This week we covered how those pink ads are really "pale purple" and are here to stay by replacing the yellow background color on AdWords. Google revamped their dictionary results. Google's Matt Cutts talked about his first spam experience. Google now warns webmasters over a spike in crawl errors. Google said, first come first serve when it comes to meta robots tag. Google has a one language per page and per sitemap rule. Google AdWords Professional links no longer working? Yahoo's search ad reports have a glitch. Microsoft shows off a cool mapping product named Street Slide. Google, not Bing, to power Yahoo Japan. Google dropped the report offensive link from Google Images. Google said SEOs outsmart them and they don't like it. Finally, Yahoo had a logo to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. That was this 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. You can also watch this live and ask questions during the show, typically Friday mornings around 9:30 (EST) at seroundtable.com/live, follow @rustybrick to be notified when we air. Here is the YouTube version of the feed:

For the original iTunes version, click here.

Search Topics of Discussion:

• Official: Google Changes AdWords Color to Pale Purple
• Google Gives Dictionary.com, Answers.com, Merriam-Webster & The Free Dictionary Top Real Estate
• Deja Vu: First Time Matt Cutts of Google Saw Web Spam
• Google To Warn Webmasters Over Dramatic Site Issues
• Google: The Robots Meta Tag Is Cumulative (First Come First Serve)
• Google's One Language Per Page Rule
• Google News Sitemaps: One Language Per Sitemap File
• New Google AdWords Certified Profile Links Not Working
• Yahoo Search Marketing Reporting Goes Down For Many
• Microsoft's Street Slide, A Preview
• Google Drops Report Offensive Images From New Image Search
• Google To Power Yahoo Japan: Here The FAQs
• Google: The "Last Thing We Want" Is The "Best SEO To Win"
• Yahoo Celebrated 20th Anniversary of Americans with Disabilities Act

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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.

Jeremy Sussman, a Google Local Product Manager has been pretty frank and clear with people in the Google Places forum. In one Google Places Help thread, he said, and I quote:

I can assure you that the last thing we want is for the business who hires the best SEO to win a better slot. But, the SEOs are, unfortunately, pretty good at what they do, and so sometimes they out smart us.

You read that? To not take it too much out of context, the thread is about why certain sites rank above others. Someone was upset his business ranked lower than another in Google Maps. Jeremy from Google said, "a simple answer like "the closest to you" is not always the right answer. But, all things being equal, the closest to you is the right answer. Figuring out the relative weights of the different factors in the rankings is one of the most difficult parts of our algorithm." But then goes on to explain that some SEOs know how to manipulate stuff and he simply isn't a fan.

Jeremy was also pretty straight in another Google Places Help thread where he said:

You know what I love about the help forum? Every now and then someone points out a problem that is not merely "my business is not ranked where I want it to be" but rather represents a real hole in our system. csteinle, this post definitely falls into that latter category.

I could make excuses about how hard it is to recognize the difference between two things that have the same name and very similar locations, but I would be out on a semi-defensible limb. Bottom line here is we need to fix this. And we will. Stay tuned.

So two bold statements, statements we rarely see worded this way from a Googler. One somewhat dissing SEOs and the other one where he admits Google failure, for now.

What is your take?

Forum discussion at Google Places Help.

Tedster started an outstanding thread at WebmasterWorld, something I personally never thought about but is all so valid.

All this stuff around having fast sites, cause Google is now looking at site performance and speed is important. It is not as important as most SEOs make it out to be, but the bottom line is, make sure your site is not too slow.

Tedster points out there is often confusion on how to determine if Google thinks your site is slow. There are two key reports in the Google Webmaster Tools:

(1) Crawl stats under Diagnostics section

(2) Site performance under Labs section

Crawl stats has a metric that tells you the time spent downloading a page (in milliseconds). That is, how much time GoogleBot spent downloading your content. It really doesn't say if it is fast or slow. I should note, you can set your crawl speed under Site configuration and Settings. If you can't, then maybe that is a sign of a slow site?

Site performance shows you data based on users with the Google Toolbar. Basically, it shows you how long a normal user takes to download the content on your site. I believe this is a more important metric for the site speed factor.

Site site performance is more about the speed algorithm factor, whereas, if you have a problem with GoogleBot crawling your site, your pages won't be included.

In any event, there is a lot of discussion around the two metrics and what you can do to leverage both at WebmasterWorld. So join the discussion.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This week we covered the Google one language per page rule and today I spotted a thread specific to how this works with Google News.

A Google News Help thread has Googler Inbal saying you should submit a News Sitemap file for each language. Inbal from Google said:

If all your languages editions are published on one site, the Google News preference is for one news sitesmaps for multiple languages.

It is also important to set the language in the News Sitemap file using the n:language tag.

For more on News Sitemap files see here.

Forum discussion at Google News Help.

Google will remove search results when a court orders them to do so or when the search result can infect a computer with viruses and malware. We know that.

I spotted an interesting and unique thread at Google Webmaster Help thread where one individual (won't use the name but you can easily find out in the thread) had a court order Google to remove search results. The search results were about a sexual harassment case between her and a guy from ten years ago. She said, when you Google her name, it comes up and thus is hurting her chances of finding employment.

So what is the issue? She said one of the results is still there, but partially removed, making it worse. She said:

One of the links is gone, but this one remains, and now it is untitled, but the snippet reads about how I sued someone for sexual harrassment, with my name and his. Before, at least, that information was not in the snippet.

Here is a picture (again, I don't want this article to rank for her name, so I am not using it in the text):

[screen shot removed on behalf of this person]

You can see the third result is untitled, meaning, it is likely partially removed. If you want to see the full court case, either Google her name or go to the URL she provided at the thread.

My only good suggestion is take this back to court. I doubt anyone in the forums can help her.

Someone said try this form, but she said she did and they told her to go to the owner of the web site.

I have never seen someone with a court order come to the forums asking for the court order to be upheld completely. So that is why I found this interesting.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Update: Please see the comments below for more details and errors.

Here is a little SEO bit that some of the even more experienced SEOs may not have heard of. The order of the meta robots tag is incredibly important. Did you know that the effects are cumulative when it comes to Google understanding the restrictions set in the tag?

Google's JohnMu said in a Google Webmaster Help thread:

For the robots meta tag, the effects are cumulative with regards to the restrictions, eg:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">
<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="INDEX, FOLLOW, NOODP, NOIMAGEINDEX">

would result in Googlebot treating it as a noindex, nofollow, noodp, noimageindex. This is different than the robots.txt file. You cannot provide more restrictive directives for the generic "robots" setting than for individual crawlers.

So if you need more granular control over controlling robots, use the robots.txt file.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help and hat tip to Colin McDermott.

The online mapping products get cooler almost every day. The latest buzz is around Microsoft Street Slide, which is not live yet, but is currently being developed.

Here is a video that explains it better than I can in words:

There are more articles on this at Neowin, Google Maps Mania and Search Engine Land.

A Google Blogoscoped Forums thread points out some people are trying to do the same type of things on Google Maps via their API over here.

This is neat stuff.

Forum discussion at Google Blogoscoped Forums.

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.

Aaron Wall posted an example of a large brand manipulating Google through an old spam technique. In short, they were buying expired domains to piggy back off of the link popularity and anchor text of those old domains.

Aaron wall said, "buying expired domain names for links is something Matt Cutts loathes." What I find most interesting is the video he posted after (spam doesn't always interest me all that much these days).

This video was done by Matt Cutts of Google about two years ago. He talked about the first time he found search web spam.

One thing Aaron Wall (and Michael Gray) are good at is calling out double-standards specifically with Google.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

There are several complaints at both WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums that the Yahoo Search Marketing campaigns are missing all their data.

One person received a response from Yahoo, where Yahoo presumingly said:

Upon researching your account we found there is a known issue causing frustration among many clients. Our reporting systems went down at approximately 8pm on Monday evening. However we have created a case for you within your account and are currently working to get this resolved as soon as possible. Please be patient while we work to resolve your concerns.

So since Monday night, some advertisers are still without accurate reporting data for their search ad campaigns.

I am not sure if this is related to Yahoo testing Bing powered ads or not, but it is around the same time.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Wired published an article last night named Exclusive: Google, CIA Invest in 'Future' of Web Monitoring. Here is a snippet of that article:

The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time - and says it uses that information to predict the future.

The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents - both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine "goes beyond search" by "looking at the 'invisible links' between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events."

The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online "momentum" for any given event.

There has always been speculation about Google "being in bed with the CIA" but this isn't exactly Google working with the CIA, not exactly.

In any event, people read Wired and people are searchers on Google. Some may stop using it, like this concerned young guy at Google Web Search Help.

Zac Jackle Reala has his username reads said:

Ok, I've been reading about the whole CIA/Google cracking down on the criminal race on the Interwebs. I've been using Google for a while. And I'm just a kid having fun on Google/Youtube. My privacy is a big deal... I don't like my "space" invaded. I'm sorry.

I find it interesting he took the time to set up a Google account and post his concern in a public Google forum.

Do you think we should be concerned?

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

A couple months ago, we wrote on how Google Alerts tweaked their algorithm to be more more quality focused and send out less alerts.

A recent Google Web Search Help thread has more on how Google Alerts works from Google Product Manager, Marcel.

Marcel responded to a quality complaint saying:

You're right, both of those are matches for your query, but neither of them are interesting documents. To get only higher quality documents, choose "Up to 20 results" for the email length. If you already have that setting, then I'm afraid there's not much I can do to help. We do send some poor quality documents, either because we're too quick, and our search engine hasn't had time to figure out that they are poor quality, or because we don't get the quality rating right at all. We're constantly working on both those problems.

I love the end, where he says, "we do send some poor quality documents, either because we're too quick, and our search engine hasn't had time to figure out that they are poor quality, or because we don't get the quality rating right at all.

I just find it interesting to see that come from a Googler.

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

A WebmasterWorld thread has Zeus, someone well known in the SEO forum space as tracking the image search engines, as not speaking positively about Bing Image Search.

The thread talks how Bing is slower than Google to index new content. Which is often the case, simply cause Google is much faster than most search engines. But Zeus breaks it out to say that their image search is even more disappointing.

Zeus said that typically he sees at most 10% of his pages or images in Bing Image search, sometimes only 5% or less. He said:

Bing Image which in my case has 45 images listed of 22,000.

Now, Bing has made some very good strides and I believe many are rutting for them to gain some more share. Heck, I even think it would be a good idea and I am an Apple guy.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread makes a basic and obvious point that many newbies miss. SEO is not just about technical implementation. You can place your title tags in the right place, have a nice site architecture, get links and so on but still not rank well if your site is not useful.

The thread creator said it nicely:

People come here with a problem about traffic dropping and people try to help by asking technical questions about the website in question.

I often wonder what is the business model of the site that dropped. Because Google appears to be grading business models. Example. I have a prospective client who wants me to fix his traffic loss. He has 20 domains each one for each brand. No real info on any of his sites and he is selling some information on each brand. I can see some value to his service but I am sure Google considers it a spam service. 20 sites all the same linked selling the same product.

No amount of tweaking to this site or that site is going to fix his problem in my opinion.

In fact, today, someone forwarded me a site that fit this example. It was built fine, but it had almost no useful content. Nothing was there and the guy was looking for technical help on how to fix it.

To fix it, you need content - content that gives people a reason to want to go to the site, read it and recommend it to others. If the site has nothing to offer, why would it rank well even if it is technically SEO friendly?

So many new SEOs, new webmasters and new site owners just don't get this. It is a shame.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.