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’s Algorithms Find Stuffed Title Attributes As Sneaky
  I spotted a thread at Google Webmaster Help where a site owner was upset his page was not ranking well.

  Googler, John Mueller took a look and noticed an unusually high amount of title attributes used on the page…

• Free Directory Sites Dropping Out Of Google?
  A WebmasterWorld thread has one SEO noticing that Google has started to purge their index of the free directory submission web sites.

  He said that about 50% of the free directory submission web sites are no longer to be found in Google…

• Bing Search Update? Crawl Changes?
  There is a single post at WebmasterWorld where a senior member is complaining that Bing has reduced the number of pages they have indexed of his site.

  He said he had about 500,000 URLs URLs indexed and now he only has about 350…

• Video Parody: Google’s Cutts On Ranking #1
  Sam Applegate put together this awesomely funny video mashup of Matt Cutts on how to rank number one in Google. As you can see…
• Classy: Google Chrome Wrist Watch
  Ade Oshineye, a Developer Advocate at Google in the Google+ Developer Relations team who is based in London, took a picture of his new watch. Yea, it is a Google Chrome watch in a blue band with a me

Other Great Search Forum Threads:

• LIVE link with 100′s of credit card numbers… Why hasn’t Google removed it yet????, Google Webmaster Help
• WMT DMCA Complaints… new complaints every day, WebmasterWorld

I spotted a thread at Google Webmaster Help where a site owner was upset his page was not ranking well.

Googler, John Mueller took a look and noticed an unusually high amount of title attributes used on the page, many with tons and tons of keywords and words in the title attribute. John said that the way he is using the title attribute can be seen as “sneaky” to Google’s algorithms.

John wrote:

It looks like a lot of the content on that page (and others within your site) is “hidden” behind title-attributes. To our algorithms, that might look a bit sneaky — and in practice, it doesn’t make that much sense, so I’d recommend going through your pages and making sure that you’re using title-attributes as they would normally be used.

Would you disagree?

Here is one of many examples of the use of the title attribute on this page:

<a class=’rsswidget’ href=’http://androidcommunity.com/htc-desire-c-gets-official-with-pics-galore-20120515/’ title=’Yesterday we mentioned that the specifications and a couple pictures had leaked of the HTC Desire C entry-level smartphone. One of those leaked photographs was an official press shot that came from an errant early publication in a catalog. Iâm not sure if the launch was always planned for today, or if HTC figured it ⦠[…]‘ rel=’nofollow’>

Years ago, on the old RustyBrick web site, I used the title attribute as a way to provide definitions on mouse over of highly technical terms. It actually worked well for users and for Google definitions back in the day.

I removed that feature with the redesign because by now, most our users know what these terms mean.

In any event, this is Google going on the record about something obvious – do not spam the title attribute. Well, do not spam anything.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

A WebmasterWorld thread has one SEO noticing that Google has started to purge their index of the free directory submission web sites.

He said that about 50% of the free directory submission web sites are no longer to be found in Google. I searched for a bunch and about 50% of my searches returned results and 50% did not.

Here is one example:

The big question to me is, is this new? Did Google just remove a bunch of these directories? Is Google going to remove more? What criteria did Google use to decide which ones to remove?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: David Harry is analyzing data and currently after testing 500 directories and says 16% are delisted from Google. So a lot less than 50% but David is researching more and maybe if that list of 500 was increased to 5,000 it would be higher?

Image credit to ShutterStock for directory book

There is a single post at WebmasterWorld where a senior member is complaining that Bing has reduced the number of pages they have indexed of his site.

He said he had about 500,000 URLs URLs indexed and now he only has about 350,000 URLs indexed at Bing. This occurred around May 5th.

So I checked several of my sites at Bing Webmaster Tools and didn’t notice a change in the index rate at all for any of my sites. In fact, here is a screen shot of the index rate for this site, as you can see, there was a little increase one day on May 3rd or so.

But when I looked at my traffic, impressions and clicks, there was a huge change – for the better – on May 7th or 8th:

I also noticed fluctuations in the crawl rate chart, but that seems normal – to be all over the place:

Have you noticed any significant changes at Bing recently?

I am thinking maybe the increase I am seeing is related to the Bing social integration or maybe not?

The last possible Bing update was in late March 2012 according to my records.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.