Google has run a sting operation that it says proves Bing has been watching what people search for on Google, the sites they select from Google’s results, then uses that information to improve Bing’s own search listings. Bing doesn’t deny this. As a result of the apparent monitoring, Bing’s relevancy is potentially improving (or getting […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: AdWords Homepage Gets More Modular, Customizable Google has redesigned the homepage for its AdWords advertiser interface in an effort to bring more relevant, customized information up front for marketers. The main […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: AdWords Preview Tool Gets Mobile-Focused Facelift Ever wonder how your AdWords ads look on different devices in different places? Google has added some features to its AdWords Preview tool in an […]
Google has updated the PageRank values of many sites within the Google Toolbar. This is the first toolbar PageRank update of the year, and arguably the first one in almost 9 months. There have been minor updates, where some sites have seen their PageRank change during 2010, but I believe the last huge PageRank update […]
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 Knol Still Alive & Fixed, But Questions Linger About Its Future Google has fixed a bug that temporarily made Knol look like a ghost town this week. And, without exactly […]
Happy New Year and welcome to the first Link Week of 2011! Just like last year, Julie Joyce, Eric Ward and I have compiled our link building predictions, recommendations, tips and trends for 2011. As you’ll see, our thoughts are as different as we are and cover a wide range of topics and sites. When […]
The Internet sometimes doesn’t work as we hope it would, or think it should. In certain verticals, great content doesn’t create great links, and because of that, in my opinion, SEOs are often forced to resort to manipulative link practices to get their clients and websites to rank. Websites with low “content link efficacy” are […]
Both Google and Bing have added many social search features over the past year. There’s also been talk about using “social signals” to help rank regular search results. But are either of the major search engines actually using those social signals to rank regular search results? A bit, they tell me. In particular, your stature […]
The New York Times has a great, detailed story out today about a merchant with an unusual marketing strategy: be mean to customers. Any publicity, even negative publicity, means a win with Google’s ranking algorithms. Is he right? Maybe. Certainly the story illustrates the fallacy of Google’s “gold standard” search results. Rank Well With Bad […]
If you’re a Twitter user, you have a TweepRank. Or perhaps a TwitRank. Or maybe an AtRank. Whatever it’s called, it’s a personal reputation score that Twitter has given you based on your Twitter activity. And Twitter isn’t about to reveal it in the form of a little blue bar on your home page. Twitter […]
Ask The Search Engines Presentations from SMX East, October 2010 You’ve heard the lingo: PageRank sculpting, duplicate content penalties, canonical tags, sitemap structure, nofollow… and most recently a lot about the potential impact of Google Instant. In this session, you can ask questions and get direct answers from engineers from Google, Microsoft and the other […]
As a site owner, you generally want Google to index as many pages of your site as possible. But there are certainly times when you find that you’ve accidentally let Google index confidential content or other information you don’t want published, and you want to get it removed as quickly as possible. Read on for […]
The condition of standard SEO metrics search engines provide the web community (if the term “metric” can even be used here) is pretty deplorable right now. Back in February, I wrote: “…the convention of using indexed page counts and backlinks to benchmark and report on site performance is facing a similar demise [to ranking reports].” […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Schmidt’s “Just Move” Joke About Google Street View & How It Went Missing Don’t like Google Street View taking pictures of your house? “Just move,” joked Google CEO Eric Schmidt, in […]
No one seems to be immune from a Google indexing problem that has many site owners baffled. Blogs and websites, big and small, aren’t being indexed as quickly as they normally are — if they’re being indexed at all. CNN.com, with its PageRank score of 10, is typically crawled frequently and deeply by Googlebot. But […]
Move over PageRank and meet Webmaster Happiness Rank. That’s another metric that Google maintains, it turns out. Speaking at SES Chicago today, Senior Developer Programs Engineer, Google, Maile Ohye said Google has a metric to measure webmaster happiness. Every week, Google’s webmaster trends analysts team gets together to talk about how the webmaster’s are reacting […]
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 Making Location More Obvious, Prominent I’m not seeing it exactly but Google has said the company is making location more “transparent” or more obvious to users so that they can […]
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 Integrates Visual Search Into Mobile App For iPhone Google Goggles is an imperfect but promising technology that allows users to search with their cameras instead of their keyboards. It’s a […]
Greetings from the Big Apple! I’m here this week attending SMX East, soaking up lots of SEO/SEM news, meeting new people and catching up with some of this industry’s best and brightest. There are two link building sessions being offered, Link Building Basics and Show Me the Links. The material in the second session will be […]
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 Use Referrers To Track Link Building Efforts Last month, I wrote about how to use your site’s bounce rate for link building purposes. Someone emailed me privately to ask […]
With the Facebook movie’s debut a week away, how about something to keep you entertained while you wait? A book. About that other major internet drama story, Google. The book? “Googled, The End Of The World As We Know It,” by Ken Auletta. Googled came out at the end of last year, and I’ve been […]
Last night, The Colbert Report featured Stephen Colbert interviewing Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt. Colbert got in some expected digs (four years to decide they didn’t like Chinese laws?), jokingly asks when the computer algorithm will take over and touches on some serious issues, such as how much Google remembers. Schmidt, I’d say, held his own […]
Google’s been under fire in various quarters, including the New York Times, that it should open up about how its ranking algorithm works. I think offering the exact formula would be difficult plus potentially give away trade secrets. But how about just listing some of the basic “ingredients?” Nope, said Google CEO Eric Schmidt, this […]
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 Make Paid Social Media Ads Effective And Engaging While advertising on social media makes sense for advertisers, the owners of ‘free’ sites like Twitter and Facebook still need to […]
In January, I was invited to speak to Google’s search quality team about issues I had with Google’s search results. My topic? For queries where I know a subject really well, I often found Google provided some pretty poor results in the top listings along with the good ones. I wanted more perfection! With 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’s Schmidt: ‘Next Great Stage’ Of Search Is Autonomous, Personal Speaking today at the IFA consumer electronics event in Berlin, Google CEO Eric Schmidt painted a vision of the future in […]
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 Unlikely To Come Back To Google Places Earlier today it was reported that Yelp’s content had been removed from Google Places — though not from Google.com results. What’s going on […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Inside The Google Voice Phone Booths Over the coming weeks, UK-style phone booths will pop-up around the US in airports and at universities, allowing anyone to make free calls to anywhere […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Hot On Sphinn: Using Excel For SEO, Paid Links, Link Building Strategies & More Every day, your peers in the search industry are reading and voting on articles that are shared […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Where Is Search Going? Surf Canyon’s Mark Cramer Some time ago, a gentleman by the name of Mark Cramer emailed me wanting to talk about the future of search. It was […]
Back in the mid-to-late 1990s, the most powerful person in search was arguably Yahoo’s Srinija Srinivasan. If Yahoo’s was the “gateway” to the web in the way some think Google is today, Srinivasan was the chief gatekeeper. And now after 15 years, she’s leaving Yahoo. Srinivasan was Yahoo’s “Ontological Yahoo,” among other titles including being […]
Search Marketing In The Facebook Zone Presentations from SMX Advanced Seattle, June 2010 You’re traveling through another dimension. A dimension not of web pages and links but of fan pages and sharing. A journey into a mysterious land where none of the PageRank rules apply. That’s a signpost up ahead: your next stop, the Facebook […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: French Newspapers Partner To Sidestep Google News A group of six French newspapers is partnering to create an online news site that they hope will be an alternative to Google News. […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Yahoo Q2 Revenues Flat, Display & Net Income Up Yahoo announced generally flat Q2 revenues of $1.6 billion but improved net income today. That compares with revenues of $1.57 billion in […]
There’s a subtle, but meaningful, connection between billiards and SEO. How so, you ask? Well, when I was younger I was a pretty good at billiards. I could see all the angles really well, and I understood when to use bank shots (using an indirect shot off the bank of the table rather than a […]
The New York Times is the number one newspaper web site. Analysts reckon it ranks first in reach among US opinion leaders. When the New York Times editorial staff tweaks its supersecret algorithm behind what to cover and exactly how to cover a story — as it does hundreds of times a day — 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: Google Web Report: Average Page Size 320 KB Google released a report on general statistics of web pages on the Internet. The report lists basic information they retrieved over the course […]
Google, founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, is the most popular search engine in the world, with a commanding market share of over 80% globally and just under 80% in the U.S. While we don’t have any figures direct from the company, it’s estimated that billions of searches – or trillions per […]
Search for [google adwords help] or [adwords help] this morning on Google and the AdWords help center is nowhere to be found. Search for the URL itself, and it doesn’t appear to be in the index.
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, Twitter Argue Against Throttling Speed Of News Google and Twitter have teamed up to support a web site that’s facing legal trouble for reporting news too quickly. Reuters reports that […]