There are several threads at the Google Webmaster Help forums with Google users saying they are seeing ads on the Google home page, but the ads are specific to adult sites and pornography.

Here is a screen capture of what one user saw but cleaned up a bit:



One thinks it had to do with an extension he added to his browser related to a "Mario Game." Others believe they downloaded some weird malware or virus.

If you see this, you can know it is not something Google wants on their home page and you likely installed a virus or malware on your computer.

It is just upsetting that there are several people reporting it in the forums because that means there are likely more affected.


Ref: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-home-porn-ad-15211.html

The time stamp on the Google document that answers the question Can competitors harm ranking? was updated on May 22nd. Although I swear it was updated a couple months ago and I thought I covered it.


There's almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you're concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don't control the content of these pages.


There are several threads saying that this change means that negative SEO is possible and Google admits it by changing this statement. We have threads at WebmasterWorld, TrafficPlanet and Google Webmaster Help.

In fact, the Google Webmaster Help thread was from April 18th, so I am not sure what was changed on May 22nd, because the content copied and pasted in that thread is exactly what I see there. I am thinking maybe the video above the content was added, since Google published that video last week.

Ref: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-can-competitors-harm-me-15210.html

Between August 2008 & May 2012 Google AdSense Ads Had Arrows To Scroll Ads:



After May 21, 2012, Arrows Go Missing:



In fact, Google started testing scrolling AdSense ads back in December 2007 and has stuck with it since mid-2008. So to drop it four years later seems interesting.
AdSense publishers are not sure what to make of the arrows not being there. I do wonder how many users actually clicked on the arrows, I bet it is something like 0.000001% of users.


Ref: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-adsense-scroll-arrows-gone-15174.html

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.



Ref: www.seroundtable.com/google-directory-removal-15151.html

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.


Ref: www.seroundtable.com/google-title-attribute-spam-15152.html

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.



Ref: www.seroundtable.com/bing-update-may-15150.html

Sam Applegate put together this awesomely funny video mashup of Matt Cutts on how to rank number one in Google. As you can see, he took dozens of videos from the Google Webmaster YouTube Channel and pieced them together to make a hilarious video parody.

Here is the video parody:





Ref: www.seroundtable.com/rank-one-in-google-video-15149.html