SEMPO and Econsultancy have released the ninth annual State of Search Survey results. According to the findings, there was a noticeable difference between how agency and company marketers answered SEO budget questions. While nearly 70 percent of agency respondents predicted client SEO budgets would increase this year, only 47 percent of respondents from within a […]
Google recently began sending a new manual action spam notification to webmasters for “spammy structured markup” also known as rich snippet spam. This comes after Google dropped 15% of the rich snippets, setting the bar higher for what sites are able to display rich snippets in the search results. The new manual action message from […]
Roughly a year after Google settled an antitrust investigation with the US Federal Trade Commission, Bloomberg is reporting that Google and the European Commission have reached a final settlement that would end the regulator’s antitrust search investigation against the company. According to the report, “Google will escape fines or any finding by regulators that 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 AdWords To Roll Out Flexible Conversion Counting, Says Goodbye To 1 Per-Click, Many-Per-ClickThis morning, Google announced in an email to a number of advertisers that upcoming changes will give advertisers […]
Satya Nadella being named CEO of Microsoft isn’t just big news for Microsoft. It’s big news for search. For the first time in ages, the three major search companies in the US are all run by CEOs who either came out of a search-background or have a solid understanding of it. Despite the attention search […]
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 Brings Search Funnels Attribution Modeling Tool To AdWords Google announced it is adding a Search Funnels Attribution Modeling Tool to AdWords to help marketers better understand how AdWords campaigns are […]
Google head of search spam Matt Cutts posted on Twitter this morning another stern warning to German webmasters about a link penalty looming for them. Matt Cutts tweeted: A reminder (in German) that paid links that pass PageRank violate our guidelines: https://t.co/u1MpvL7kh4 — Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) February 3, 2014 The blog post is written […]
In spite of what many think, Google is not broken. But wait, naysayers will say, Look at this search result, it stinks! This spammer is succeeding in ranking high, they emerged from nowhere and are now in the top three results! It’s true — there are many such examples that you can point to. Making […]
Google’s Business community manager, Jade Wang, announced in a Google discussion forum thread that they have vastly increased the number of business categories available to businesses outside of the United States. Jade said they now have added “over 1,000 new categories in the new Places dashboard” for businesses around the world. The new categories are […]
Kara Swisher on Friday broke the news that Yahoo was working on two internal (no longer) secret initiatives to get Yahoo back into organic and potentially paid search and thereby separate from Microsoft. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has been critical of the Search Alliance with Bing and its impact on her company. The Search Alliance […]
It looks like we have an upset. Bud Light appeared to be the clear front runner among Super Bowl advertisers running paid search ads on Google and Bing, It turns out the King of Beer’s less filling counterpart is merely the runner up on both search engines. Volkswagen has garnered the top spot 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: Nadella Would Bring Search Cred To Microsoft CEO Role Based on several reports is appears very likely that Microsoft will announce that Satya Nadella will be the next CEO. He brings […]
Along with the Super Bowl, there’s another annual big game that happens — sites trying to be number one for “What Times Does The Super Bowl Start?” This year, I want to win by pointing out that no one should click on any of the articles competing. Just look up, searchers — Google already won. […]
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 Q4 2013 Earnings Report $16.86 Billion In Revenues Google announced fourth-quarter 2013 earnings today. Google’s revenue targets beat estimates, while their earnings-per-share did not. Google had revenues of $16.86 billion […]
Google announced fourth-quarter 2013 earnings today. Google’s revenue targets beat estimates, while their earnings-per-share did not. Google had revenues of $16.86 billion for the quarter ended December 31, 2013, an increase of 17% compared to the fourth quarter of 2012. Google’s operating income in the fourth quarter of 2013 was $3.92 billion, or 23% of […]
According to CEO Mark Zuckerberg during Facebook’s recent earnings call, Facebook’s Graph Search will hit mobile devices ‘pretty soon.’ It’s now been a full year since Graph Search was launched and mobile integration only makes sense. According to cnet, Zuckerberg stated the following quote in regards to Graph Search on the call: “Pretty soon, I think, […]
Yesterday, Google launched a new design of the stock quotes “card” at the top of its search results. The new card dropped links to competing financial websites, something Google previously had in place since 2000. But after attention was drawn to the fact, Google quietly restored the links. Google Operating System noted the change and […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: People, Videos, News: Twitter Adds New Search Filters Earlier today Twitter announced that it was bringing a number of new search filters to the site. These include: people, photos, videos, news. […]
Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, posted a video answer encouraging webmasters not to use article directory web sites with the goal of building links. The question posed was: Links from relevant content in article directories — Seen as good or bad? E.g., I link my beauty website from a cosmetic surgery article on […]
In an anticipation of the big game Sunday night, Bing has tallied searches for both Super Bowl teams across the country and found the Seattle Seahawks won the largest share of search volume in 33 states. The search engine was quick to note the percentage of searches are “generally evenly divided indicating that Sunday’s game […]
Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, announced on Twitter earlier this morning that Google has taken action on another “link network” named Buzzea. His tweet read, “Today we’re taking action on a French link network that violates our quality guidelines (Buzzea).” In addition, Matt added that they are working on a German based link […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: 5 Tactics Super Bowl Advertisers Are Using To Boost Their Paid Search Campaigns In the weeks leading up to game day, several Super Bowl advertisers have been employing paid search to […]
With more than 3,700 survey respondents, this year’s industry survey from search marketing analytics provider Moz discovered the No. 1 SEO tool used by internet marketing professionals is Google Webmaster Tools. The majority of the survey focused on marketing issues, but Moz did ask participants a few SEO-related questions, including which SEO tools they currently […]
Google’s Chris Nelson of the search quality team issued a warning on the Google Webmaster Blog to affiliates who produce thin-content. He said that affiliates that produce thin-content and have little-to-no value-add on their site may be penalized for going against Google’s guidelines. The warning was more direct to affiliate sites in the “adult” space, […]
There are several reports throughout the search community that Google’s OneBox answers or a form of the knowledge graph, are now more aggressive about answering even more complex questions with more detailed responses or answers. When we asked Google about this, a Google spokesperson told us, “we’re always experimenting with different types of answers, but […]
Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, posted a video yesterday answering why some old sites may not have their rankings in Google last forever. Matt Cutts explained that there are many old sites that are in the range of about 15 years old and while that is a good thing, some of these sites […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: SMX West Rates Increase Saturday – Register Now, Save $200! Early Bird rates for Search Engine Land’s SMX West conference expire Saturday. Register now and get three days of exceptional content […]
Move over, pandas. Fly away, hummingbirds. Waddle away, penguins. Google has a new animal friend: crows. But unlike its past associations with the animal world, this one isn’t about SEO or algorithms — it’s a new search trick that adds distance calculation to Google’s OneBox feature. (The OneBox is where Google often presents immediate answers […]
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 […]
Conductor released a study that analyzed the ten blue links at Google showing 34% show rich media, nine organic listings and nine search ads. 34% Of Search Snippets Have Rich Media The Conductor study showed that there was rich media on the search results page 34% of the time. The breakdown of rich media showed […]
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 […]
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: […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 Don’t Use Twitter Or Facebook Social Signals To Rank Pages Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, released a video today answering the question, “are Facebook and […]
Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, released a video today answering the question, “are Facebook and Twitter signals part of the ranking algorithm?” The short answer was no. Matt said that Google does not give any special treatment to Facebook or Twitter pages. They are in fact, currently, treated like any other page, according […]
By default, searches on Yahoo.com are now done through a secure server. That means more protection for searchers but less data for search marketers about how they are receiving traffic. Most visits from Yahoo done via search will appear as if someone came to a site directly. As a result, Yahoo’s apparent popularity as a […]
Google is now dynamically changing the top search menu/filters based on the search query entered by the searcher. So now, what options you see at the top might differ or be in a different order based on the query you enter into Google’s search box. A Google spokesperson told us this based on noticing that […]
Google’s John Mueller announced on the Google Webmaster blog this morning that the Google Webmaster Tools team has updated the crawl errors report to show errors on the final URL of the redirect, as opposed to the origin URL of the redirect. What this means is that Google is now showing the errors on the […]
Expedia appears to have been hit by a Google penalty related to unnatural links. So what do Google and Expedia have to say about the situation? No comment. As covered yesterday, the visibility of Expedia listings in Google appears to have recently plunged, according to measurements by Searchmetrics: This comes after accusations last month, which […]