China has historically been the land of copyright and trademark infringement of Western software, goods and other intellectual property — and Chinese websites such as Baidu and Taobao its willing handmaidens. In February of this year the US trade authority named Baidu one of the world’s “notorious markets” because it was seen facilitating copyright infringement. Here’s […]
Did watching elected representatives debate SOPA last week without understanding some fundamentals of the internet rattle your nerves? Welcome to my world of watching the same thing happen about Google and search. In September, the US Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights held a hearing called “The Power of Google: Serving Consumers or […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: RIAA Scolds Google, Wants Search Algorithm Changed To Fight Online Piracy Saying that Google has a “special responsibility” to fight copyright infringement, the RIAA has issued a report card that scolds […]
Saying that Google has a “special responsibility” to fight copyright infringement, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has issued a report card that scolds Google for not following through on promises to fight piracy. In a report card issued Monday, the RIAA takes a look back at four promises that Google made last year […]
Google and Mozilla have struck a deal that renews their agreement making Google the default search engine in Firefox browsers. No financial terms were announced, but Mozilla’s blog post says the agreement extends the companies’ agreement “for at least three additional years.” The renewal comes about three weeks after the previous contract expired. The two […]
Online reputation management is an important sector of the Internet marketing industry. At SEO Inc. we have been doing online reputation management since the service was invented, so we have really seen it all. Perhaps one of the most important values to have in order to be successful in this field is good study habits. Given […]
The agenda is live, and we’re now accepting submissions to speak at SMX West 2012, San Jose, CA on February 28-March 1. To increase the odds of being selected, be sure to read the agenda. Understand what the sessions are about. Ensure that your pitch is on target to the show’s audience and the session. […]
It’s prediction time again. Before I dive into predictions for 2012, let’s take a look back at where I’ve been wrong and right over the years. I have a fairly good track record, and I like to take a few chances with these, rather than taking the easy way out with predictions like “links will […]
Year-end is a good time to review your programs to get them ready for the next year. Typically, this time of year things slow down due to the holidays you might have some time to focus on the recommendations below. Year-end Recap It is critical that you develop a year-end recap and send it out […]
A new Dilbert cartoon makes fun of the Google employee 20% time to work on whatever they want. As many of you know, Google has a policy to let their engineers spend 20% of their time work on anything they want. Products like AdSense came from it. But is the 20% time really all that […]
US Senators Herb Kohl and Mike Lee are urging the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether Google unfairly favors its own properties in search results. Kohl and Lee are both members of the Senate’s antitrust subcommittee — that’s where Google’s Eric Schmidt testified in-person back in September on the same subject — and have jointly […]
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 Removes Author: Search From Google News You can no longer search for articles from specific authors in Google News. As Barry Schwartz reported this morning on Search Engine Roundtable, using […]
You can no longer search for articles from specific authors in Google News. As Barry Schwartz reported this morning on Search Engine Roundtable, using the author: firstname lastname command at Google News brings up no results now, and Google has disabled it on purpose. If you think it has something to do with the rel=author […]
Here is a little Christmas gift for all local Citation builders: a carefully curated list of the top 50 Citation Sources for businesses in the US & UK.* Over 1 Million Local Citation Sources Found Between March-May 2011, the research team at BrightLocal conducted a huge Citation Analysis project. Over 480,000 Google Places listings were […]
Despite what you may see in Google’s search results these days, the search engine tells us that, no, there’s been no expansion of Sitelinks recently. We’ve received emails here at Search Engine Land HQ and seen tweets asking about the appearance of Sitelinks on sub-pages that previously didn’t have them. We’ve also seen them show […]
At the most recent Search Insider Summit, Aaron Goldman moderated a terrific panel titled “The Perfect Search Engine” (video here). Panelists evaluated how the perfect search engine (“PSE”) might take information (voice, text, other signals), how it should display that information, and what factors should carry the most weight in ranking results. Overall, the discussion was […]
Retail brands with popular mobile apps are benefiting tremendously this holiday season from prominent mobile app visibility in Google’s organic search results. Search for Groupon, eBay, Amazon, Target, QVC or numerous others. Alongside the brand website listing, local listings, and social profiles, searchers are starting to see links to these brands’ iPhone, iPad, and Android […]
Last month, I wrote about a conference session I moderated on Building and Training In-house SEO Teams. And while that get-together was a blast, I didn’t really get my geek on until I was presenting on a panel on Enterprise Level Bid Management. The title was a bit of a misnomer, as we covered topics well […]
Google has released ten different videos for webmasters on how rich snippets work. Google’s rich snippets are special markups used by webmasters to enhance the Google search results. They often take a while to show up in the search results, and often lead to webmaster confusion on if there are issues with the markup used […]
Google has a new easter egg for the winter holiday season – search for [let it snow] and Google will turn the search results page into a powdery snow covered set of search results. The search results will become so hard to see that you will instinctively want to wipe the screen clean with your […]
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 Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) Stalls In Congress The U.S. House Judiciary Committee abruptly adjourned today without voting on the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA), a controversial measure that would […]
The U.S. House Judiciary Committee abruptly adjourned today without voting on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a controversial measure that would impose radical new requirements on search engines, ISPs, ad networks and other key internet players. The hearings will resume “earliest practical day that Congress is in session” according to the chief sponsor of […]
Search engines have “won a major victory” in their battle against so-called content farms. So says the current issue of New Scientist magazine, in an article that’s also available online. New Scientist asked University of Glasgow computer scientist Richard McCreadie to study 50 search queries that are “known to be a target of content farmers.” […]
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.
Many new webmasters and website marketers are under the mistaken impression that online marketing is a “Field of Dreams” and “if you build it, they will come.” Unfortunately, you can build it, but if you don’t market it, and place it in front of the audience that buys your products, nobody will come, and neither […]
Google announced on their Google+ page that they have revamped the Google Doodles page. Google Doodles is what Google calls their special logos that they put up for special holidays or to remember special people from our history. The new Doodle page has a quick search box at the top, making it easy to search […]
Bing’s slow growth in US search market share continues, and Microsoft’s two-and-a-half-year-old search engine is now practically neck-and-neck with Yahoo. Both, however, remain far behind Google. The latest comScore numbers show Bing increasing its market share in November to an even 15 percent, while Yahoo’s dropped to 15.1 percent. Google holds 65.4 percent of the […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Googlebot Identifies Smartphone Content With New User-Agent Google has announced that its mobile crawler now has a user-agent that’s specific to smartphones. The company has already had a user-agent that targets […]
Google has announced that its mobile crawler now has a user-agent that’s specific to smartphones. The company has already had a user-agent that targets feature phones. The new Smartphone Googlebot-Mobile user agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7 (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +https://www.google.com/bot.html) […]
More and more, Google has been showing pictures of article authors next to search results. But what began ostensibly as simple adoption of industry standard Web markup seems to have become an exercise in promoting the Google+ social network. In June 2011 Google began to pilot a way for content authors to associate a photo […]
Google has introduced a new report in Google Webmaster Tools named “Author Stats.” Author Stats shows you how often your content is showing up on the Google search results page. This will show up under Google Webmaster Tools in the “labs” section in Webmaster Tools. It shows the impressions and clicks of the stories found […]
Google released the Google Zeitgeist 2011 today. Google made several lists this year and even broke them down by country. You can play with the interactive lists at googlezeitgeist.com. Those in the picture above are included in the “fastest rising searches” category, including Rebecca Black, Google+, Ryan Dunn, Casey Anthony, Battlefield 3, iPhone 5, Adele, […]
Yesterday, I made an assumption that Google would put all Panda updates on hold until after the holiday season. Google tweeted yesterday afternoon that there would be “no major Panda updates until the new year.” The last Panda update we had was labeled a “minor” update on November 18th and since then, it has been […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: A Letter From Santa To The Search Community December, 2011 The North Pole Dear Search Community: Thanks so much for your many letters to the north pole. Your nicely written texts […]
December, 2011 The North Pole Dear Search Community: Thanks so much for your many letters to the north pole. Your nicely written texts and emails included some familiar requests from last year and some entirely new ones. Lisa and Ian, I’m very sorry, I can’t drop that referring keyword data from signed in users down the […]
This is a mantra we hear far too often. Many B2B marketers expect their search marketing program to generate only high-quality leads that are immediately ready for sales interaction and closing. Question: Is this really realistic? Business Buying Is A Process Think about your own experience — both as a consumer and, if applicable, as […]
The Conversion Rate is calculated as the number of conversions – leads, sales, subscriptions, trials, etc. – divided by the number of visitors to the site from organic search traffic, paid search, referrals, email, etc. Thus, your conversion rate can be improved in two ways: get more of your visitors to convert (the top), or […]
Coupons, Rebates, Daily Deals…it seems everyone is looking for a bargain. But for search marketers, bargains in paid search can be hard to find. CPC prices continue to rise, making it harder and harder for them to expand search campaigns and achieve their goals. However, search retargeting can offer search marketers a bargain. Let’s take […]
The internet and search engines in particular are the top sources for information about local businesses, according to a new survey from the Pew Internet & American Life Foundation. That’s not really a surprise. But what’s interesting perhaps is how many people rely on print newspapers and how few seem to rely on social media […]
Hotel industry, you’re on notice: Google appears to be running a test that places its own Google Hotel Finder at the top of very competitive, hotel-related queries. Search Engine Land reader Alex, who works in the hospitality industry, tipped us to this development and at least one of our SEL editors was able to replicate […]