Happy Thanksgiving Day! Both Google and Bing has special logos and themes up on their home pages today. Google has a Google Doodle representing the Thanksgiving Day parade, with the Google letters as hot air ballons. Bing has a Turkey getting a warm kiss from a friend: For some reason, Yahoo doesn’t have a special […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Nokia’s HERE Maps For iOS A Disappointment Nokia has many fans around the world who believe that its mapping service is the best one out there. And in selected ways it […]
Nokia has many fans around the world who believe that its mapping service is the best one out there. And in selected ways it might be. Nokia offered “offline” maps well before Google. The company is also the go-to mapping provider for third parties, such as Yahoo and Yandex. In addition, Nokia plays an increasingly […]
Music lovers are able to buy individual songs without buying the whole album. Investors are able to buy individual stocks without buying a mutual fund or ETF. Search marketers are able to bid on individual search terms without buying pre-packaged bundles of terms. Until recently, however, display marketers have been mostly confined to targeting audience […]
In the last couple of weeks, two well-known search tool providers — Raven and SEOmoz — have had their access to the AdWords API revoked, with little public explanation, as was reported by Kahena Digital Marketing. But Google denies that this is a “crackdown” or widespread enforcement activity, saying it’s all in a day’s work […]
There has been a lot of discussion in the SEO world lately around structured data and rich snippets in the SERPs. If you are not familiar with structured data, it is basically a way to explain the content of your website to the search engines in a trusted (structured) format. You can think back to […]
There are now enough indications to suggest that any antitrust settlement between the FTC and Google — and the FTC would much prefer to settle than test its case in court — won’t involve “vertical search.” An earlier Reuters report, probably resulting from an internal FTC leak, suggested that vertical search wasn’t the core of […]
The holiday shopping season is almost upon us. Black Friday comes at the end of the week, followed by the increasingly popular Cyber Monday. While there are plenty of deal sites, there also remain traditional shopping search engines that consumers may wish to use. Shopping search engines, or perhaps more properly, product and price comparison […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: No, That Wasn’t A Panda Update — But One Is Coming We’ve been hearing reports from within the SEO community that a significant Google update happened starting this past Friday throughout […]
Forrester, the large marketing technology analysis organization, has released the final of its quarterly Forrester Wave reports related to search marketing. The first, Forrester Rates The Top Large Search Marketing Agencies, offered an assessment of large, full service (meaning agencies that offer both organic SEO and PPC) and agencies who serve large clients of $1 […]
Recently I had a chance to sit down with two veterans of the search industry, Andrew Goodman of Page Zero Media and fellow Search Engine Land contributor, Matt Van Wagner of Find Me Faster, after their session “From Keywords to Buy Words” at SES Chicago. The conversation started with keywords, but took on a life of […]
What if you could only spend one hour each week identifying some of your biggest opportunities and problems? What would you spend the time doing? That was a question – well, more of a “challenge” given to me by a few attendees of a recent Advanced Keyword Modeling presentation. While the many possible analysis were […]
We’ve been hearing reports from within the SEO community that a significant Google update happened starting this past Friday throughout the weekend. Google tells us there was no Panda update over the weekend but is not confirming or denying if there was another type of update over the weekend. Google did however tell us they […]
Ever wondered exactly what keywords in a searcher’s query resulted in your ad being triggered? Google has added a feature in AdWords to give advertisers that information, allowing them to adjust their keywords and bids accordingly. Meanwhile, the company has made other interface changes — including account diagnostics and new impression share reporting. The new […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: 5 Important Trends Affecting The Local, Social & Mobile Industry On Tuesday last week, London hosted the Local Social Summit 2012, the fourth year this great (and growing) summit has been […]
On Tuesday last week, London hosted the Local Social Summit 2012, the fourth year this great (and growing) summit has been put on. As a UK-based local SEO, I am envious of the plethora of local and social events that run regularly in the US; sadly, I don’t get across to many of them. So, […]
Late last week Groupon announced that it was going to make a growing inventory of less perishable deals accessible to consumers. Calling this the Groupon “Local Marketplace” the new functionality is live in Chicago and New York, soon to be available across Groupon cities: In the last year, we’ve increased our North American selection of […]
It sounds really attractive: 9-5 hours. You get to focus on a single product. You can win over a single IT department. The grass is way greener over there. But the truth is, in the SEO world, the large enterprise is in trouble. I know about brand favoritism. And I know large enterprises have massive […]
Google’s Matt Cutts said on a Hacker News comment that those who are interested in switching their whole web site from http to https should go ahead and do that. I spotted this comment in response to Facebook going HTTPS by default, where someone mentioned that Google may have an issue indexing HTTPS content. Matt […]
I recently had an AdWords client get blacklisted by Google for policy reasons. Anyone who has worked on AdWords accounts for more than a couple of years has no doubt had this happen to them as well. In this case, I had just launched the client’s account and had bought a total of maybe 20 […]
BrowserFame reports the latest “nightly channel” of the Firefox browser, version 19, is warning browser users when it appears someone is hijacking the search engine results. This is to warn users when they may be “falling victim” to “search hijacking” according to the feature page. The page goes on to explain how the feature works […]
The world, it seems, just cannot wait for Facebook to come along and start its own search engine and knock Google off the top of search mountain. The rumors and expectations of this go back for years. Now the latest twist: Yahoo and Facebook will team up together. If you’re banking on that potential alliance […]
Google and Bing both hit all-time highs in U.S. search market share in October, while overall desktop search activity was up eight percent from the month before. All of that’s according to comScore’s October 2012 search activity/rankings report. Google’s market share rose two-tenths of a point, from 66.7 percent in September to 66.9 percent in […]
Bing has published its first set of webmaster guidelines, offering website owners general guidance on best practices related to SEO for Bing’s search engine. They’re accessible in the Help section of Bing’s Webmaster Tools as a new entry under the “Content Guidelines” section. The direct link is www.bing.com/webmaster/help/webmaster-guidelines-30fba23a. Bing’s Webmaster Guidelines touch on things like […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: How To Gather Evidence To Help Determine If It’s Time For A Mobile Website Is t time for a mobile website? I was talking to some clients a few weeks ago […]
Is t time for a mobile website? I was talking to some clients a few weeks ago and in separate conversations, both asked me if it was time for a mobile website. Their current websites rendered okay on a smartphone, but they noticed a lack of conversions for mobile users, as well as a high bounce […]
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.
When Apple announced, in June, that it was introducing its own maps and ousting Google from its default position on the iPhone, that was perhaps the best thing that could have happened to Mountain View. Apple subsequently introduced an elegant-looking but flawed mapping app as part of iOS 6. While Apple and its mapping mistakes have […]
Twitter is rolling out an update to its search results that will put a new “Top Photos” section above matching tweets. “Top Videos” may also appear. Twitter will also begin automatically showing tweeted pictures for those searching on the iPhone or with Android devices. Top Photos & Videos Twitter already shows top photos and images […]
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 Targeting Improvements To Help More Marketers “Get Local” For Holidays While this will be a true multi-channel holiday, the overwhelming number of actual purchases (north of 90 percent) will […]
While this will be a true multi-channel holiday, the overwhelming number of actual purchases (north of 90 percent) will still be made in stores. Yet those purchases will be highly influenced by PC, tablet and smartphone usage. More than 80 – 90 percent of online consumers do research before buying offline. This has been documented […]
Anyone involved with online retail should be well aware of just how critical holiday revenues are, not only to a strong fourth quarter, but to our success for the entire year. An RKG analysis of 2011 paid-search results shows that, on average, retailers generated 18% of their annual revenues over the 30 day period starting […]
Some readers may be surprised to discover that despite the opportunity organic search offers — a recent Shareholic study showed organic search drives nearly half of all traffic, 5 times more than social networks combined — many executive budget holders are still reluctant to make an initial substantial investment in SEO. Other, battle-scarred veterans will […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Hijacking Google Search Results With Duplicate Content Dan Petrovic has explained how he hijacked a few pages in Google to show his copied version over the original version of the page. […]
Are we hiding from science? As I write this, we have all let our breath out having learned the outcome of a presidential election and countless congressional races. Now that the task of getting elected is behind us, it is time to examine a bastion of political debate: bashing science. Shawn Lawrence Otto writing in […]
Dan Petrovic has explained how he hijacked a few pages in Google to show his copied version over the original version of the page. For example, he was able to confuse Google into thinking a page on MarketBizz should really show on dejanseo.com.au instead of on marketbizz.nl. How did he do it? He simply copied […]
Does Google not support reconsideration requests in Italian or other non-English languages? Yes, it does, and might even give detailed advice. But if you want that, you have to ask in your native language. The situation came up recently in a blog post by Gianluca Fiorelli. It covered how an Italian site owner received a weird response from Google […]
Dan Petrovic documented a competitive link hack that can easily been done within Google Webmaster Tools to find all the links pointing to any page on the internet. It is a competitive link hack that seems to work just fine for anyone. The hack takes advantage of the intermediate link feature within webmaster tools. Without […]
Earlier today Nielsen, xAd and Telmetrics released the third part of their “mobile path to purchase” study conducted earlier this year. The research focused on three verticals: restaurants, travel and autos. While almost all the mobile and tablet users doing research on these devices are highly qualified purchasers, there are differences in the consumer behavior […]
Globally there are arguably four main digital mapping competitors: Google, Apple, Microsoft and Nokia. Google is the clear leader. However Nokia is making a renewed bid to challenge Google’s mapping supremacy with a rebranded platform “Here,” new APIs, a Google Street View-like offering, augmented reality and new apps for third party smartphone operating systems. Apple […]