A new bill making its way to Israel’s parliament (the Knesset) would assess a tax of 7 percent on search engine ad revenues to subsidize local content publishers. The story was reported in the Financial Times. While it’s not explicit or exclusive to any individual company, the bill has been nicknamed the “Google Law.” This […]
Online marketing experts have spent a lot of time providing advice on managing online ratings and reviews for local businesses — but reputation can have much broader impact than your reviews in Yelp and Google. There’s hardly a business out there that doesn’t have an occasional issue arise with a customer. Ideally, you can resolve […]
Move over, pandas. Fly away, hummingbirds. Waddle away, penguins. Google has a new animal friend: crows. But unlike its past associations with the animal world, this one isn’t about SEO or algorithms — it’s a new search trick that adds distance calculation to Google’s OneBox feature. (The OneBox is where Google often presents immediate answers […]
Leaving nothing to chance, Apple’s ensured that anyone searching for “Mac” on Google or Bing today, the 30th birthday of the Mac, will know about the anniversary. The company has purchased ads that lead to a special Mac birthday area of the Apple site. Above is an example of what shows on Google, for a […]
Google has lost another case in the Max Mosley lawsuit, this time in Germany. According to a Reuter’s report, a German court has ruled Google is responsible for distributing scandalous pictures of the former Formula One president, and is ordering the search engine to block links to the images from appearing in search results. 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: Days-Old Error In Google Search Causes Gmail User To Get Thousands Of Emails Earlier this week, we reported a glitch in Google Search, where clicking on a link after a search […]
Earlier this week, we reported a glitch in Google Search, where clicking on a link after a search for Gmail listed someone’s email address, complete in a window ready to send them email. With today’s Gmail outage, that error — never fixed — has resulted in at least one person getting thousands of unwanted emails. […]
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.
It’s been seven months since we launched Optmyzr’s first tool at SMX Advanced in Seattle — the Quality Score Tracker — and we’ve been busy adding tools, reports and optimizations since then. Now, one of the most common questions we get is when to use various optimizations — and, of course, these apply no matter what tools […]
Conductor released a study that analyzed the ten blue links at Google showing 34% show rich media, nine organic listings and nine search ads. 34% Of Search Snippets Have Rich Media The Conductor study showed that there was rich media on the search results page 34% of the time. The breakdown of rich media showed […]
A judge has determined patent-holding company Vringo is entitled to additional royalties from Google in a patent infringement case involving Google AdWords. The order stems from a case brought by Vringo subsidiary I/P Engine in 2011 that claimed filtering technology used in Google AdWords violated two of its patents. A jury found in favor of […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: MapQuest Transfers Local Listings Management To Yext Last October, MapQuest started outsourcing local business listings management to Yext. The “claim your MapQuest listings” page is hosted by Yext (I believe) with […]
Last October, MapQuest started outsourcing local business listings management to Yext. The “claim your MapQuest listings” page is hosted by Yext (I believe) with a co-branded look and feel. Yesterday, MapQuest notified business users that its local business center and basic local listings product would be formally shutting down. Here’s the text of the email that went out: […]
Google announced they are replacing the old smartphone crawler user-agent with a new one in order to make it possible for Google to index more smartphone content. Zhijian He, a smartphone search engineer at Google said that the previous user-agent “made it impossible for Google to index smartphone content of some sites, or for Google […]
As retargeting becomes more widely used and better understood, its reputation is improving. Marketers are learning to avoid creeping people out through better targeting and less intrusive messaging. Early adopters now have a year or two (or more) of experience to share, which is exactly what I intend to do today. At Wordstream, we’ve been […]
With the three major search engines migrating their default searches to secure search, over SSL/HTTPS, marketers and webmasters want to know what referrer and analytics data will be passed to them and what won’t. The majority of Google is secure search, Yahoo yesterday defaulted all searches to be conducted over SSL, and Bing is currently […]
I expect that most everyone working in SEO knows that PDFs are indexable by search engines. PDFs can also appear with an authorship-rich snippet in Google SERPs. But, just because a file format can be indexed doesn’t always mean that it’s the ideal approach. Today, I’d like to explore the pros and cons of PDFs […]
Google has announced the formal rollout of a test that some searchers have been seeing for a few days now — a test that associates a Knowledge Graph popup with certain web pages in desktop search results. The popup adds more information about certain search results, which sounds like it should be good for searchers. […]
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 Matt Cutts: We Don’t Use Twitter Or Facebook Social Signals To Rank Pages Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, released a video today answering the question, “are Facebook and […]
Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, released a video today answering the question, “are Facebook and Twitter signals part of the ranking algorithm?” The short answer was no. Matt said that Google does not give any special treatment to Facebook or Twitter pages. They are in fact, currently, treated like any other page, according […]
By default, searches on Yahoo.com are now done through a secure server. That means more protection for searchers but less data for search marketers about how they are receiving traffic. Most visits from Yahoo done via search will appear as if someone came to a site directly. As a result, Yahoo’s apparent popularity as a […]
Google is now dynamically changing the top search menu/filters based on the search query entered by the searcher. So now, what options you see at the top might differ or be in a different order based on the query you enter into Google’s search box. A Google spokesperson told us this based on noticing that […]
Though there have been several studies on the impact of display ads on search queries, researchers from Harvard and Ozyegin University in Turkey sought to bring academic rigor to this discussion. Their findings are contained in a Harvard Business School paper entitled, “Do Display Ads Influence Search? Attribution and Dynamics in Online Advertising” (embedded below). The document is tedious and […]
I have written numerous times on the many myths that abound in SEO. But it seems that no matter how many times I try to bust these myths wide open, they still persist. Perhaps I am fighting an uphill battle here because the world of SEO unfortunately has its fair share of charlatans who want […]
Google’s John Mueller announced on the Google Webmaster blog this morning that the Google Webmaster Tools team has updated the crawl errors report to show errors on the final URL of the redirect, as opposed to the origin URL of the redirect. What this means is that Google is now showing the errors on the […]
Is your company using customer avatars or marketing personas effectively? The idea of persona-driven marketing appeals to practitioners for a wide variety of reasons. It’s part of what I’d call core inbound marketing dogma. Yet, marketers are admitting that they’re not really using personas or that they’re failing to use them effectively. Let’s take a […]
Pinterest has updated its search features, making it possible to filter for vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free and paleo ingredients or recipes when performing food-related searches. According to the announcement, Pinterest is rolling out the new search feature on the web now, and has plans to bring it to its mobile site as well. Along with the […]
Expedia appears to have been hit by a Google penalty related to unnatural links. So what do Google and Expedia have to say about the situation? No comment. As covered yesterday, the visibility of Expedia listings in Google appears to have recently plunged, according to measurements by Searchmetrics: This comes after accusations last month, which […]
Google’s head of webspam, Matt Cutts, caused an uproar in the SEO community yesterday when he published a blog post on his personal blog claiming guest blogging for SEO purposes is dead. In his post, Cutts offered a history of how guest blogging has moved from being a reliable source of high-quality content to now […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Will Link Building Soon Be A Thing Of The Past? The other day while working on a client proposal, I came to the section about link building and had to pause. […]
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The life of an SEO can be challenging. Just when you think you’ve got things figured out, have mastered the nuances of hundreds of ranking signals and have perfected your own tactics and techniques to achieve great search engine visibility, someone like Google’s Matt Cutts will write a blog post condemning a widely-used, and up […]
The other day while working on a client proposal, I came to the section about link building and had to pause. While everything we include in a proposal is relevant, strategic, and in my opinion, a good tactic, I wasn’t sure I wanted to position it as link building. As someone who has been building […]
By now it’s clear that retailers made record investments in Google product listing ads (PLAs) in Q4 2013, as reports from Covario, RKG and IgnitionOne have each shown. Today, Marin Software released its own findings which reinforce the general consensus that PLA performance this past holiday season will set the trend for 2014. Marin also […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Matt Cutts: “Stick A Fork In It, Guest Blogging Is Done” Google and Matt Cutts, in particular, has made a number of statements about guest blogging over the past year as […]
Google — and Matt Cutts, in particular — has made a number of statements about guest blogging over the past year as the tactic has grown as a link building tactic. None of those statements are as clear as the one Cutts wrote today on his personal blog. Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team, […]
The major travel website, Expedia, seems to have lost 25% of their search visibility in Google according to Search Metrics. It appears that drop was due to an unnatural link penalty, where Nenad called out Expedia over a month ago for possible paid links on article sites. Expedia.com’s Google Traffic Decline: Patrick Altoft noticed a […]
Google has agreed to several concessions after an investigation by Canada’s Office of the Privacy Commissioner found Google in violation of Canada’s privacy rights for the use of sensitive health history in remarketing campaigns. The investigation began last January, when a man complained that his personal health history was being used for ad targeting purposes. […]
Most SEO consultants I have met are pretty decent, hard-working folks. But there are plenty of SEO con artists out there, and it kills me every time I see a small business (or a big business) get taken. Recently, I had the privilege to witness a true Picasso of SEO con artists. I am sharing […]
I’ve been struggling with a particularly difficult link cleanup project lately. On the occasion of my 100th reconsideration request (4th for this particular client), I thought it might be helpful to share five not-so-common problems that you might run into during your own link cleanup project. [Editor’s note: Since this post was originally published, it’s […]
If you search for [gmail] in Google and if you click on the sitelink that reads “Google mail” — Google may push you to a page that composes an email to a Google Apps user. Here is the search result you may see when you search for [gmail]: Clicking on that sitelink below the main […]