SearchCap: The Day In Search, January 23, 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:

• MapQuest Transfers Local Listings Management To Yext
  Last October, MapQuest started outsourcing local business listings management to Yext. The “claim your MapQuest listings” page is hosted by Yext (I believe) with a co-branded look and feel. Yesterday, MapQuest notified business users that its local business center and basic local listings product would be formally shutting down. Here’s the text of the email that went out: […]
• Google To Replace Smartphone User-Agent To Improve Smart Phone Indexing
  Google announced they are replacing the old smartphone crawler user-agent with a new one in order to make it possible for Google to index more smartphone content. Zhijian He, a smartphone search engineer at Google said that the previous user-agent “made it impossible for Google to index smartphone content of some sites, or for Google […]
• 3 Surprising Benefits Of Retargeting
  As retargeting becomes more widely used and better understood, its reputation is improving. Marketers are learning to avoid creeping people out through better targeting and less intrusive messaging. Early adopters now have a year or two (or more) of experience to share, which is exactly what I intend to do today. At Wordstream, we’ve been […]
• An Easy Way To Check What Referrer Data Google, Bing Or Yahoo Pass To Your Secure Site
  With the three major search engines migrating their default searches to secure search, over SSL/HTTPS, marketers and webmasters want to know what referrer and analytics data will be passed to them and what won’t. The majority of Google is secure search, Yahoo yesterday defaulted all searches to be conducted over SSL, and Bing is currently […]
• Are PDFs Optimal For SEO? The Pros And Cons
  I expect that most everyone working in SEO knows that PDFs are indexable by search engines. PDFs can also appear with an authorship-rich snippet in Google SERPs. But, just because a file format can be indexed doesn’t always mean that it’s the ideal approach. Today, I’d like to explore the pros and cons of PDFs […]
• Live @ SMX West: Breathing New Life Into A Tired Paid Search Campaign
  If you’ve been doing paid search for a while, you’ve undoubtedly run into a situation where you’re working on a campaign that’s been moderately successful, but has essentially been on autopilot and isn’t taking advantage of any new features that could enhance its performance. Or perhaps you’ve inherited a campaign from another team or agency […]
• Google Adds A Knowledge Graph Popup To Search Results, But Is It Good For Site Owners?
  Google has announced the formal rollout of a test that some searchers have been seeing for a few days now — a test that associates a Knowledge Graph popup with certain web pages in desktop search results. The popup adds more information about certain search results, which sounds like it should be good for searchers. […]

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

• Volkswagen Wins Title Of Most Shared Super Bowl Brand Ever With Over 7 Million Shares
• Twitter Deals Out In-Depth Analytics For Twitter Cards
• Consumer Watchdog Files FTC Complaint Over “Send To Anyone On Google+” Feature
• Google Invests $14 Million Of Combined $61 Million Tech Firms Spent To Sway Legislators In 2013
• Report: Marketing Emails Opened On Mobile Devices Jumped 61% To 65% In Q4 2013
• Push Mobile Marketing — App Notifications Vs. Messaging

Search News From Around The Web:

Local & Maps

• Every Earth view from “Gravity” identified in Google Earth, Ogle Earth

SEM / Paid Search

• 3 Agency Best Practices for Using Bing Ads from the JXT Group Case Study, advertise.bingads.microsoft.com
• How to Untangle AdWords Phone Call Metrics, 3Q Digital
• Pay Per Click Lessons to Learn from Marketing Leaders, www.poweredbysearch.com

Searching

• Entity Search is Getting Real, SwellPath

SEO

• 5 SEO Metrics You Need to Know About Your E-Commerce Competitors, Search Engine Journal
• 7 Areas of Focus for An SEO Friendly Website in 2014, dailyseotip.com
• Do Not Build High Quality Content For SEO, Build High Quality Patterns Instead, internetmarketingninjas.com
• Google Now marketing: Get your business processes and relationships into Google, Managing Greatness
• Guest Blogging Is Done, www.hitreach.co.uk
• Guest Blogging: A Change in the Google Algorithm, Spin Sucks
• How to Bake SEO into the Marketing Cake: Integration as a Recipe for Excellence, Distilled
• SEO After Hummingbird, Penguin, and Panda: How Link Building and Content Marketing Are Really Changing, Search Engine Journal
• Time for Guest Blogging With a Purpose, moz.com
• Using ALL of Google Webmaster Tools data to tackle (not provided), Luna Metrics
• Why Have My Rankings Dropped? An SEO Troubleshooting Guide, koozai.com