The display URL is the part of your ad copy text that tells consumers where they will go if they click on your ad. Therefore, it is a very important tool for branding yourself, as it is how consumers will recognize you in list of sponsored results. Each of the major search providers typically enforces […]
Google wants to make the internet faster. By speeding up the “most important computing platform of our time,” Google believes that consumers and businesses will experience a wide range of benefits, many of which we can imagine, some of which might be revealed over time. There’s no product or specific consumer offering here. Rather Google […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: The Link Builder’s Guide To Analyzing SERP Dominators For Link Opportunities This article walks you through the tools, processes and strategies for identifying the most powerful players in your keyword space […]
This article walks you through the tools, processes and strategies for identifying the most powerful players in your keyword space and then analyzing their link sources and link building tactics.
The coverage of the competition among the big internet companies is not unlike the classic Japanese monster movies of the 1960s (e.g., King Kong vs. Godzilla): titanic struggles for control of everything as we know it with only one possible winner. A more thoughtful but still sensational installment of that saga is the Wired piece: Great […]
The Google News blog announced it is now easier to find other articles by authors. They have now hyperlinked the author’s name, when available, in the Google News search results. Here is a screen shot that shows it in action: I believe you have been able to search by author for a while now, but […]
This Thursday, June 25 at 1 PM Eastern, Search Marketing Now hosts a free webcast “Online Holiday Retail 2009: Tips, Tactics & Timelines for Success,” sponsored by Performics. Eli Goodman of comScore will provide an overview of the current state of online retail. With Q1 e-commerce revenues flat—vs. down in Q4 2008—can we expect growth […]
You could be the next “Will It Blend” but if nobody knows about you, then it doesn’t matter how creative and awesomely original you are. One of the most important factors in social media is the promotion of your content, and this often leads to annoyance. There are many annoying social media habits, but perhaps […]
In February 2008, when Vanessa Fox wrote that Eytan Seidman, Program Management Director over core relevance at Microsoft Live Search (now Bing.com) was leaving Microsoft (and Seattle) for a start-up, she may not have known that he was jumping into murky waters of travel search. Today, Eytan’s start-up site was unveiled – Oyster.com, a site […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: It’s Official: Wikipedia Is A Google News Source Google’s “experiment” in using Wikipedia as a news source on Google News is over, at least in the U.S. and Canada. The experiment […]
Google’s “experiment” in using Wikipedia as a news source on Google News is over, at least in the U.S. and Canada. The experiment was obviously a success, because Google has confirmed for us that the idea has been expanded. Says Google spokesperson Gabriel Stricker: “As with many features on Google News, these links were initially […]
Most firms now recognize the importance of developing a powerful online brand. Now, an increasing number of professionals have started to recognize the benefits of developing a personal brand. Many people recognize that a personal online brand could be as important (possibly more so) than a company brand when looking to win a new client, […]
Google Blogoscoped reported that Google seems to be testing showing Facebook friends in the Google search results for some Facebook profile URLs. For example, a search for facebook marissa mayer, I see the following search snippet: Why is this showing up? As Philip notes, it doesn’t seem like Facebook is using the rich snippets markup […]
When most of us travel, we like to visit famous landmarks in the area we’re touring. It’s easy to find famous landmarks, like the Eiffel Tower or the Great Pyramid, but can be difficult to find lesser known sites. And for armchair travelers, it can take time to search for images of landmarks even with […]
After an apparently successful limited trial, Yahoo is rolling out a program that targets small businesses (SMBs) for self-service display advertising on its network and through RightMedia, its ad exchange. The DIY portal is a collaboration between Yahoo and AdReady, which supplies the back end and the ad templates. (Google earlier introduced a similar, though […]
This Friday, I was one of the million people to get a new iPhone 3GS. After getting through my activation issues I had some time to test out the new search feature on the iPhone, named Spotlight (from Apple OS). With the new iPhone, you can have an unlimited number of applications, so finding those […]
Google Maps has introduced a useful new feature called “What’s Here,” which allows you to use the map as a kind of discovery tool. Select a point, right click and the menu appears with a new choice “what’s here,” allowing discovery of — you guessed it — what’s at/around the designated site or point. The […]
This spring, Idearc Media LLC filed for Chapter 11, planning to reorganize to get out from under massive debt, and in the process, leave thousands of stockholders holding worthless paper. Idearc's failure could easily be thought of as yet another in a long list of companies experiencing woes due to the economy, but is this the actual cause? I think someone should be asking if Verizon itself was responsible for spinning off the company with an unreasonable debt load in the first place.
The number of people who access the web from a mobile device is on the rise. However, those accessing the web from a mobile device with a full browser (such as an iPhone or Blackberry Storm) and those on a mobile browser (such as Blackberry Curve) see different sets of information, and, more importantly to […]
We wanted to wish all the fathers out there a happy Father’s Day from all of us at Search Engine Land. To celebrate, below is a collection of some of the logos from Google and the rest of the industry. Happy Father’s Day! Google: Yahoo: AOL: DogPile: Bing: Ask.com: Cre8asite Forums: Search Engine Roundtable:
After hearing about the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” earlier this year — an area the size of Texas in the Pacific Ocean filled with trash — I went looking for it on Google Earth. And never found it. It’s not that the patch doesn’t exist. It’s just that despite being large, it’s not that visible […]
Network World is reporting that Google has put in a claim for one million phone numbers with Level 3 Communications. The claim is presumably for the upcoming rollout of Google Voice, which is currently only available to a limited number of users. Google Voice offers users a variety of features: one phone number for all […]
Google’s paid search results continue to evolve beyond the traditional 25-character text headline, two-line snippet of information, and URL that we’re all so used to seeing. Both the Wall Street Journal and Google Blogoscoped have details of a new Google Product Ads beta test that will bring product images and price information to paid search […]
Remember that Google Street View bike that was unveiled in May for use to map footpaths in Britain? Turns out, Google has a number of them, and they’re also operating in Japan, Italy and the US. In fact, imagery from them from three spots in California has recently gone online and more will be coming […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Google Goes Rainbow For Gay-Related Searches Google Operating System notes that Google is once again flying rainbow colors to support gay pride celebrations happening this month throughout the world. Certain searches […]
Google Operating System notes that Google is once again flying rainbow colors to support gay pride celebrations happening this month throughout the world. Certain searches get topped by a rainbow-colored divider, symbolic of rainbow flags often flown by those in the gay community or in support of them. To see the colors, try searches for […]
Google has always truncated the display URLs in the search results when it went beyond two lines, I believe. But now new reports from several sources are noticing that Google may be truncating the URLs to a single line, when applicable. Below is a screen shot of Google shortening URLs. As you can see, the […]
In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more.
The Google Webmaster Central blog finally blogged Google is now indexing the content of files that some SWF files load externally, technically from “external resource loading”. Flash often loads external files to generate what you see in the SWF, so if the SWF is calling an external HTML, XML, another SWF, etc files, Google will […]
CNN’s online news site recently posted a poll that asked, “Are you tired of social networking?” When I had checked their results, it showed that 74% chose “YES.” Yet according to Inside Twitter by Alex Cheng, Mark Evans and Harshdeep Singh, after analyzing information disclosed on 11.5 million Twitters accounts, 72.5% of all users joined […]
TechCrunch is reporting that “Flipper” is a visual version of Google News, enabling people to see images of publications — and presumably “flip” through the pages accordingly. Immediately I was struck by two thoughts, this is somewhat like Google’s News Timeline, which offers a more visual presentation than the current News, and that it bears a […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Google Book Search Adds Seven New Features Today, Brandon Badger, Product Manager, Google Books, announced on the Inside Google Book Search Blog, seven, that’s right seven, new features and tools for […]
Today, Brandon Badger, Product Manager, Google Books, announced on the Inside Google Book Search Blog, seven, that’s right seven, new features and tools for Google Book Search users. Here’s a quick look at what has just gone live. First, Google has made it easier, just click and copy, to embed “preview” material onto a web […]
Yahoo started the push to structure the web when it launched SearchMonkey. With SearchMonkey, a web developer could add semantic markup to a page and then build an enhanced listing for Yahoo search results. Not long after, they made things even easier by using this data to enhance listings even without a SearchMonkey application. Google […]
This morning there are two new entrants in the “real-time” search derby, run by two search veterans. They are CrowdEye and Collecta. CrowdEye is from Ken Moss, who ran search engineering at Microsoft and built the new engine himself. At the helm of Collecta is Gerry Campbell, who was a search executive at AOL and […]
Microsoft recently published a PDF about Search Engine Optimization called Bing: New Features Relevant to Webmasters. This is the second SEO-related offering in as many weeks. During SMX Advanced, Microsoft launched the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit. I’m working on a review of that as well, but it requires Vista or Windows 7 and IIS […]
The Google Analytics Blog announced that advertisers can now import their Google Analytics Goals and Transactions into AdWords for conversion-tracking purposes and CPA bidding. Beyond CPA bidding the benefit is that it “lets you track campaign ROI and optimize your account for conversions directly inside the AdWords interface.” The move simplifies the overall process of […]
Across the TV industry there are various efforts going on to bring more targeting into TV advertising. The readers of this blog know about Google’s TV advertising initiative. But SpotRunner and various others (e.g. Project Canoe) have been working to bring “addressable advertising,” the kind of targeting that exists online (demographic, geo, even behavioral), to […]
Changes that Google has made to search queries have a big potential implications for retailers and other merchants. Among the first to recognize this and make proactive site changes is Pinny Gniwisch, executive vice president of marketing at jewelry site www.ice.com. Ice.com is No. 166 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide. Most search engines, […]
In last week’s Small Is Beautiful column, Hanan Lifshitz posed the question “Do SMBs Still Need the Middleman to Advertise?” It’s an especially timely question, given the recent Borrell report about the number of small businesses who cancel their contracts with online advertising providers within a year. The short version of my reaction to the […]