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.

It has been two weeks since my last video recap, but I have been doing text recaps - so check those out. Why did I miss the video recaps, I was in Israel for both pleasure and business. I ran SphinnCon Israel this past sunday, it was a blast.

Yahoo Search updated their index this week. Google's AJAX crawling proposal is now live. Google is upgrading the Site Performance report in Webmaster Tools. Yahoo upgraded their search marketing desktop tool out of beta. People ignore real time search results, according to a study. Google Shopping added stock levels. Google Maps added bike directions. Google is testing TV search. Microsoft starts a major ad campaign in the UK. MSN.com updated their look. Google News Archive added a "browse" feature. Google Doodle controversies over International Women's Day and Chuck Norris's 70th birthday. That was this past week at the Search Engine Roundtable.

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Search Topics of Discussion:

Industry News:

• SMX's SphinnCon Israel 2010 Recap

Yahoo SEO:

• Yahoo Search Update: March 2010

Google SEO:

• Have Google Index Your AJAX, Here Is How
• Google Shuts Down "Site Performance" Tool While Upgrading It

Yahoo PPC:

• Yahoo Releases Search Marketing Desktop Just In Time To Kill It

Real Time Search:

• Study: Searches Ignore Real-Time Search Results

Google Updates:

• Google Shopping Adds Inventory Levels
• Google Maps Adds Bike Directions & Route Layers
• Googlers Testing TV Search Android Enabled Devices With Dish Network
• Google News Archives Adds "Browse This Newspaper"

Microsoft News:

• Microsoft Aims To Capture UK Search Market Share with Ads
• The UK Bing Ads : Here Is a Video
• MSN's New Portal Now Live

Google Doodles:

• Google's International Women's Day Logo at Google Russia Only?
• Chuck Norris Turns 70 Today, No Google Doodle?

Please do subscribe via iTunes or on your favorite RSS reader. Don't forget to comment below with the right answer and good luck!

If you go to the Google News Archives and find a digitized back issue from the Google archives, you should be able to now browse that newspaper directly on Google.

For example, let's take a look at the The News and Eastern Townships Advocate. I can then browse the newspaper by panning through the pages.

Here are some screen captures:

I spotted this addition via the Google News Help forum where Googler, Inbal replied to an old thread with this feature request. She said:

We're excited to announce the launch of browse mode for newspapers in Archives! To do so, click "Browse this newspaper" to view other editions from that newspaper!

Indeed, very neat feature!

Forum discussion at Google News Help.

Ever want to pick up a product from a store now and want to know if it is in stock in nearby stores? Yea, you have, I have. I end up calling stores to find a store that has it. But you may no longer have to do that. Just open your smart phone, go to Google, click on shopping and type in your product. Then look for a blue indicator to see which stores have them in stock.

Here is an example I ran in my iPhone for a search in Wii Fit:

Click on the link near the blue icon:

Great feature for the typical searcher. If you are a merchant and you want your product inventory data in Google Shopping, you will need to be part of the Google Merchant Center and Local Business Center and then fill out this form.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Frank Watson wrote that RipOff Report Now Selling Links, Verifying Safe Cash4Gold. In short, he shows how they are selling links for certain "qualified" and "verified" businesses.

What is the big deal if a site sell links? Well, it is not - it is up to the site if they want to take the risk of selling links and being penalized by Google for doing so. So what is the big deal here?

Well, Ripoff Report is a site that can often be an online reputation management nightmare. Ripoff Report tends to rank very well for business names that have complaints about them. Pushing down results in Google from Ripoff Report is often not the easiest task to complete. Which is why SEOs might like to call out issues with the site, especially webmaster guidelines issues.

Just read this Sphinn comment:

Its hard to understand how Google can justify the authority it betows on this site. They break all the rules and continue to thrive hurting many innocent victims of their so called consumer advocacy site.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

I cannot tell you how many issues I see come up in the AdWords API forum about why does a certain request work in the Google AdWords API Sandbox and not in the normal AdWords API. A Sandbox API is a test ground for developers to test out new code changes without impacting live data.

Eric Koleda from the AdWords API Team announced in a AdWords API Help thread the introduction of enhanced XML validation for the AdWords API sandbox. That means, the XML you use in the sandbox will be stricter and return more detailed errors when it does not validate. Let me quote Eric:

Yesterday we enabled an enhanced form of XML validation on the AdWords API sandbox that returns more detailed error messages for incorrectly formatted SOAP XML requests. This new validation mechanism is more strict and enforces rules that were previously ignored. Most SOAP libraries already conform to these rules, but requests that are constructed manually may now return validation errors. Some key changes in the validation logic are:

* The fields of an object must be in the correct order. The order of the fields is defined in the WSDL and reflected in our developer documentation.
* The namespaces used in the request body must be declared on the method element (get, mutate, etc). If all of the namespace prefixes are declared on the SOAP envelope element you must ensure they are re- defined on the method element.

For right now this will only be enabled in the sandbox to give you time test your code against this new type of validation. If you have any questions or issues please let us know.

Forum discussion at AdWords API Help.

Every year or so, the Google PageRank debate lives on. Some people say Google PageRank is the number one important attribute to have a page rank well in Google. Some say PageRank is worthless and should be completely ignored. Others take a middle ground. SEO's opinion on the topic changes from year to year - even mine.

A WebmasterWorld thread has renewed discussion on the topic. So I thought it would be a good time to run a poll and see how important you all feel PageRank is nowadays. Here is the poll.

Now that you have taken the poll, I want to share some recent Google chatter on PageRank.

A couple weeks ago at SMX West Google's Director of Research, Peter Norvig told Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman that PageRank is overhyped. Here is an abstract from Search Engine Land's coverage of the event:

One thing that I think is still overhyped is PageRank. People think, yeah, you do this computation on the web graph and then you just order all the pages by that [PageRank]. Yes, that computation is important but it's just one of many things. And people say, "Oh, well you're stuck if you don't have that."� We never felt that way. We never felt that it was such a big factor. It's got the catchy name and the name recognition, but we've always looked at all the available data"¦.

There is this confusion that there's this one component that's called PageRank, but the whole thing [Google's algorithm] has [also] been called that. That was a mistake. We need some better branding.

There is no doubt that Googlers involved with webmasters want to remove the PageRank values from the toolbar. In fact, PageRank was removed from Webmaster Tools last year after concern of PageRank became overwhelming for many. Since before 2007 Google wanted to remove PageRank from the toolbar. In fact, then Matt Cutts personally wanted it gone, but I guess he failed? And my new favorite Googler, Tomer Honen tweeted, "And that's why I don't use Twitter that often - only 140 characters... Get over PageRank!"

As you can see, I did not make a distinction here between real PageRank and Toolbar PageRank.

So what do you think? Take the poll and feel free to comment.

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.

Yahoo announced a new search update, or what they call a "weather report" for their index. Yahoo said you may notice ranking changes in the Yahoo Search results. They said:

The Yahoo! Search engineering teams are rolling out updates to crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms. Similar to previous updates, you may notice some ranking changes and page shuffling during the process, which we expect to complete over the next few days.

I have not seen any discussion around this but there may be an issue with the Yahoo Search WebmasterWorld forum, so I am not sure.

I did spot two threads discussing an update with Yahoo Site Explorer. One thread was at the Site Explorer Suggestion Board and the other at DigitalPoint Forums.

Update: I was able to post a thread at WebmasterWorld (maybe there was a bug on my side) and now we have a nice amount of feedback on how significant this update is. Here are some posts from the thread:

I'm seeing a small but statistically insignificant increase from Yahoo!

We had been showing a steady increase in traffic until yesterday (March 10th). Today, we've lost about 20% of our traffic from Y!.

This is a pattern that seems to repeat with each update. After the update we drop in ranking but slowly climb back before the next update.

They are showing lots of love for Wikipedia.

I'm seeing huge differences not in the results but the output...5 natural results for some queries instead of the usual 10 and quite frankly I like it shortened like this. Top 5 or go home.......

A WebmasterWorld thread reports that some Google AdSense publishers are being forced to pick a local currency, instead of using the U.S. dollar.

Three publishers claimed it happened yesterday, where they logged into AdSense and had to pick a local currency. Here are some of the messages in the forum thread:

I think it is not possible to skip it any more.

They should have waited untill march 31 or april 1 to let it synchronize with taxes cycles. For those of us living in the EU but not in Ireland, it makes necessary new taxes forms.

This obviously should not impact U.S. publishers and publishers who live in countries where Google cannot pay out in that local currency.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google Maps has been a extremely important area for SEOs and SEMs to focus on for their clients. Ranking in the Google results that have a maps result is often critical to these businesses and those map results come up more often in the web results at Google on a daily basis. So when you see bugs reported, especially ones that can end up in a competitor claiming your spot, you get worried.

A Google Maps Help thread has an excellent video demo of a possible bug or issue with how Google Maps citations can be poached from competitors. I am not sure what the issue here is, but let me share the video here.

The video is on ScreenCast.com is about 4 minutes long. It was created by the Small Business Online Coach and documents the issue very well.

I am not sure how serious this issue is, what do you think?

Forum discussion at Google Maps Help.

There are three known and confirmed bugs with YouTube. They include not being able to save changes being made to videos, and issues playing and sharing videos in YouTube Groups and Orkut. Here are the three threads created by Liz from the YouTube team:

(1) Known Issue: "Save changes" button doesn't appear on "Edit video" page:

We've seen a lot of reports from you indicating that on the "Save changes" button isn't appearing for you on the edit video page for your uploads (my_videos).

I've reported this situation to our team and they're working on a fix so that you're able to save the edits you make to your videos again without running into this issue.

(2) Known Issue: bug playing videos in YouTube Groups:

We've seen many of you report that videos you've submitted to a YouTube Group are not playing on the page. A grey box appears in place of where the video should appear in the player and sometimes an error message is displayed stating that the video is no longer available. The video is in fact still available (from the uploader's channel and in search), but its just showing as unavailalbe in the Group setting.

This situation has been reported to our Team here in San Bruno, and our engineers are currently investigating the issue and working on a fix.

(3) Known Issue: issues with YouTube videos on Orkut:

Just wanted to let you know that our Team is aware of the issue with sharing YouTube videos to Orkut. Many of you have reported here in the forum that when sharing one of your uploads to YouTube on Orkut, Orkut produces an error message saying that your video doesn't exist / isn't found. Ah!

I've reported this to our engineers and they're currently working with the folks over at Orkut to try and resolve the situation. A big thanks to you all for letting us know about this issue, and we really appreciate your patience as we're working on a fix. Hopefully you should be able to enjoy YouTube videos on Orkut soon.

So those are the three issues.

Forum discussion at YouTube Help Forums.

OneUpWeb released an eye-tracking study that showed how most searches ignore the real time search results. The takeaways from the study, as Greg Sterling recapped nicely include:

• 73% had never heard of real-time results before participating this study
• Only a quarter of the consumers cared for the real-time results compared to 47% of the information foragers
• The majority of the participants surveyed were indifferent to the real-time results

The Guardian notes that these real time results cost Google $15m and Bing $10m - what is the return on investment for that then?

A WebmasterWorld thread has conversation around this where most people say they are not surprised by the study's findings. Just hard to imagine blowing $15 million on something like this.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

All of the content published on this site is sourced via discussion forums, that is what makes this site unique from the thousands of other SEO blogs out there. Much of that content is sourced from the Google help forums. So when Google changes something in their help forums, I typically notice.

One thing Google recently changes was the help forum search feature. Now, Google is including content in the help forum search that is from external web sites, not owned or maintained by Google. For example, a search at the Google Analytics Help forum returns several results that are from third party web sites. Here is a screen capture:

Each web site that is not maintained by Google is clearly labeled as such, with a message that reads:

The site you are about to visit is not maintained by Google Inc., but its content might be helpful.

There is then a way to "Report Abuse" on a site listed here.

What I find interesting is that Google labels their own blogs as "not maintained by Google," when indeed, it is maintained by Google. But it does differentiate between what is "user content" versus Google content - so I find that interesting.

A hat tip goes to PizzaSEO.com for letting me know about this new feature.

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.