All too often, I get a fair amount of frantic emails from people who are seeing a dropoff in rankings and/or traffic after the latest algorithmic update and are looking for help or just a second opinion. Sometimes a keyword that has been number 2 for 8 months in a row moves down a spot to number 3. Sometimes one drops off the first page and isn't in the top 100. Sometimes traffic almost completely dies. In any case, it creates panic. Most people don't think very clearly when they panic. Their immediate response is something drastic, their directives are to take place yesterday, and t [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | How To | How To: Links | Intermediate | Link Building | Link Building: General | Link Week

No. That is to say, no method of comparing country to country statistics fairly and accurately really exists. Thank you for reading this article and I hope you have a good day. Now, don't tell me you want me to explain that? In the case of global organisations, the performance of businesses, people and campaigns are frequently compared. It's quite logical if you think about it, that executives of global entities are going to look across the line and compare one performance against another. You can argue that this is part of being "global" and there are marketing textbooks I know which ex [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Multinational Search

I’ve got a joke for ya: What has 250,000 URLs, a content team of 15 people and three target keywords? Your website. I understand SEO’s keyword obsession. It’s hard to let go, and a nice, high ranking for a really juicy phrase tends to justify budget. But, as I’ve written before, there’s more to justifying enterprise SEO than keywords alone. In fact, in enterprise SEO, I’d say keywords should be the last thing you look at. You can get your biggest, best wins with a a general focus on site visibility, content clarity and site performance. Here’s why: Someone’s Already P [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Enterprise SEO

Last week, iAcquire found itself accused of purchasing links for clients. Google seemed convinced, banning iAcquire from its index. Now, iAcquire says that it will no longer purchase links for new clients and will phase out paid links for existing customers and campaigns. "In certain cases, we have allowed finanical compensation to develop links, not as our only tool but one of them," said Joe Griffin, cofounder and partner with iAcquire, when I spoke with him earlier today. "Effectively immediately, we've removed that tool from our toolset. We've issued a company-wide memo and told everyo [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Link Building: Paid Links | SEM Industry: General | Top News

How does one manage the day-to-day health of the site's performance while mapping a course to even greater treasures? Check out Rio SEO's most recent e-solutions spotlight article to learn how to use site audits as a compass to guide the way. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | Sponsor Messages

The Google Penguin update first touched down on April 24th and many webmasters that were hit by this update were frantically making changes to their web site in anticipation for a Penguin refresh. That refresh happened late Friday evening and we have one report that appears to be a legit Penguin recovery. An SEOmoz story named How WPMU.org Recovered From The Penguin Update has a pretty good case of a likely Penguin recovery. How can we know it is a pretty good case of a recovery? The Google Analytics graphs show a huge dip in traffic on April 24th and then a huge spike on May 26th, retur [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Penguin Update | Google: SEO

Google’s admitted the possibility of "negative SEO" for years. But in the wake of the Penguin Update, some have claimed it’s now easier than ever. Does a new change by Google in its help pages acknowledge this? Google’s admitted the possibility of negative SEO since at least 2007. On its help page, it previously had said this about "negative SEO," a term used to describe a way a competitor might harm another site: 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 su [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Penguin Update | Google: SEO | SEO: Spamming

Last week, my colleague and fellow columnist, Brad Geddes outlined 8 Features Advertisers Really Need from Google AdWords and I couldn’t agree more with the points he brought up. Back in December, I ran a wish list of my own, 7 Things On My Google AdWords Wishlist For Santa and many advertisers jumped in with their own wishlists. Actually, many of the items on my list weren’t so much features as they were requests for re-engineering of incompletely or illogically-implemented features, some so old and ingrained that many advertisers had forgotten about them until Microsoft implemented t [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Paid Search

In his Smashing Magazine response to Jakob Nielsen’s directive to build separate desktop and mobile sites, Bruce Lawson used the line "you never know better than your users what content they want" to argue that we shouldn’t be building separate mobile websites. I would agree with him that you never know better than your users what content they want, but would argue that’s usually a reason to build a separate mobile website. In search, we have the benefit of user queries that tell us what the majority of users want, and those queries often tell us that they’re looking for different t [...]

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

It’s the 'new' social network everyone is talking about – and if you’re a local business owner, it could be a strong addition to your online marketing strategy. For the past few years, marketers have stressed the need for local businesses to leverage social networks like Facebook and Twitter to drive engagement with existing and potential customers. Now Pinterest, the visual scrapbook network that allows users to "pin" images and video they want to share from across the web, is becoming part of the conversation for a number of reasons: Unprecedented user growth. In March, Pinterest [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: Social | How To | How To: Social Media Marketing | Local Search

The most talented marketers in the business will attend Search Marketing Expo – SMX Advanced. Conference tickets are sold out, but you can still participate. Keep reading to find out how, and join us next week at the Bell Harbor International Conference Center in Seattle! Sign up today for a Network Pass to attend these networking events: June 4 (5:45pm-7:30pm): Meet & Greet on the Bell Harbor rooftop– sponsored by Adobe, Brafton, BrightEdge and Bruce Clay Inc. June 5 (6pm-7pm): Expo Hall Reception in Elliot Hall at the Bell Harbor June 5 (9pm-11pm): SMX After Dark, sponsor [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | SEM Industry: Conferences | SEM Industry: Search Marketing Expo - SMX | SMX & DMD Alerts

No matter that it's late Friday night on the start of a three-day holiday weekend in the U.S., Google has just pushed out the first update to its recent webspam-fighting Penguin algorithm. Let's call it Penguin 2. Google's Matt Cutts announced the news a short time ago on Twitter, calling it a "data refresh" that impacts less than one-tenth of a percent of English-language searches. Minor weather report: We pushed 1st Penguin algo data refresh an hour ago. Affects <0.1% of English searches. Context: goo.gl/4f7Pq — Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) May 26, 2012 Although webmasters and SEOs h [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Penguin Update | Google: SEO | 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 Live Blogging: Interview with Amit Singhal, Google Fellow In Wake Of Penguin, Cou [...]

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 Wikipedia Appears On Google's Page One 46 Percent Of The Time, Compared to 31 Perce [...]

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 AdWords "Rotate Evenly" Setting To Stop Rotating After 30 Days Google "Comparison [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | Search Week

Microsoft says it does send copyright-related takedown requests to its own search engine, Bing, in addition to the multitude of requests that it sends to Google. This comes on the heels of yesterday's news that Microsoft is the number one submitter of copyright-related URL removal requests to Google. It sent more than 500,000 such requests in the past month, asking Google to remove URLs that host pirated copies of Microsoft products and other copyright-infringing material. TechDirt pointed out that some of the URLs that Microsoft asked Google to remove were still appearing in Bing's sear [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Legal: Copyright | Microsoft: Bing | 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: iAcquire Banned From Google After Link Buying AllegationsThe search marketing agency, iAcquire, that was allegedly responsible for buying links for clients was just banned from Google’s search results. iAcquire was cited as the agency behind Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corporation’s link buy request emails. For more on that see our story named What Can We Learn From The Latest Brand To Be [...] Search In Pics: SEO LEGO, Facebook [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | SearchCap

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. Facebook Cooler & Snackbar: Source: Google+ Social Internet Candies: Source: Flickr Google's Larry Page In Green: Source: YouTube SEO & Googler LEGO: Source: SEOBook A Happy SEO: Source: Facebook [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | Search In Pictures

Like fighting spam and click fraud, finding and nixing bad ads on AdWords is a continually escalating battle. One telling stat the company revealed in a blog post today: 134 million. That's how many ads Google axed in 2011, a 136% rise from the year before. Back in 2008, the company only disapproved 25 million ads. The rise appears to be due to a combination of factors -- first, there are just more bad ads out there. "My interpretation is that the better we get, the faster we get at shutting them down, the more persistent they get," David Baker, Google's director of engineering for adv [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Google: AdWords

Slowly Bing is handing over more of its mapping "back end" functions to Nokia, as part of the deal that brought the two together for the Lumia-Windows Phone partnership. Yesterday Microsoft announced that in 24 countries, including the US and UK, Nokia (Navteq) will be delivering traffic data to Bing Maps. The company also said that it would start using Nokia’s geocoding services in several (unnamed) countries to improve directions. In May last year I wrote Bing Maps To Be Powered (Replaced) By Nokia? A source argued to me that over time Nokia would gradually replace most of the [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Local | Google: Maps & Local | Microsoft: Bing | Microsoft: Bing Maps & Local | Search Engines: Maps & Local Search Engines