Google Analytics

SearchCap: The Day In Search, August 31, 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: Google Tightens Review Process For New AdSense Publishers Google has added a new review step to its process for adding new AdSense publishers, presumably to better eliminate abuses and improve the […]

Google Ads

Google Tightens Review Process For New AdSense Publishers

Google has added a new review step to its process for adding new AdSense publishers, presumably to better eliminate abuses and improve the quality of the AdSense network for advertisers. In the new process, publishers’ sites will be reviewed after they’ve placed the AdSense ad code on their sites, and real, paying ads won’t run […]

Link building

Sanity Saver: Seek Out Local Search Meetups In Between Conferences

I have attended many conferences in the last ten years, including Search Marketing Expo, Search Engine Strategies, and Internet retail events. Generally speaking, I’ve been pretty impressed with all of them. However, the reality is, these conferences are expensive. In fact, the average cost of attendance is around one-thousand dollars, not to mention the cost of […]

Google

Google Makes Chromebooks More Useful With Offline Access

Google Chromebooks are great — unless you don’t have an internet connection; then they’re essentially useless. (Other colorful descriptors I’ve heard include “suck,” “blow,” “fail” and so on). Now Google is taking steps to address the problem with offline access to Gmail and, very soon, Calendar and, most importantly, Docs. According to the Gmail blog: […]

Content

US Move Against AT&T-Mobile May Spell Trouble For Google

A big story today is the US government’s effort to block the proposed $39 billion acquisition of T-Mobile USA by AT&T. AT&T wants T-Mobile’s spectrum and network and the US thinks it will harm competition in the wireless market. According to the New York Times the government’s lawsuit boils down to the argument that less […]

Analytics & conversion

4 Areas To A/B Test For E-Commerce Websites

Out of all websites found on the Internet, online retail stores have the most potential for improvement through A/B testing. Amazon, Ebay and Etsy are just few examples of e-commerce websites that do a ton of A/B testing. The potential for A/B testing is enormous because of the sheer number of variables that these stores can […]

Content

5 Steps To Improve Your Customer Driven B2B Lead Generation

To maximize online lead generation campaigns, B2B marketers need to focus on the multifaceted customer they serve. Design campaigns to meet their needs across the entire decision cycle and business buying process to achieve the optimal ROI from their program. The Many Faces Of The B2B Customer In the realm of the B2B marketer, one […]

SEO

Yelp CEO: 50 Percent Deal Margins Unsustainable

Following the elimination of daily deals (though not check-in deals) from Facebook’s lineup of products, Yelp followed suit this week by scaling back its daily deals program. Many people incorrectly interpreted the news, presented in a Bloomberg article, as Yelp’s total exit from the space. Some have also seen it as an indication that the […]

Google Analytics

SearchCap: The Day In Search, August 30, 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: Microsoft Tightens Relevancy And Quality Requirements In AdCenter Microsoft has announced changes that tighten up its adCenter Relevancy and Quality policy for ads served to the U.S. and Canada. Changes are […]

Google

Google Trusted Stores: For Organic Rankings & Search Ads?

Google Operating System Blog discovered a new feature to be released by Google named “Google Trusted Stores.” The landing page for this feature will be at google.com/trustedstores but it is currently not live. There was a video that was released today that was just made private. The video was shared on Google Operating System Blog […]

Apple

ComScore: Android Continues Gains, RIM Tanking

Today comScore released its latest mobile market share figures. Once again the smartphone story is the same: Android showed strong quarterly growth while the iPhone saw modest growth and all others saw declines, especially RIM. Among handset OEMs (all mobile devices), Samsung leads the pack with 25 percent of the US market. Motorola, which Google […]

SEO

Linking Oddities That Ripley Would Like

Ahhh, the strangeness that is links. This week’s column will hopefully spark some questions, answer a few others, and also point out some weird linking related phenomena, beginning with two examples: If this search is correct, Google indexes a little over (Use Dr. Evil voice) 1 billion pages from the Yahoo.com family of domains. But, […]

Paid social

The (Social) Medium Is Not The Message

Last month, I talked about how marketers need to distinguish between interactions and true engagement*. As part of that, I referenced the fact that Facebook and Twitter had been written about in relation to events such as the death of Amy Winehouse, the massacre in Norway and the Egyptian revolution. But since writing that, social […]

Google

Google Webmaster Live Help Via Google + Hangouts Tomorrow

Google has been quietly hosting Google + Hangouts for webmasters to ask Google Webmaster analysts and engineers questions. The next Google hangout, named Google Webmaster Office Hours, was announced by Jenny Murphy and will take place tomorrow on her profile. Again, it will take place Wednesday, August 31st at 11:30am PDT / 2:30 EDT on […]

Link building

SearchCap: The Day In Search, August 29, 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: 6 Key Findings From The 2011 Local SEO Industry Survey If you ask any local SEO what the nature of our industry is like, you’ll get a range of answers from […]

Link building

6 Key Findings From The 2011 Local SEO Industry Survey

If you ask any local SEO what the nature of our industry is like, you’ll get a range of answers from ‘exciting‘ & ‘high-growth’ to ‘ever changing’, ‘full of opportunity’ and ‘challenging’. The local online advertising market has seen strong growth over the last few years and this positive trend is expected to continue. Research […]

Link building

How Integrated QR Codes Could Disrupt Your SEM Strategy

This summer, I dedicated my columns to exploring the disruptive effects QR codes will have on the core of search marketing – from SEO URL strategy, to the very notion of link building. Today, I’ll look at how QR disrupts the SEM game, and may force you to adopt a new strategy. It’s In The […]

PPC

3 Steps To Adopting A New Attribution Model In A Large Enterprise

When I first got to Yahoo! and asked about attribution models in our marketing team, our marketing analytics lead informed me that we had developed, and subsequently scrapped, a very elegant attribution model. In fact, we were back to square one with a last-ad model, the same one that’s been dominating our industry for what […]

Apple

New Insights Into The Google Auction

Granted, we’re geeks. We get really excited anytime the engines give us new information to analyze or tools with which we can fine-tune our approach. Google has just given us a treasure trove of new information: click level data on an ad’s position. In the past, we’ve had to rely on observations and average position […]

Content

Google CEO Page Said To Avoid Potential Criminal Prosecution In Pharma Settlement

Last week the bombshell announcement came that Google was admitting liability and forfeiting roughly $500 million in profits and fees from accepting illegal ads from Canadian pharmacies targeting US residents. This is a historic “fine” according to the US Department of Justice (DOJ). But new information revealed over the past few days suggests that Google may […]

Facebook

Facebook Social Deals Done After Four Months

Facebook is backing off from the local/small business space — or at least parts of it. A few days after dropping its check-in service for Facebook Places, the company is now getting out of the deals business. In a statement reported by Reuters, Facebook says its Deals product will go away “in the coming weeks.” […]

SEO

Hurricane Irene Swirling Around the Web

The sheer number of people potentially affected by the approaching Hurricane Irene means that the web is experiencing an incredible amount of traffic from those seeking information. Hitwise reports that searches for Hurricane Irene have increased more than 2300% since August 21. Thankfully, there are plenty of resources online where people along the heavily-populated East Coast […]

Google

Google Maps — Now With Voice Search

Voice search all began for Google several years ago with the now-shuttered, free directory assistance service GOOG-411. After the underlying infrastructure had matured Google introduced it on Android devices and in its iPhone apps. More recently, in July, the company put the same voice search capability on Google.com on the Chrome browser for the PC. […]

Google News

SearchCap: The Day In Search, August 26, 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: Google Signals Upcoming Algorithm Change, Asks For Help With Scraper Sites Google is calling for help in identifying a long-running problem: scraper sites in its search results — and particularly scraper […]

Google Ads

AdWords Editor Version 9.5 Released For Windows And Mac

Google has released version 9.5 of its free desktop software for managing AdWords campaigns, adding support for campaign experiments and location extensions, among other recent enhancements to the AdWords web interface. Users can now manage their campaign experiments on the AdWords Editor, including applying and editing an experiment status, a default maximum CPC or a […]

Content

Pew: 65% Of Online Adults Now Use Social Networks

It comes as no surprise that social networking is one of the top online activities, exceeded only by email and search according the Pew Internet Project. The most noteworthy finding of a new Pew report on social networking is that its growth is most pronounced among older Americans: The frequency of social networking site usage […]

Google

Google Retires The Googlebot-News Bot

Today, Google announced that they will no longer be crawling news sites with Googlebot-News and instead will crawl news sites with Googlebot, the same bot that crawls sites for web search. However, you can still block your content from being indexed in Google News by disallowing Googlebot-News in robots.txt or using a meta robots tag. […]

Apple

SearchCap: The Day In Search, August 25, 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: Think Global — But Make Your Ads Local Find out how to maximize your performance in international PPC campaigns – watch this webcast: “Global Domination through PPC: What you MUST know […]

Google

Google Adds 100+ Domains, Signals Plans For National Small Biz Push

Google appears to be readying plans to roll out its “Get Your Business Online” program across the U.S. That’s based on Mike Blumenthal’s discovery that Google has recently added more than 100 domains to its portfolio, with URLs such as coloradogetonline.com, dakotagetonline.com, getoregononline.com, getpennsylvaniaonline.com, newyorkgetonline.com, northcarolinagetonline.com, ohiogetonline.com, etc. Get Your Business Online is Google’s outreach […]

Google

Video: How Google Improves Their Search Algorithms

Google published a nice 4 minute video on how they go about improving their web search algorithms, the quality of results and the user interfaces. They talk about finding problems, coming up with new ideas, testing those ideas, approving or rejecting those ideas and implementing the ideas. Overall, much of this is not new to […]

Content

China Appears To Admit Cyberattacks On US

Circumstantial and indirect evidence has long implicated the Chinese government and its surrogates in numerous incidents of digital espionage and other hacking into US corporations’ and government-owned websites and databases. The infamous Gmail hacking episode that triggered Google’s censorship protest and “withdrawal” from the Chinese search market is only one example. The Chinese themselves have […]

Bing

Bing Webmaster Tools Integrates Yahoo Traffic Data

Bing Webmaster Tools now has fully integrated in Yahoo’s traffic numbers as well. So if you have seen a spike in your Bing Webmaster Tools traffic charts, this is the reason why. You should see your impressions and clicks data spike up, while the click through rate numbers may fluctuate from the norm as well. […]

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