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” Offered Today, Google News is undergoing its first major redesign since being launched in 2002. Gone is the default “section” view, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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? […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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 Kong Google announced they are no longer allowed under Chinese law to redirect Google.cn to Google.com.hk. The Chinese government told Google that […]
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 […]
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 […]
Let’s take “Google Me” seriously as a social networking site, successor to Orkut and overall Facebook challenger. As everyone by now knows Digg’s Kevin Rose started a wave of coverage when he asserted over the weekend, in a Twitter post now removed, that Google was working on a Facebook competitor. Yesterday I asked Google for […]
The Google AdWords Blog announced two additions to the program. The first is the ability to set goals in the opportunities tab within the AdWords console and the second is a new seller ratings extension available for some advertisers. Goals in Opportunity Tab: Google is rolling out a new feature in the Opportunities tab within […]
Google 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, but when clicked […]
You might not have thought of it this way but the old MapQuest was mostly about driving directions. The new Mapquest (launching today) is about local search and an expanded range of capabilities and use cases. There’s a new look and feel, a new back end, a single search box and a new “brand.” Mapquest […]
Website translation processes can often conflict with SEO objectives. How can these two opposites be reconciled? With such huge sums invested in localization -- it makes sense to get the maximum return on investment -- but you need to review the process. Here's how!
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Microsoft To Replace MSNBot With BingBot October 1, 2010 The Bing Search Blog announced that on October 1st, MSNBot will be renamed to BingBot. Bing has been testing a beta bot […]
The Bing Search Blog announced that on October 1st, MSNBot will be renamed to BingBot. Bing has been testing a beta bot since November of last year. On October 1st, the beta label will be removed from the Bot name and it will be named BingBot. You should see the following useragent in your log […]
At the SMX Advanced 2010 conference in Seattle, we invited four leading paid search experts to share some of their recent experiments in paid search in a new session entitled The Mad Scientists of Paid Search. The panelists were encouraged to add a bit of academic rigor to their presentations by including their hypotheses, design […]
Ad network Chitika has published interesting findings from an examination of a whole lot of search-driven ad impressions. Specifically, “Chitika looked at a sample of 41,103,403 impressions of search traffic coming into their network between June 13 – June 19.” The company found that 26 percent of (organic) search-driven traffic was the result of “three-word […]
About a month after Google launched encrypted search at https://www.google.com/, they will be moving it to https://encrypted.google.com/. The reason for the move is due to “better serve our school partners and their users,” said Dave Girouard, President, Google Enterprise. The issue with having it at https://www.google.com/ is that they can block encrypted searches via their […]
In last month’s column I talked about buying brand keywords and some of the great (somewhat) new ad products available to advertisers. All that talk about buying brand keywords brought me back to a familiar topic about which, if you read my post with any frequency, you just might be getting a tiny bit tired […]
In today’s changing media environment, local businesses are looking for new ways to reach the consumer. In addition to placing ads in traditional outlets like the print Yellow Pages—which still have significant consumer reach—local businesses are increasingly adding websites and social networking pages, online videos, iPhone and iPad apps and other popular advertising tools to […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Facebook “Search War” With Google Mostly Sound And Fury The people running Facebook are an ambitious crew; they see Facebook as a successor to Google in many respects. In fact many […]
The people running Facebook are an ambitious crew; they see Facebook as a successor to Google in many respects. In fact many of the executives used to work at Google, including CTO Bret Taylor, COO Sheryl Sandberg, Advertising VP David Fischer and Communications VP Elliot Schrage, among others. However as a search property Facebook has, […]
Improving website performance is hard work, and SEO alone will not get the job done. The following analysis of human search behavior is the first step in developing a world-class website strategy. Top performing websites have most of these traits in common:
I’m a huge fan of treating Page Titles and Meta Descriptions as ad copy. Using language that speaks to a person’s motivation for shopping and buying will encourage the click through when your listing appears organically, as well as in a paid position. The problem Having a “testing” environment for organic ad copy has, until […]
Yahoo Chief Defends Her Site, Strategy from the Wall Street Journal is one of the latest in an ongoing pattern of Yahoo’s CEO constantly having to defend herself to investors, reports and users. Carol Bartz became Yahoo’s CEO one year and five months ago. And if you read through the stories mentioning her name, you […]
May was a banner month for YouTube. ComScore’s latest video rankings report shows that the site hit all-time highs with 14.6 billion videos viewed and more than 100 videos seen per user. Needless to say, YouTube remains the dominant player in video rankings, with 43% of online videos being seen on the site, according to […]
One of the most familiar faces left at Yahoo, that is until today, was Larry Cornett. Larry was the vice president of search consumer products at Yahoo. He has always lead Yahoo in their search advancements over the course of the past 4 years. Today he announced he is moving on. We knew Yahoo began […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: 8 Easy Ways To Monitor The SEO Your Competition Is Doing If you’re a marketer and you’re currently tied up with other initiatives (campaigns, new site launch, etc.), or a search […]
If you’re a marketer and you’re currently tied up with other initiatives (campaigns, new site launch, etc.), or a search professional bogged down with doing keyword research, a technical audit, or staying up with the latest trends, remember to come up for air every now and then (at least once a month if not more) […]
We knew that Bing was added as an option in the default search engines used on the new Apple iPhone iOS4. But if you try to searching on either Bing or Yahoo when your default search provider is Google, both will prompt you to switch to their own search engine. Not only will you be […]
Twitter announced two new ways to find new friends on Twitter. Twitter added to the find friends section, a LinkedIn and Facebook tab to allow you to connect with your LinkedIn connections via Twitter and friends on Facebook. The only issue is that as soon as Twitter announced this feature, the Facebook connection tool was […]