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 Panda's Winners & Losers In Germany: Bing's Ciao.de, Wikio.de & More Google & Motor [...]

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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 ISPs Caught Hijacking & Redirecting Search Results Google+ Poised To Become Numbe [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | Search Week

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: 6 Key Findings From The 2011 Local SEO Industry SurveyIf you ask any local SEO what the nature of our industry is like, you’ll get a range of answers from ‘exciting‘ & ‘high-growth’ to ‘ever changing’, ‘full of opportunity’ and ‘challenging’. The local online advertising market has seen strong growth over the last few years and this positive trend is expected to continue. Research [...] Hot At Sphinn: How To Avoid S [...]

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If you ask any local SEO what the nature of our industry is like, you’ll get a range of answers from ‘exciting‘ & ‘high-growth’ to ‘ever changing’, ‘full of opportunity’ and 'challenging'. The local online advertising market has seen strong growth over the last few years and this positive trend is expected to continue. Research group BIA/Kelsey forecasts that local online ad revenues will double between 2010 and 2015 to US$45 billion (US market only). While SEO is distinctly different from online advertising, the objective for clients is the same. National and local [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Local | Local Search

There are still several good discussions from last week happening over on our sister site, Sphinn. SEO pricing, fixing broken links for SEO, and the social media time sink were all hot topics among commenters. That last one was the subject of our "Discussion of the Week," which asked How do you keep Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc. from being a timesink/distraction? Our favorite reply came from Sphinn member Matt Bowyer of AccessDirect, who shared these ideas: I like the idea of using a laptop for social networking during the day; it means you have to make a conscious effort to use it, n [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | Features: General | Sphinn

This summer, I dedicated my columns to exploring the disruptive effects QR codes will have on the core of search marketing – from SEO URL strategy, to the very notion of link building. Today, I’ll look at how QR disrupts the SEM game, and may force you to adopt a new strategy. It's In The Mail If you’re a US resident, you’ve surely noticed the spike this summer in direct mail pieces featuring 2D barcodes (typically QR) – even curiously from firms that are typically late adopters, like non-profits. This was due to a brilliant (perhaps desperate) move by the US Postal Service to rema [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Mobile Search | Search Marketing: Mobile | SEO: Mobile Search

When I first got to Yahoo! and asked about attribution models in our marketing team, our marketing analytics lead informed me that we had developed, and subsequently scrapped, a very elegant attribution model. In fact, we were back to square one with a last-ad model, the same one that’s been dominating our industry for what seems like forever. When I asked why we abandoned the obviously superior system, I was surprised by the answer I got. Hard To Sell The attribution model developed by our analytics team was quite elegant, apparently. It accounted for ad interactions from various marke [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Enterprise SEM

Granted, we're geeks. We get really excited anytime the engines give us new information to analyze or tools with which we can fine-tune our approach. Google has just given us a treasure trove of new information: click level data on an ad's position. In the past, we've had to rely on observations and average position day to day to get a sense of where an ad is appearing on the page. But we know that averages lie. By giving us information identifying the position on the page for each click we get a whole new window on auction dynamics. How It Works Similar to the Google Click id, gcli [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Paid Search

Last week the bombshell announcement came that Google was admitting liability and forfeiting roughly $500 million in profits and fees from accepting illegal ads from Canadian pharmacies targeting US residents. This is a historic "fine" according to the US Department of Justice (DOJ). But new information revealed over the past few days suggests that Google may have avoided a much larger problem: potential criminal prosecution of Google CEO Larry Page. The DOJ "non-prosecution agreement" explains that Google was on notice since 2003 that licensed and unlicensed Canadian pharmacies were using [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Google: AdWords | Google: Critics | Google: Legal | Google: Outside US | Legal: Regulation | Top News

Facebook is backing off from the local/small business space -- or at least parts of it. A few days after dropping its check-in service for Facebook Places, the company is now getting out of the deals business. In a statement reported by Reuters, Facebook says its Deals product will go away "in the coming weeks." "After testing Deals for four months, we've decided to end our Deals product in the coming weeks," the company said in a statement emailed to Reuters. "We think there is a lot of power in a social approach to driving people into local businesses," Facebook added in the stateme [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Facebook

The sheer number of people potentially affected by the approaching Hurricane Irene means that the web is experiencing an incredible amount of traffic from those seeking information. Hitwise reports that searches for Hurricane Irene have increased more than 2300% since August 21. Thankfully, there are plenty of resources online where people along the heavily-populated East Coast (and elsewhere) are able to access information about evacuations and planning. Official New York Sources The official web site for New York City, NYC.gov, has reportedly been difficult to access at some times tod [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | Features: General | Top News

Voice search all began for Google several years ago with the now-shuttered, free directory assistance service GOOG-411. After the underlying infrastructure had matured Google introduced it on Android devices and in its iPhone apps. More recently, in July, the company put the same voice search capability on Google.com on the Chrome browser for the PC. Now it's extending that functionality to Google Maps. While voice search on mobile devices is widely used it's not clear whether many people are yet searching with voice on their PCs. (Insert Star Trek joke here.) In October 2010 Chitika fou [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Mobile | Google: Maps & Local | Google: Mobile

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 Signals Upcoming Algorithm Change, Asks For Help With Scraper SitesGoogle is calling for help in identifying a long-running problem: scraper sites in its search results — and particularly scraper sites that are ranking higher than the original page. Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s spam fighting group, put out the call for help on Twitter this morning: Scrapers getting you down? Tell us about [...] AdWords Editor Version 9.5 Relea [...]

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Google is calling for help in identifying a long-running problem: scraper sites in its search results -- and particularly scraper sites that are ranking higher than the original page. Matt Cutts, the head of Google's spam fighting group, put out the call for help on Twitter this morning: Scrapers getting you down? Tell us about blog scrapers you see: http://goo.gl/S2hIh We need datapoints for testing. The link leads to a Google Doc form that asks for the exact query where there's a "scraping problem," along with the exact URLs of the original and scraper pages. The form explains that [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | Google: Web Search | SEO: Spamming | Top News

Google has released version 9.5 of its free desktop software for managing AdWords campaigns, adding support for campaign experiments and location extensions, among other recent enhancements to the AdWords web interface. Users can now manage their campaign experiments on the AdWords Editor, including applying and editing an experiment status, a default maximum CPC or a maximum CPC bid multiplier. Importing and exporting of these variables can now also be uploaded in both CSV and XML. The new version also supports location extensions. Users can create new location extensions, modify existi [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Google: AdWords

In this week's Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more. GooglePoly: Zoogle: Google's Adam Lasnik: Google + Pins: Matt Cutts & His Toy Panda: [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | Search In Pictures

It comes as no surprise that social networking is one of the top online activities, exceeded only by email and search according the Pew Internet Project. The most noteworthy finding of a new Pew report on social networking is that its growth is most pronounced among older Americans: The frequency of social networking site usage among young adult internet users under age 30 was stable over the last year – 61% of online Americans in that age cohort now use social networking sites on a typical day, compared with 60% one year ago. However, among the Boomer-aged segment of internet users ages 50 [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Stats: General | Stats: Popularity | Stats: Size

It appears Google is testing a new type of rich snippet for displaying real estate and other types of business listings. I reported this at the Search Engine Roundtable and included a few pictures from various sources. The rich snippet, which is not yet confirmed by Google, seems to show real estate listings as well as possibly contractor listings. Zillow and Service Magic seem to be in this test. Here is a picture from @t1c1 of the Zillow result: Here is a picture from Carlos Gonzalez Rotger of the Service Magic listing: As you can see, this rich snippet seems to basically [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Rich Snippets | Google: User Interface | Google: Web Search

Data is a fickle friend. It is only as reliable as the setup you have and the effort you put into understanding the numbers. There are so many variables that can kill your data, and fixing the things that are broken is always a process of elimination. I can tell you that most skewed data is generally caused by two things 1) incorrectly installed scripts, or 2) the site owners themselves. You and your coworkers and employees are the one that visits your site most often. Your marketing team and webmaster are probably a close second and third. Do those visits really represent honest traffic [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: Analytics | Google: Analytics | How To | How To: Analytics | Search & Analytics

Today, Google announced that they will no longer be crawling news sites with Googlebot-News and instead will crawl news sites with Googlebot, the same bot that crawls sites for web search. However, you can still block your content from being indexed in Google News by disallowing Googlebot-News in robots.txt or using a meta robots tag. Blocking Content From Google News Seem confusing? On the one hand, it's not at all. If you want Google to index your content in both web search and News (if you are a Google News publisher), then you don't need to do anything. Google will keep crawling as it [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: News | Google: Webmaster Central | Top News