Apr 1, 2013 at 4:21am ET by Matt McGee

Bing is hopping on the April Fools' Day joke bandwagon later than Google and even Wolfram Alpha, but it's taking a swing at Google in one of the two gags that it just announced via separate blog posts. Bing Basic On its main search blog, Bing has an esoteric blog post that talks about "Bing Basic," a feature that lets searchers experience Bing's home page without the large, colorful and almost always beautiful, clickable photos. The post says Bing is running a test today and, if you know "a certain telltale query," this is what you'll experience: ...you'll get something a little more bla [...]

Google’s April Fools’ Day 2013 Joke-A-Thon: YouTube Shutdown, Google Nose & More

Mar 31, 2013 at 3:17pm ET by Matt McGee

April Fool's Day is pretty much like a national ... err, international holiday for everyone that works for Google. It seems that nobody else on the Web takes the tradition of pranks and jokes as seriously as Google does -- just see our coverage from the last few April Fool's Days for proof: Google's Gags Go Worldwide For April Fool's Day 2012 It's Over: Google Has Already Won April Fools Day 2011 Google Books, Google Maps Get 3D View – But Only For April Fool's Day April Fools' Day 2009: Google CADIE & More From Search Industry It may still be March 31st for me, and maybe [...]

Apple Hiring ‘Ground Truth’ Managers To Improve Maps

Mar 28, 2013 at 5:32pm ET by Matt McGee

If job listings are any indication, Apple remains committed to improving its iOS Maps app. As the iDownload Blog spotted, Apple currently has seven job listings for what's called a "Maps Ground Truth Manager." The positions are based around the world -- U.S., Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Japan, Asia-Pacific, the Americas and Middle East/Africa. The job description explains that these Ground Truth Managers will be responsible for improving and ensuring the accuracy of Apple Maps. The Maps team is searching for a manager for the team responsible for regional map quality and ground trut [...]

Need A Google Alerts Replacement? Meet Talkwalker

Mar 27, 2013 at 4:05pm ET by Gary Price

With Google Alerts coming under fire as being broken, an impressive new service has stepped up to appeal to those seeking an alternative: Talkwalker. Luxembourg-based Talkwalker is a social media monitoring company that has now released its own keyword-based alerts resource. The free service utilizes Google's Web, news, and blog databases and delivers alerts by email or RSS. So, are Talkwalker Alerts the Google Alerts replacement many are looking for? I spent a few hours running several alerts and at this point I'm both optimistic and even impressed. A few initial impressi [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Features: Analysis | Google: Alerts

Author Rank, Authorship, Search Rankings & That Eric Schmidt Book Quote

Mar 27, 2013 at 1:44pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Last month, an excerpt from Eric Schmidt's forthcoming book came out where he discussed how identity and authorship might be used to better rank search results. Since then, I've seen that widely cited as proof Google is already doing "Author Rank." It's not, nor was Schmidt describing a Google-specific system. But that could come, and Google's existing authorship program may be a part of it. Schmidt On Potential Future Of Profiles & Ranking The excerpt came from the Wall Street Journal, which quoted from The New Digital Age, the book due out next month that Schmidt has coauthored wit [...]

Microsoft “Research” Discovers The Obvious In Renewed Anti-Trust Attack On Google

Mar 26, 2013 at 11:55am ET by Danny Sullivan

Did you know that the higher a site is listed in search results, the more traffic that site is likely to receive? If you're a search marketer, or anyone with a dose of common sense, you do. But Microsoft had research conducted to yet again prove this point, in an attempt to influence the ongoing EU antitrust review against Google. Microsoft's Hired Gun Does Research In a Microsoft blog post today, Susan Athey, a Microsoft consultant and professor of economics at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, writes about how she worked with those from Microsoft's Bing search engine to c [...]

Bing Offers Recommendations for SEO-Friendly AJAX: Suggests HTML5 pushState

Mar 25, 2013 at 10:12pm ET by Vanessa Fox

Bing has announced support for HTML5 pushState as a way to implement AJAX on a site in a way that enables Bing to crawl and index the URLs and content. As Google has supported this implementation since early 2012, site owners finally have an AJAX option that can be crawled and indexed by both major search engines in the United States. (The ease of implementing is another story altogether.) Bing tells me that while they still support the #! version of crawlable AJAX originally launched by Google, they're finding it's not implemented correctly much of the time, and they strongly recommend pus [...]

Apple Buys Indoor Location Company, What’s It Up To?

Mar 25, 2013 at 10:06am ET by Greg Sterling

This weekend the Wall Street Journal reported that Apple had paid roughly $20 million for a company called WifiSLAM. The company was an early stage startup that had raised roughly $1 million in angel investment. It appears to have had some ambitious plans, according to a company description on AngelList: We are building the next generation of location-based mobile apps that, for the first time, engage with users at the scale that personal interaction actually takes place. Applications range from step-by-step indoor navigation, to product-level retail customer engagement, to proximity-based [...]

Facebook Graph Search Now Passing Keyword Data To Webmasters

Mar 25, 2013 at 8:18am ET by Greg Finn

When Facebook launched Graph Search earlier this year, a noticeable element missing to marketers was the lack of keyword data that was passed. Well, this weekend Glenn Gabe of G-Squared Interactive uncovered the fact that Facebook has begun passing keyword data within referral strings. The keyword data is passed from Facebook with a query string [q={keyword}] appended to the end of the referring URL. Since analytics providers like Google don't view Facebook as a search engine, the data must be parsed as referring traffic, not as a search engine. While the data exists, it takes so [...]

Google Pushes Google Search App With Commercials

Mar 22, 2013 at 1:12pm ET by Danny Sullivan

The commercial in the middle of an episode of "Worst Cooks In America" this weekend caught me off-guard. Was that an ad for the Google Search App? It sure was, and the restart of Google's campaign to push its cross-platform search tool. It was the first time I spotted this particular campaign on TV, though Google tells me they've been running since the fall. That's true, but those seemed to have stopped soon after the New Year, and now the campaign has begun again, it looks like. Of course, Google's no stranger to TV ads these days, such as Google Now recently getting a commercial during [...]

Google Says No To Phone Numbers In PPC Ads, Forcing The Use Of Call Extensions

Mar 22, 2013 at 11:48am ET by Ginny Marvin

You may have missed Google’s quiet and brief announcement that starting in April, AdWords ads with phone numbers in the text will be disapproved. Advertisers who want to display phone numbers will have to use the call extensions feature instead. Google states in the announcement, “We are making this change to foster a safer, more consistent user experience across desktop, tablet, and mobile devices.” As others have stated, what this change really does is allow Google to charge for mobile ad engagements as part of its transition to enhanced campaigns. With call extensions, advertise [...]

Bing Snapshot Grows To Understand People, Places & Things With “Satori” Expansion

Mar 21, 2013 at 12:21pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Over the past year, Bing's been steadily growing the "Snapshots" it shows on the right-hand side of its pages. Now, Bing says those are taking another leap to better understand relationships between people, places and things, using an expansion of what it calls its "Satori" technology. Bing writes on its blog today saying: Today, we are inviting people to check out Snapshot to experience our expansion of Satori. Since its introduction in June, we have expanded Satori to include a significantly larger number of entities from more domains with a deeper level of understanding about them. T [...]

Google Trends Now Shows YouTube Searches

Mar 20, 2013 at 1:19pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Google announced on Google+ that they have expanded Google Trends to add YouTube search support. Now you can use Google Trends to see what searches are trending and spiking across the world from within YouTube search. The trend data for YouTube goes back to 2008. To use this, go to Google Trends and search for something. Then on the left-hand panel under "Limit to," choose "YouTube" to restrict the data to just YouTube searches. Here is a picture: For more details, see the YouTube Blog. [...]

The Short Cutts: Matt Cutts SEO Videos With Quick Questions & Answers

Mar 20, 2013 at 9:15am ET by Barry Schwartz

Google has published over 500 videos on the Webmaster Help YouTube Channel, most of those videos features Matt Cutts answering quick SEO related questions. Sometimes you want the quick answer from Matt Cutts and sorting through hundreds of videos with the average length of two to five minutes can take a while. That is where The Short Cutts comes in! TheShortCutts.com is a searchable directory of all videos Matt Cutts produced, with quick question and answers printed right under the video. You can search or browse the question and answer videos right on that page. For example, this vid [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Features: Analysis | Google: SEO | SEO: General | Top News

New PPC Report: Bing Ads Vs. Google AdWords In 6 US Verticals

Mar 20, 2013 at 8:15am ET by Ginny Marvin

AdGooroo has released a new study titled Yahoo! Bing PPC Performance Metrics that analyzes advertiser participation and performance metrics on the Yahoo! Bing network through Bing Ads compared to Google AdWords. The study looked at U.S. advertisers in six verticals during Q312. Backing up one of the loudest complaints among advertisers about the Yahoo! Bing network, the study found that AdWords out-delivered Bing Ads by serving 7.3 million more ad impressions in the Shopping and Classified category. A surprise, however, was to see Bing Ads come out ahead in the Financial Services categor [...]

Is Bing Testing “Subjectship” Rather Than Authorship In Its Search Results?

Mar 19, 2013 at 3:17pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Some are spotting new author images appearing in Bing's search results today, similar to the way Google shows author images. Except, they're not really author images. They're what I'd call subject images, something that might be coming more formally to Bing. Author Images At Google Here are two examples of authorship images as they appear on Google: The first is a picture of Kara Swisher, next to a search that brought up an article that she wrote on the new season of Game Of Thrones. The second is for myself, for an article I wrote about a test I ran to see if my two boys would ch [...]

Google Flight Search Takes Off Around The Globe

Mar 19, 2013 at 12:34pm ET by Greg Sterling

Google's flight search tool had been limited to a few markets in the US. As such, it was of limited value. But last week, the company expanded flight search internationally to include 500 airports outside the US. (See postscript below below for correction.) Flight search can also be used by people in other countries -- UK, France, Italy, Spain or the Netherlands -- to do research and initiate trip planning. In addition, Flight Search now comes in eight languages: English, French, Italian, Spanish, Basque, Catalan, Galician and Dutch and features local currency. Perhaps the feature th [...]

Google Panda Update 25 Seems To Have Hit

Mar 15, 2013 at 2:04pm ET by Barry Schwartz

There are many webmasters and SEOs believing right now that Google has released an update to their Panda algorithm late yesterday. We've reached out to Google to confirm or deny the Panda update, as we've done 24 times previously; but this time, Google told us they are unlikely to confirm future Panda updates since Panda will be incorporated into their indexing processes. It would not be surprising if this was indeed a Panda update since Matt Cutts, Google's head of search spam, did say at SMX West that a Panda update will be rolling out this Friday through the weekend. Matt then said al [...]

Google: We’re Unlikely To Confirm Current Or Future Panda Updates

Mar 15, 2013 at 1:53pm ET by Barry Schwartz

What's that, a Panda Update you just felt? Some believe so. But Google says it is unlikely to confirm that or any future Panda Update, as it has done in the past, because of the new "gradual" rollout infrastructure it is using for Panda Update changes. Earlier this week at SMX West, Google's Matt Cutts said a new Panda Update might hit this week, then later said that the update — and future updates — would no longer be apparent as an abrupt change. Rather, Panda changes would roll out over a series of days. Because of this, Google now says it's unlikely it will confirm officially if [...]

AdWords “Ineffective” Says eBay, Google “Meta-Pause Analysis” Contradicts Those Findings

Mar 14, 2013 at 1:06pm ET by Greg Sterling

A story generating buzz and controversy earlier this week amounts to a stinging indictment of the paid search industry as a whole. It was based on new research from eBay that argues SEM is all but worthless and has little or no impact on traffic and sales -- except in marginal cases. However, Google studies argue SEM delivers clear and tangible benefits to advertisers and publishers. In a paper published last week eBay describes its study (.pdf) and related results. The company says it sought to determine the impact of pausing paid-search ads on its organic traffic and sales. eBay: SEM "In [...]

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