That test many of you have been seeing where Google shows its search options above the search results instead of on the left? It’s not a test anymore. Google has just confirmed that all U.S. searchers will soon be getting the new interface — one that highly resembles Google’s mobile search results pages. Options to […]
Who’s winning in today’s US presidential election between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney? Who’s ahead for the many House of Representatives and US Senate seats that are up for grabs? Who won in the many state and local elections happening? The major search engines of Google, Bing and Yahoo have you covered with answers. Bing […]
By the time this election is over more than $2.6 billion will have been spent by the two US presidential candidates on political advertising. I’ve also seen some estimates that say total political advertising this election cycle will top $6 billion. Yet, remarkably, The Atlantic points to a Google Trends report showing a huge November […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Who Should Win The 2012 Social Media Election? With today being Election Day, I figured it would be appropriate to write a post related to politics. Then I thought better of […]
With today being Election Day, I figured it would be appropriate to write a post related to politics. Then I thought better of myself and realized it would pretty much be impossible to write anything about the election without getting overly political. To be completely honest, I don’t follow politics that closely, so I wouldn’t […]
Did you feel it yesterday? Some did, a slight shaking in the Google results. Yes, it was real. Google’s confirmed to us that a Panda Update happened yesterday. Google said that worldwide, the update will impact about 0.4% of queries that a regular user might notice. For those searching in the United States in English, […]
It’s Election Day in the United States, and Google is marking the occasion with a special ballot box logo. It’s more than a pretty picture, however. The logo also helps people find their local polling place. Click on the logo, and you’ll get a prompt to enter your address and find your voting place: That, […]
Ahrefs is a suite of tools that contains “the largest index of live links.” There is a free version and a premium version, an API, and an affiliate program. They have their own index, putting them into the same arena as SEO Moz and Majestic, and they post some useful stuff on their internal blog […]
Yandex is rolling out maps of the US and Europe, powered by Nokia’s mapping division Navteq. The company is also introducing a Turkish mapping site. Yandex says that its maps have an audience of 16.5 million on the PC and an additional 6.6 million users in mobile. Most of these users are concentrated in Eastern […]
After last month’s major change to Google Shopping, making the service solely pay-for-play, the company is exploring ways for affiliates to participate via Product Listing Ads (PLAs) in the US. Google Shopping has been testing ways of working with affiliates for nearly six months in alpha and is now opening up the beta to additional […]
Tuesday is election day in the U.S. and, by almost all accounts, the presidential race between President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney will be tight. No doubt many other races across the country will be equally close, and Yahoo will let searchers track results right in its search results pages. Some of Yahoo’s “direct […]
Citing “sources at Google familiar with its mapping plans,” the UK Guardian website reports what amounts to anxiety that Google’s forthcoming mapping app will not be approved by Apple: Sources at Google familiar with its mapping plans say they are “not optimistic” that Apple will ever approve a dedicated Google Maps iOS app. Though the […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Can Blogging Be Your Secret Weapon For Local SEO? I get called frequently by local companies wanting a quick fix for local rankings. In many cases, they discover that local SEO […]
I get called frequently by local companies wanting a quick fix for local rankings. In many cases, they discover that local SEO doesn’t equate with a cheap shortcut to high rankings. Increasingly, local SEO is about ongoing, consistent online promotion activities. That’s where blogging comes in. Good blogging doesn’t have to be a back-breaking enterprise. […]
This holiday shopping season is predicted to the the biggest ever for mobile commerce. A new survey from Deloitte expects that holiday sales from mobile devices will hit $36 billion this year, accounting for 5.1% of the $925 billion online total. Your Holiday To Do List So, if you have a mobile store up and […]
All too often, I encounter many enterprise organizations that are mired in the habit of manipulative link acquisition. It often falls to me to try and talk them out of doing it that way. This can be very challenging. There are always reasons why they want to continue to do what they are doing. That the current […]
There are a lot of levers to pull in PPC, and it can be confusing to prioritize them. One very good and often-overlooked area to focus on is the campaign settings tab in the Google AdWords interface. As you know, there are default settings in Google, and they can be calibrated too broadly or too […]
Do a search for “Obama,” and you might find your subsequent queries for things like “medicare” seemingly personalized based on your initial Obama search. Do the same for Romney, it is doesn’t happen. Is Google biased toward Obama, as some are now writing? No. Is it the “filter bubble” of personalization out of control? Perhaps […]
Almost exactly three years ago then Google employee Marissa Mayer described “the perfect search engine” in an interview with IDG News. She said it would be one “that could understand speech, questions, phrases, what entities you’re talking about, concepts. It would be able to search all of the world’s information, [find] different ideas and concepts, […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Bing Advertising To Increase Transparency With “Quality Impact” How valuable would it be to work on improving your paid search keywords’ Quality Score? And which keywords should you focus on first? […]
How valuable would it be to work on improving your paid search keywords’ Quality Score? And which keywords should you focus on first? Bing Ads is introducing a new feature called “Quality Impact” that will tell advertisers how many new impressions they could gain by improving their Quality Score on each keyword. The feature looks […]
Google is in the process of shutting down its collection of city pages — a change that follows the shift from Google Places to Google+ Local, and a change that may be reflective of a larger shift in direction for Google’s local efforts. Mike Blumenthal noticed yesterday that the Portland city page had gone missing. […]
Forrester, the large marketing technology analysis organization, has released two of three of its Forrester Wave reports related to search marketing. I wrote about the first one yesterday in Forrester Rates The Top Large Search Marketing Agencies, which offered an assessment of large, full service (meaning agencies that offer both organic SEO and PPC) and […]
Have you ever done a search to find out how to do something in Excel, just to find the search results littered with macro options? I used to avoid those results like the plague because I found macros (at least those beyond what I could create with the Macros Recorder) really intimidating. And I’m writing […]
Have you ever gone shopping for a couple items, only to find the checkout lines too long or slow, so you drop your items and leave the store? I have, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. It may not happen all that frequently at a brick and mortar, but it does online. A […]
It’s almost unanimous: 94 percent of U.S. teachers say their students equate “research” with using Google or other search engines — more so than Wikipedia and other online encyclopedias. But teachers are less sure that their students are effective searchers, and they’re more skeptical than most adults about the accuracy and trustworthiness of information that’s […]
Forrester, the large marketing technology analysis organization, has released two of three of its Forrester Wave reports related to search marketing. The first, The Forrester Wave: Search Marketing Agencies, Q4 2012 rates seven of the largest full-service search marketing agencies. While the ranking results are interesting in themselves, some of the other insights offered in […]
Both Google Maps Mania and the Google Earth Blog are reporting that Google has started to post-Sandysatellite imagery showing the destruction in New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland. Specifically, via the Google Crisis Map, you can select these areas for post-Sandy Imagery: Beach Haven to Cape May, NJ Spring Lake to Harvey Cedars, NJ Little Assawoman […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Apple Maps Sees Its First International Territorial Dispute As Korea Protests Island Naming From the it-had-to-happen-sooner-or-later department: Apple is in the midst of its first international territorial dispute over its new […]
From the it-had-to-happen-sooner-or-later department: Apple is in the midst of its first international territorial dispute over its new Apple Maps product. As the Korea Times reports (and also picked up by ZDNet), the South Korean government is upset because Apple is displaying a collection of small islands in between it and Japan with different names […]
Earlier this morning I wrote a post about how most search marketers were failing to utilize mobile paid search and/or not following mobile best practices. Failing to “get your act together” (from a mobile standpoint) could be costly for marketers of all sizes this holiday season. There have already been a dozen or so surveys […]
As keyword lists expand, they often outgrow the groups that were initially created to contain them. For example, a group that started out with a single keyword, [running shoes], could expand over time to contain [running shoes], [womens running shoes], [jogging shoes] and [black running shoes], among others. The original creative that was generated to […]
Google has been pumping out research and speaking at industry trade shows trying to educate advertisers and agencies about the growing importance of mobile in the consumer path to purchase. One of the “best practices” advocated by Google, as well as those experienced with mobile paid search, is to separate PC and mobile campaigns. However […]
The movement toward structured data markup (i.e., increasing use of standards like Open Graph, Schema.org, RDFa, etc.) has bothered me for awhile, but I could not exactly put my finger on the issues. A few weeks ago at SMX East, there were some great presentations on these topics, and I finally realized that I have […]
One of Google’s most well-funded and tenacious opponents in the legal arena, Rosetta Stone, has agreed to settle its trademark suit against the search giant. The language learning software company had contended that the use of its trademarks as “keyword triggers” infringed trademark law and confused consumers. Terms of the settlement agreement weren’t disclosed. The three-year-old case was […]