Canadian SEO guest blog with information from North American SEO leaders.

A few days ago, Microsoft Bing launched another advertising campaign on the domain name scroogled.com.

It basically explains how Google has always said their search results will be unbiased and the ads would not play a role in the organic search results. But now, Google switched their shopping search to a purely paid model. Yea, Google is being pretty hypocritical if you look at their past statements – but they are not hiding that it is paid.

In any event, Danny Sullivan explains that while Google is doing this, Bing is calling them out for the same thing Bing Shopping does. Danny writes:

Bing is attacking Google over its shift to a pay-for-play shopping search engine through a new “Scroogled” site, pledging that Bing has “honest search.” Great campaign, if it were true. It’s not. Bing itself does the same things it accuses Google of. It’s also another indictment of how little the FTC is doing to protect consumers from “search results” they might not realize are ads.

You can check out the scroogled.com site out to see how Bing goes about it.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Bradley Horowitz, Google’s VP of Google+, has a new Tesla Model S and he showed us how Google+ loads on the console screen in the car.

I wish I had a display like this in my car. How sweet!

Technology baked into the car – a beautiful thing.

Bradley shared this on Google+.

This post is part of our daily Search Photo of the Day column, where we find fun and interesting photos related to the search industry and share them with our readers.

I’ve said this before, espesially with the disavow tool and removing links in general.

If your site has a link penalty or another penalty, and that penalty is removed – it doesn’t mean your rankings will return after the penalty is removed.

Think about it for a second…

You have a ton of links that is driving your Google rankings to the top results. Then Google notices something fishy about the links and applies a manual penalty to your site for the unnatural links. So you go about removing the links manually or via the disavow tool.

All you are doing is removing links that Google already to manual action on. Maybe your rankings will increase a bit but it likely will not increase to the levels before your penalty.

Why? Because your original rankings were based off of Google counting those links – now they won’t because (1) Google caught them and/or (2) you removed them or disavowed them.

We have a case of this at Google Webmaster Help where one webmaster complained just about this. The response by one SEO was dead on:

In process of removing spam back links, you will lose some sort of weight age of links and trust factor in search engines. you need to improve your authority and build few related high quality back links. to make your website perform better.

Experienced SEOs understand this, new SEOs won’t.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

The Google Local Business forum is filled with questions, bugs, confusion and concerns. So Jade Wang of Google posted an FAQ in the Google Business Help forum on the topic of merging your local pages in Google+.

The title of the FAQ is named “Issues with merging the local business/place page in Google+ and the local Google+ page (with reviews)?”

It then goes into a nicely outlined format to help with many issues. Here is that post:

- Help! My social local Google+ page (that I made in the local business/place category) has been verified but doesn’t seem to have merged with the correct reviews.

– Submit these pages to be merged as duplicates here, selecting, “There is a duplicate listing that I would like to have removed.”

- The social local Google+ page I made is stuck in verification and still says “In progress” after over a week.

– A handful of pages appear seem to be stuck in verification, and we’re working on getting them out. Sit tight!

- The PIN I received isn’t working.

– Make sure your business location is findable on Google Maps. Go into http://maps.google.com and type in the exact text you have as your address on the page. Make sure Maps can find your location without needing to go through any “Did you mean…?” links.

– Make sure no information on the page is set to “Private.”

– Don’t change any info on your page in between requesting the PIN and entering the PIN.

– Request a new PIN if possible.

– If you can’t request a new PIN, contact support via the Google+ verification troubleshooter.

- I’m getting a 500 error when I try to manage the verified/merged page.

– Report to me on this thread

– This is a known issue the team’s trying to pin down.

– There may be a workaround. Try accessing your page through https://plus.google.com/b/######## (as opposed to the usual https://plus.google.com/########)

- I’m getting a 500 error when trying to verify the page.

– Report to me on this thread

– Team’s aware and working on a fix.

Forum discussion at Google Business Help.

Some AdSense publishers are saying they have received an invitation from Google named “Learn with Google.” There is a thread of a bunch of these publishers talking about it at WebmasterWorld.

Google has AdSense events all the time, but this one is different. One publisher said:

It looks similar to the Adsense in Your City events, but this is an all day thing with breakfast and a happy hour.

I did find a “Learn with Google” landing page over here but it seems more AdWords focused than AdSense focused.

If anyone has a picture of the email invite, feel free to attach it to the comments.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There are some business owners stuck in limbo within the Google+ Local verification process. This is not a new bug, but there are many still with this problem.

As discussed at Google Business Help forums, business owners try to verify their businesses in Google+ Local but it just stays in process forever.

One business owner said it has been in this step for over a month, he wrote:

My Google + page is not appearing but it has been verified. The status up the top says ‘In progress’. This has been like that for over a month now. Can you please get back to me urgently.

Google’s Jade Wang responded saying they are aware of the issue and engineers are trying to fix it. She wrote:

It seems like these pages are affected by an issue where the pages get stuck in the verification process. The team’s aware and working on a solution.

Jade must have the most depressing job at Google. All she does is respond to bugs all day.

Forum discussion at Google Business Help.

I didn’t know Google had a glittery side to it. Richard Hay from Google shared yet another picture on Google+ of a sign somewhere in Google of the Google logo in glitter.

How sparkly!

This post is part of our daily Search Photo of the Day column, where we find fun and interesting photos related to the search industry and share them with our readers.

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 Webmaster Tools Security Breach Fixed
  
  Last night, there was a pretty significant security breach giving unauthorized access to your Google Webmaster Tools. Google has fixed the security issue this morning but not after it being an issue for probably about 12 hours.




• Tons Of “Not Selected” In Google Index Status?
  
  About five months ago, Google introduced additional index status reports that showed a lot more information about how Google indexed your site.
  
  Recently, a lot of webmasters have been asking about the “not selected” number…




• Monitor Google AdWords Ad Disapprovals With New Reports
  
  Google quietly added additional columns you can add to your AdWords reports to monitor and maintain your ad disapprovals…




• Raven & SEOmoz Tools Blocked From Using Google AdWords API
  
  Kahena first discovered that Google was blocking access to their AdWords API on tools like SEOmoz and Raven.
  
  Pamela from Search Engine Land received confirmation from Google that they do review and audit usage of the API and take action when necessary…




• Google In Hebrew (????) Gematria
  
  An image floating around the Jewish and Israeli search community is the calculation of Google spelled in hebrew and the meaning of the numbers. Google, spelled in Hebrew is ????. If you add up the v

Other Great Search Forum Threads:

• Android App Reviews Now Require Google+ Account, WebmasterWorld
• Mobile friendly – Vary Http header question, WebmasterWorld
• Blackhat attempts vs my site – disavow or ignore?, WebmasterWorld
• Same Content For Diferents Cities, HighRankings Forums

Last night, there was a pretty significant security breach giving unauthorized access to your Google Webmaster Tools. Google has fixed the security issue this morning but not after it being an issue for probably about 12 hours.

@patrickaltoft pinged me about this last night on Twitter but I didn’t see the issue myself in Google Webmaster Tools. Plus I didn’t see any other complaints about it in the Google Webmaster forums. But State Of Search blog and David Naylor saw it and documented the issue. We later covered it at Search Engine Land after not hearing back from Google about the issue.

This morning, Google sent us a statement saying:

For several hours yesterday a small set of Webmaster Tools accounts were incorrectly re-verified for people who previously had access. We’ve reverted these accounts and are investigating ways to prevent this issue from recurring.

It is unclear if any damage was done over that 12 hour period but for some, it was incredibly nerve racking knowing that some people may have unauthorized access to your Webmaster Tools account and do some serious damage to your site in Google.

Here is a screen shot from David Naylor showing the unauthorized access:

This morning I spotted only a couple threads with complaints about the issue.

Did any damage happen to your site’s due to this?

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.