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WebmasterWorld

url: http://www.webmasterworld.com
News and discussion for the advanced web professional

CAPTCHA Replacement Is A Mini Game

"Text-based CAPTCHAs are difficult to decipher and easy to break, which forces them to become increasingly more difficult to solve," said Reid Tatoris, chief operating officer of Are You a Human."This vicious cycle makes it frustrating for users, who many times will give up before following through to a site."

Microsoft Launches So.cl Student Social Network

So.cl isn't designed to be a Facebook challenger.

Report: Google's Chrome Browser Now The Web's Most Used Browser

Measuring the Web is an imprecise science, very often based on scaling up small scale measurement surveys, but the gist of Statcounter's data over the last year indicates that Chrome use is rising of Chrome at the expense of IE and Firefox, regardless of the exact precision of the data.

Yahoo Sells 20pct of Alibaba for $7 Billion

Yahoo and Alibaba Group have finally reached an agreement for the Silicon Valley Internet giant to sell back half its stake in the Chinese Web company in a $7 billion deal.

$15 Billion Amended Class Action Suit Against Facebook Over User Tracking

It accuses Facebook of improperly tracking users even after they logged out of their accounts.

New Tailored Suggestions, And Twitter Supporting Do Not Track

...we support Do Not Track (DNT), which is reflected in our privacy policy as one of the ways you can indicate your preference.

WebmasterWorld Weekly Roundup May 17

WebmasterWorld's weekly roundup of hot topics and discussions you may have missed in the last few days. (-Subscription required)

Pinterest Gets $100m Funding From Rakuten

Social networking service Pinterest is to receive $100m in funding from Japanese internet retailing giant Rakuten and existing investors.Rakuten said the money would be used to improve Pinterest's service and expand its user base.

Hitwise: Bing Now Powers Over 30% Of U.S. Searches

"...now account for 30.01% of all U.S. searches. By itself, Bing grew 16% year-over-year and 5% month-over-month and now accounted for 14.32% of all U.S. searches in April 2012."

Google's Amit Singhal Introduces Knowledge Graph

We've begun to gradually roll out this view of the Knowledge Graph to U.S. English users.

Understanding Google's Panda - Thin Content vs Low Interest Content

WebmasterWorld Members discuss a content theory over Google Panda.

Bing Dropping Some Pages?

WebmasterWorld Members are reporting drops of indexed urls in Bing.

Pirate Pay Torrent Disruptor Prevents Downloading of Pirated Content

The tool poses as real bit torrent users but then "confuses" peer-to-peer networks, causing disconnections.

Google Penguin Recovery Tips

WebmasterWorld Members discuss Google Penguin recovery tips.

Yahoo chief executive steps down

Yahoo has said that Ross Levinsohn will temporarily replace chief executive Scott Thompson, who has stepped down in the face of controversy about his allegedly inflated CV.

Facebook Testing Pay To Promote Post

"We're constantly testing new features across the site," said the spokesperson. "This particular test is simply to gauge people's interest in this method of sharing with their friends."

WebmasterWorld Weekly Roundup May 10

WebmasterWorld's weekly roundup of hot topics and discussions you may have missed in the last few days. (-Subscription required)

Facebook To Roll Out File Sharing For Groups

Users can upload most file types up to 25MB

The Benefits Of In-House SEO Compared To Outsourcing

WebmasterWorld Members discuss the pros and cons of in-house SEO over outsourcing. Are the outsourced SEOs good enough?

Bing Integrates Facebook Into SERPs in a New Column

Microsoft attempts to deeply integrate Facebook into Bing search to gain some ground on arch-rival Google.

Facebook App Center Launched

All developers should create an app detail page. The page is required for being listed in the App Center, and it will also become the new destination when non-users search for your app on Facebook.

Foursquare Plans Coupons For People That Check-In To Businesses

"One of the most fun things about the Foursquare pitch is sitting down with merchants and you can show them a stats dashboard. It shows this is the time of day people come in, here is the breakdown of male and female, here is the list of your best customers, here are some customers that used to come here a lot and don't come anymore..."

AdSense Revenue Share Earnings Changes

Site publishers discuss a negative change in AdSense Earnings coinciding with changes with the AdWords program.

Cleaning your Backlinks - Ideas and Suggestions

With all the "over-SEO" and "webspam updates" recently - and especially with the flood of WMT notifications about backlinks - a lot of webmasters have their attention on what they can do practically to make Google happier about their backlink profile.

US Jury Finds Google Infringed Oracle's Java Copyrights in Android

Oracle: "The overwhelming evidence demonstrated that Google knew it needed a license and that its unauthorized fork of Java in Android shattered Java's central write once run anywhere principle,"

Google's 52 Search Quality Highlights For April

One of the big changes for me was our latest algorithm improvement to help you find more high-quality sites. But, that's not all we've been up to. As you may recall, a couple months back we shared uncut video discussion of a spelling related change, and now that's launched as well (see "More spell corrections for long queries"). Other highlights include changes in indexing, spelling, sitelinks, sports scores features and more.

Domain Name With No EU Trademark Should be Stripped From U.S. Entity

An American eyewear company cannot take a dot-eu Internet address since its trademark is not established in the European Union, a high court adviser said Thursday.

Link Development: Including Backlinks on Plugins

Link Building Strategies - WebmasterWorld Members discuss the pros and cons of building backlinks with plug-in attribution links.

May 2012 AdSense Earnings and Observations

WebmasterWorld's AdSense barometer - a monthly look at Google AdSense earnings and observations.

Google Updates and SERP Changes - May 2012

WebmasterWorld's monthly look at Google's SERPs changes.

WebmasterWorld Weekly Roundup May 3

WebmasterWorld's weekly roundup of hot topics and discussions you may have missed in the last few days. (-Subscription required)

Google Analytics Adds Social Reports, And Tracks Links To Your Content

These reports provide another layer of social insight showing which of your content attracts links, and enables you to keep track of conversations across other sites that link to your content. Most website and blog owners had no easy mechanism to do this in the past, but we see it as another important feature for holistic social media reports. When you know what your most linked content is, it is then also much easier to replicate the success and ensure that you are building relationships with those users who actively link to you the most.

Bing Updates Template - Layout - Retro Cool

New Bing SERP layout trims 25% of HTML weight while increasing white space almost 35%.

Yahoo Marketing Dashboard, Free For Small Business

With key business metrics from across the Web accessible in one location, small business owners with limited resources can spend more time focusing on their core businesses and less time buried in multiple interfaces and spreadsheets.

Twitter Aiming For 2 Billion Users

You might think that statement was from Mark Zuckerberg, as Facebook approaches 1 billion active users on its social network and focuses on the next billion. But it was Satya Patel, Twitter's vice president of products, outlining the goal his company has set for itself.

Google Changes AdWords Ad Rotation To 30-Day Period

Starting next week, the 'rotate' setting for ad rotation will change. Instead of rotating creatives for an indefinite period of time, this setting will only rotate for a period of 30 days.After that, the setting will then optimize to show the ads expected to generate the most clicks. Every time a creative is enabled or edited, the ads in that ad group will rotate more evenly for a new period of 30 days.

ICANN Plans To Notify All Applicants Over TLD System Data Breaches

"We have absolutely no reason to believe it's a hack. We have been able to find some of the instructions in the software that caused the issue,"

Microsoft Invests $300 Million In Barnes and Noble

The partnership with Microsoft could give the Nook the kind of content and global expansion to make it a bigger player in the tablet business,

Full FCC Report Released On Google Street View

The report points the finger at a rogue engineer who, it says, intentionally wrote software code that captured payload data information -- communication over the Internet including emails, passwords and search history -- from unprotected wireless networks, going beyond what Google says it intended. The engineer invoked his 5th Amendment right and declined to speak to the FCC.

Survey: 90pct Of HTTPS Sites Are Insecure

Despite this, only 10 percent of the scanned websites were deemed truly secure. Seventy-five percent -- around 148,000 -- were found to be vulnerable to an attack known as BEAST, which can be used to decrypt authentication tokens and cookies from HTTPS requests.

WebmasterWorld Weekly Roundup April 26

WebmasterWorld's weekly roundup of hot topics and discussions you may have missed in the last few days. (-Subscription required)

ALERT: The Google Anti-SEO Update

In the next few days, we're launching an important algorithm change targeted at webspam. The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google's existing quality guidelines.While we can't divulge specific signals because we don't want to give people a way to game our search results and worsen the experience for users, our advice for webmasters is to focus on creating high quality sites that create a good user experience and employ white hat SEO methods instead of engaging in aggressive webspam tactics.

Google WT Wants Links From Sponsored WordPress Themes Removed

Some 2+ years ago in throws of questionable wisdom I sponsored about 5 or 6 WordPress themes where the "Designed by" link in the footer gets replaced by a link to your site. They were nice looking and "relevant" themes, at least as far as the name and pictures used in design suggest. They were not used much initially and I did not think much of them until these "unnatural links" notices started flying a month ago.

Link Building Targeted by Google Spam Date 04-24-2012

Another round of Google tweaks, including some to catch link manipulators.

Firefox 12.0 Released

Yet another version major version release.

Apple Reports Quarterly Profits Up To $11.6 Billion

Clearly iPad results are driving results, as well as international sales. This is consistent with Apple continuing to capture market share against Android.

Google Drive, Cloud-Based Store Starts With 5GB Free

Drive is built to work seamlessly with your overall Google experience. You can attach photos from Drive to posts in Google+, and soon you'll be able to attach stuff from Drive directly to emails in Gmail. Drive is also an open platform, so we're working with many third-party developers so you can do things like send faxes, edit videos and create website mockups directly from Drive.

Facebook Pays $550 Million For AOL Patents From Microsoft

Facebook is paying Microsoft $550 million in cash for a chunk of the patent portfolio that Microsoft recently acquired from AOL.

Google Launches AdWords For Video

With Google AdWords for video, you only pay when someone chooses to watch your ad, and you can create and manage video campaigns from the same platform as your search and display ads.

Mozilla Smartphone Open OS Ready Late 2012

Speaking at a press conference in Sao Paulo, Gary Kovacs, chief executive of Mozilla, said this openness would make a difference to the way applications on phones operate.B2G aimed to make apps more like webpages and able to share data and links, he said. It did this by basing everything on the latest web standard known as HTML5.

YouTube Could Face Massive Royalty Bill In Germany

A German court ruled today that Google-owned YouTube is solely responsible for the content that users upload and post on the video-sharing website, a decision that could have massive implications for the company.

Microsoft Reports Q3 Revenue 6pct Up at $17.41 Billion

"We're driving toward exciting launches across the entire company, while delivering strong financial results," said Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer at Microsoft.

Tumblr To Add Paid Adverts From May 2, 2012

Blogging platform Tumblr is to introduce paid advertisements on its service, despite its owner once saying that online ads "turn our stomachs".

Closely Examining Site Over-Optimization To Avoid a Google Penalty

WebmasterWorld Members examine the over-optimization aspect of sites likely to be penalised by Google's latest move.

Tim Berners-Lee Wants Users To Have Access To Their Personal Data From Web Giants, Such As Facebook and Google

Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the world wide web, has urged internet users to demand their personal data from online giants such as Google and Facebook to usher in a new era of highly personalised computer services "with tremendous potential to help humanity".

Google Adwords Changes Phrase and Exact Match To Match Close Variants

Starting in mid-May, phrase and exact match keywords will match close variants, including misspellings, singular/plural forms, stemmings, accents and abbreviations. Based on our research and testing, we believe these changes will be broadly beneficial for users and advertisers.

Yahoo's CEO, Scott Thompson, Plans To Close About 50 Non-Core Products

He said he had asked: "How would we build Yahoo from the ground up if we were building it from scratch today?"As a result he said it would be "shutting down or transitioning roughly 50 properties that don't contribute meaningfully to engagement of revenue".

Yahoo Q1 Posts $1,077 Million Revenue, 1pct Up On Previous Year

"In the first quarter, Yahoo!'s results came in at the high end of our guidance range and beat consensus on revenue and profits," said Scott Thompson, CEO of Yahoo!. "We also made changes to resize the organization and establish a new leadership structure to quickly deliver the best user and advertiser experiences at scale."

Twitter Publishes Draft Of Innovators Patent Agreement (IPA)

Typically, engineers and designers sign an agreement with their company that irrevocably gives that company any patents filed related to the employee's work. The company then has control over the patents and can use them however they want, which may include selling them to others who can also use them however they want. With the IPA, employees can be assured that their patents will be used only as a shield rather than as a weapon.

Announcing the Windows 8 Editions

The product names are Windows 8, Windows 8 Pro and Windows RT.

Google AdSense And Responsive Web Design With AdSense Ads

Google AdSense fails on mobile friendly and responsive design website layouts. WebmastersWorld Members discuss workarounds.

Google's Sergey Brin Reacts to Threats Against Net Openess and Access

The threat to the freedom of the internet comes, he claims, from a combination of governments increasingly trying to control access and communication by their citizens, the entertainment industry's attempts to crack down on piracy, and the rise of "restrictive" walled gardens such as Facebook and Apple, which tightly control what software can be released on their platforms.

Microsoft and Yahoo Search Alliance Completing In UK, Ireland, France

Next week, we begin to shift ad serving for Yahoo! Search over to Microsoft Advertising adCenter. This means that adCenter ads will gradually be displayed on Yahoo! Search result pages in the UK, France and Ireland.

Google AdSense Delivering Irelevant Gambling Ads

WebmasterWorld Members discuss the apparent inaccurate ads appearing, and what to do about it.

Google Reports Q1 Revenues Up 24pct Year on Year

Google reported revenues of $10.65 billion for the quarter ended March 31, 2012, an increase of 24pct compared to the first quarter of 2011.

Microsoft to Charge for Bing Search API

"Developers can expect subscription pricing to start at approximately $40 (USD) per month for up to 20,000 queries each month,"

Amazon CloudSearch (Beta) For Developers

Amazon CloudSearch provides a fully-featured search engine that is easy to manage and scale.

ICANN Takes TLD Application System Offline Due To 'Unusual Behavior'

ICANN is taking the most conservative approach possible to protect all applicants and allow adequate time to resolve the issue.

MPAA Says You're Infringing Copyright Just By Embedding Videos

The Motion Picture Association of America is squaring off against a coalition of Internet giants and public interest groups over the key question of whether it's possible to directly infringe copyright by embedding an image or video hosted by a third party.

Google Algo Changes March 2012 and How It Affects Links

WebmasterWorld Members discuss how Google's latest changes affect links.

How I Grew Sales From Zero to 1000 Per Month on Amazon via Indie Publishing

As a child, I dreamed of becomming an author. I read some blogs last year, a few case studies and then did a test run. (-Subscription required)

Antitrust Lawsuit: U.S. Justice Dept. Filed Against Apple, Hachette

The U.S. sued Apple Inc., Hachette SA, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon and Schuster in New York district court, claiming the publishers colluded to fix eBook prices.

Google+ Given a Facelift

Google says it has made G+ more functional and flexible.

Google SERPs Pollution Using Microdata

WebmasterWorld Members discuss the use, and apparent abuse of microdata to produce visibly different SERPs listings.

Yahoo Patent Filing For eBook Advert System

It suggests users could be offered ads as hyperlinks based within the book's text, in-laid text or even "dynamic content" such as video.

Regaining The Incentive For Creating New Pages

WebmasterWorld Members discuss how to rekindle the entrepreneurial mojo in the face of declining Google AdSense revenues.

Facebook To Acquire Photo Sharing Network, Instagram, For $1bn

This is an important milestone for Facebook because it's the first time we've ever acquired a product and company with so many users. We don't plan on doing many more of these, if any at all. But providing the best photo sharing experience is one reason why so many people love Facebook and we knew it would be worth bringing these two companies together.

Report: Google+ Up 27pct Feb-Mar 2012

But the ever-elusive engagement figure for Google+ still remains mysterious: What percentage of its total users are logging into their profiles, adjusting their circles, and commenting on friends' posts each day, week, or month?

April 2012 Google AdSense Earnings and Observations

WebmasterWorld's AdSense barometer - a monthly look at Google AdSense earnings and observations.

Google AdWords Now Has Better Local Targeting Including US Zip Code

"To help you organize your local ad campaigns this spring, we're introducing three new features in AdWords to help you create ads that are more relevant to local customers."

Twitter Turns To The Law To Shut Down Spammers

This morning, we filed suit in federal court in San Francisco against five of the most aggressive tool providers and spammers.

Google's Larry Page 2012 Update

I believe that by producing innovative technology products that touch people deeply, we will enable you to do truly amazing things that change the world. It's a very exciting time to be at Google, and I take the responsibility I have to all of you very seriously.

WebmasterWorld Weekly Roundup April 5

WebmasterWorld's weekly roundup of hot topics and discussions you may have missed in the last few days. (-Subscription required)

Flashback Trojan Hitting Apple Macs

According to researchers, as many as 600,000 Macs have the malware installed. Apple has issue a software update.

UK and EU Cookie Permissions Compliance

WebmasterWorld Members discuss the UK and EU Cookie Law and how to make your site compliant.

Google Display Campaign Organizer Rolled Out To All

With greater adoption and a significantly improved engine, we're excited to announce that Display Campaign Optimizer is exiting "beta" and available to all advertisers through AdWords.

Yahoo To 'Re-Shape The Company' And Cuts Around 2,000 Jobs

"Today's actions are an important next step toward a bold, new Yahoo!, smaller, nimbler, more profitable and better equipped to innovate as fast as our customers and our industry require.""Today, the company will begin the process of informing employees about these changes. As part of that effort, approximately 2,000 people will be notified of job elimination or phased transition."

Google Announces Updates - Apr 2012

Google announced 50 changes for March.

Australian Court Finds Google Liable For Misleading Ads

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) said the ruling meant that not only Google, but other Internet search engines, would now be held responsible for "deceptive paid search results."

Bing Enhances Video Search

Bing has announced some enhancements to its video search.

Google Updates and SERP Changes - Apr 2012

WebmasterWorld's monthly look at Google's SERPs changes.

The eCommerce Site Is Growing, So How Best To Transition From Owner To CEO

WebmasterWorld Members discuss how best an eCommerce business moves from a small operation where the owner does a lot of different jobs, to the owner becoming a CEO. How to plan for staffing, management, and delegation without losing the opportunity for continued growth and profits.

Competitors Hurting Sites Through Bad Backlink Profiles In Google

WebmasterWorld Members discuss the apparent re-emergence of competitors developing unnatural links, possibly established to hurt another site's ranking.

Spending Too Much Time Filing DMCA Complaints to Pinterest

Pinterest has an easy-to-use DMCA interactive complaint form. Unfortunately, when a webmaster is faced with hundreds and hundreds of full-size images being stolen and displayed on Pinterest, filing hundreds and hundreds of DMCA complaints for every single image is extraordinarily tedious.

Google Research: The Impact of Organic Ranking on Ad Click Incrementality

On average, 50pct of the ad clicks that occur with a top rank organic result are incremental, compared to 100pct of the ad clicks being incremental in the absence of an associated organic result.

Google AdSense Launches New Ad Review Center

...we're rolling out an entirely new version of the Ad review center. It'll give you more control over your ads and make it easier than ever to manage the ads showing on your pages.

Webmasters; Let Googlebot Crawl your JS and CSS

In a new video "public service announcement" Matt Cutts asks webmasters to remove robots.txt disallow rules for js and css files.

Bing SERPs Update Reported

WebmasterWorld Members are reporting Microsoft's Bing SERPs update.

New Google Panda Rollout March 23, 2012

WebmasterWorld Members discuss the latest Google Panda Rollout.

Japanese Court Instruct Google to Disable Part Of Search Autocomplete

Google has been ordered to disable part of its autocomplete function in Japan after complaints it violates privacy.

Link Buying: The Dilemma of Reporting A Competitor

Should you report someone buying links, or should you just focus on your own promotion? And, is it really a shady practice or just good honest advertising? (-Subscription required)