SearchCap: Cutts resigns, DuckDuckGo surges & click-through rates

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

• Matt Cutts officially resigns from Google
  Jan 19, 2017 by Barry Schwartz
  Matt Cutts is the new director of engineering at the US Digital Service. He has been on leave with Google since 2014 and officially resigned at the end of 2016.
• Study shows search terms with the very worst (and best) click-through rates
  Jan 19, 2017 by Greg Finn
  A new study uncovers a slew of search terms that aren’t earning their fair share of clicks in the search engine results pages.
• True marketing automation is predicting a customer’s next move, not reacting to a moment
  Jan 19, 2017 by Digital Marketing Depot
  It’s time to break away from trusting expert opinions on shopper behavior and start trusting the machines. By building a unified profile of your customers’ behavior across all channels, you can create truly personalized shopping experiences. In “Trusting the Machine: Data Science and the Multi-Channel, Multi-Device Shopper” from Emarsys, you’ll learn how to stop focusing […]
• DuckDuckGo surpasses 10 billion searches, with 4 billion happening in 2016 alone
  Jan 19, 2017 by Amy Gesenhues
  The privacy search engine says it had its biggest day already this year with 14M searches on January 10th.
• Relaunching your website? Don’t forget an SEO audit!
  Jan 19, 2017 by Janet Driscoll Miller
  Columnist Janet Driscoll Miller outlines the steps you should take pre-launch and post-launch to ensure a smooth transition to a new website.

Recent Headlines From MarTech, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:

• Automate omnichannel marketing strategies to improve the customer journey
• Kia recruits Melissa McCarthy for Super Bowl LI campaign to launch the new Niro crossover SUV
• LinkedIn refreshes desktop interface, emphasizing content and conversation
• 6 UX principles marketers can’t afford to overlook
• Snapchat will target ads based on what people buy off Snapchat
• Impact Radius’ new tool lets brands find more possible partners for affiliate links
• SteelHouse unveils a novel concept: Telling advertisers for free if their ads can be seen
• [Podcast] Marketing Land Live #41: The Path to CMO with NPR’s Meg Goldthwaite
• How IBM’s Watson scores the tone of Trump’s tweets
• Cortana comes to Android’s lock-screen in a battle for visibility and usage
• Why influencer marketing trumps influencer advertising
• Pinterest now offers ad groups to paid campaigns

Search News From Around The Web:

Industry

• Google Uses Its Search Engine to Hawk Its Products, Wall Street Journal

Local & Maps

• Google Earth placemarks to Excel, Google Earth Blog

Link Building

• Yoast internal linking: the making of, Yoast

Searching

• Answer: Finding immersive experiences, SearchReSearch
• Wrong information on Google flight card meant we missed our flight, The Guardian

SEO

• Google Crawl Budget: What SEOs Need to Know About Googlebot Crawling, thesempost.com
• Google Intrusive Interstitials Mobile Penalty Not Such An Negative Impact Yet, Search Engine Roundtable
• How to Combine JavaScript & SEO With Isomorphic JS, Search Engine Journal
• How to Identify Your E-commerce Product Page Keywords Using MozBar, Moz
• SEO and UX Lessons from Home Improvement Purgatory, Portent
• SEO Strategy: Five Steps That Guarantee Your Campaign Success, Search Engine Journal

SEM / Paid Search

• Capitalizing on Mobile User Habits With Device-Specific PPC Campaigns, Marketing Mojo
• Create Javascript Tracking Cookies for Enhanced PPC Attribution, Metric Theory
• Google harvests school kids’ web histories for ads, claims its Mississippi nemesis, The Register
• PPC strategy for small businesses, Bing Ads