Pick your survey, and one of the top activities on a smartphone is to use Facebook. That’s what the new Facebook Home is all about, making it easier for Facebook users to get Facebook. But it also makes another top activity — search — harder to do. On Android devices, search is almost always just […]
The shift to Enhanced Campaigns is important to every advertiser, but critically important to Enterprise programs, particularly those with meaningful brick and mortar footprints. The reality of Enhanced Campaigns today doesn’t create much urgency to switch over. We don’t get any more controls, and in fact, we lose some. However, the near-term future of EC […]
The New York Times offers an interesting story about Google and the competitive landscape of mobile. The headline is “As Web Search Goes Mobile, Competitors Chip at Google’s Lead.” The central idea of the article is that while Google is used on the PC equally to discover information and to navigate to specific sites, on smartphones […]
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 Search Retargeting Is Bridging The Gap Between Search & Display Recently, Harvard Business School published a working paper, Do Display Ads Influence Search? Attribution and Dynamics in Online Advertising. While […]
Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, posted a 90-second video on what happens if a site that is selling links also links to your site. In short, Matt Cutts explains that when sites that sell links (with Google knowing about it) link to you, Google won’t pass value from that link seller website. So, […]
Yes, it is harder to find pages to iTunes apps in Google. But no, the company says, it’s not part of some nefarious plot. Rather, Google’s having technical problems gathering iTunes Preview pages, an issue it’s working to solve. Google has confirmed the issue, saying: We’ve been having some issues fetching pages from the iTunes […]
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 To Speak @ SMX Advanced? Here’s How The agenda is live, and we’re now accepting submissions to speak at SMX Advanced 2013 in Seattle, on June 11-12, 2013. To increase […]
Marketers may want to add BigWebStats to their lists of research tools. The new site pulls a wide range of information on just about any website. Enter a URL and BigWebStats aggregates data from several sources across the Web and displays it in one page, including visitors insights, social engagement, domain and technology information 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: How To Manage PPC Closely To A Budget A few weeks ago, at SMX West in San Jose, George Michie of RKG, was talking about the challenges of managing enterprise-level PPC […]
Bing is hopping on the April Fools’ Day joke bandwagon later than Google and even Wolfram Alpha, but it’s taking a swing at Google in one of the two gags that it just announced via separate blog posts. Bing Basic On its main search blog, Bing has an esoteric blog post that talks about “Bing […]
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 Simple Ways To Debug Your Google Analytics Installation As you might guess, we QA a lot of Google Analytics installs. It is often a maddening task that makes you want […]
Findings from a new study show the visibility of Google Shopping in Google’s “Universal Search” results dropped significantly after the search engine implemented a new paid inclusion model. Video content also dropped but still remained by far the most dominant source mixed with web page listings. Searchmetrics, a provider of search and social analysis software, conducted 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: Report: PPC Tablet Spending Up 112%, Smartphones Up 113% The new IgnitionOne Digital Marketing Report for Q1 finds that overall paid search spend in the U.S. was flat for the quarter, […]
We may have seen the end of CPC stagnation. Covario’s Global Paid Search Spend Analysis for Q1, released today, suggests that the cost-per-click trends of the last six quarters have reversed with CPC prices rising 7% from the previous quarter and 23% year-over-year. Overall paid search spend grew 9% quarter-over-quarter and 33% year-over-year. The following […]
News publications having “sponsored content “deals are on the rise, and Google’s apparently concerned enough that it’s issued a warning today that publishers should keep such content out of Google News. In a post today on the Google News blog, the company writes: If a site mixes news content with affiliate, promotional, advertorial, or marketing […]
Bing has added a search filter that gives users the opportunity to limit search results to three recent time periods: Past 24 hours Past week Past month The options appear directly below the search box on Bing’s search results page. It’s a welcome addition, but one that Google has had for a long time now. […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. From Search Engine Land: Need A Google Alerts Replacement? Meet Talkwalker With Google Alerts coming under fire as being broken, an impressive new service has stepped up to appeal to those seeking an alternative: Talkwalker. […]
Search continues to shift away from the desktop toward mobile devices. That’s one of the conclusions of the just-released Neustar Localeze/15miles/comScore Local Search Study, which is now in its sixth year. This year’s study involves a sample of more than 3,000 U.S. adults that say they use the Internet to search for local businesses. Results […]
Last month, an excerpt from Eric Schmidt’s forthcoming book came out where he discussed how identity and authorship might be used to better rank search results. Since then, I’ve seen that widely cited as proof Google is already doing “Author Rank.” It’s not, nor was Schmidt describing a Google-specific system. But that could come, 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: How To Create A Sustainable Link Plan I’ve recently spoken with three business owners who have approached me in a fairly atypical way: instead of asking me for a proposal, they’ve […]
Did you know that the higher a site is listed in search results, the more traffic that site is likely to receive? If you’re a search marketer, or anyone with a dose of common sense, you do. But Microsoft had research conducted to yet again prove this point, in an attempt to influence the ongoing […]
Bing has announced support for HTML5 pushState as a way to implement AJAX on a site in a way that enables Bing to crawl and index the URLs and content. As Google has supported this implementation since early 2012, site owners finally have an AJAX option that can be crawled and indexed by both major […]
Don’t want your content to be included in many of Google’s vertical search services, such as Google Shopping or Google+ Local? Google’s got a new tool for that, a result of its agreement earlier this year with the US Federal Trade Commission over anti-trust charges. Announced on the Google Webmaster Central Blog, the new tool […]
When Facebook launched Graph Search earlier this year, a noticeable element missing to marketers was the lack of keyword data that was passed. Well, this weekend Glenn Gabe of G-Squared Interactive uncovered the fact that Facebook has begun passing keyword data within referral strings. The keyword data is passed from Facebook with a query string [q={keyword}] appended […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. From Search Engine Land: Microsoft Shows Off Coming Improvements To Bing App’s Voice Search Microsoft has shared video of what was a confidential, employee-only demonstration of new voice search capabilities in its Bing app for […]
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 Primer On How To Get The Most Out Of Sitemaps Search crawlers are becoming more and more effective every day in discovering new content pages on websites. But, that process […]
Over the past year, Bing’s been steadily growing the “Snapshots” it shows on the right-hand side of its pages. Now, Bing says those are taking another leap to better understand relationships between people, places and things, using an expansion of what it calls its “Satori” technology. Bing writes on its blog today saying: Today, we […]
You would think that when you search for something in Google, and an image comes up in their knowledge graph box, that the image would be rated PG-13 or lower. Well, that is not the case when you search for Angel Tompkins (warning: topless image if you click the link). The image shown for her is from […]
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 Snag A Sale From A Simple ‘Contact Us’ Page Getting website sales isn’t all about product pages and shopping carts. Many business owners forget there is a whole conversion […]
Google announced on Google+ that they have expanded Google Trends to add YouTube search support. Now you can use Google Trends to see what searches are trending and spiking across the world from within YouTube search. The trend data for YouTube goes back to 2008. To use this, go to Google Trends and search for […]
One of the highlights from the SMX West show a week ago was the session named “The Search Police: Matt & Duane’s Excellent Search Engine Adventure.” The panel featured Google’s Matt Cutts and Bing’s Duane Forrester as Bill & Ted with Danny Sullivan playing Rufus. Matt (Bill) and Duane (Ted) both give presentations and then […]
Google has published over 500 videos on the Webmaster Help YouTube Channel, most of those videos features Matt Cutts answering quick SEO related questions. Sometimes you want the quick answer from Matt Cutts and sorting through hundreds of videos with the average length of two to five minutes can take a while. That is where […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. From Search Engine Land: Latest Google Shopper App Offers New Refinement Options & More Product Details Google Commerce has released Google Shopper 3.2, an updated version of its app that includes category-specific refinements for improved […]
Google Commerce has released Google Shopper 3.2, an updated version of its app that includes category-specific refinements for improved search results. When searching for products, users can now filter their results by brand, store, price and other options, as well as view detailed product information, read product reviews, watch video reviews from YouTube, and see […]
Some are spotting new author images appearing in Bing’s search results today, similar to the way Google shows author images. Except, they’re not really author images. They’re what I’d call subject images, something that might be coming more formally to Bing. Author Images At Google Here are two examples of authorship images as they appear […]
A study by Portent, an Internet marketing company, shows that Google’s tolerance of spammy links to trigger a Penguin algorithm ranking drop has declined by 30% since the Penguin algorithm launched. The study shows that of the 500,000 links found, Google has been steadily reducing its tolerance for webspam. Now, Google is likely to penalize […]
We’ve filled three positions on our editorial team and it’s a pleasure to introduce you to the newest Third Door Media staffers: Amy Gesenhues, Jessica Thompson and Ginny Marvin. Amy Gesenhues is our new, full-time General Assignment Correspondent. She’ll be covering a variety of search- and marketing-related stories for us on both Search Engine Land […]
Animated GIFs have been making a comeback, particularly since Google+ gave them support when it launched, not to mention Tumblr. So, no surprise, Google’s now pushing a new way to find GIFs within Google Image Search. Google posted the news today on Google+, explaining that a new “Animated” option is available for those who search 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: Search Week: March 18, 2013 Search Week is an exclusive weekly newsletter for Search Engine Land premium members that recaps stories covered on Search Engine Land over the past week. Below […]
Google did end commenting on why the BBC received an unnatural link notification despite offering us a “no comment” on our story this past Friday. Was the BBC penalized for unnatural links? Was it possible that the world’s largest news organization was not trusted by Google’s algorithms? The answer is, only one article was penalized. […]