Pinterest

SearchCap: The Day In Search, March 31, 2014

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Marin Launches Context Connect, Says Retailer Impressions Surged During Polar Vortex As the brutal Polar Vortex weather system bore down on much of the U.S. this winter, consumers apparently hunkered down […]

Content

Paid Search Spend Rises 8 Percent In Q1, Mobile Shows Signs Of Maturing [Report]

In the first quarter this year, U.S. search advertising spend rose 8 percent when compared both quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) and year-over-year (YoY) according to IgnitionOne’s latest report which looks at the campaigns run through its digital marketing platform. In Q1 2014, paid search clicks increased 5 percent and click-through-rates (CTR) were up 23 percent YoY while […]

Google

Google’s Matt Cutts On How They Evaluate New Search Algorithms

Google Head of Search Spam Matt Cutts posted a video today answering how Google goes about evaluating which new search algorithms they use and which they throw away or adapt. The question was posed by James Foster of Sydney, Australia who asked: What are some of the metrics that Google uses to evaluate whether one iteration […]

Content

US Court Says Baidu Has Free Speech Right To Censor Search

Late last week, Chinese search engine Baidu succeeded in gaining dismissal of a lawsuit by pro-democracy activists based in New York (Zhang et al. v. Baidu.com, Inc). Plaintiffs had sued in the US and argued that Baidu improperly blocked them from seeing content on the search engine. Specifically, according to Reuters, the plaintiffs said that people in the US couldn’t […]

Google

Google Webmaster Tools Index Status Showing Data For HTTPS Protocol

Google has announced they’ve added “more precise” data for the Index Status reports in Google Webmaster Tools. Specifically, Google is now reporting each indexed URLs for each protocol, specifically both for HTTP and HTTPS, as well as for verified subdirectories. Google said this change “makes it easy for you to monitor different sections of your […]

SEO

Climbing The Ladder To Guest Posting On Tier 1 Sites

Content marketing is all the rage these days and, if you are pursuing guest posts as part of your link-building strategy, it is critical to target the highest authority sites possible. You want to find the sites where your presence builds your visibility and reputation (regardless of SEO) and where the links might get clicked […]

Apple

Survey: Search Engines Dominate Mobile Product Research

Last week, Local Corporation released survey results from its latest round of consumer mobile shopping research. The company is promoting a new version of its local-mobile shopping app Havvit. The survey was conducted in March and carried out by the Chicago-based e-tailing group and consisted of nearly 1,300 US smartphone owners. Among other questions the […]

Link building

SearchCap: The Day In Search, March 28, 2014

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: IE8 Users Don’t Get Forwarded To Google Secure Search At the moment, users of IE8, still the most popular version of the Internet Explorer browser worldwide, are being sent to unsecure […]

Google

IE8 Users Don’t Get Forwarded To Google Secure Search

At the moment, users of IE8, still the most popular version of the Internet Explorer browser worldwide, are being sent to unsecure search on Google. The move to send users to Google regular servers instead of secure servers is related to Google seeming to work through how it deals with people still using the older […]

Content

Still Newsjacking For Links? Forget That, Make The News Instead!

We all know that Google frowns upon trying — in any way, shape or form — to get links (they’re serious, guys). Yet, links still play a very large role in determining SERP rankings. If you can’t ask for or chase down high-quality, authoritative links, what’s a marketer to do? You have to earn them. […]

LinkedIn

The Benefits Of Participating In Our Professional Search Community

As a search and internet marketer, it’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day work with our employers and clients, as well as the task of keeping up with the latest developments from search engines, social media platforms and industry tools. Today, I’d like to step back from this and discuss search and social […]

Link building

SearchCap: The Day In Search, March 27, 2014

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Car Makers Drove 14.4 Million Clicks From Google Ads In 2 Months (And That Doesn’t Include Mobile) A whopping 177 automotive manufacture sites drove 14.4 million paid search clicks from Google […]

Google

Car Makers Drove 14.4 Million Clicks From Google Ads In 2 Months (And That Doesn’t Include Mobile)

A whopping 177 automotive manufacture sites drove 14.4 million paid search clicks from Google ads on desktops and tablets this January and February. Of those 177 advertisers, the top 20 advertisers (roughly 11 percent) accounted for 81 percent of the paid search clicks in the two month period, according to new data from search marketing intelligence […]

Paid social

Is Rewarder The Heir Of Google Answers?

There have been a range of “answer engines” or “help engines” (Q&A sites) that have come and gone over the years. Some of them might be considered “social search.” Yahoo Answers, Ask.com (more recently focused on Q&A), Answers.com, Askville (Amazon), ChaCha, Keen, JustAnswer/Pearl are among those that remain and still exist. Verticals with Q&A angles […]

Google

How To Reduce Landing Page Clutter For Optimal AdWords Performance

When it comes to optimizing PPC landing pages, marketers often think about beefing up page copy, adding trust signals, or including eye-catching graphics. What they often neglect to consider are ways to reduce page clutter — ways to make the information on your landing page easier to read, or ways to visually enhance the most […]

PPC

4 Steps To The Perfect AdWords Audit

I recently participated in a few SEM tune-up clinics where we did live reviews of AdWords accounts. While I hope I provided a few interesting tidbits, I think the thing advertisers are looking for in these sessions is insight into the process that other practitioners go through when checking an account. So whether you’re doing […]

Google Analytics

SearchCap: The Day In Search, March 26, 2014

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: How A Single Guest Post May Have Gotten An Entire Site Penalized By Google Google made it clear earlier this year that those doing guest posts “for SEO purposes” might be […]

Ecommerce

Bing Ads Launches Product Ads In U.S., Mobile Version Now In Beta

After months of testing, Product Ads are now available through Bing Ads in the U.S. Like AdWords Product Listing Ads (PLA), Bing’s version are powered by merchant product feeds. The ads display on the Yahoo Bing Network for commerce-related searches and feature a product image, title, price and merchant name. Also similar to the Google […]

Content

New AdWords For Video Reporting Now Rolling Out In Google Analytics

Google is introducing a new Video Campaigns report in Google Analytics to give advertisers more insights into the performance of their YouTube TrueView ads that are managed through AdWords for Video campaigns. The new report is rolling out in Analytics accounts over the next few days and can be found in the AdWords section under […]

Google

Google Granted Patent For Panda Algorithm

Google’s Panda update has been one of the most talked about algorithmic updates by SEOs and webmasters since it launched in February 2011. Today is the day the patent document describing Panda was granted. It was written by Navneet Panda, which is why it was named Panda, and Vladimir Ofitserov of Google. The patent application […]

Apple

Apple Broadening App-Store Search With Related Keywords

Mobile app discovery continues to be a challenge for most developers. Quixey (across platforms) and Google (on Android) are trying to address that challenge by indexing deep links within apps. For its part, Apple appears to be trying to broaden App Store search with related keywords. When entering search queries within the App Store, Apple […]

PPC

Unicorn Accounts Don’t Use DKI & 9 Other PPC Lessons From SMX West

Freshly back from the excitement of SMX West in beautiful San Jose and full to the brim with insightful PPC notes (if Evernote can technically get full to the brim), I’ve set about compiling a list of my top PPC-related takeaways from the event. The following are the ten that most caught my imagination. 1. […]

Google

Google Misattributing Content From Major News Publishers

A reader has sent us examples of Google misattributing content from dozens of large online news publications, with hundreds thousands of examples of Google indexing URLs and pages, but that content being pulled from a different source. For example, if you search for [hometownlocator site:post-gazette.com], the first result is local.post-gazette.com/boardman+florist.9.125954212p.home.html: If you look at the […]

Google Analytics

SearchCap: The Day In Search, March 24, 2014

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 Slaps Greek Sites With Penalties It appears that Google has taken action on spammers, potentially link spammers, in Greece recently. Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, responded on Twitter […]

Content

Quora Kicks Off Verified Profiles With Spotlight On President Barack Obama

Quora announced new Verified Profiles today, now adding a checkmark to profile pictures of public figures and writers deemed worthy by the site. According to Quora, it doesn’t accept verification requests, but instead will determine who gets a verified profile based on whether a “significant percentage of Quora readers recognize the person’s name or background […]

Google

Google Now Comes To Chrome For Desktops & Laptops

Google’s amazing predictive search tool, Google Now, is finally being made available to people on desktop and laptop computers using the regular release of its Chrome browser. Until now, it had only been available through mobile devices or to those using beta versions of Chrome. Google shared the news via its Google Chrome account on […]

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