I just found out that a YouTube Strike is is on my video channel, and that certainly can’t be good!

Over the past few months I’ve been using a simple embed code from YouTube to share the videos over at SEO Automatic, and it’s been easy enough.

Inside of Google Webmaster Tools, there is an option called “Fetch As Googlebot” that is supposed to go crawl that page and return what it sees.

Until this moment, I’ve never had much use for this, but that’s not the case now!

I discovered a problem when a website which had been hacked and then fixed was still showing the polluted snippet in the description on the results page.

Yesterday Google released a more Bingish looking version of its homepage (what comes next, daily photos?) that has a new font, brighter colors, more earning potential for them, and probably more earning potential for you too.

After hitting the now more visible “More” link, there’s a new menu that you can’t possibly miss.

One of our mail servers has again been added to a spam blacklist, meaning that we are banned from sending e-mail, undoubtedly due to one of our hosting customers who has been sending bulk e-mail.

Technically, we can still send, but the users at Yahoo, MSN, and dozens of other providers will temporarily not accept mail from that mail servers IP address.

Google is all over the map in the way it displays search results,  but it looks like  SEO, web-hosting, and web design are not!

Well, technically they’re still  “on the map”  but the map is not showing up any more in Google searches.

Yes, in case you missed the news,  Google local map results are not being shown any more for web designers, for search marketing firms,  or web hosting.

Before Google’s announcement that the speed at which your site loads for visitors “matters”, we’d all heard it said repeatedly that it did NOT matter for organic rankings, but that it may someday, and it seems that day arrived early last month.

There were a few changes at Google this month which I’ve been pointing out to clients, so I’m posting them here too.

I added the month to my title, because I expect we’ll be seeing a lot more of these types of game changers as time goes on.

Doing a search the other day I was stunned to see a new interface from Google showing me tabbed results, with other relevant search phrases lined up across the top.

I had been using a brand new laptop, so I walked over to my main computer to get a screen shot, and  I wasn’t able to re-create them.  I went back to the laptop, did a search, and *poof*  they were gone.

Last night my kids had football practice, and I had an 8pm commitment too, but I wanted to attend last nights monthly SEMpdx event, which was David Mihm’s presentation on local search.

Recently, I’ve found myself working with some very small local businesses, and several sites for friends and casual acquaintances. I wanted to see what was new and important, so I blew off my family, and went to the presentation anyway. Nice, huh?

While browsing through the stats of some (very poorly maintained) sites of our own, I found one that had zero traffic for quite a few weeks. Visiting the site, I saw no site, and just a “Cannot connect to database” error.

A glance at the toolbar showed me a PR zero, and indexed pages in Google (site:domain.com) brought up nothing but a few wp-content pages that should have been blocked by a robots file anyway. Sigh.

I was just mid-session on Google Webmaster tools, when I clicked on a link and saw the message – “that page no longer exists”.  Huh?

I went back to my home page for WMT, and that too was a bad link. Weird. So, i went to my IGoogle home Page, went back into Google Webmaster Tools, and “wham” everything was different!

“Universal Search” was implemented by Google quite a while ago, yet the only visible change to the search results has been occasional interspersing of some video or news.

Search was not really “revolutionized” or “changed as we knew it”, and most users have absorbed the subtle addition without even noticing.