a bagel. The ‘investigation’ is partly a reminder that Facebook still has issues with fake profiles and astro-turfing, but is also a simple re-stating of the fact that you get what you pay for and if you put up a dumb ad targeted too widely you’ll waste your money.

The BBC’s tech correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones spent a whole $10 on Facebook ads to promote the page, adding a little light targeting to reach a potential audience of “112 million customers” and garnered 1,600 Likes within within 24 hours. VirtualBagel turned out to be popular in Egypt, Indonesia and the Philippines, but not in the UK or US where bagels are more typical fare. However, most of the people who liked the page appeared to have fake profiles which had also Liked a bunch of other random pages.

Finding he got a lot of Likes from places that probably would’t be interested or even able to do business with his Uk-based Bagel business, Cellan-Jones ends up pondering the efficacy of Facebook ads when there were so many fake profiles on the system.

Facebook has responded saying – naturally enough – the experiment is “worthless” because the ads were not targeted enough, and yes, there are fake profiles in Facebook but they act to discourage the practice, and fake profiles are not allowed under their T&Cs. This is not exactly news.

But, asked the BBC, can Facebook’s $100bn valuation be justified when there are so many fake profiles? Well, how can we put this Rory, did you do the same campaign for $10 on Google AdSense and find a lot of bad clicks?

Because there’s a truism here – yes there are scammers and spammers and astro-turfers on the Internet. But at least on Facebook, you can generally see where they are coming from and get a sense of whether they are fake customers or not, which is the significant difference with something like Google Adsense, and of course why Google+ is crucial for Google’s future going forward in terms of ad targeting.

Facebook has responded, with their response summed up with the statement: “We’ve not seen evidence of a significant problem. Neither has it been raised by the many advertisers who are enjoying positive results from using Facebook…. Looking at the test case you flagged – the person has, for some reason, taken a scatter-gun approach to distributing their ads, sending them to multiple countries with little or no demographic targeting.”

Now, the Beeb was put up to this idea by a social media consultant Michael Tinmouth who’d found his small business clients were clicking false clicks on their ads. Here’s a little information on Tinmouth.

He describes himself as a “Journalist, investor and communications strategist tweeting about social media, entrepreneurship, small business and occasionally my travels and cats!”. Tinmouth is a former editor of Entrepreneur Country, which is run by Ariadne Capital. Ariadne is generally regarded in the tech sector as a high-priced agency, run by high profile business woman Julie Meyer, which makes most of its money by charging introduction fees between startups and Angel investors.

Until April this year Tinmouth had about 10,000 Twitter followers, but then on 15 April his follower count jumped dramatically to nearly 30,000.

There is no suggestion than Mr Tinmouth “gamed” his followers by using one of the many services out there to buy Twitter followers.

And it would be cruel of us to point out that there may potentially be some fake Twitter profiles following Mr Tinmouth, so we won’t do that.

Google announced you can now block AdSense ads within the Google Publisher Toolbar but warns that you should not block ads simply because you think you will earn more money doing so…

Google announced you can now block AdSense ads within the Google Publisher Toolbar but warns that you should not block ads simply because you think you will earn more money doing so.

Google said:

Please be assured that clicking the ad overlays generated by the toolbar is permitted, and wonât generate any invalid clicks. Also, keep in mind that blocking any ad will lower your potential earnings, as it reduces competition for your ad space by removing advertiser bids from the auction. Itâs a myth that filtering ads can prevent âlow-paying adsâ from appearing, so as always, we recommend blocking only those ads that you feel are unsuitable for your users.

Google has told us before that blocking types of ads do not help you earn more.

But publishers have been blocking ads since the feature came out as a way to try to earn money from better earning ads.

A WebmasterWorld thread has publishers that simply do not believe Google that this method doesn’t work when trying to earn more money.

MartniBuster, an old time AdSense publisher responded, “What the heck?” Another senior member said, “If my site was flooded with one of those fat belly adverts, no-one will click on it. By removing it allows other adverts to appear, and more likely to be clicked on.”

What do you think?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.