10 Blue Links Be Gone: Yahoo Axis Offers Browser & Visual Search Experience

May 23, 2012 at 11:50pm ET by Greg Sterling   

Search launches seem to come in threes. A couple of weeks ago we had Bing Social, then came Google with Knowledge Graph and now Yahoo introduces Axis. When I met with Yahoo earlier this week to hear about it I received the now familiar speech that Yahoo is still very much in search and continuing to “innovate” around [...]

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What Can We Learn From The Latest Brand To Be Called Out For Paid Links?

May 22, 2012 at 8:18pm ET by Danny Sullivan   

Move over JC Penney. Another brand is getting attention over buying links, this time Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corporation. Today’s news is less news and more a reminder of lessons that SEO companies, clients and publishers all need to keep in mind, to avoid trouble. Josh Davis drew attention to the DBCC situation in his [...]

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Google Provides Competitive Information In New Auction Insights Report

May 22, 2012 at 1:20pm ET by Pamela Parker   

AdWords marketers’ days of regularly refreshing on all their keywords may be over — or at least that activity may not be quite so necessary. Google is releasing a new report — Auction Insights — that helps marketers understand how their ads stand, compared to others in the same auctions. “For a given keyword, the [...]

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Just Because Someone Works At Google Doesn’t Make Them An SEO Expert

May 22, 2012 at 12:48pm ET by Danny Sullivan   

I had an interesting email hit my inbox, someone showing me how a Google employee was “100%” sure there had been no Penguin Update. There was, of course, and it’s a reminder that just because someone is a Googler, that doesn’t mean they know how Google Search works. Google has nearly 25,000 employees (according to [...]

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“Ads Related To…” Text Officially Rolls Out On AdWords’ Top Ad Block

May 21, 2012 at 2:12pm ET by Pamela Parker   

We’ve seen “Ads related to…” followed by the search query before, but now it’s at the top of the top ad block and it’s rolled out officially for most — if not all — search terms on Google AdWords. The new text appears at the top of the yellow AdWords box on search engine results [...]

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EU Offers To Settle With Google Over Anti-Trust Claims

May 21, 2012 at 11:04am ET by Greg Sterling   

European Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia issued a statement this morning offering “preliminary conclusions” of the EU’s  investigation of numerous antitrust complaints against Google. It lays out “concerns” about Google’s market power in four areas. Almunia acknowledges Google’s prior statements about a willingness to settle and suggests that if a settlement can be reached Europe and [...]

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Google’s Penguin Update Makes The Wall Street Journal

May 17, 2012 at 9:20am ET by Barry Schwartz   

The Google Penguin Update is now mainstream after The Wall Street Journal covered it in a feature story named As Google Tweaks Searches, Some Get Lost in the Web. The story interviews a few small business owners who were hit hard by the update. One business owner saw his sales drop to $25,000 this month, [...]

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Peeking Into the World Of Google’s Algorithm Changes With Google Search Quality Head Amit Singhal

May 17, 2012 at 6:57am ET by Vanessa Fox   

Earlier this week, Google Fellow Amit Singhal gave the opening keynote at SMX London. Although Matt Cutts has always been the public face of all parts of Google’s unpaid search, his realm is primarily web spam. Singhal has been speaking publicly more often (notably when Panda launched) and oversees search quality. Or, as he described [...]

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Google Launches Knowledge Graph To Provide Answers, Not Just Links

May 16, 2012 at 1:00pm ET by Danny Sullivan   

Hinted at for months, Google formally launched its “Knowledge Graph” today. The new technology is being used to provide popular facts about people, places and things alongside Google’s traditional results. It also allows Google to move toward a new way of searching not for pages that match query terms but for “entities” or concepts that [...]

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With Fix In Place, Wolfram Alpha Explains How Siri “Recommended” The Lumia By Mistake

May 16, 2012 at 11:15am ET by Danny Sullivan   

It wasn’t Siri that was recommending the Lumia as the best smartphone to some last week; it was Wolfram Alpha. That won’t happen again, now that Wolfram Alpha has made changes to to fix problems it had dealing with customer reviews. Reviews Weren’t Weighted To Account For Number When I looked into the Siri-Lumia issue last [...]

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Bing’s New Social-Friendly Search Interface Now Live

May 15, 2012 at 7:31pm ET by Matt McGee   

The new Bing interface, with a healthy dose of social connections and discovery, is now live for all users. Bing’s announcement today says that anyone can access the new interface at www.bing.com/new, but you should also see a new message atop the Bing home page that invites you to try “the best search, now with [...]

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In Wake Of Penguin, Could You Be Sued For Linking To Others?

May 15, 2012 at 9:59am ET by Greg Finn   

Many webmasters have been desperately trying to fix poor SEO work done to a site thanks to the recent Penguin update targeting webspam and the bad link warnings sent from Google.  The only current way to discredit a link is to have it removed as reverse nofollow functionality for webmasters simply doesn’t exist.  One recent example of a link removal request was particularly [...]

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Live Blogging: Interview with Amit Singhal, Google Fellow

May 15, 2012 at 3:56am ET by Daniel Waisberg   

Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman are on the stage at SMX London to interview Amit Singhal. Amit is a Google Fellow, a honorary title reserved for Google’s most accomplished engineers, and he has spearheaded Google’s core ranking team since 2000. He’s also a key influencer of Search Plus Your World, Google’s search experience centered around [...]

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Report: Scott Thompson To Step Down As Yahoo CEO, Ross Levinsohn To Step In

May 13, 2012 at 12:37pm ET by Greg Sterling   

Kara Swisher at AllThingsD is reporting that embattled Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson is going to step down for “personal reasons.” Swisher has one or more “moles” inside the company and consistently gets inside information — which generally turns out to be correct. Thompson’s “personal reasons,” as we all know, are: misrepresenting that he had a [...]

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Apple Siri’s Recommending Nokia? Then Nokia’s Recommending Android & iPhone, I Guess

May 11, 2012 at 7:23pm ET by Danny Sullivan   

Apple’s Siri search feature for the iPhone 4S thinks the Nokia Lumia 900 is the best phone ever? Actually, it’s Wolfram Alpha that thinks this, based on all of four user reviews. While it’s a chuckle that Siri seemed to be recommending the Nokia, it’s a better reminder that Siri itself doesn’t answer questions but [...]

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Yahoo Search Sees 8th Monthly Share Decline — comScore

May 11, 2012 at 12:57am ET by Greg Sterling   

It’s that time again: April comScore qSearch data are coming out tomorrow. But the financial analysts are releasing it first to their clients and others who’ve subscribed to their missives. According to our source, comScore will report that both Google and Bing have made small, incremental gains since last month and seen modest growth since last [...]

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Bing Relaunches, Features New Social Sidebar

May 10, 2012 at 1:00pm ET by Danny Sullivan   

Bing announced a relaunch of its search engine today, with a big emphasis on bringing social into search. But wait! Didn’t Bing already have social as part of its search experience? Yes, but now the search engine hopes to do it better, especially by largely off-loading social elements into a new sidebar area. The new [...]

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Two Weeks In, Google Talks Penguin Update, Ways To Recover & Negative SEO

May 10, 2012 at 9:00am ET by Danny Sullivan   

It’s been about two weeks since Google launched its Penguin Update. Google’s happy the new spam-fighting algorithm is improving things as intended. But some hurt by it are still wondering how to recover, and there remain concerns about “negative SEO” as a threat. I caught up with Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s web spam [...]

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Google Testing “Sources” Area With Info About Movies, Books, People, Music & More

May 9, 2012 at 1:38pm ET by Danny Sullivan   

Last November, Google tested a new “Sources” section in its search results, in the third column where ads normally appear. It seems the testing is underway again, showing extended information about actors, films, musicians, people and more. It also seems likely everyone may see this extended information soon, and that it’s the “search refresh” the [...]

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Does The First Amendment Create A Complete Defense For Google Against Antitrust Regulation?

May 9, 2012 at 9:08am ET by Greg Sterling   

Google now faces antitrust investigations on multiple continents. The US FTC recently hired a prominent outside litigator in a sign that it may be preparing to bring an action against the company. But does Google have a “slam dunk” defense against such a case (at least in the US) under the First Amendment of the [...]

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