SearchCap: The Day In Search, October 19, 2011

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Taking a Closer Look at the Google’s Panda 2.5 “Flux” On around September 27th, Google launched what’s being called 2.5 of its Panda algorithm. On October 5th, Google’s Matt Cutts tweeted: […]

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Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

  • Taking a Closer Look at the Google’s Panda 2.5 “Flux”

    On around September 27th, Google launched what’s being called 2.5 of its Panda algorithm. On October 5th, Google’s Matt Cutts tweeted: “Weather report: expect some Panda-related flux in the next few weeks, but will have less impact than previous updates (~2%).” Panda-related flux? Indeed, this seems to be the case, with site owners reporting Panda-related […]

  • As Yahoo Struggles Can It “Bring Sexy Back”?

    Yesterday Yahoo released Q3 revenues. While they generally met expectations, and operating income came in at the “high end” of Yahoo’s guidance, overall revenues and profit declined: Revenue excluding traffic acquisition costs (“revenue ex-TAC”) was $1,072 million for the third quarter of 2011, a 5 percent decrease from the third quarter of 2010. Income from operations […]

  • Stephen Colbert Gets His Siri On

    It was pretty funny – Stephen Colbert started The Colbert Report last night talking to Siri on his iPhone 4S and not feeling particularly happy about the responses, all of which were real. Colbert began by asking Siri to “write the show” since, as he later explained, he’d been playing with it all day and hadn’t […]

  • Google: Local Now 40 Percent Of Mobile, Physical Distance Becomes A Ranking Variable For AdWords

    Today Google is introducing some new ad formats for mobile and announcing that it will now use location proximity as a scoring factor in deciding which AdWords to show the mobile user. Google’s Surojit Chatterjee also shared some mobile data in the context of announcing the new units and policy: Click to Call is now driving “millions […]

  • Aspirations Of Incompetence: Benchmarking Competitors

    Why oh why do we obsess over our competitors’ SEO strategies and tactics? Business leaders, frequently molded from concentrated Type-A material, can’t help but obsess over performance relative to competitors. They celebrate gains in market share, the thrill of stealing a client and the schadenfreude of a competitor’s stock decline. When introduced to SEO, they […]

  • Google Analytics Gains “Napoleon’s March” Flow Visualization Charts

    Google Analytics announced a new set of reports that should help marketers and website owners to understand how users behave on their websites. The feature was presented this morning during Web 2.0 Summit, on a keynote delivered by Susan Wojcicki (SVP of Google, Advertising) & Phil Mui (Group Product Manager, Google Analytics). This feature is […]

  • Having Won The Land War Google Is Now After “Hearts And Minds” With Ice Cream Sandwich

    With a wide array of new features and upgrades Android 4.0 (“Ice Cream Sandwich”) launched last night in Hong Kong. The new version of the operating system unites Android for tablets and smartphones, though there are not yet any Ice Cream tablets. Honeycomb, which proved to be tablet-only was largely a failure. (Android boss Andy Rubin says […]

  • Google: 1% Of Searches Affected By Site Speed Ranking Factors

    In a recent video posted on the Google Webmaster Central YouTube Channel, Matt Cutts answered the question How does Google determine page speed? In his answer, he said approximately 1 out of 100 searches are affected by the site speed ranking factor. Cutts said, 1 out of 100 searches done on Google are affected by […]

  • Where Did Cached Pages Go On Google?

    Since Google launched the new instant previews just about a month ago, the question we have seen come up from searchers time and time again is “where did the cached page go?” Yes, Google has moved the “cached” and “similar” links from near the display URL in the search results and to the instant preview […]

  • Yahoo Completes Global Organic Transition To Bing (Except Korea)

    Twenty months later, Yahoo and Bing have announced the completion of the organic (algorithmic) transition from Yahoo powered search results to Bing powered search results globally, with the exception of Korea. If you do a search on any Yahoo powered site via your desktop or mobile device, with the exception from within Korea, the search […]

  • 5 Reasons Online Display Advertising Is Simpler Than Ever

    A good glass of wine is one of life’s simple pleasures. However, industry “experts” often make it sound complicated. This is the case with online display advertising today. But marketers need to know that display advertising today is a lot simpler than many of them believe. Complexity: Old News Time and again, we are told […]

  • Why Search Marketing Silos Are Conversion Killers

    The conversion rate for your site is the number of conversions divided by visitors. Quality traffic is half of the equation (the bottom half). No matter how well optimized a site is, if the traffic isn’t qualified, conversion rates will falter. I recently commented to Chris Robino* of SearchRanking.net that companies rarely get our conversion […]

  • SearchWeek: October 17, 2011

    Search Week is an exclusive weekly newsletter for Search Engine Land premium members that recaps stories covered on Search Engine Land over the past week. Below are top stories organized by topic that happened over the past week. Each topic (or Search Engine Land column) is also a link, where you can click through and […]

  • Ballmer: 70% Of The Time, Google & Bing Are The Same, So Try Bing!

    It’s perhaps one of the strangest product pitches I’ve heard. Asked on stage at Web 2.0 Summit by John Battelle about his Bing search engine, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer encouraged the audience to try Bing because, well, it’s pretty much the same as Google. The Ballmer 70/15/15 Challenge “I would issue you all a kind […]

  • Reactions From SEOs Come Loud, Fast & Often Angry To Google’s Switch To Encrypted Search

    Google caused a major stir in the search marketing community today with the news that it will begin encrypting searches and outbound clicks by default in some situations. The move means that valuable keyword referral data will not be passed to analytics programs (including Google Analytics) when a logged-in Google user searches from Google.com. Although […]

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About the author

Matt McGee
Contributor
Matt McGee joined Third Door Media as a writer/reporter/editor in September 2008. He served as Editor-In-Chief from January 2013 until his departure in July 2017. He can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee.

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