No sooner did I hit “publish” on my earlier post, Google’s “Voice Assistant” Not Quite Siri-Smart But Most People Won’t Notice, than people on Twitter started responding that I was out of my mind. A couple of people cited a Piper Jaffray study, published yesterday, comparing the accuracy and breadth of Siri “search results” vs. […]
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 “Voice Assistant” Not Quite Siri-Smart But Most People Won’t Notice At Google I/O this week Google introduced spoken search results, which mimic Siri’s functionality on the iPhone. Siri had been […]
At Google I/O this week Google introduced spoken search results, which mimic Siri’s functionality on the iPhone. Siri had been a major point of differentiation between Android handsets and the iPhone, despite Google’s preexisting voice search. The new Google female voice actually sounds less like a machine and more natural than Siri. And there are […]
It’s time again to update your AdWords Editor desktop software. Google today released version 9.8.1 which will now let users add and edit dynamic search ads and product listing ads. Each of these ad formats now has its own tab, and these types of ads can now be managed on two new targeting tabs. The […]
All the talk today about Bing’s launch of a disavow this link tool is a good reminder that we should go back into our video archives and post the comments that Google’s Matt Cutts made about a tool like that during our SMX Advanced event earlier this month. Cutts was speaking with Search Engine Land’s […]
The new Google Shopping is based off of your typical paid comparison shopping engine, such as Pricegrabber, Nextag or Shopping.com. It’s a move that presents significant opportunity to the merchants who chose to stay and play in the market-rate CPC program, with no minimum CPCs. Many small merchants and some SEOs have shown their disgust […]
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.
Google doesn’t always penalize you for bad links, they sometimes and very often, will ignore links completely that they find to be against their guidelines. Back in 2007, Google started penalizing sites for selling paid links and over the years they have penalized many sites for buying links. Recently, Google has stepped up their notifications […]
An interesting challenge came across my desk this week. A site owner had installed a new contact form plugin on their WordPress website and they were struggling with tracking the submissions. The form submit button triggered some JavaScript and didn’t then open its own thank you page within the site. The problem? Virtual Pageviews were previously chosen […]
Google has long made it possible for users of YouTube to skip ads. Now, it’s adding that capability to the Display Network, letting people hit an “X” to dismiss, or mute, the currently-displaying ad. Google says it will use the signal as a way to deliver more relevant ads to consumers. Once a person mutes […]
For years, Google’s webmaster guidelines have noted that attempts to manipulate Google’s algorithms with artificial external link profiles (paid links, link schemes and the like) are violations and that Google may take action (by removing the site from the index or lowering its ranking). This year, Google starting alerting site owners with “unnatural links”, recommending […]
Google continues to hold a death-grip on search market share in the U.S., but Experian Hitwise says that Bing has taken five percent of Google’s market share in the last 12 months. According to Hitwise’s market share stats for May 2012, Google accounted for 65 percent of all U.S. searches — down from 68 percent […]
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 Make Deal With French Anti-Racism Groups Over ‘Jew’ Search Suggestions Google in deal with French groups over ‘Jew’ suggestion via the AFP reports Google has made a deal with several […]
Google in deal with French groups over ‘Jew’ suggestion via the AFP reports Google has made a deal with several French anti-racism groups of Google offering ‘Jew’ to the search suggestions for several prominent names in that country. Our earlier story named Google Queries Reveal Potential “Underground” Anti-Semitism In France explains that the French people […]
Microsoft announced today, that in conjunction with Nokia, Bing has added “more than 2,700 venue maps” in North America, Europe and Asia. You can access them online at Bing.com/maps (“explore venue maps”). In the US and UK markets venue (indoor) maps are also available on Windows Phones and through the Bing app for the iPhone. The following […]
SMX Advanced is my favorite conference of the year. Hands down. The sessions are always memorable, and I get to see a lot of the SEO “old timers” – you know…the SEOs who have been in the game for at least 10 years, which is like 70 years in Internet time. In conclusion, SMX Advanced […]
AdWords advertisers on Google’s Display Network can now use multiple targeting methods at the ad group level, rather than the campaign level, via a new feature called “Flexible Reach.” The option was first reported by Philly Marketing Labs on its blog, but it is already appearing in accounts and in AdWords Help. With Flexible Reach, […]
As of yesterday Google’s new offline mapping capability for Android devices is now live (with a Google Maps update). It was announced a couple of weeks ago at the Google Maps “next dimension” event that preceded the announcement of Apple’s new mapping platform. Offline maps are available for 150 countries, and users can save offline […]
Yahoo has suffered through its fair share of turmoil over the last few years: a revolving door of CEOs, significant layoffs, investor revolts, and a declining share of the search space, both paid and organic. One recent bright spot for Yahoo was their first year over year growth in search revenues after traffic acquisition costs […]
Google announced a few upgrades and new features to its Maps and Places APIs during the Google I/O developers conference on Wednesday. On the API front, Google Maps’ Product Manager Thor Mitchell announced that business reviews are now available in the Google Places API. Developers will be able to access the top five reviews associated […]
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 Introduces Redesigned Mobile Search Experience, “Google Now” And Siri-Like Assistant Buried among the sexy hardware announcements and hair-raising Google Glass demo this morning were some fairly radical changes to the […]
Buried among the sexy hardware announcements and hair-raising Google Glass demo this morning were some fairly radical changes to the Google search experience for mobile devices. To date Google has been compensating for the awkwardness of the PC SERP on smartphones with voice search and other marginal “fixes.” Today it took a potentially major step […]
The paid search part of the Search Alliance has conquered three more countries. Both Bing- and Yahoo-owned and operated properties, as well as publisher networks, in Germany, Austria and Switzerland are now powered by Microsoft Advertising’s adCenter, the company announced today. Now both the algorithmic and the paid search portions of the Alliance have been […]
Google’s knowledge graph which launched a little over a month ago is reportedly often wrong. Conductor ran a study showing that for trending terms, the knowledge Google is providing via their knowledge graph is wrong about 20% of the time. By trending, Conductor looked at the top 50 ‘people’ in Google Trends and Google Insights […]
Whether you’ve hired a search marketing agency or are using in-house resources, how do you know if your B2B SEO expert is doing a great job? Three simple questions that all business marketers should ask about their B2B SEO program are: How does our SEO plan differ from a consumer-oriented (B2C) SEO program? Specifically what […]
Regardless of medium, the best marketers know cross-channel integration is key, and the exchange of information between channels should be a two way street. The world of online marketing is no exception, as more and more search marketers are looking to search retargeting as a way to leverage their knowledge of search engine marketing over […]
As search marketers, your job is to generate traffic. More traffic means more sales. As we become more wise to the math of conversion, we begin to realize that it may make sense to shift some attention away from the unending search for higher click-through rates and toward getting higher conversion rates on our sites. […]
Financial services, hotels, flights, products… what’s next for Google’s paid inclusion vertical search engine plans? It appears to be new cars, if a Bay Area test is any indication. The test was first spotted by auto industry publication DealerELITE. If a person has indicated he is in the San Francisco Bay Area, searching on specific […]
Google is testing yet another user interface test, this one is where the top thin black bar can be removed completely. Tecno-net spotted this earlier and showed that if you can also remove the top black bar by going to this URL. Google added the thin Google black bar back in June 2011 and tried […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Official Google Panda Update Version 3.8 On June 25th Google has announced they pushed out a new refresh to the Panda algorithm recently. This update “noticeably affects only ~1% of queries […]
For a local business, localized search results are lifeblood to them. Focusing on a local SEO strategy can often have a bigger impact on their business model than focusing on the full organic results. A lot of smaller local businesses aren’t blessed with an extremely large marketing budget and could have potentially resorted to tactics […]
As the “mapping wars” heat up Microsoft is introducing a huge new body of satellite imagery into Bing Maps. It’s not clear whether any of this will extend to mobile given the apparent substitution of Nokia Maps for Bing in Windows Phone 8. The new imagery covers vast amounts of land on almost every continent. […]
Link building can, and should, be a domino effect. A good solid link should lead to more good, solid links, but do we always pursue links with this in mind? I confess that I don’t always. Sometimes a link is just a link, and that’s where it ends, but moving forward in the wake of […]
Does Google really “get” international? There are clearly some very clever people within Google who do — but the corporation’s behavior bizarrely still tends to suggest a silicon valley tech company that’s a little insulated from the non-English speaking world. Take, for example, the “Global Market Finder” tool which you can find here. This tool […]
The battle to dominate the local search space intensified these past few weeks as Apple and Google both announced new initiatives designed to capitalize on this rapidly growing market. The headlines – Apple introduces new Maps feature and Google Places becomes Google+ Local – sparked great interest: not only in what the moves mean for the industry, […]
Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead at Google, posted a video on the Google Webmaster Blog about how to learn the “essential” SEO techniques for your web site. It is targeted specifically at sites with under 50 pages or so, that want to rank for their company name and related keywords, and want to be […]
Google has announced they pushed out a new refresh to the Panda algorithm recently. This update “noticeably affects only ~1% of queries worldwide,” said Google on Twitter. There were earlier rumors of an update over the weekend but Google said the rollout started today and not over the weekend. The previous Panda update was on […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: The Current State Of PPC Keyword Match Types I’ll start with a big thank you! It’s been a busy few months with advertisers and Google forcefully exchanging opinions back and forth […]
I’ll start with a big thank you! It’s been a busy few months with advertisers and Google forcefully exchanging opinions back and forth on topics such as ad rotation, features needed/wanted in AdWords, and changes to keyword match types. In my column on the Google ad rotation change last month, I expressed my strong concerns about […]
I live in Colorado, where we’re experiencing an unprecedented number of wildfires this summer—reportedly, fully 50% of country’s firefighting resources are currently stationed here. I’m not in any personal danger (at the moment) but like most people living here I’m closely tracking news of the fires and am very concerned for those who are at […]