Jan 21, 2013 at 2:32pm ET by Vanessa Fox

Journalists call them headlines; SEOs call them titles and headings. Whatever you call them, they're the words that tell someone that your article is what they want to read. Look at Google News any day of the week for examples of headlines that give you absolutely no idea what the article might be about. Search engines don't know what to rank them for; users don't know whether to click. One trend I watch is that of searchers asking what time things start. For any event, you can be sure that searchers will take to Google to find out the start time. I chronicle this every year, for instance, [...]

Will [Not Provided] Ever Reach 100% In Web Analytics?

Jan 18, 2013 at 2:07pm ET by Vanessa Fox

With the news today that Chrome is moving to secure search, marketers may be wondering about the larger picture of using search data in Web analytics. The searches people do that lead them to a site is valuable data to an organization. What other data source do we have that gives us direct access to our customers' wants and needs? Sure, we can ask them, but customers can lie. Or choose not to answer. By looking at exactly what visitors have searched for, we can learn a lot about who our customers are, what they really want, and if we're providing it to them. Search marketers have valued [...]

Sign of Hope? Banned Advertisers Rises Just 8 Percent in 2012

Jan 18, 2013 at 12:52pm ET by Ginny Marvin

The battle against bad ads getting past the AdWords review process rages on. Google announced in a blog post this week that the company axed 224 million bad ads in 2012. That’s up 67% from 2011. The 2012 numbers underscore that there is no shortage of scammers, however they may also point to a sign of hope. The number of banned advertisers plateaued from 2011, rising just 8%. Last year the number of banned advertisers increased by 70%. That leveling off could mean Google’s efforts are paying off and scammers aren’t flocking to AdWords the way they used to. Last year, Google announce [...]

Adobe: Paid Search Opportunities Lie In Tablet Targeting And PLAs

Jan 17, 2013 at 10:53am ET by Pamela Parker

Where are the bargains in paid search these days? According to an analysis of the fourth quarter in paid search, Adobe determined that both tablet targeting and product listing ads represent great opportunities for marketers, where there's a substantial gap between cost-per-click (CPC) and conversion rate. Adobe came to its conclusions after looking at paid search spend across more than 2 billion impressions by its clients in the fourth quarter. Adobe's Media Optimizer unit came from the company's acquisition of paid-search-specific company Efficient Frontier. Paid search as a whole had [...]

Up Close With Facebook Graph Search

Jan 15, 2013 at 4:38pm ET by Danny Sullivan

We've covered the launch of Facebook Graph Search, explored how it differs from Google search but now it's time for the hands-on. Come along for a tour of how it works. Sign-Up & Wait To get started, you have to sign-up, where you'll be added to a waiting list. There's no particular ETA of when you'll actually have it enabled: Expect it to likely take days and possibly weeks, especially if you're late to signing-up. But when it happens, you'll see a notice like this: The New Search "Box" That's Not A Box Once you've turned on Graph Search, you'll see the old-style search box g [...]

SEO For Facebook Graph Search? Facebook Has Some Tips

Jan 15, 2013 at 3:04pm ET by Matt McGee

With today's announcement of the new Facebook Graph Search, many business owners will eventually be wondering, "How do I make sure my business gets found in Facebook search?" Never fear: Facebook itself has already shared a few tips to help make that happen. We'll get to that below, but first a quick bit of background that's good to know. What Business Owners Need To Know About Facebook Graph Search Facebook Graph Search could eventually become a fairly effective local search/recommendations engine. Here are a couple things to know before we get to Facebook's visibility tips: Although [...]

How The New Facebook Search Is Different & Unique From Google Search

Jan 15, 2013 at 2:22pm ET by Danny Sullivan

At long last, Facebook's search challenge to Google has arrived. But it has arrived in a much different format than many expected. Indeed, Facebook's not using its data to provide a better search than Google. Facebook is providing a new type of search that you simply can't do on Google or anywhere else. The Connections Of Links Vs. Likes I've struggled with how to describe this new service. I hate the term "graph," whether it's used by Facebook for "Social Graph" and now for "Facebook Graph Search" or Google for "Knowledge Graph." To the ordinary person, I feel "graph" is a noise word, sayin [...]

Google, Mobile Search And The Paradox Of Competition

Jan 8, 2013 at 12:28pm ET by Greg Sterling

How much does Google figure into the "future of search," whose advances will largely be determined by mobile and non-traditional devices? That's a hard question to answer. On the one hand Google is one of the biggest (if not the biggest) brand in the world, with almost unlimited resources to develop technology or buy companies it sees as threats. (Google Ventures has for example invested in Expect Labs, which is building a next-generation mobile search capability.) On the other hand its traditional search model and content presentation are not well suited to a range of new search and discov [...]

Google Is Hiring Someone To Find Ways To Make You Want To Search While Signed-In

Jan 8, 2013 at 9:09am ET by Barry Schwartz

Google is hiring a new product marketing manager for search with one of the key goals being to find ways to get people to sign-in while they search. The job description says: As Product Marketing Manager within the search growth team, you will be responsible to developing plans, creatives, campaigns and programs to increase the number of user's signed in. Brian Ussery spotted this first and posted a screen shot of the job posting: As you know, the number of "not provided" terms listed in Google Analytics because Google is blocking the search query parameter from analytics programs [...]

The Strange Explanation Of Why Windows Phone Users Lost Access To Google Maps

Jan 5, 2013 at 10:32pm ET by Danny Sullivan

On Friday, Windows Phone users supposedly found themselves unable to access Google Maps. But Google said it made no sudden change on its end to cause this. What happened? It seems likely many people simple noticed for the first time long-standing redirection that Google had in place for those not using Android or iOS devices. Windows Phone User? No Google Maps For You! To recap briefly, some Windows Phone users started reporting (as covered by The Verge) that they were unable to reach Google Maps using the Internet Explorer web browser on their phones. They got redirected instead to the Go [...]

From Praise To Outrage: Reactions To Google’s Antitrust Settlement

Jan 4, 2013 at 2:54pm ET by Greg Sterling

The post-mortem analysis of Google's antitrust settlement happened very quickly yesterday and this morning with some journalists and analysts concluding that factors other than the law were responsible behind the scenes. For example, Politico asserts it was largely "a calculated and expensive charm offensive" (lobbying) that drove the outcome yesterday. An even more absurd analysis argues that Google is essential to US foreign policy and thus the FTC let the company off the hook. While Google lobbying may have had an impact, in reality the the facts and the law weren't on the FTC's sid [...]

A Test, Not A Bug: Bing Deep Links To Facebook, eBay, Craigslist Under Google’s Search Result

Jan 3, 2013 at 8:27pm ET by Matt McGee

It looked like a screwup. If you searched for [google] on Bing, you saw Deep Links to Facebook, eBay and Craigslist underneath the main search result for Google. So, in my article earlier today, I called it a "strange bug" in Bing's search results. I was wrong. It wasn't a bug; it was a test that Bing was running and has now turned off. A Bing spokesperson confirmed for us this afternoon that this was no mistake. We're constantly updating and refining the Bing search experience to help people get things done more quickly. We are currently conducting tests on navigational links that will [...]

Search Engine Land’s Most Popular Stories On Google+ In 2012: Panda, Knowledge Graph & SEO

Dec 28, 2012 at 9:00am ET by Monica Wright

It's started, the top lists of 2012! Over the next few days, we'll be posting a series of these, including the most read Search Engine Land stories, the most tweeted ones and the ones most liked on Facebook. But to kick it off, the stories with the most +1's on Google+. How did we collect this data? Search Engine Land columnist Annie Cushing suggested we use Social Crawlytics, a tool that easily crawls the site and reports on the social activity for each URL. If you haven't checked it out, go do so. It's free to get started. A few observations while aggregating list: Seventeen of t [...]

Only 5% Of News Publishers Use The Google News Keywords Meta Tag

Dec 26, 2012 at 1:32pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Just over three months ago, Google launched the news keyword meta tag designed to let news publishers have a better chance of ranking for words they might not have included in their headlines. Adoption rate so far? Only about 5% of the sources within Google News use the tag, according to new data provided by Blekko. Last month, I'd asked Google how many publishers were using the tag. It declined to answer. But rival search engine Blekko crawls the web and is able to spot what pages have the news keywords tag. Blekko has released a report showing how many pages and sites across the web have [...]

Where’s Santa Claus? The 2012 Santa Tracker List, From NORAD To Google, From The Web To Apps

Dec 24, 2012 at 12:34pm ET by Danny Sullivan

It's Christmas Eve, and Santa Claus is on his annual trip delivering presents to all the good little boys and girls around the world. This year, not just one but two major organizations are offering ways to track Jolly St. Nick on his flight. Below, our annual review of how to track him by the web, by app or even through a telephone call. The Santa Tracking Sites You can find the two major Santa tracking sites this year here: NORAD Tracks Santa Google Santa Tracker Below, more about using both of the sites, including related apps or even an email-for-location feature that NORAD [...]

Official: It’s Google Panda Update 23, Impacting ~1.3% Of Queries

Dec 21, 2012 at 1:50pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Google has confirmed rumors of a Google update announcing on Twitter that they pushed out a Panda data refresh today impacting about 1.3% of English queries. This would make for the 23rd Panda update since the first Panda algorithm was introduced on February 24, 2011. Since then we had 22 updates both to the algorithm and also to the index or data refreshes. The latest impacted 1.3% of the queries, whereas version 22 impacted only 0.8% of English queries. We did see signs of a major update a week ago but Google told us there was no such update. Then again, I reported early signs of an [...]

Google’s Policing Of Duplicate Ad Sitelinks Extensions Misses Apparent Violator — Itself

Dec 20, 2012 at 2:59pm ET by Pamela Parker

AdWords advertisers know that Google has plenty of policies by which you must abide, like Ad Sitelinks extensions can't have two links that point to the same page, and sitelinks can't have the same destination page as the text ad's headline. These rules seemingly apply to everyone except… Google itself. The rule-breaking was spotted by SEER Interactive's Francis Shovlin, who noticed some pretty blatant examples on ads for certain search terms, and wrote about it on the company's blog. Marketing Land has been able to replicate some, but not all, of what Shovlin described. Search for "ad [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Features: Analysis | Google: AdWords

Study Hints At Long-Term Siri Threat To Google In Mobile

Dec 20, 2012 at 1:28pm ET by Greg Sterling

Apple Insider is reporting, based on a study by investment firm Piper Jaffray, that Siri today (iOS 6) relies on Google considerably less than it did in iOS 5. That's partly a result of the switch from Google's local data in Maps to Apple's own mapping data. However another part of the change is probably the addition of more non-Google sources of structured data to support Siri. In Piper Jaffray's previous study it found that Siri used Google or Google data to answer 60 percent of queries. Now that number has dropped to 30 percent. The chart below (via Apple Insider) illustrates who "w [...]

Finally, You Can Search All Your Tweets Via Twitter

Dec 19, 2012 at 2:47pm ET by Danny Sullivan

It's been one of the biggest problems Twitter has had for years, that it's difficult to find your own tweets on the Twitter. The new Twitter Archive service that Twitter launched today goes a long way in solving this issue. Step-By-Step: How To Download All Your Tweets With The New Twitter Archive Service is our story on our Marketing Land sister-site that covers how the new service works. Here on Search Engine Land, we'll focus on the search aspect. After you've downloaded your tweets, you can hunt through them in one of two ways: browsing by month or by keyword search: Browsing [...]

Google Challenges NORAD In Tracking Santa, Launches Google Santa Tracker

Dec 19, 2012 at 12:52pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Google has decided to take on the decades-old Santa tracking service that NORAD offers with its own "Google Santa Tracker." It comes in the wake NORAD booting Google out as a partner in favor of Microsoft. NOTE: For the latest news on 2012 Santa tracking, see our post: Where’s Santa Claus? The 2012 Santa Tracker List, From NORAD To Google, From The Web To Apps How NORAD Began Tracking Santa Since 1955 First some history, then what Google has in store. When I was a kid (I said history, right?) back in the 1970s, I remember listening to the radio to get NORAD updates about where Santa's lo [...]

Get Our News, Everywhere!

Follow @sengineland

Got a tip? Tell us here!

Most Likes
Most Tweets
Comments

Our Stories Being Liked on Facebook

Search Engine Land Sponsors

Advertise With Us

Free Daily Search News Recap!

SearchCap is a once-per-day newsletter update - sign up below and get the news delivered to you!

Click to watch SMX conference video

Join us at an upcoming SMX event:

North America

SMX Advanced - June 11-12, 2013
SMX East - Oct. 1-3, 2013
SMX Social Media Marketing - Nov. 20-21, 2013
SMX West - March 11-13, 2014

EMEA

SMX Paris - June 6-7, 2013
SMX Stockholm - Oct. 14-15, 2013
SMX Milan - Nov. 7-8, 2013
SMX Israel - Jan. 2014
SMX Munich - March 25-26, 2014
SMX London - May 2014

APAC

SMX Sydney - April 2014

Search Engine Land produces SMX, the Search Marketing Expo conference series. SMX events deliver the most comprehensive educational and networking experiences - whether you're just starting in search marketing or you're a seasoned expert.