Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Google News Has Major Redesign: Personalization, Sharing & “News Stream” OfferedToday, Google News is undergoing its first major redesign since being launched in 2002. Gone is the default “section” view, replaced instead by a “news stream” view of stories. Creating a personalized collection of stories has been made easier, as is the ability to share stories with friends and others via email, Twitter, Google Buzz [. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | SearchCap

Today, Google News is undergoing its first major redesign since being launched in 2002. Gone is the default "section" view, replaced instead by a "news stream" view of stories. Creating a personalized collection of stories has been made easier, as is the ability to share stories with friends and others via email, Twitter, Google Buzz or Facebook. Let's dive in and see what's new. Old Google News To benchmark what's changed, here's how "old" Google News appeared: As you can see, the page was designed primarily to present stories in "sections." At the top were "Top Stories," then se [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Content | Features: General | Google: News | Top News

French regulators said today that "Google had abused its dominant position in the internet advertising market when it barred a location data company from using its AdWords service," according to a report appearing in the Financial Times. The complainant is Navx, a company that provides "geolocalized content" of various sorts. The company complained to French authorities that its AdWords account had been wrongly suspended by Google. The "ruling" in this case requires Google to reinstate the company's AdWords account "within five days." According to a quote in the FT's article: Sixty per [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Google: Legal | Google: Outside US | Legal: General | Top News

After a protracted set of M&A discussions with Yahoo and Facebook (and perhaps others), Foursquare announced that it had secured $20 million in funding from several VCs: Union Square Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. CEO Dennis Crowley discussed the funding and how it would be used in his blog post: With this new round of financing, our main priority will be to expand our organization to supplement the amazing core team we’ve assembled already (know any great engineers? send them our way!). We’re hoping to build a world-class engineering organization [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Local | Foursquare

Most people have never heard of ITA. However it's the dominant company that provides reservations (inventory management) software and performs other functions for the travel industry. The company's client list includes major airlines such as American and Continental as well as popular travel sites such as Kayak and Orbitz. ITA is foundational infrastructure for many of these firms. The revelation that Google has been in discussions to buy ITA is reportedly unnerving to many of those companies that use its software. According to Reuters: The concerns are so real that Kayak offered to buy I [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Google: Acquisitions

On July 6th, you'll be able to purchase a printed book written by Yahoo called The Yahoo! Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World. Putting aside for a moment the irony of providing an online style guide as a printed book, what's this style guide all about? The first style guide of its kind? The press release says it's the "first guide of its kind to focus on the specific issues associated with developing content for the online medium". That's not true, of course. I started using the Yale Web Style Guide when it was first publi [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | SEO - Search Engine Optimization | Yahoo: SEO

Yahoo published their very own Yahoo Style Guide this week. We took a look at the SEO basics section of the style guide and noticed Yahoo has a list of keyword research tools. In that list, Yahoo recommends everyone from their competitor, Google to 3rd party tools from WordTracker and Keyword Discovery. Many of you probably remember that Yahoo was the king of keyword research tools. Everyone used the Overture keyword tool, which lived at http://inventory.overture.com/. Yahoo, after acquiring Overture, slowly been killing this popular tool and finally laid it to rest two years ago today. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Microsoft & Yahoo Search Deal | SEM Tools: Keyword Research | Top News | Yahoo: Search | Yahoo: Search Ads

Nothing is more certain in the world of SEO than the fact that things will change over time. Rankings, search traffic, search algorithms and your website’s structure and content are all mutable. In order to maximize the value of your optimization efforts, it is important to know not only the nature of any given change, but when it occurred. At a fundamental level, it is impossible to make a relationship between cause and effect without knowing the sequence of events. To this end, it is useful for SEO to plot relevant events and data against a timeline. This is especially true for in-house [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | How To: SEO | In House Search Marketing

The Google AdWords Blog wrote that yesterday at about 4:30pm to 7:30pm (EST), there was an AdWords ad serving bug that prevented ads from being displayed. Google said the ads were not showing on Google.com and Search Partner sites at around 4:40pm. Google posted the issue at 6:30pm and updated the post about an hour later saying the issue has been fully resolved. So it appears that the ad serving issue lasted for about 3 hours or so. Google apologized and said: Again, we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. Our engineers are working to ensure that this type of i [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Google: AdWords

Getting a prospect to your website is only half the battle. Successful B2B search marketing programs must also focus on the "post-click" experience. Here are five proven ways to improve B2B landing pages and increase your search marketing conversion rate. 1. Support your brand. Build trust. Landing pages that are aligned with your brand demonstrate credibility and strengthen customer loyalty. Your search marketing landing pages should be consistent with corporate logo, color, font and language standards. For example, a landing page logo should be prominently located and in the same rel [...]

Related Topics: B2B Search Marketing | Channel: Search | How To: SEM

Did you know that the US is the world's second-largest Spanish-speaking country? It’s true. In fact, there are 46.3 million Hispanics in the US today, and 20 million of them use the internet. Are you targeting the Hispanic market with search? If not, perhaps it’s time you considered doing so. Understanding the opportunity Clearly, the US is undergoing a dramatic shift in demographics. Today, Hispanics represent the largest middle class group in the US, and over 88 percent have a household income of $50,000. Moreover, according to eMarketer, on average Hispanics spend more than 14 ho [...]

Related Topics: Brand Aid | Channel: Strategy

You can significantly increase both your conversion rates and the quality of your prospect list by using some of these risk reversal strategies on your lead generation web pages.

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | Search & Conversion

Since Google launched XML Sitemaps back in 2005, they've added specialized formats to enable site  owners to submit content other than web pages. Until now, site owners have had to create separate Sitemaps for each content type: Mobile News Video Geo Images Code Search That's now changed. You can now create a single XML Sitemap that contains any combination of these content types. The Google Webmaster Central blog post doesn't mention News Sitemaps, so presumably news content can't be mixed with the other types. Great news for site owners? Possibly. It may be easier to cre [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Webmaster Central | SEO: Submitting & Sitemaps | Top News

Search Week is an exclusive weekly newsletter for Search Engine Land premium members that recaps stories covered on Search Engine Land over the past week. Below are top stories organized by topic that happened over the past week. Each topic (or Search Engine Land column) is also a link, where you can click through and drill into the Search Engine Land members library to find other stories in that area. Because some stories are listed in more than one category, you may see them repeated. Top News Google Is Top Shopping Site, TheFind Passes Yahoo As The New Number Two Google Street [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | Search Week

Search Week is an exclusive weekly newsletter for Search Engine Land premium members that recaps stories covered on Search Engine Land over the past week. Below are top stories organized by topic that happened over the past week. Each topic (or Search Engine Land column) is also a link, where you can click through and drill into the Search Engine Land members library to find other stories in that area. Because some stories are listed in more than one category, you may see them repeated. Top News Live Blog: Right Time, Right Place - Location Services & MarketingLive Blog: Google's [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | Search Week

The world's most popular online trust mark, the VeriSign seal has helped web sites increase transactions an average of 24%. Daily malware scans help keep your site off search engine blacklists. The trust seal displays next to your search result in leading search engines to maximize incoming traffic. Learn more [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | Sponsor Messages

Google Social Search, which shows content from those in your social circle, is now tapping into a new source of knowing what your friends are writing about, sharing and creating: Google Buzz. Remind Me: What's Google Social Search? For those unfamiliar with Google Social Search, it launched across all of Google in January, after initially rolling out as an experiment last October. When you're signed in to Google, the service shows matching web pages and other content on the topic of your search that's created by your friends or others that Google has determined that you're "connected" [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Social Search | Top News

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Google No Longer Redirecting Google China To Google Hong KongGoogle announced they are no longer allowed under Chinese law to redirect Google.cn to Google.com.hk. The Chinese government told Google that they won’t renew their license to operate in China if they continue to do the redirect. Google’s solution? Create a landing page on Google.cn, which appears to be a search box, [...] Why Logic Rules As A Link Builders Greatest AssetFor [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | SearchCap

For every so-called "rule" about link building, there are exceptions. You might find consensus on a rule or two, like - site wide footers bad, follow links good! - but your greatest enemy as a link builder is ignoring your gut. I think logic might just start in the gut and is then confirmed in the brain. Submitted for your consideration, the below excerpt from a real email. I have been trained that more than one link from one domain is not beneficial to your site because it counts as 1 link. I wonder who did that training? It seems logical though. Why would multiple links from the same s [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Link Week

Internet users are already notorious for fast browsing and scanning content by nature. It's been long known that most people scan content and don't actually read it word-for-word like a book. This behavior greatly intensifies when Internet users are browsing through content on social media sites. A user going down the front page of a social news aggregation site, like Digg.com, will be cherry picking content they want to read. They are so overwhelmed by the variety of content that catches their interest that they are eager to consume one piece of content and move on to the next. Creating [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | How To: Social Media Marketing | Search & Social