SearchCap: The Day In Search, April 18, 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:
- Demand Media: Panda’s Impact On eHow.com “Significantly Overstated”
Demand Media says recent reports have “significant overstated” the impact of Google’s Panda update on eHow.com, its flagship website. In a brief statement issued early this morning, the company says: Certain third parties that have published reports attempting to estimate the effect of recent search engine algorithm changes made by Google on traffic to the […]
- Panda Update: Google Lowers The Boom On eHow.com
After escaping damage in the first rollout of Google’s Farmer/Panda update, Demand Media’s eHow.com was reportedly not as fortunate in this week’s expansion. Sistrix, one of the companies that’s been tracking the impact of Google’s changes, says that eHow.com was hit hard by the latest Panda update. We already reported the Sistrix (and other) numbers […]
- Mobile SEO For Websites That Behave Like Apps
The debate over whether to build an app or a mobile website will get more interesting in the next couple months, thanks to a new platform developed by the jQuery team. jQuery Mobile is a set of scripts and style sheets made specifically for mobile phones, and has the potential to even the playing field […]
- 7 Google Quality Score PPC Myths
This month, I’ll cover 7 of the common myths related to PPC Quality Score. This article is a continuation of 5 Paid Search Marketing Myths Explained In Simple Terms from last month. 1. There Is Only One Quality Score This is not true. There are actually three different quality scores. They are: a) Search Quality […]
- 5 Tips For Large Scale Mobile Advertisers
More and more consumers are accessing the Internet on their mobile devices each day. There are over 5 billion mobile phones worldwide, and according to recent Neilsen research, over 50% of the mobile phones in the US will be smartphones (capable of internet browsing) before the end of 2011. The majority of these mobile users […]
- Yellow Pages SEO In The Post-Panda World
This week at the Yellow Pages Association conference in Las Vegas, I will be leading a session on the state of search engine optimization and how local directories can benefit (or not) from using SEO strategically. For those of you who can’t make it to the show, I thought I’d provide some highlights of my […]
- What Its Like To Be A Google Search Engineer
As you may know, Google is hiring search quality engineers. They are hiring across the board in search, including synonyms and spell correction, core ranking, UI changes, evaluation, and webspam. To apply, fill out this form. As part of their hiring efforts, Google has released a video named Search Engineering at Google. Some of your […]
- Yellow Pages Industry Association Changes Name To Focus On “Local Search”
After months of deliberation the Yellow Pages Association has changed its name and brand identity to the “Local Search Association.” The name change reflects the transformation of yellow pages organizations from publishers of primarily print directories to multi-platform providers of leads, calls and clicks to local businesses. The organization is also reaching out to new […]
- Google Tells Video Users To Move Over To YouTube
Many outlets, starting with Allan Stern at CenterNetworks, reported over the weekend that Google Video is finally doing away with hosting. Two years ago the service stopped allowing new video uploads but said it would continue to host videos that had already been uploaded to the system. No longer. Everything must be downloaded and moved […]
- Hot At Sphinn: Who Needs Websites, Death Of Check-Ins, Infographic Tools & More
Quite a bit of variety last week on our sister site, Sphinn. The most popular stories ranged from things like white hat SEO examples to tools that help you make infographics to a discussion on the necessity of having a website. The latter was the topic of our Discussion of the Week. We asked a […]
Search News From Around The Web:
Business Issues
- GOOGLE’S LARRY PAGE DOES EXACTLY THE RIGHT THING: Says "Whatever" To Wall Street, Business Insider
- Photo tour of Facebook’s new datacenter, Scobleizer
- Why Google Should Buy the Music Industry, open
- Jim Lanzone, president of CBS Interactive: Career path, latimes.com
- Real Estate Listings Site Zillow Files For $51.75 Million IPO, TechCrunch
- Shepherding the wind, Official Google Blog
- Walmart Announces Acquisition of Social Media Company Kosmix, Walmartstores.com
- Winklevoss Twins Ask for New Hearing in Facebook Case, New York Times
- Wolfram|Alpha and DuckDuckGo Partner on API Binding and Search Integration, Wolfram|Alpha Blog
Local, Maps & Mobile
- Bing Capture and Share Panoramas Anywhere You Go with the Photosynth App, Bing Search Blog
Paid Search & Contextual
- Google now allows you to opt out of ad targeting via the Android Market, www.talkandroid.com
Searching
- Apple May Have Tweaked App Store Ranking Algorithm, Making Downloads Matter Less, insidemobileapps.com
- Google Product Search Showing Up For Wrong Queries, i am chad burgess
- MOAT: A Search Engine For Ads, And So Much More, TechCrunch
- The layered look: How Google News is integrating the social web, Nieman Journalism Lab
- This week in search 4/15/11, Official Google Blog
SEM Industry
SEO & SEM
- 5 Site Optimization Blunders that Will Kill Your Rankings, SEO.com
- Does a Site ‘SEO’ Itself?, Daily SEO Tip
- How to Optimize for Google 2011 – Part 2 of 3, StepForth
- Testing Google’s Panda algorithm, CNET News
- The Impact of Cloud Computing on SEO, Bruce Clay Australia
- What Is Duplicate Content (& Do You Have It), Search Engine People
- Your SEO Competitor Gaining On You?, Search Engine Roundtable
Social Media
Recent Hot Items From Sphinn, Our Social News Sharing Site:
- What We Learnt From a Pills Link Hacker – You may not like it, but the fact is that you can learn a lot (and cut through a lot of the fluff and opinion masquerading as fact on many mainstream SEO sites) by analyzing black hat SEO case studies like this one.
- Google Holds Out Against ‘Do Not Track’ Flag – Apple made it clear this week that the next version of its Safari browser — which will ship with the upcoming version of Mac OS — will include the ability for users to tell websites not to track them, by using what’s known as the ‘Do Not Track’ header, according to The Wall Street Journal. That leaves Chrome, the browser created by the online-advertising giant Google, alone in not supporting the nascent feature. And according to Google, it has no plans to do so anytime soon.
- FBI seizes online poker websites; customer funds on lockdown – We’ve seen the FBI and ICE seize websites in the past, though they were usually related to pirated or copyrighted material. Today, we get a different spin. The FBI hasapparently seized four large online poker websites — PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker,UB.com and Absolute Poker — claiming bank fraud, money laundering, and illegal gambling offenses.
- 15 Things I Hate About the New Google Analytics – From The Article: "We’ve been testing the new Google Analytics for some time now. I have a separate list of shiny new functions that I’m enjoying, but wanted to share the areas I’m running into difficulties with the new Google Analytics."
- Just What User Behavior Data Does Google Use to Influence Search Rankings? – Uber-search-patent-geek Bill Slawski looks through some of Google's patents to see what they had to say about how Google might incorporate user behavior data into panda driven search results.
- Special Characters In Meta Descriptions – The Beboisation Of Google? – The practice of optimising search results to maximise click-through-rate is not a new one and has been used in PPC advertising to good effect for years, but where PPC ads have to go through an approval process (where many techniques are outlawed) meta descriptions and organic results do not, so boundaries can be pushed much further.
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