Webmaster News Roundup from Website Hosting Provider

Google news

This article is offered by your website hosting provider and lists current webmaster news important to business owners.

Google is in the news about copyright issues again, but this time, it's because they're working to prevent copyright issues. YouTube (which Google owns) doesn't allow users to upload material that they don't have the right to publish. To help prevent copyright infringements, Google is working on a database of video "fingerprints" to match against video clips that appear to be copyrighted. It's expected to be launched this fall.

If your URLs look like example.com/keyword_and_keyword, Google didn't see those keywords because they didn't treat underscores as word separators. However, Google is or will soon be treating underscores as word separators, according to Google's Matt Cutts. Hyphens or dashes are allegedly still better, but webmasters with URLs using underscores as word separators can now hope to get some SEO benefit from keywords in those URLs.

At Cutts' Word Camp 2007 presentation, he provided more information about Google for webmasters:

• With the exception of .exe, the file extension doesn't affect rankings.
• The number of slashes in URLs isn't relevant (although it's rumored to be relevant for MSN and Yahoo).
• Query strings are treated the same as static URLs. Question marks in URLs are okay, but more than two or three equal signs might not be.

Web content that's intended to be indexed only temporarily can now be indexed as temporary content. Google has introduced a meta tag that allows webmasters to specify even the time of day that a page should be removed from Google search results. It looks like this:

<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="unavailable_after: 31-Aug-2007 17:00:00 EST">

ClickZ's article How 'unavailable_after' Should (But Won't) Be Used presents a different point of view on this meta tag.

Earlier this month, Google released their Custom Search Business Edition. Unlike Google's free custom search engine, the business edition doesn't display AdWords ads with search results. Pricing starts at $100 per year for websites that have fewer than 5,000 pages.

Mobile phones led to mobile search, and soon, to Google AdSense for Mobile. Some advertisers have been invited to participate in beta testing for it.

Microsoft news

Microsoft and Digg have partnered in a deal similar to Microsoft's 2006 deal with Facebook. Microsoft will be selling and serving ads on Digg, and the two companies will be working together on future initiatives.

Last week, Microsoft announced plans to acquire AdECN, Inc., an online ad exchange. AdECN helps Microsoft compete against Yahoo's Right Media and Google's Doubleclick exchange.

Microsoft announced in April that they're supporting sitemap autodiscovery. Autodiscovery allows webmasters to share their sitemaps with search engines supporting sitemap protocol without submitting the sitemaps to each search engine individually. Last week, a Microsoft representative posted at Webmaster World that they're planning changes in how they respond to sitemaps.

Live Search now has new image search features. Users can use search filters to view face, portrait, or black and white photos.

Yahoo news

In a move that increases its presence in India, Yahoo has purchased up to 50 percent of Tyroo Media, an Indian online ad company. The deal will allow Yahoo to increase its advertising presence in India, where the market is growing quickly.

In Europe, Yahoo Panama is beta testing quality score rankings. They're upgrading advertisers in waves to make the transition smooth, and they'll introduce their new ranking model after they've upgraded all their advertisers.

Yahoo Image Search now includes search results from Flickr. Results display member names, and members have the option to have their images omitted from Yahoo Image Search.

Other search engine news

Spock, a relatively new vertical search engine, indexes information about people (dead or alive) at sites such as social networking sites, blogs, and Wikipedia. Search results can be for people's names or for search terms such as "drunk driver." According to this Associated Press article, they plan to have a searchable database of 100 million people when they launch sometime in August 2007.

If your search interest is home design or recipes rather than people, Kitchen & Bath Search and FoodieView are two more vertical search engines making appearances. Kitchen & Bath Search is aimed at professionals in the kitchen and bath industry. Search results include information about products, services, industry news, design ideas, and tips. FoodieView is a recipe search engine that allows users to search by ingredients or category. It also has a restaurant guide with food critic and customer reviews.

Other news from Website Hosting Provider

Domain squatters buy domains that are typos of brand names and place ads on the sites, sometimes for counterfeit products. Enter CADNA: the Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse. CADNA is a Washington, DC-based non-profit organization with high-profile members that include Yahoo, Verizon, and Hilton. CADNA's goal is to help make cybersquatting difficult and unprofitable by getting relevant laws and regulations changed.

Superpages is now offering video ads at their site. Video ads that are 30 or 60 seconds long are being shown for local merchants in Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Francisco so far.

According to a recent media-consumption study, people of all ages enjoy reading user-generated content online, not just younger generations. In addition, people of all generations in the study reported reading print magazines as well as online content. Less surprising is that the under-25 age group makes more use of newer technologies than older generations do.

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