Interflora got penalized only 2 weeks ago, right after Valentine’s day with a huge coverage in the media and also a some-what indirect statement from Google’s Matt Cutts himself about Advertorials also counting as paid links if they pass Page Rank (i.e. do not have NOFOLLOW tags on them). Now, just this past Sunday, a […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. From Search Engine Land: The Power Of Headlines: The LA Times Gets It Right With Their Piece On The Inauguration Journalists call them headlines; SEOs call them titles and headings. Whatever you call them, they’re […]
Where are the bargains in paid search these days? According to an analysis of the fourth quarter in paid search, Adobe determined that both tablet targeting and product listing ads represent great opportunities for marketers, where there’s a substantial gap between cost-per-click (CPC) and conversion rate. Adobe came to its conclusions after looking at paid […]
Google Product Listing Ads generated 28% of Google non-brand clicks in Q4 according to RKG’s latest Digital Marketing Report released today. PLA CPCs were 26% lower than CPCs for competitive text ads. RKG also found a larger than average gap between bids and actual CPCs for PLAs, suggesting competition is still relatively light. Product Listing Ads […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: A/B Testing From Search To Conversion As I mentioned in a previous post, search marketers should work on finding the middle ground between a high CTR (appealing ads) and a high […]
It’s Christmas Eve, and Santa Claus is on his annual trip delivering presents to all the good little boys and girls around the world. This year, not just one but two major organizations are offering ways to track Jolly St. Nick on his flight. Below, our annual review of how to track him by the […]
Google is featuring a Google logo, aka Doodle, for the holiday season this morning. The logo is incredibly happy and festive, with lots of colors and Christmas like characters and activities within the logo that makes up the letters in Google’s name. The logo can be found worldwide today, December 24th, on Christmas Eve. But […]
Google has confirmed rumors of a Google update announcing on Twitter that they pushed out a Panda data refresh today impacting about 1.3% of English queries. This would make for the 23rd Panda update since the first Panda algorithm was introduced on February 24, 2011. Since then we had 22 updates both to the algorithm […]
Google has decided to take on the decades-old Santa tracking service that NORAD offers with its own “Google Santa Tracker.” It comes in the wake NORAD booting Google out as a partner in favor of Microsoft. NOTE: If you’re looking for the latest information on Santa tracking for the current year, see our Your Guide To […]
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 Maps iPhone App Gets 10 Million Downloads In Two Days Just about a week ago Google’s new Google Maps iPhone app was released and oh boy were people waiting for […]
The holiday season is now in full swing! Google has finally added the Christmas and Kwanzaa decorations to compliment the Festivus pole and Hanukkah decorations you already get on Google. How does it work? Just search for [christmas] and you will get Christmas bells. Note, this also works for [santa] and other holiday search terms: […]
If you search for [hanukkah] or [dreidel] or [menorah] and so on – you will see special Hanukkah decorations on the Google search results. Hanukkah began this past Saturday night and we reported yesterday that Google launched Festivus decorations but didn’t have any decorations for the holiday of Hanukkah. Well that has just changed, Google […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Yelp Adds Restaurant Menus (And Images) Following on the heels of Foursquare, YP and a few others in the local segment Yelp is adding restaurant menu information and pricing. With the […]
Google’s Moby Dick logo celebrates the 161st anniversary of The Whale novel written by author Herman Melville. There are two special points to be made about the implementation of this logo: (1) Google purposely is taking searches who click on the logo to a search result for [Herman Melville books] which brings up the Google […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Optimizing Search Engine Marketing For Seasonal Opportunities Many in-house search marketers operate within a seasonal framework, whether a retail high season culminating in Christmas, a peak summer travel season, or another […]
Marketers have had a couple weeks to digest their fourth quarter numbers and assess their successes and failures from a period that can be a whirlwind, particularly in the retail sector. Now, with Google’s Q4 earnings report and Yahoo’s out, we’re getting a chance to compare our own performance to data put out by some […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Major Entertainment Groups Accuse Google, Bing Of Directing Users To Illegal Content Several major UK entertainment industry groups are accusing Google and Bing of directing searchers to illegal content, and have […]
That didn’t take long. In my coverage today about the new Google “Search Plus Your World” feature, I detailed how part of it gave hefty ammunition to claims that Google is abusing its dominant position in search. The anti-trust charges have now already started. Here’s the short story why. Imagine, Sending People To Other Stores! One of […]
It’s Christmas Eve! Santa Claus is on his annual trip of delivering presents to good little boys and girls around the world. Time also for our annual tradition, telling you how to track Santa using the internet, by smartphone and even through good old-fashioned voice telephone calls. NOTE: If you’re looking for the latest information […]
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’s New Happy Holidays Logo: Dancing Christmas Lights & Jingle Bells For Christmas and the holiday season, Google has a new musical logo out that plays Jingle Bells and ends by […]
For Christmas and the holiday season, Google has a new musical logo out that plays Jingle Bells and ends by wishing “Happy Holidays.” The special logo, or “doodle” as Google calls them, starts out with an all-white background: Push any note, and the logo lights up with the Google name as Christmas lights: As you […]
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 Adds Christmas & Hanukkah Decorations To Search Results If you go to Google and search for variations of either [christmas] or [hanukkah], you will see Google has dressed up the […]
If you go to Google and search for variations of either [christmas] or [hanukkah], you will see Google has dressed up the search results page with holiday decorations. The Christmas version shows Christmas ornaments hanging from the top bar: The Hanukkah version shows Jewish stars across the top bar: In the past they placed these […]
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 Removes Author: Search From Google News You can no longer search for articles from specific authors in Google News. As Barry Schwartz reported this morning on Search Engine Roundtable, using […]
Over the last 6 months in this column we have looked at all aspects of the overlap between search and display, from why search marketers could take over the world media budgets of the future, to advanced methods for retargeting and simple alternatives to attribution modeling. So to round out the year, we revisit the […]
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: Parked Domains, Scraper Sites Targeted Among New Search Changes In what’s now to be a monthly update on search changes, a new Google “Inside Search” blog post today tells us […]
Google’s teaming up again with NORAD to product one of my favorite Christmas traditions, the NORAD Tracks Santa web site. But new for this year, Bing joins the holiday sweepstakes with a Advent calendar-like Bing Magical Holiday Calendar. NOTE: If you’re looking for the latest information on Santa tracking for the current year, see our Your […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Cats & Dogs Living Together: Bing Promotes Firefox If you ever wanted proof that Microsoft has learned that for Bing to succeed, it needs to spread its wings beyond Microsoft, look […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Want Better Google Analytics Data? Learn To Tag Your Campaigns! One of the most important hurdles to tackle before analyzing data is collecting clean and correct data. There are many ways […]
Google has done some calculations based on mobile query growth patterns over the past few years and come out with a remarkable projection for the coming holiday shopping season: “44 percent of total searches for last minute gifts and store locator terms will be from mobile devices this holiday season based on historical growth rates.” […]
Yesterday, Yahoo reported a second quarter of massive declines in its search revenue. Yahoo blamed the “headwind” of paying its partner Microsoft 12% of Yahoo’s net search revenues. Yahoo also said Microsoft’s ads are underperforming. But even without these factors, Yahoo has seen an almost unbroken quarterly decline in search revenues since 2008. Failure is […]
The Royal Wedding of Prince William & Kate Middleton is about two weeks away, and interest continues to rise — including on Google. Below, a look at some wedding-related search activity. Wedding Terms Spiking On Google Google gave CNN Money a list of some top-rising terms that it deemed related to the wedding. Here’s a […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Bing’s Streetside Already Facing Objections In Germany Well, that didn’t take long. Just days after announcing plans to operate its Streetside map/photo service in Germany, Microsoft is already dealing with its […]
Google’s on-the-streets promotional blitz for its Hotpot ratings and recommendations service has landed a new home: Las Vegas. The company has just announced a local marketing campaign in “sin city” that’s aimed at upping usage of Google Places and Hotpot. As part of the launch, Google is giving away 10,000 free Las Vegas Monorail tickets […]
Quora, a relatively new question-and-answer search engine that’s become a darling of the tech community, is suffering through growing pains caused by exponential growth in the past two weeks. And co-founder Charlie Cheever has outlined some of the company’s plans to deal with those growing pains. In a post today on Quora, Cheever admits that […]
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 Vows To Look At Deceptive Cloaking Techniques Google’s Matt Cutts tweeted that Google will be looking more at Cloaking in the first quarter of 2011. Cloaking, as defined by Google, […]
It’s Christmas Eve, and you know what that means. Santa Claus is busy delivering toys to boys and girls around the world. Where is Santa Claus right now? Below, our annual round up of ways to find Father Christmas, from tracking Santa on Google Earth to monitoring him from your iPhone. NOTE: If you’re looking […]
Google has posted its 2010 Christmas holiday logo. It may be the best yet! A Holiday Card From Google by the Wall Street Journal has a detailed article on what went into the logo. Google reportedly started working on this logo back in July, spending 250 man hours between five different “doodle” designers to create […]
This week’s rumors are true: Yahoo began laying off several hundred employees today. Reuters is reporting that most of the cuts affect about 600 employees, or 4% of Yahoo’s workforce. The layoffs, as expected, will come from Yahoo’s product division. This week’s rumor mill had suggested the layoffs would hit about 650 people, or 5% […]
The dust seems to have finally settled on the long holiday weekend, and according to several reports both formal and informal, that dust is largely colored green. Green, as in money: transactions, average order size, revenue, and other metrics are widely reported as being up this year compared to 2009. Here’s a recap of several […]