Google, SEO, SEM y un poco más

Tened en cuenta esta nota: A partir del 1 de Abril Google aplicarà una serie de cambios en la politica permitida en el campo “display url”.

Aunque los cambios tienen todo el sentido del mundo, y posiblemente afecten a poca gente… sería recomendable revisar  con antelación si nos afectará o no dicha nueva política.

No sea que luego tengamos que correr

We’d like to give you advance notice of an update to our display URL policy, which will take effect on April 1st. While the majority of advertisers will not be affected at all, action will be required from those who are. Please take a few minutes to read this post thoroughly, as the information below should help you determine whether you will be affected by this change.

In response to advertiser and user feedback, and in an effort to provide more relevant advertising results and a higher quality experience for our users, we have made the decision to no longer allow certain exceptions with regards to our display URL policy. This includes, but is not limited to redirects and vanity URLs. This policy will be strictly enforced regardless of past approvals and will apply to all advertisers, beginning on April 1st.

In line with our existing policy, we will continue to require that your ad’s display URL match its destination URL (the URL of your landing page).

For example, if your destination URL is www.google.com, your display URL must also be www.google.com. The following would not be acceptable display URLs for an ad for www.google.com:
www.google.co.uk - because this URL leads to a different site
www.gogle.com - even though this URL simply redirects to www.google.com it is still not acceptable
www.gooogle.com - because this URL leads to a page showing content identical to www.google.com
What about tracking URLs?
We do understand that many advertisers utilize tracking URLs within the destination field of their ads. Therefore, if the URL of your landing page matches that of your display URL, your ads will be approved.

For example:

Display URL: www.google.com/adwords
Destination URL: www.trackingurl.com/google123
–> Landing page URL: www.google.com would be acceptable

Display URL: www.google.com/adwords
Destination URL: www.trackingurl.com/google123
–> Landing page URL: www.trackingurl.com would not be acceptable

Are sub-domains still acceptable?
Yes, the use of sub-domains and additional text within the display will continue to be acceptable provided the top-level domain matches the URL of your landing page.

For example, display URLs such as the following:

sub.google.com
google.com/extratext
www.google.com/extratext

would all be acceptable for the landing page URL below, as the top-level domain of google.com is matched:

http://sub.google.com/miscellaneous

In light of this update to display URL policy, we’d encourage you to make any necessary changes to your ads in advance of the April 1st date to ensure that they’ll run without disruption by future disapprovals related to this policy.

Thanks for reading this far, and please note that more information will be provided before April 1st via alerts in all AdWords accounts.

Os adjunto un resumen interesante de las Q&A del último PubCon. Como siempre… interesante.

Site Verification Files and Meta Tags
Several webmasters asked, “Is it necessary to keep the verification meta tag or HTML file in place to remain a verified owner in Webmaster Tools?” The answer is yes, you should keep your verification file or meta tag live to maintain your status as a verified owner. These verification codes are used to control who has access to the owner-specific tools for your site in Webmaster Tools. To ensure that only current owners of a site are verified, we periodically re-check to see if the verification code is in place, and if it is not, you will get unverified for that site. While we’re on the topic:

Site Verification Best Practices
If you have multiple people working on your site with Webmaster Tools, it’s a good idea to have each person verify the site with his or her own account, rather than using a shared login. That way, as people come and go, you can control the access appropriately by adding or removing verification files or meta tags for each account.
You may want to keep a list of these verification codes and which owner they are connected to, so you can easily control access later. If you lose track, you can always use the “Manage site verification” option in Webmaster Tools, which allows you to force all site owners to reverify their accounts.
Subdomains vs. Subdirectories
What’s the difference between using subdomains and subdirectories? When it comes to Google, there aren’t major differences between the two, so when you’re making that decision, do what works for you and your visitors. Following PubCon, our very own Matt Cutts outlined many of the key issues in a post on his personal blog. In addition to those considerations, if you use Webmaster Tools (which we hope you do!), keep in mind that you’ll automatically be verified for deeper subdirectories of any sites you’ve verified, but subdomains need to be verified separately.

Underscores vs. Dashes
Webmasters asked about the difference between how Google interprets underscores and dashes in URLs. In general, we break words on punctuation, so if you use punctuation as separators, you’re providing Google a useful signal for parsing your URLs. Currently, dashes in URLs are consistently treated as separators while underscores are not. Keep in mind our technology is constantly improving, so this distinction between underscores and dashes may decrease over time. Even without punctuation, there’s a good chance we’ll be able to figure out that bigleopard.html is about a “big leopard” and not a “bigle opard.” While using separators is a good practice, it’s likely unnecessary to place a high priority on changing your existing URLs just to convert underscores to dashes.

Keywords in URLs
We were also asked if it is useful to have relevant keywords in URLs. It’s always a good idea to be descriptive across your site, with titles, ALT attributes, and yes, even URLs, as they can be useful signals for users and search engines. This can be especially true with image files, which otherwise may not have any text for a search engine to consider. Imagine you’ve taken a picture of your cat asleep on the sofa. Your digital camera will likely name it something like IMG_2937.jpg. Not exactly the most descriptive name. So unless your cat really looks like an IMG_2937, consider changing the filename to something more relevant, like adorable-kitten.jpg. And, if you have a post about your favorite cat names, it’s much easier to guess that a URL ending in my-favorite-cat-names would be the relevant page, rather than a URL ending in postid=8652. For more information regarding issues with how Google understands your content, check out our new content analysis feature in Webmaster Tools, as well as our post on the URL suggestions feature of the new Google Toolbar.

Moving to a new IP address
We got a question about changing a site’s IP address, and provided a few steps you can take as a webmaster to make sure things go smoothly. Here’s what you can do:
Change the TTL (Time To Live) value of your DNS configuration to something short, like five minutes (300 seconds). This will tell web browsers to re-check the IP address for your site every five minutes.
Copy your content to the new hosting environment, and make sure it is live on the new IP address.
Change your DNS settings so your hostname points to the new IP address.
Check your logs to see when Googlebot starts crawling your site on the new IP address. To make sure it’s really Googlebot who’s visiting, you can verify Googlebot by following these instructions. You can then log into Webmaster Tools and monitor any crawl errors. Once Googlebot is happily crawling on the new IP address, you should be all set as far as Google is concerned.
To make sure everyone got the message of your move, you may want to keep an eye out for visits to your old IP address before shutting it down.
Proxies
A few webmasters were concerned that proxy services are being indexed with copies of their content. While it’s often possible to find duplicate copies of your content in our results if you look hard enough, the original source is most likely going to be ranked higher than a proxy copy. However, if you find this not to be the case, please drop us some URLs in the Webmaster Help Group. There are many Googlers including myself who monitor this group and escalate issues appropriately.

Ultimamente estamos deployando una estratégia de Adwords a nivel Europeo, y hemos detectado algunas diferéncias muy, muy relevantes.

Almenos, son diferéncias que de haberlas sabido… nos hubieran modificado algunas prioridades

De hecho, me quadran a la perfección con un cuadro que vi en algun site, con las previsiones de inversión en publicidad en toda la zona “Western Europe”.

Para que os hagais una idea… Francia era una de nuestras primeras prioridades… pero claro: Hemos podido comprobar (y coincide con estas previsiones) que es uno de los paises con mas competéncia !!! (a parte del todo poderoso uk, claro).

En fin: Una información muy interesante.

Si pretendeis entrar en Francia, UK y/o Alemania –> Guardaros un buen budget, o no hareis nada de nada.

Sin embargo… Italia, y otros paises menos “desarrollados” permiten inversiones mas controladas.

Espero que os sirva !!! (Ojala lo hubiera tenido yo antes)

Este post es solo para aquellos que les interese saber como Google tiene organizado uno de sus Datacenters (el que tienen en Oregon).

Se basa en 3 edificios, un espacio de parking bastante grande… y un dimensionamiento electrico (en cuanto a capacidad espectacular !!!).

El plano es originario de Harper’s Magazine. Me ha parecido interesante.