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:

Google in Class Action Lawsuit Over AdSense for Parked Domains
InformationWeek reports that there’s a class action suit against Google about having AdSense on parked domains when they aren’t likely to yield conversions. In the specific case, a legal services provider had his ads running for about 6 weeks on parked pages. He received over 200,000 impressions, 668 clicks, and zero conversions. The plaintiff spent $136.11 and is disappointed that he had nothing to show for it. By forming a class action suit, he and
What are the Technologies Behind the Google Ranking?
The official Google Blog had a post yesterday about the technologies that are behind the Google ranking, following up from a post about how Google ranks results. Amit Singhal is at it again and he talks about the importance of information retrieval (IR). He goes on to say that Google crawls and indexes pages to understand them and associates important concepts to a page when they’re not actually obvious on the page itself. But what
Search Engine Optimization: You Don’t Know it All
I’ve personally found a number of people who consider that because SEO seems like “optimizing title tags, doing keyword research, and adding a little extra to a website,” they can be search engine optimizers too. In the past few weeks, I stumbled across two very problematic websites from so-called “SEOs” who offer nothing but spammy services. The problem is that they think they’re 100% right. And that’s a discussion that High Rankings Forums members are

Tracking Search Traffic Versus Content Traffic in Microsoft adCenter
Since the tide seems to be shifting and more and more advertisers are opting for Microsoft adCenter over Yahoo Search Marketing, I thought I share with you a recent adCenter related thread from WebmasterWorld. Let’s say you wanted to track your adCenter search traffic differently from your adCenter content network traffic. How do you do it? Well, in Google, it is easy. You just add {ifsearch:} and {ifcontent:} parameters to the URLs and it is
Google Only Uses Exact Match Data for Quality Score Metrics
This may be an obvious fact for many Google AdWords professionals, but I am sure many people do not know this. According to a Google AdWords representative, Google only uses exact match data for quality score analysis data. AdWordsPro Sarah said in a Google Groups thread, Match types does not affect Quality Score (we only collect Quality Score data when the query matches the keyword exactly. The exact match Quality Score is then shared with
More Yahoo Search Changes in July? Oh, Also Google
Let me take you back a few steps before getting into this update. On June 30th, Yahoo announced an update that did not update any of the search results around that date. Several days later, around July 7th, webmasters began to notice a July Yahoo update. Now, I am seeing early reports of an additional Yahoo update. The reports come from WebmasterWorld yesterday, saying that in the real estate niche, “80% of the sites” are

Google Analytics Switch Data Processing Times or Reporting Errors?
Over the course of a month or two, many Google Analytics users began distrusting the reports provided in Google Analytics. We now have more reports, this time via Search Engine Roundtable Forums of Google Analytics not reporting accurate numbers. I noticed yesterday’s reports for this site was down about 20%. I immediately thought, give it a day and see if the numbers are higher tomorrow. They were. The numbers reported for Tuesday on Wednesday, was
Official YouTube Support Comes to Google Groups
The YouTube Blog announced that they have launched a YouTube support forum at Google Groups. The forum can be found at groups.google.com/group/youtube-help. As you know, we track forums for new discoveries, insights and hot topics. So we will be adding this forum to the list of discussions we are tracking. What I find interesting is that the YouTube representatives do not have the standard blue G logo [] by their posts. Instead, they have a

Other Great Search Forum Threads:

15 Signs an SEO Girl Likes You, Sphinn
Added Google Analytics and Custom Search – followed by Huge Traffic Drop, WebmasterWorld
AdWords Downtime: July 19, 10am-3pm PDT, Google Groups
Is this a Google Penalty? Need Help, Google Groups
Online Reputation Management: What Goes Around May Be Total Crap, Sphinn
Re-organising an AdWords campaigns, Google Groups
Remove all Amazon dupe content from site? – hard decision, WebmasterWorld
SES SJ 2008 – Fairmont Hotel 30% discount, Search Engine Watch Forums
Temporary Gmail error (502) on logging in, Google Groups
Twitter Confirms It Has Acquired Summize, WebmasterWorld
Who here has directory type sites that have been canned by Google?, Google Groups
Yahoo Directory bug lets you see your competitors clients, Sphinn