Google algorithm updates

SearchCap: The Day In Search, December 18, 2009

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 To Group Your Keywords; Plus: Q&A With WordStream’s Larry Kim

    Organizing your paid search keywords into the right ad groups can be a difficult task for even the best search engine marketers. Many times, a keyword may seem to naturally fall into multiple ad groups. The engines tell us the best practice is to not have the same keyword in different groups, because […]

  • Search In Pictures: Yahoo Duck, Google Band & Chrome Ads

    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. […]

  • Google Battles French, Italians In Court, Loses Copyright Case

    Google will probably be fighting legal battles in European courts and appearing before EU regulators for some time to come. For the time being Google has lost (at least for now) a copyright case in France arising from book scanning. According to Reuters: […]

  • SEO Expert Swears In Court That Google Uses Meta Keywords Tag

    I was pointed to a filed affidavit (PDF) between Jenzabar & Robert Maginn as the plaintiffs versus Long Bow Group as the defendants. In short, it seems like the plaintiff is suing the defendants over trademark infringement within a site’s keyword meta tags. […]

  • Google Relaunching Google Answers As Google Guru?

    Google Blogoscoped reports that one of his readers noticed a “Google Guru” link in his Google Account page. Google Guru was launched in January 2007 in Russia as a social question and answer site. You can access it at guru.google.co.th/guru/ and here is a picture:[…]

  • The Ultimate Reason Your SEO Is Underperforming

    In the first installment of this series I asserted that your SEO performance is suffering in proportion to how powerfully you are able to communicate the opportunity to executives. Winning the resources required to grow the channel requires a basic set of metrics. In the subsequent installments, I showed you how to use “Jedi” performance […]

  • Is Social Media Ruining Search Results?

    I preferred search engine results pages (SERPs) before other forms of social media became the rage. I think the commercial web search engines are giving social media items far more attention and validation than they deserve. Do you?

  • QuickMark Says Fix Coming Soon For Google Favorite Place Decals Bug

    Google is suffering through a somewhat embarrassing turn of events regarding its Favorite Place decals, but the company that’s actually responsible for the problem says a fix is on the way. QuickMark, makers of an iPhone app that has led users to the wrong URL when a Favorite Places decal is scanned, says it has submitted […]

  • Google To Buy Yelp For $500 Million?

    TechCrunch is reporting that Google is “advanced acquisition negotiations” to buy Yelp for $500 million or more. TechCrunch has been generally correct about many of the rumors it has reported recently (i.e., Google Phone) so we should take this seriously. Yelp has raised a little over $30 million over several funding rounds. Revenues are heading toward […]

  • Bing Still Working On Canonical Tag Support, Suggests Other Ways To Manage Duplicate Content

    While Google has recently announced its support of the canonical tag across different domains, Bing says it’s still working on supporting the canonical tag on a single domain, and suggests webmasters should rely on other means to manage duplicate content. The rel=”canonical” link element was introduced earlier this year as a way for webmasters to define […]

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Editorial disclosure

Contributing authors are chosen for their expertise and work under the oversight of the editorial staff. Search Engine Land is owned by Semrush. The contributor was not asked to mention Semrush; the opinions expressed are their own.

About the author

Matt McGee
Matt McGee joined Third Door Media as a writer/reporter/editor in September 2008. He served as Editor-In-Chief from January 2013 until his departure in July 2017. He can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee.