AFP reports a Japan court has ruled Google to alter the search suggestions and fined Google 300,000 yen ($3,100). The Tokyo District Court ruled that Google has to change the auto-completions for a search on a particular man's name - the name was undisclosed - because Google provided suggestions that the man committed criminal acts. In addition, Google was ordered to pay the man $3,100 for the mental anguish the search suggestion caused him. What is interesting is that since Google does not operate the search results from within Japan, Google technically does not and historically has not [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Legal | Google: Outside US | Google: Suggest

Google's Matt Cutts answered a question submitted by another Googler, John Mueller, on YouTube asking, "Should I add an archive of hundreds of thousands of pages all at once or in stages?" The question is, if you build out a new section of your website with tons of content - is it safe to just launch them all at once or should you do smaller chunks at a time? Matt said that Google can handle it either way, but he did say that if a site released hundreds of thousands of pages overnight, it may raise a red flag and warrant a manual review by the Google spam team. And if you do not want Goo [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | Top News

Many of our clients face sales cycles in a six- to twelve-month duration. In a recent client interview, one of the sales directors revealed that they were on the verge of closing a multi-million dollar deal that took nearly three years of nurturing alone to finally get to the proposal process. With multiple decision makers and departments impacting complete B2B solutions, marketing plays a pivotal role. A recent news release, which summarized a comprehensive survey of B2B marketing professionals put together by BtoB Magazine and Bizo revealed that the sales cycle is lengthening for many B2 [...]

Related Topics: B2B Search Marketing | Channel: SEO | Google: Authorship | Site & Enterprise Search

[caption id="attachment_152995" align="alignright" width="267"] Image via Shutterstock[/caption] For many years, email was one of just a few ways you could share a URL with another person. And, people were far less accepting of link request spam than they are today. So, for today’s column, let’s talk about the ancient concept of net etiquette and link building. In many ways, it’s come full circle and is as relevant today (if not more so) as ever. Net Etiquette & Link Building There was a thing called "netiquette" back in the day, a concept that today seems almost quaint. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Link Building | Link Building: General | Link Week

An online survey examining SEO assumptions by SurveyMonkey found that the No. 1 reason users would block a website from their search results was if the website contained too many ads. If given an option to remove a website from future search results, 68 percent of the respondents said they would block a website because it had too many ads, while 60 percent claimed they would block a site because of poor quality content. Respondents were more forgiving of typos and grammar mistakes, with 26 percent claiming to block a website with typos and only 23 percent blocking a website containing bad g [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | Google: Web Search | Microsoft: Bing | Microsoft: Bing SEO | Stats: General | Stats: Search Behavior

In a recent study by SurveyMonkey examining SEO assumptions, respondents were given two search result pages, one with a page header labeled "Google" and the other with a page header labeled "Bing," and asked which page of results they preferred. Even when the page header labels were swapped, more users preferred the Google search results. Of 641 survey respondents, 379 participants received a survey asking which of two search result pages they preferred. One page of results for the term "file taxes" included true Google results and the other page included true Bing results. The Google page [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Search Quality Raters | Google: Web Search | Microsoft: Bing | Microsoft: Bing SEO | Search Engines | SEO: Domain Names & URLs | Stats: Popularity | Stats: Search Behavior | Top News

With the announcement of Facebook Home, Facebook has pushed the accelerator on its local mobile strategy, which was already in high gear, thanks to Facebook Local Search and its big brother, Facebook Graph Search. By the end of 2013, I expect the social media giant to further strengthen its hold as the #2 local search app; so, it might behoove local marketers to get a handle on exactly how their businesses are showing up in Facebook these days. There are numerous ways that local business data makes it into Facebook, including: "Link" buttons on local business sites "Share on Facebook" [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Facebook | Facebook: Facebook Search | Facebook: SEO | Local Search | Microsoft: Bing Maps & Local

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="300"] Twitter Cards Image from Marketing Land[/caption] Mobile Application Search in both Apple's App Store and Google Play is frustratingly similar to general online search in the early 2000s -- and the tactics used to make them visible in search resuls also closely mirror the SEO best practices from that era. Searching for and discovering the right apps is a concern for both developers and mobile users, which may recently have been dealt a helping hand from Twitter with its App Cards. How Do Twitter App Cards Work? Currently, you need special [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Mobile | Mobile Search | Search Engines: Mobile Search Engines | SEO: Mobile Search

The Google Operating System blog noticed Google is testing a new form of Sitelinks on the mobile interface. These new sitelinks are sub-sitelinks, secondary levels beyond the sitelink you'd find in the normal search interface. Sitelinks are designed to help searchers quickly find the section of the website they are trying to navigate toward. It is mostly found for navigational queries but also can be found on other types of queries. For example, in the image below, you will see a sitelink category for "phones" and when you expand it, it shows categories of phones: --> We ac [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Sitelinks | Google: User Interface

Yandex has taken exception to a recent study that reported it has more malware in its search results than other major search engines like Google and Bing. The company shared its concerns with Search Engine Land via email, saying that it also sent the same response to AV-TEST, the German IT security firm that published the findings from an 18-month search/malware study. We reported on the study yesterday after PC Mag was first to report on it. The AV-TEST study examined more than 13 million Yandex search results and found malware in about .024 percent -- twice the percentage of malware it [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Search Engines: Yandex | SEO: Spamming | Top News

About three years ago, Google was labeled in one study as the "King of Malware." Things have apparently changed a lot since then. A new study reports that Google is beating its primary search competitors pretty significantly when it comes to keeping malware out of search results. The 18-month study (PDF), done by a German IT security group called AV-TEST, reviewed more than 40 million web pages -- the vast majority (about 38 million) coming from Google, Bing, Yandex and Blekko. The results: About .0025 percent of Google's search results were links to malicious websites. Blekko was [...]

Related Topics: Blekko | Channel: SEO | Google: Security | Google: Web Search | Microsoft: Bing | Search Engines: Yandex | SEO: Spamming | Top News

[caption id="attachment_155242" align="alignright" width="250"] Photo from drp.Used under Creative Commons license.[/caption] In many ways, taking charge of your search engine results page is like answering the age-old philosophical question, “Who am I” -- but for your business. You may still be in the dark about what motivates some of your personal actions, but if you’re a business owner, I’m pretty certain you know exactly what your business is all about. That’s the first step. Now you need to translate that into Google results. Sound easy? Didn’t think so. It’s a bit [...]

Related Topics: All Things SEO | Channel: SEO | Google | How To | How To: SEO | SEO - Search Engine Optimization

Matt Cutts, Google's head of search spam, posted a video answer to the question "Can I buy a domain that used to have spam on it and still rank?" Matt explains that there can be two penalties here, one on the manual side and one on the algorithmic side. If this was a manual penalty, you can fix the spam and submit a reconsideration request. Manual spam also has a time out, where the penalty will auto-expire if the spam is cleaned up. If it was an algorithmic penalty, then you need to wait until the algorithm picks up on the changes. Plus, if the spam was very aggressive, it would be much [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | SEO: Spamming

In January, Facebook unveiled its first major move into the search space: Facebook Graph Search. Graph Search is not just another index of the Web, however. Rather, it's powered by what people are liking and sharing, leading to vastly different results than you'd see on Google. And while it’s not currently a direct threat to Google, the writing is on the wall, so to speak: Graph Search is poised to change the very fundamentals of SEO, and socially-informed search and content marketing. Graph Search is currently being rolled out as a small private beta, but over time all billion-plu [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Facebook: SEO | SEM Industry: Conferences | SEM Industry: Search Marketing Expo - SMX | SMX & DMD Alerts

Google's Pierre Far, Webmaster Trends Analyst, announced on the Google Webmaster Central blog a new annotation designed to help communicate redirects and languages to Google for multilingual and multinational web sites. The annotation is designed to work with homepages of multinational and multilingual sites that are configured to point users to localized pages, either via redirects or by changing the content to reflect the user's language. When this happens, you can now communicate to Google of this action through the new rel-alternate-hreflang annotation. The rel-alternate-hreflang ann [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | Google: Webmaster Central

Google announced on Google+ that the Knowledge Graph now supports searches for non-profit organizations. Now, when you search for some non-profits by name on Google, Google will show on the right hand side, in the Knowledge graph box the nonprofit's financials, cause, assets, tax ID, tax code, recent Google+ posts and more. This seems to only currently work for non-profits with Google+ pages. So if you do the marketing for a non-profit, it may be wise to create a Google+ page for them. Here is an example of a search for [donors choose]: The information that is shown in the k [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Knowledge Graph | Google: Web Search

A few years ago, I launched a website called FindHow, and we gave it a full-court press from a PR standpoint. In this series of articles, I’m running through all the best practices we leveraged. In the first part of Public Relations For SEO: The Complete Guide, we talked about how to convince journalists that your topic is newsworthy by properly “positioning” your product or service, and then delved into the basics of writing a press release. Part 2 continues with strategies for targeting journalists and tips for scheduling your announcement. Pick A Strategy To Target Journalists [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Features: Case Studies | How To | How To: Links | Link Building | Link Building: General | SEO - Search Engine Optimization

This is the first of a three-part article about Public Relations for SEO. Let me start by saying that a press release written, issued and leveraged properly, can result in word-of-mouth, articles paraphrasing the release, and at a minimum, at least some backlinks. But, a press release alone will get much less exposure than one coupled with outreach to individual journalists and bloggers directly prior to issuing it. A few years ago, I launched a website called FindHow, and we gave it a full-court press from a PR standpoint. In this series of articles, I’ll run through all the best practi [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Features: Case Studies | Link Building | Link Building: General | Link Week | SEO - Search Engine Optimization

A few years ago, I launched a website called FindHow, and we gave it a full-court press from a PR standpoint. In this series of articles, I’m running through all the best practices we leveraged. In Part 1 and Part 2, we talked about how to convince journalists that your topic is newsworthy,  the basics of writing a press release, strategies for targeting journalists and tips for scheduling your announcement. Here, we conclude with tips for pitching journalists and how to work it before, during and after the announcement of your release. Pitching Journalists Before you start, understan [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Features: Case Studies | How To | How To: Links | Link Building | Link Building: General | SEO - Search Engine Optimization

The lowly keyword phrase seems to be getting more attention these days. Last month, I spoke at SMX West about big data and co-optimization, then finished up at the International Search Summit with global keyword research and management. Based on the recently released 2013 Search Marketer Survey from BrightEdge, it appears as though global search marketing activities might finally be top of mind for search marketers: One of the areas getting a significant boost in interest is the discovery of keywords relevant to global audiences. The BrightEdge  survey of Enterprise Search Marketers ind [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Multinational Search | Search Marketing: Multinational | Search Marketing: Search Term Research | SEO: Keyword Research