Last week there was a report that “four out of five FTC commissioners” favored going forward with an antitrust case against Google. The Reuters article in which the claim appeared mentions but doesn’t emphasize the litany of “vertical search” complaints against Google raised by competitors. Those “Google favors its own results” claims have been at […]
Enterprise businesses demand savvy communication from SEM managers. It is the nature of large organizations to have the following: Senior executives reviewing data from programs they don’t understand A shortage of institutional memory Consultants coming and going who offer opinions based on superficial data Each of these traits make performance reporting particularly important, and sometimes […]
Wondering if some human at Google has reviewed your web site and decided it deserves to be penalized in Google’s search results? Google’s now reporting such cases nearly 100% of the time. “We’ve actually started to send messages for pretty much every manual action that we do that will directly impact the ranking of your site,” […]
A study we recently did at Conductor found that search engines still have work to do when it comes to integrating social search results in the SERPs: 62% of respondents reported they do not want or gain benefit from social results mixed in with search results. In the same survey, we asked the 150 respondents […]
Google’s Moby Dick logo celebrates the 161st anniversary of The Whale novel written by author Herman Melville. There are two special points to be made about the implementation of this logo: (1) Google purposely is taking searches who click on the logo to a search result for [Herman Melville books] which brings up the Google […]
Yelp is now showing “Consumer Alert” warning messages on the profile pages of eight businesses that it says it caught in a sting operation trying to buy reviews. As the New York Times reports, Yelp conducted a sting operation in which one of its employees pretended to be an “Elite” reviewer and responded to review […]
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 Underrated Content Marketing Assets For B2B SEO One of the biggest obstacles to B2B search engine optimization is developing new content marketing assets for targeting important keywords and acquiring link […]
One of the biggest obstacles to B2B search engine optimization is developing new content marketing assets for targeting important keywords and acquiring link assets. While our organization has seen this in client relationships throughout the years, this degree of difficulty was further supported by industry peers in the 2012 MarketingSherpa Search Engine Marketing Report. Even […]
I don’t know what images were showing up for a “binders full of women” search on Google Images before last night’s US presidential debate. But today, they’re dominated by a meme started from a comment last night by Republican candidate Mitt Romney. Romney was commenting that he sought to increase the number of women in […]
One of the more popular Webmaster and SEO forums, WebmasterWorld, has been sold today to Jim Boykin’s Internet Marketing Ninjas. Jim Boykin has been acquiring several forums this year, including all of the Developer Shed network including SEO Chat forums and Cre8asite Forums from Kim Krause Berg. Cre8asite Forums has been around since 1998 as […]
Engagement is a magnetic “measure” of online effectiveness. You might call it an “engaging” metric. This is because it is a nice stand-in when real measures of sales, leads or subscriptions are too difficult to track or deliver disappointing results. “No, we didn’t increase sales, but look at the engagement!” is the mantra. The definition […]
Advertisers will tell you that they don’t like to waste money. This is especially true heading into the holiday season. However, that is exactly what many advertisers do by not taking advantage of Look-a-like technology, which has made great advances in recent years. Look-a-likes can reduce waste, save time, and improve performance by defining highly effective […]
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 Launches Disavow Links Tool Google has launched a new and widely anticipated “disavow links” tool. The tool was announced by the head of Google’s web spam team Matt Cutts, when […]
Google has launched a new and widely anticipated “disavow links” tool. The tool was announced by the head of Google’s web spam team Matt Cutts, when speaking during a keynote at the Pubcon conference today. The tool is live and can be found here. It has been beta tested by some selected SEOs already for […]
It’s not everyday you get to hear from someone that’s worked on Google’s Search Quality/Webspam team and isn’t named Matt Cutts. But Andre Weyher, whose LinkedIn profile lists a two-year stint as a member of the search quality team, recently spoke with James Norquay, a search/digital marketer based in Australia, and shared some interesting comments […]
Google is making its call tracking solution called “Call Reporting” available in AdWords Express, its simplified search marketing solution directed toward small businesses. For now this is US only and each completed call over 30 seconds costs $1. It’s simple and works like other call tracking programs. Google replaces the phone number in the ad […]
Since search and social have had more of a convergence, the idea of the “hub” has become stronger, providing one main place to drive your existing audience and capture their attention. Most marketers or brands make the mistake of having social media be their “go to” place and they neglect any semblance of a strong blog or […]
It all makes sense. According to comScore, map-based search on the PC has now peaked and is starting to erode. By contrast mobile usage of mapping applications is growing and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Apple Maps’ problems notwithstanding, smartphone mapping apps offer a better overall experience than online maps. Because […]
There’s a new player on the links tool market – Serpi.co. Using Majestic SEO‘s data, they allow you to view link data of up to ten competitors at once, let you track keyword rankings over time, set up automatic alerts, and provide you with historic data that goes back to 2007. They also offer a link […]
Last week, someone accused me of being too technical when describing geo-targeting settings — it followed a conversation where I was told that one of my discussions was not “advanced” enough! So, I apologise in advance, as this post is going to be too technical for some and not for others! It’s also a little […]
Majestic SEO, one of the advanced SEO third party link reporting services, announced they are now updating their linkage data to be as fresh as within hours or minutes. Instead of waiting 24 hours for the link reports to update, Majestic SEO is pushing updates throughout the day, almost hourly, so webmasters can see new […]
Here’s another small step in Google’s effort to centralize your Google search activity: The company is expanding a field trial to include Google Drive documents in search results. At the same time, the existing trial that includes Gmail information in search results is being expanded to work not only from Google.com, but also within Gmail […]
It would appear that Siri will be getting a little more searchy. As AllThingsD reported this afternoon Apple has hired William Stasior, the guy who took over at Amazon’s search engine A9 after Udi Manber left for Google. While Siri isn’t a search engine it can operate like one from a user perspective. With Stasior’s […]
According to SEMPO, a search marketing industry association, the US Federal Trade Commission is “strongly considering” a review of how well — or poorly — search engines are compliance with its 2002 guidelines on disclosing paid listings to consumers. The news comes in a letter that SEMPO — the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization — sent 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: DuckDuckGo’s New Video Targets Google’s “Filter Bubble” Of Personalized Results DuckDuckGo’s ongoing mission to challenge Google (and other search engines, but mainly Google) on privacy issues has taken another turn with […]
DuckDuckGo’s ongoing mission to challenge Google (and other search engines, but mainly Google) on privacy issues has taken another turn with the recent launch of a video that accuses Google of putting searchers in a “bubble” of personalized results. The video hits on a few of DuckDuckGo’s consistent talking points in its ongoing battle to […]
DuckDuckGo has added new “zero click” information from Zanran to its search results, giving users quicker access to some of the deeper web content that Zanran offers. You may remember Zanran from my profile last year, Zanran: New Search Engine That Unearths Data In Charts, Graphs & Tables — it’s essentially a search engine for […]
Last week, we assembled a group of paid search experts in NYC at the SMX East Conference for a conversation about where Paid Search Advertising was heading in 2013. I figured we’d hear some wild predictions about new mergers and buyouts, ad formats, campaign automation tools; and the usual whining about rising CPCs, Google’s quality […]
SEOs focusing on Web search may have had a Panda update and an EMD update at the beginning of October, but SEOs focusing on mobile and app search have had their own share of turmoil in the last few months. In February, there was a major spam crackdown by Apple which resulted in many developers […]
While attending BIA/Kelsey’s SMB Digital Marketing 2012 Conference in Chicago last month, I was surprised by the results of a recent LCM study, which showed that only 20 percent of local businesses said they have experience with mobile marketing. Small businesses today operate in a time when smartphone adoption is growing rapidly (eMarketer predicts there […]
From Ben Guild we get to see some blurry native iOS Google Maps screenshots. We know the app is coming; the questions are: 1) precisely when and 2) will Apple do anything to block it? My guesses would be: 1) within the next month and 2) no. Guild says the mapping app is currently in […]
At Define Media Group, we jokingly say that we are unafraid to be the best in the world at an industry that is imploding faster than Amanda Bynes’s career. With many major media conglomerates as bedrock clients and hundreds of news and magazine titles under our watchful eye, the following thoughts represent our attempt at saving […]
Google’s head of search spam, answered some questions in the Power Searching with Google Hangout on Air #2 on October 2nd. In that video, he was asked by fellow Googler, Dan Russell a Search research scientist at Google, will search spam go on forever? This question was asked about 36 minutes into the video, where […]
Perhaps it was always inevitable that Foursquare would shift its emphasis from location-based social networking to local search. Indeed, the site has been moving in this direction for quite some time, and very self-consciously for the better part of the past year. This afternoon the company is rolling out a new PC homepage for users […]
Google is celebrating the 107th anniversary of the comic strip by Winsor McCay named Little Nemo. The comic strip originated on October 15, 1905 in the New York Herald and continued through July 26, 1914 at William Randolph Hearst’s New York American newspaper. This is Google’s first comic strip logo, where you click on the […]
Reuters is reporting that majority of those on the US Federal Trade Commission believe an antitrust case should be brought against Google. But if action comes, it doesn’t seem likely to involve Google being found to “favor” its own “vertical” search engines like local or shopping over competing ones. Apparently four of the five FTC commissioners […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: VP Debate Spurs Searches Like “Shirtless” (Ryan), “Laughing” (Biden) & Other “Malarkey” There’s a kind of Pavlovian response that happens with major national events in the U.S. (and probably elsewhere): internet […]
There’s a kind of Pavlovian response that happens with major national events in the U.S. (and probably elsewhere): internet users taking to the web to comment on and/or learn more about what they’re experiencing. As expected, conversation spiked on social networking sites during the Vice Presidential debate last night. Twitter says there were 3.5 million […]
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.
Spending on Search Marketing continues to be the biggest contributor to online advertising revenues in the U.S., according to the latest report on the first half of 2012 released by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and Pricewaterhouse Coopers. Search ads represented 48% of the overall interactive advertising market in the first six months of 2012, bringing […]