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Google Treats Punycode Domains As Unicode (Japanese Domains)

On January 26, 2010, In SEO, by rustybrick

A Google Webmaster Help thread has discussion around Japanese domains and how Google may treat them. Honestly, I know very little about this topic, so I hope I do justice to this thread.

Example of Punycode domains versus Unicode:

Unicode – http://アアアアア.com
Punycode – http://xn--cckg5dfdwc.com

Google said, for “domain names in Punycode are equivalent to their Unicode versions.” There may be an issue with PageRank being displayed in the Punycode version in the Google Toolbar, but Google assures us that there is PageRank, the equivalent to the Unicode version. JohnMu said in the thread that he would “pass that on to check out” why it isn’t working properly in the toolbar.

So which should you use? Google said, they generally use the “Punycode versions since this is more likely to work across all browsers.”

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

A Google Webmaster Help thread has discussion around Japanese domains and how Google may treat them. Honestly, I know very little about this topic, so I hope I do justice to this thread.

Example of Punycode domains versus Unicode:

Unicode – http://アアアアア.com
Punycode – http://xn--cckg5dfdwc.com

Google said, for “domain names in Punycode are equivalent to their Unicode versions.” There may be an issue with PageRank being displayed in the Punycode version in the Google Toolbar, but Google assures us that there is PageRank, the equivalent to the Unicode version. JohnMu said in the thread that he would “pass that on to check out” why it isn’t working properly in the toolbar.

So which should you use? Google said, they generally use the “Punycode versions since this is more likely to work across all browsers.”

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

The Google Webmaster Tools iGoogle Gadgets Are Broken

On January 25, 2010, In SEO, by rustybrick

For those of you who use iGoogle and use the Webmaster Tools Gadget, you may have noticed that no information is flowing to the gadget. Here is a screen shot from my iGoogle dashboard, which I honestly never go to:

It seemed like the issue became a big issue starting on the 20th. A Google Webmaster Help thread has several webmaster reporting it. Then Jonathan Simon of Google came in and confirmed the bug. He said:

We are currently looking into this issue and hope to have it resolved soon.

There is not estimate time for a fix, but Google is aware of the issue.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

For those of you who use iGoogle and use the Webmaster Tools Gadget, you may have noticed that no information is flowing to the gadget. Here is a screen shot from my iGoogle dashboard, which I honestly never go to:

It seemed like the issue became a big issue starting on the 20th. A Google Webmaster Help thread has several webmaster reporting it. Then Jonathan Simon of Google came in and confirmed the bug. He said:

We are currently looking into this issue and hope to have it resolved soon.

There is not estimate time for a fix, but Google is aware of the issue.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Where Is My Google Reconsideration Request Response?

On January 13, 2010, In SEO, by rustybrick

A Google Webmaster Help thread and a WebmasterWorld thread has questions about the timeline for receiving a response from your reconsideration requests.

About six months ago, Google began sending notifications of status updates on reconsideration requests. But there are two times where Google will not send a notification. As Susan Moskwa said in the Google Webmaster Help thread:

(1) If your site is not (never was) in violation they won’t email you
(2) If your site is still in violation they won’t email you

But recently, over the vacation, it seems like there has been a backlog at Google slowing down the review process. A WebmasterWorldhas two webmasters complaining about the slow down in these requests. Personally, I find it funny they have that much experience with this process that they know when Google is slowing down. Maybe all they do is fix sites killed by Google?

In any event, if you submit a reconsideration request to Google and you did not fix the issues with your site or if you never had issues with your site – you won’t get a response.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help and WebmasterWorld.

Update: Susan commented below, she said:

This is not accurate. We send notifications in all cases after we’ve processed a reconsideration request. What I said was that if you don’t see any significant change in your site’s performance after your request has been processed, that usually indicates one of the two items above.

A Google Webmaster Help thread and a WebmasterWorld thread has questions about the timeline for receiving a response from your reconsideration requests.

About six months ago, Google began sending notifications of status updates on reconsideration requests. But there are two times where Google will not send a notification. As Susan Moskwa said in the Google Webmaster Help thread:

(1) If your site is not (never was) in violation they won’t email you
(2) If your site is still in violation they won’t email you

But recently, over the vacation, it seems like there has been a backlog at Google slowing down the review process. A WebmasterWorldhas two webmasters complaining about the slow down in these requests. Personally, I find it funny they have that much experience with this process that they know when Google is slowing down. Maybe all they do is fix sites killed by Google?

In any event, if you submit a reconsideration request to Google and you did not fix the issues with your site or if you never had issues with your site – you won’t get a response.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help and WebmasterWorld.

Update: Susan commented below, she said:

This is not accurate. We send notifications in all cases after we’ve processed a reconsideration request. What I said was that if you don’t see any significant change in your site’s performance after your request has been processed, that usually indicates one of the two items above.

Google Promises to Fix Google Webmaster Tools API Verification Process in January

On December 30, 2009, In SEO, by rustybrick

Those of you who are patiently waiting for Google to fix the verification tag in the Webmaster Tools API for the past two months just has to wait a bit longer.

In short, those who are tying to use the Webmaster Tools API to verify their sites with Google Webmaster Tools are running into issues. The reason is, the meta tag being generated via the API is wrong and needs to be updated by Google. This has been going on since October 2009.

Dennis G. from Google promised he will finally update it to work in January, sometime. He said:

We’ve partly updated the API already. The rest will be fixed in January. Sorry for the delay.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Those of you who are patiently waiting for Google to fix the verification tag in the Webmaster Tools API for the past two months just has to wait a bit longer.

In short, those who are tying to use the Webmaster Tools API to verify their sites with Google Webmaster Tools are running into issues. The reason is, the meta tag being generated via the API is wrong and needs to be updated by Google. This has been going on since October 2009.

Dennis G. from Google promised he will finally update it to work in January, sometime. He said:

We’ve partly updated the API already. The rest will be fixed in January. Sorry for the delay.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Google Blogger & Webmaster Tools Verification Bug

On December 29, 2009, In SEO, by rustybrick

A Google Webmaster Help thread, written in Italian, has confirmed reports of a bug between Google’s Blogger and Google Webmaster Tools.

Dennis G. from the Google Webmaster Team, who is specifically involved in the verification process, wrote in a Google Webmaster Help thread:”

It looks like we have a bug in our blogger integration. I’ll go fix that. In the meanwhile, try verifying by meta tag instead.

It seems like he is the man that actually goes in to fix the “bug.” How cool is that?

In any event, if you are having problems verifying your Blogger blog with Google Webmaster Tools, know that you are not alone.

There is no ETA for the fix, but Dennis made it sound like it is a quick fix.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

A Google Webmaster Help thread, written in Italian, has confirmed reports of a bug between Google’s Blogger and Google Webmaster Tools.

Dennis G. from the Google Webmaster Team, who is specifically involved in the verification process, wrote in a Google Webmaster Help thread:”

It looks like we have a bug in our blogger integration. I’ll go fix that. In the meanwhile, try verifying by meta tag instead.

It seems like he is the man that actually goes in to fix the “bug.” How cool is that?

In any event, if you are having problems verifying your Blogger blog with Google Webmaster Tools, know that you are not alone.

There is no ETA for the fix, but Dennis made it sound like it is a quick fix.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Google to Add PDF Support to Fetch As Googlebot?

On December 18, 2009, In SEO, by rustybrick

A couple months ago, Google released an incredibly useful feature in the Webmaster Tools labs named fetch as GoogleBot. It basically allowed you to see what GoogleBot sees, enabling you to see crawl issues, hacks, injected links and other webmaster related issues as a GoogleBot. But when it came to PDFs, I don’t think the tool worked properly (yes, it is in labs).

A thread in the Google Webmaster Help forums has one webmaster asking why the feature doesn’t work with his PDFs. He asked:

For example, in the URL in question, http://www.knowitall.com/literature/spec/95731_Pharmaceutical_Excipients_Spec_Sheet.pdf, the text “Pharmaceutical Excipients Database” is in the pdf, but in the “Fetch as GoogleBot” results window, none of those terms are found–the results are basically in binary format. The document is found by the Google Search engine so it is apparently extracting the human readable text.

I couldn’t run a test on that document, but I used a PDF on my server to compare. I ran five different tests on two different domains, with a bunch of different types of PDF documents and they all came out with gibberish binary format results in the fetch as GoogleBot. Here is one sample screenshot:

Not, Susan Moskwa from Google said in that thread:

FYI we’re looking into this issue, so sit tight. If it looks okay in search results the problem is probably not with your site (we’ve been able to reproduce it for other sites as well). Thanks for letting us know.

So it seems like they may get the fetch as GoogleBot feature working for PDF documents?

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

A couple months ago, Google released an incredibly useful feature in the Webmaster Tools labs named fetch as GoogleBot. It basically allowed you to see what GoogleBot sees, enabling you to see crawl issues, hacks, injected links and other webmaster related issues as a GoogleBot. But when it came to PDFs, I don’t think the tool worked properly (yes, it is in labs).

A thread in the Google Webmaster Help forums has one webmaster asking why the feature doesn’t work with his PDFs. He asked:

For example, in the URL in question, http://www.knowitall.com/literature/spec/95731_Pharmaceutical_Excipients_Spec_Sheet.pdf, the text “Pharmaceutical Excipients Database” is in the pdf, but in the “Fetch as GoogleBot” results window, none of those terms are found–the results are basically in binary format. The document is found by the Google Search engine so it is apparently extracting the human readable text.

I couldn’t run a test on that document, but I used a PDF on my server to compare. I ran five different tests on two different domains, with a bunch of different types of PDF documents and they all came out with gibberish binary format results in the fetch as GoogleBot. Here is one sample screenshot:

Not, Susan Moskwa from Google said in that thread:

FYI we’re looking into this issue, so sit tight. If it looks okay in search results the problem is probably not with your site (we’ve been able to reproduce it for other sites as well). Thanks for letting us know.

So it seems like they may get the fetch as GoogleBot feature working for PDF documents?

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Will Google Analytics Hurt My Google Rankings? Speed Issues?

On December 9, 2009, In SEO, by rustybrick

A Google Webmaster Help thread has one webmaster worried that Google will be using page speed as a ranking factor in 2010. But the reason he is worried is because the site performance feature in Webmaster Tools shows Google Analytics as needing some speeding up.

The two suggestions this webmaster gets from Google is related to their own product, Google Analytics. The suggestions read:

(1) Compressing the following resources with gzip could reduce their transfer size by 15.5 KB:
* Go to URLhttps://ssl.google-analytics.com:443/urchin.js (15.5 KB)

(2) The domains of the following URLs only serve one resource each. If possible, avoid the extra DNS lookups by serving these resources from existing domains:
* Go to URLhttps://ssl.google-analytics.com:443/urchin.js

A Googler named sreeram in the forum said it is okay to “ignore the suggestion to gzip urchin.js.” Google actually noted this issue in their announcement where they said, “some servers return uncompressed content for Googlebot, similar to what would be served to older browsers that do not support gzip-compressed embedded content (this is currently the case for Google Analytics’ “ga.js”).”

That response did not satisfy the concern of this webmaster who asked again:

The question is if the speed impact of using these Google products will affect my sites’ rankings?

I hope not, but I also know if has affected my users experience on my site and that affects me.

Google did release asynchronous calls for Google Analytics, which does speed things up a bit.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

A Google Webmaster Help thread has one webmaster worried that Google will be using page speed as a ranking factor in 2010. But the reason he is worried is because the site performance feature in Webmaster Tools shows Google Analytics as needing some speeding up.

The two suggestions this webmaster gets from Google is related to their own product, Google Analytics. The suggestions read:

(1) Compressing the following resources with gzip could reduce their transfer size by 15.5 KB:
* Go to URLhttps://ssl.google-analytics.com:443/urchin.js (15.5 KB)

(2) The domains of the following URLs only serve one resource each. If possible, avoid the extra DNS lookups by serving these resources from existing domains:
* Go to URLhttps://ssl.google-analytics.com:443/urchin.js

A Googler named sreeram in the forum said it is okay to “ignore the suggestion to gzip urchin.js.” Google actually noted this issue in their announcement where they said, “some servers return uncompressed content for Googlebot, similar to what would be served to older browsers that do not support gzip-compressed embedded content (this is currently the case for Google Analytics’ “ga.js”).”

That response did not satisfy the concern of this webmaster who asked again:

The question is if the speed impact of using these Google products will affect my sites’ rankings?

I hope not, but I also know if has affected my users experience on my site and that affects me.

Google did release asynchronous calls for Google Analytics, which does speed things up a bit.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Google Popeye Logo For E. C. Segar’s 115th Birthday

On December 8, 2009, In SEO, by rustybrick

If you visit Google today, you will see a logo of Popeye. The logo is to celebrate Popeye’s creator, E. C. Segar’s 115th birthday. E. C. Segar was born on December 8, 1894. Popeye, the character, was first introduced on January 17, 1929 in a comic strip Thimble Theatre, which was renamed to Popeye later (I believe).

In any event, the logo on the Google.com home page looks like this:

Google typically only shows Google Doodles for light hearted events, such as this. Which is why there was no Doodle for Pearl Harbor yesterday, December 7th. But it did not stop dozens of complaints in the Google Web Search Help Forums.

Forum discussion on Popeye at Google Webmaster Help and DigitalPoint Forums.

If you visit Google today, you will see a logo of Popeye. The logo is to celebrate Popeye’s creator, E. C. Segar’s 115th birthday. E. C. Segar was born on December 8, 1894. Popeye, the character, was first introduced on January 17, 1929 in a comic strip Thimble Theatre, which was renamed to Popeye later (I believe).

In any event, the logo on the Google.com home page looks like this:

Google typically only shows Google Doodles for light hearted events, such as this. Which is why there was no Doodle for Pearl Harbor yesterday, December 7th. But it did not stop dozens of complaints in the Google Web Search Help Forums.

Forum discussion on Popeye at Google Webmaster Help and DigitalPoint Forums.

Google Page Speed Report Comes to Webmaster Tools

On December 3, 2009, In SEO, by rustybrick

Like all you know, page speed with be a ranking factor in Google in 2010 and if you didn’t believe it until now, maybe Google adding a page speed report to Google Webmaster Tools will convince you of that.

I figured I show you detailed screen shots of how slow this site is, using this tool.

As you can see from the chart below, this site is slower than 86% of the other sites on the Internet. The chart does slow slight improvement, but clearly, I need to clean things up here – quick.

Then Google shows me example load times for specific pages on my site:

Then Google offers speed suggestions:

I can drill down deeper on a specific page to see exactly what is suggested:

Figured I slam my own site over someone elses – why not.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help and WebmasterWorld.

Like all you know, page speed with be a ranking factor in Google in 2010 and if you didn’t believe it until now, maybe Google adding a page speed report to Google Webmaster Tools will convince you of that.

I figured I show you detailed screen shots of how slow this site is, using this tool.

As you can see from the chart below, this site is slower than 86% of the other sites on the Internet. The chart does slow slight improvement, but clearly, I need to clean things up here – quick.

Then Google shows me example load times for specific pages on my site:

Then Google offers speed suggestions:

I can drill down deeper on a specific page to see exactly what is suggested:

Figured I slam my own site over someone elses – why not.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help and WebmasterWorld.

Google Sitelinks Linking to Wrong Sites?

On November 17, 2009, In SEO, by rustybrick

A WebmasterWorld thread reports that someone is noticing that his site’s Sitelinks in Google are pointing to a different site. I am not sure how that is possible. How can Google link a Sitelink for one site to a different site? But according to this webmaster, it is true.

I do not have any proof that this is happening, nor will I ever get proof because WebmasterWorld does not allow examples. But I believe it is possible that with DNS changes and shared IPs, it is possible that Google can be confused and link to the wrong place.

There were cases where Google got the wrong site for the info operator and the cache being the wrong page, but never a Sitelink.

If this happens to you, the first thing you should do is block those Sitelinks in Google Webmaster Tools. Then post evidence at Google Webmaster Help.

As Tedster said at WebmasterWorld:

Sounds like a particularly nasty data bug. Does that sitelink show up in your Webmaster Tools account? If so, you can veto it. If not, you could take the issue up on the Google Webmaster forum or try a reconsideration request.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports that someone is noticing that his site’s Sitelinks in Google are pointing to a different site. I am not sure how that is possible. How can Google link a Sitelink for one site to a different site? But according to this webmaster, it is true.

I do not have any proof that this is happening, nor will I ever get proof because WebmasterWorld does not allow examples. But I believe it is possible that with DNS changes and shared IPs, it is possible that Google can be confused and link to the wrong place.

There were cases where Google got the wrong site for the info operator and the cache being the wrong page, but never a Sitelink.

If this happens to you, the first thing you should do is block those Sitelinks in Google Webmaster Tools. Then post evidence at Google Webmaster Help.

As Tedster said at WebmasterWorld:

Sounds like a particularly nasty data bug. Does that sitelink show up in your Webmaster Tools account? If so, you can veto it. If not, you could take the issue up on the Google Webmaster forum or try a reconsideration request.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The Google Webmaster Tools iGoogle Gadgets Are Broken

Where Is My Google Reconsideration Request Response?

Google Promises to Fix Google Webmaster Tools API Verification Process in January

Google Blogger & Webmaster Tools Verification Bug

Google to Add PDF Support to Fetch As Googlebot?

Will Google Analytics Hurt My Google Rankings? Speed Issues?

Google Popeye Logo For E. C. Segar’s 115th Birthday

Google Page Speed Report Comes to Webmaster Tools

Google Sitelinks Linking to Wrong Sites?

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