At a Bing Ads Next event in Redmond, Washington yesterday, Microsoft executives outlined the roadmap ahead for Bing and Bing Ads, which powers paid search advertising on both Bing and Yahoo. In discussing the evolution of Bing and the way Micosoft is thinking about search, Rik van der Kooi, Corporate VP, Advertiser and Publisher Solutions […]
In Google’s Q3 earnings report, released yesterday, another round of big revenue gains weren’t enough to meet analysts’ expectations. Google’s revenue grew 20 percent over the previous year in Q3, but that’s the lowest annual growth rate the company has posted since Q2 2013. Year-over-year click volume increased 17 percent over Q3 2013. But, click […]
Conversational search on Google’s mobile apps got an upgrade today, as the company announced a few new voice commands that are specific to travel planning. Basically, the app is smarter about knowing where you are (at a hotel, for example), letting you complete actions by voice (i.e., making reservations via OpenTable), getting directions as part […]
Google announced that you can now search Google for when your bills are due and in addition, Google Now will place reminder cards in your Google mobile app as a reminder as well. You can search or speak your search for [show me my bills] or [my bills due this week] and Google will show […]
Anyone who follows Google knows that nothing it creates is immune from elimination. Like so many efforts before it, Authorship is fading into the sunset.
In a Google+ post from Google head of search Amit Singhal, Google shares they have made “more than 890 improvements to Google Search last year alone.” In 2009, Google told us they made between 350 to 400 changes to search and in 2010, they said they made 550 improvements to search in the past year. […]
Over the weekend, Google has sent out mass link penalty notifications throughout Europe for those sites partaking in specific link networks with the goal of manipulating their rankings in Google. Google’s Johannes Mehlem posted on Twitter that Google has “taken action on one European and one German linking network.” We have taken action on one […]
There are widespread reports within the industry of negative SEO extortion emails being sent to website owners, webmasters, SEOs and others. The emails are claiming that an evil SEO will ruin the site’s ranking in Google and other search engines if they do not come up and wire $1,500 to the evil SEO. Both Dan […]
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 Starts Giving A Ranking Boost To Secure HTTPS/SSL Sites Google To Give Secure Sites A Ranking Boost Google has announced that going HTTPS — adding a SSL 2048-bit key certificate […]
Just last month, six international tech support scam operators were ordered to pay more than $5.1 million as a result of charges filed by the Federal Trade Commission in 2012. The scammers typically posed as representatives of major technology companies, convinced consumers that their computers were loaded with viruses and got them to fork over […]
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 Conduct A Winning Local Search Audit Every week, our support team at BrightLocal fields numerous questions from our customers about how best to conduct a local search audit. The […]
How’s this for brazen? For at least two years, a Russian hacker has been running a cheekily-named click fraud service called GoodGoogle, promoting it in videos on Google’s YouTube and using Gmail accounts to correspond with customers. Online security expert, Brian Krebs, recently brought the scam to light. The service enables advertisers to quickly run […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Now Link Google My Business And AdWords, Get Account-Level Location ExtensionsGoogle is introducing the ability to set up location extensions at the account level by linking your Google My Business account […]
Google Maps has updated its app for iPhone and iPad. The new version adds features and content and even makes the app more visually appealing. The new version includes the following improvements: Search results appear with descriptions on the map Easy switching between map and list view of results Reservations via Gmail indicated on map […]
According to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. Supreme Court will not review a U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision allowing a class-action lawsuit that argues Google violated the federal “Wiretap Act” when it intercepted private email and other personal data. The appellate court decision thus stands and Google must confront the lawsuit. The case followed […]
Cast your mind back to November 2011, only a few months after the launch of Google+. That’s when Google made one of its biggest Google+ification moves. It demoted a long-standing search feature involving the plus symbol so that searchers could instead more easily reach new “Google+ Pages” that had been launched. Today, this “Direct Connect” […]
The emerging consensus from the early “hands on” or “first look” reviews is that the Amazon Fire Phone has some novel and interesting features but that it doesn’t measure up, overall, to the iPhone or “true Android” devices. I’ve argued that Amazon missed the boat with its high-end pricing. Interestingly, there has been almost no […]
When you think about the job the search engines have to do it’s pretty daunting. Given a collection of mostly wildly unstructured data from an endless number of sources, Bing, Google and the others have to somehow make sense of all that information and then give it back to us on demand in a way […]
The cat and mouse game between China, Google and the internet continues. Today and tomorrow are the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Fearing another anti-government uprising, every year at this time China cracks down on its citizens’ ability to access information about the event online. However this year, China is going to greater […]
MetaFilter is a news and discussion site dating back to the early years of the web. Founded in 1999, it’s attracting attention this week after coming forward about how a Google penalty has severely harmed its business, to the degree of having to let staff go. It serves as a poster child of problems with […]
Last week saw a flurry of speculation on the future of Google+ after the head of Google+, Vic Gundotra, announced his departure. The question raised most often is whether Google+ is going away. Although some are reporting that G+ will kill the product side, the platform (in terms of data collection and unique user sign-ins) […]
Spoiler alert: ComicBook.com reported this weekend everyone’s favorite spider-bitten superhero has switched from searching on Bing to being a full-fledged Google user. According to the report, Spider-man alias Peter Parker used Bing in the 2012 The Amazing Spider-Man film, much to the disbelief of many hardcore comic book fans: In a world where somebody bitten […]
According to Android Police, Google is preparing a broad expansion of voice actions beyond its search app. The report describes this initiative as “OK Google Everywhere.” Voice actions would extend to other Google apps (e.g., mail, photos) and would also be contextually specific, taking on Google Now-like capabilities. Currently queries and some app-related commands can […]
Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, announced on Twitter this morning that Google has “taken action” on seven different link networks in Japan. Over the past several months, Google has not only been manual taking action against link networks or link schemes in the US, but they have been widening their efforts across 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: Bing Testing New Search Results Design Bing is testing a new search results layout that changes the color of the logo from gray to the yellow/orange, changes the color of the […]
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.
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 Fixing Reverse DNS GoogleBot Verification Google has confirmed that there are some GoogleBot useragent spiders not properly passing verification protocol. Savvy webmasters noticed that GoogleBot over the .249.70.0 /24 IP […]
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 Matt Cutts: We Can Improve Our Algorithms For Authorities On Topics In an interesting video released by Matt Cutts, Google’s head of webspam, Matt answers the question on how Google […]
Is it just me, or does it seem like Google starts celebrating April Fools’ Day earlier and earlier every year? No company on the web takes April 1st more seriously than Google, as we’ve been covering for years now. So what about this year’s April Fools’ Day antics? Let’s have a look. Google Maps: Pokémon Challenge It […]
Yesterday, Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, posted an interesting tip to SEOs around disavow file submissions. He said that you should not delete or remove the original disavow file when uploading a new one. He said instead, upload the new one, which will replace the old disavow file. The reason he said was […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: 10 Key Takeaways From Meet The Search Engines @ SMX West Another SMX is in the books! This show definitely had one of the most engaged attendee groups I have ever […]
Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, announced on Twitter today that they have penalized and taken action on two additional German link networks. He mentioned one by name: efamous. efamous looks like a typical ad network, but I guess they passed PageRank through their link network, which is against Google’s guidelines. Cutts also said […]
Google is the dominant mobile search engine with nearly 90 percent of the market in the US and an even greater share internationally. The problem is that search engines aren’t used as often in mobile. Large volumes of content are consumed in apps. Google is trying to address that challenge by indexing more app-based content, including […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: New Video Shows Microsoft “Assistant” Cortana In Action Microsoft will be introducing its Siri and Google Now/Voice competitor Cortana with Windows 8.1 in April. The new “intelligent assistant” will eventually be […]
It’s definitely not what you expect to make the top of a Google News section, a crappy article promising that you can watch The Lego Movie online for free, not when the film is still in theaters. But that’s what Google is delivering up. The screenshot above shows the situation, which reader Vishvesh Agrawal of […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: New Google Maps Comes Out Of Preview Today Roughly last May at Google’s “I/O” developer conference, the company introduced an updated version of its desktop Maps experience. Since that time, it […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Starbucks & The Economist Admit To Using Google+ For SEO More Than Social Last Friday, a New York Times report on Google+ spotlighted Starbucks and The Economist as two brands currently […]
A New York-based “patent troll” called Vringo, through its subsidiary I/P engine, successfully sued Google, Microsoft, AOL and others using two patents related to search advertising. The plaintiff won approximately $30 million at trial in 2012. Google was asked to pay $15.8 million of that amount. Yet plaintiffs were also seeking ongoing royalties, which the court has now awarded. […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Days-Old Error In Google Search Causes Gmail User To Get Thousands Of Emails Earlier this week, we reported a glitch in Google Search, where clicking on a link after a search […]
Earlier this week, we reported a glitch in Google Search, where clicking on a link after a search for Gmail listed someone’s email address, complete in a window ready to send them email. With today’s Gmail outage, that error — never fixed — has resulted in at least one person getting thousands of unwanted emails. […]