More from Search Engine Land: Page 4

Google Analytics

SearchCap: The Day In Search, January 17, 2011

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: A Personal Preview Of SMX West – And Why You Should Go! Our annual Search Marketing Expo (SMX) West is less than two months away on March 8-10, and it’s shaping […]

Google

Seznam.cz Disputes Google’s No. 1 Ranking In Czech Republic

Czech search engine Seznam.cz disagrees with recent reports that Google has overtaken it as the number one search engine in the Czech Republic. In a blog post with an accompanying English-language translation, Seznam calls last week’s news reports “misleading” and says they were based on “a rather unobjective interpretation of Toplist statistics.” The news, which […]

PPC

Case Study: How Negative Keywords Can Pump Up Paid Search Performance

Once campaigns reach a certain size, successful paid search marketing becomes less about generating traffic and more about identifying and driving the highest value visitors. At the same time, however, scale makes creative testing and ad group refinement difficult to implement across hundreds of thousands or even millions of keywords. In a high-volume world, actively […]

PPC

Questioning Paid Search Benchmarks

Wouldn’t it be great if you could measure the success of your paid search program by comparing your numbers against industry benchmarks? Every advertiser would love to know how their program stacks up against the competition in terms of: The breadth of keyword coverage The quality of the landing pages chosen The effectiveness of the […]

Local

5 Keys To Reselling Search Engine Marketing To Small Businesses

Through the years, Marchex has created, managed and optimized hundreds of thousands of small business search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns on behalf of our partners. These include some of the world’s largest small business aggregators, such as AT&T and Yellow Pages Group Canada. This is really hard work – we’ve made plenty of mistakes and […]

Google

Spanish Want Google To Police Libel On The Internet

In yet another difficult European regulatory decision for Google the Spanish data protection authority has demanded that Google remove links to articles online (e.g., newspaper articles) that contain defamatory content. According to the UK-based Guardian: The technology giant has been ordered to remove almost 100 online articles from its search listings by Spain’s data protection […]

Bing

Google’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Logo

Today Google has a special logo on Google.com for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Today would be his 82nd birthday celebration. Technically, Martin Luther King, Jr. was born on January 15th, but the United States celebrates the first Monday after his birthday as a national holiday for his leadership during the African American civil rights […]

Bing

Robbing Peter To Pay Paul: Report Says MSN Suffering For Focus On Bing

AdWeek and the NY Post are reporting that Microsoft’s use of its popular portal MSN as a traffic driver for Bing is compromising some of MSN’s partner relationships, angering internal sales staff and even costing the company revenue. The Post reports that “During the past quarter the mix of MSN headlines on its front page […]

Content

Google Links To Competitors Next To YouTube Videos

Google has begun showing links to different video sites and search engines in its search results. The links appear next to YouTube videos — but only on music-related searches. On a search for u2, for example, Google shows three videos from YouTube, but each video listing now includes additional links that might otherwise have only […]

Content

89% Find Search Engines Do Good Job Finding Information, But “Noise” Is Issue

Has Google’s relevancy gotten worse? A recent opinion poll suggests not, while at the same time confirming a concern that’s been rising in anecdotal accounts — there’s too much “noise” surrounding the “signal.” Rasmussen Reports surveyed 740 adult Americans on January 4-5 about a variety of search engine related issues. The key question that caught […]

SEO

Yahoo’s Irving: “Hell Yes” Yahoo Is Committed To Flickr

Yahoo Product Chief Blake Irving just tweeted a ringing endorsement of Flickr, the company’s photo sharing site/community. Q. Is Yahoo! committed to Flickr? A. Hell yes we are! We love this product and team; on strategy and profitable. The tweet is no doubt a response to questions earlier this week about Flickr’s profitability and the […]

Link building

SearchCap: The Day In Search, January 14, 2011

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Bing Set To Advertise During Golden Globe Awards Microsoft is set to run a pair of television ads during Sunday’s broadcast of the Golden Globe awards, according to the Seattle PI. […]

Bing

Bing Set To Advertise During Golden Globe Awards

Microsoft is set to run a pair of television ads during Sunday’s broadcast of the Golden Globe awards, according to the Seattle PI. Bing is, of course, no stranger to TV advertising and marketing in general — what with that $80 million marketing war chest and all back on day one. But the commercials that […]

Google Ads

More See Horizontal Look For Top Three Google Ads

Reports keep coming in that Google is testing a new format for its top three ads. The new format — in which the headline is combined with the first description line, or the two description lines are combined — has been spotted as far afield as the United Kingdom. The effect, some have suggested, makes […]

SMX® - Search Marketing Expo & Conference series

2011 About.com Web Search Readers’ Choice Awards Now Open

Wendy Boswell, About.com’s Websearch Guide, has announced the opening of the 2011 Readers’ Choice Awards, which will showcase the best products, features and services in more than a dozen topic areas, from technology to hobbies to sports. Categories include: Best Search Engine Best Reference Site Best Movie/Video Site Best Family and Kids Site Best Shopping […]

Content

Google, Bing Up While AOL Hits All-Time Low: comScore December Search Data

Ahead of their official release, financial analysts released comScore’s December search data. Total search query volume, minus “contextual search” (slideshows), was reportedly up 24 percent vs. a year ago for a total of 18.2 billion monthly queries. Here are the market share figures: Google — 66.6 percent (record high for Google in comScore’s numbers) Yahoo […]

Google

Google’s John Hanke Speaks About New Mobile Incubator

Last week I wrote briefly about Google’s John Hanke’s move into a new role, based on a Forbes interview with him. Yesterday I got to speak directly with Hanke about his “new gig,” as they say. The former CEO of Keyhole came to lead the “geo team” (Maps, Earth) at Google after Keyhole was acquired […]

Analytics & conversion

Why Google’s New Keyword Data May Actually Make 2011 “Year of Mobile Marketing”

By helping solve the fundamental business problem of resource allocation, Google’s freshly announced Mobile Keyword Tool has the potential to ignite mobile search marketing and propel mobile web marketing into orbit, right now. How is that? The announcement revealed a new feature designed to help marketers build segmented keyword lists that better target ads toward […]

SEO

SEO For A Good Cause: Supporting Advocacy & Non-Profit Campaigns

Not every SEO campaign starts and ends with a P&L statement. An increasing number of political campaigns, advocacy groups, and nonprofits are using search engine marketing to achieve their goals. It’s tempting to apply the same metrics to either kind of campaign: traffic is traffic, and conversions are conversions, after all. But issues-based campaigns often […]

SEO

How To Model Search Term Data To Classify User Intent & Match Query Expectations

Query data is the first tool in every search marketers arsenal – it serves as a launch pad for developing information architecture, understanding market opportunity to creating landing pages with carefully worded ad copy to maximize conversions. To fully understand query data in any market segment, it is extremely valuable to understand and creating a […]

Paid social

The Social Graph: Revolution or Evolution?

Following Danny Sullivan’s interview with Google and Bing that confirmed social media reactions are a ranking factor with both search engines, it’s easy to get excited about social media being the new big thing in search engine optimisation (SEO). Others are less impressed, not convinced that this will change anything in the real world, especially in […]

Content

Mr. Cutts Goes To Washington, Testifies Google Has Integrity

The head of Google’s search spam fighting team, Matt Cutts, is in Washington DC this week, doing an “educational tour” to explain to US Federal Trade Commission members and congressional staffers that his company’s search results don’t require government regulation. The Washington Post covers his visit, including a presentation today at Google’s Washington DC offices, […]

Google Analytics

SearchCap: The Day In Search, January 13, 2011

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’s New China Plan: Target Display Advertisers, Report Says Despite its ongoing struggles in China, Google reportedly has a new plan for its business there: targeting display advertising, particularly amongst the […]

Google

Google’s New China Plan: Target Display Advertisers, Report Says

Despite its ongoing struggles in China, Google reportedly has a new plan for its business there: targeting display advertising, particularly amongst the growing export industry. That’s according to a Reuters report, which lays out Google’s new focus this way: Under the new game plan, Google is targeting Chinese firms to advertise on its dominant overseas […]

Google

Europeans Go “Fishing” For Bad Google Behavior In Anti-Trust Inquiry

According to the NY Times, EU antitrust officials have developed a lengthy questionnaire directed to advertisers as part of its antitrust inquiry into Google’s business practices. Broadly speaking the 120 question document “seeks to ascertain whether Google manipulated search results and used its popular platform to keep business and disadvantage rivals in online advertising and […]

Bing

Bing Now Powering Yahoo Search In 3 More Countries

Readers outside the US may want to know that the Yahoo-Bing search transition is now complete in three more countries. According to this Yahoo blog post, Bing is now powering the Yahoo back-end for organic search in: Australia Brazil Mexico Bing started powering Yahoo’s organic results in the US and Canada last August.

Bing

Experian Hitwise: Bing Searches Up 5% In December 2010

According to the latest data from Hitwise, Bing had a very happy holiday season. From November to December 2010, Bing.com saw a 5% increase in search activity, while Bing powered searches also rose 2%, search activity on search.Yahoo.com remained the unchanged. Search activity on Google decreased from 70.10% in November to 69.67% in December 2010. […]

Bing

Bing Enhances Auto Instant Answers with Car Listings

One of Bing’s differentiating strategies is to offer increasingly rich information on the first page of search results: “instant answers.” (Of course Google and Yahoo try to do similar things.) In the context of autos, for example, Bing provides a great deal of information about fuel economy, pricing and links to other information on vehicles […]

SEO

Why FeedBurner Is Killing Your SEO Strategy

When Feedburner was acquired by Google in mid-2007, we were all excited about the potential. As time progressed and Google really began to own and better develop its vision for the tool, Feedburner became increasingly useful. But with some recent emphasis on link wheels and automatic updates, there is a very good chance Feedburner could […]

Local

The Connection Between Facebook Citations & Google Place Pages

Google and Facebook’s ongoing battle to dominate the Internet can make it difficult to understand some Internet trends. This is further complicated by the fact that Facebook is blocking the Googlebot from crawling its pages. However, Google does have quite a few Facebook pages in its index – a quick search suggests as many as […]

Paid social

Topsy Launches Brand-Friendly Twitter Widgets

Topsy has launched what it’s calling Social Modules: embeddable widgets that bring Twitter content to any website. Topsy isn’t the first nor only way to do this — Twitter itself offers several flavors of embeddable widgets — but Topsy’s version offers a few brand-friendly options that I haven’t seen available elsewhere. Topsy’s module-maker is similar […]

Analytics & conversion

German Govt. Says Google Analytics Now Verboten

In a move that could harm its country’s own businesses, Germany is targeting Google on privacy issues again — this time over Google Analytics. German privacy officials are concerned that Google Analytics tracks web users’ IP addresses, and that could violate an individual’s privacy. According to German news site The Local, Johannes Caspar, data protection […]

Google Analytics

SearchCap: The Day In Search, January 12, 2011

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Extreme Email Experiment: How Much Is Too Much? With some simple analytics in place, you can pretty easily establish the ideal frequency of your B2B email campaigns. Based on the results […]

Ecommerce

Wolfram Alpha Redesigns For 2011

Next time you visit Wolfram Alpha, you’ll be greeted by a shiny, new, colorful home page — that’s just one of a few design tweaks the site has announced on its blog. There are also some interesting tweaks to the results pages. One is the addition of linked data inside the search results, which you […]

Google Ads

Google Tweaks New AdSense Interface

Google has announced of series of changes to the new AdSense interface. There are a handful of changes in Google’s blog post: The default metrics on the Home and Performances reports have been changed back to page-level metrics. The ad block/allow selector now shows the product name. Ad unit impressions and queries have been renamed […]

Apple

Google Places Gets Its Own iPhone App

There’s a Maps app on your iPhone, a Google Mobile app that includes access to Google Maps, and now there’s a third option for Google-based local search and discovery: a dedicated Google Places app. It’s just announced today and is already available in the iPhone’s app store. The app seems to focus more on the […]

Google Ads

Session-Based Clicks Under Fire in WSJ Report

Advertisers interviewed by the Wall Street Journal are complaining about Google’s practice of delivering ads within a user’s search session, but beside results unrelated to an advertiser’s purchased keywords. Google says it’s been returning AdWords in this way for years, in an effort to target users in the process of narrowing down their search for […]

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