Presentations from SMX West, March 2012 It hasn’t even been a year since Google launched Google+ and associated +1 buttons, but they’re already having a dramatic impact on Google’s search listings. Google’s new social network affects search rankings as well as how listings appear. In this session, the latest knowledge and tips on how you […]
Search Marketing & Competitive Analysis Presentations from SMX West, March 2012 It’s not enough to be brilliant with your own search marketing efforts. You also need to have an intimate understanding of your competitors – their keywords, optimization techniques, linking tactics, campaign management efforts – everything that they’re doing to enhance their own visibility 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: “Ads Related To…” Text Officially Rolls Out On AdWords’ Top Ad Block We’ve seen “Ads related to…” followed by the search query before, but now it’s at the top of the […]
Duane Forrester, Senior Product Manager at Microsoft Bing, wrote a blog post on the Bing Search blog named Penguins & Pandas Poetry. The post is about Google’s latest Penguin update and how SEOs and webmasters need to be better prepared for such updates. The basic advice is simple, SEOs and webmasters need to do one […]
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 In Pics: LinkedIn Bike, Chrome Watch & Facebook @ Google In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at […]
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 Search API Now On Paid Platform About a month ago, Microsoft informed us the Bing API would no longer be free and today is the day they migrated the Bing […]
The Google Penguin Update is now mainstream after The Wall Street Journal covered it in a feature story named As Google Tweaks Searches, Some Get Lost in the Web. The story interviews a few small business owners who were hit hard by the update. One business owner saw his sales drop to $25,000 this month, […]
Earlier this week, Google Fellow Amit Singhal gave the opening keynote at SMX London. Although Matt Cutts has always been the public face of all parts of Google’s unpaid search, his realm is primarily web spam. Singhal has been speaking publicly more often (notably when Panda launched) and oversees search quality. Or, as he described […]
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 Launches Knowledge Graph To Provide Answers, Not Just Links Hinted at for months, Google formally launched its “Knowledge Graph” today. The new technology is being used to provide popular facts […]
Yesterday I covered a WebmasterWorld thread where SEOs were complaining that Google has been removing tons of free web directories from their index. I conducted some random tests and did notice some of these free web directories not coming up in Google. Later in the day, Terry Van Horne began running larger tests on 500+ […]
The new Bing interface, with a healthy dose of social connections and discovery, is now live for all users. Bing’s announcement today says that anyone can access the new interface at www.bing.com/new, but you should also see a new message atop the Bing home page that invites you to try “the best search, now with […]
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 Glossary Of 15 Really Useful International Search Marketing Terms A conversation with a number of international search marketers recently showed that their range of experience ranged from expert to beginner, […]
It has been a long couple months for the search marketing community between the Penguin update, a Panda refresh, the link notifications and the parked domain bug – you guys need a laugh. Sam Applegate put together a hysterical parody video of Matt Cutts talking about how to achieve number one ranking in Google. The […]
Many webmasters have been desperately trying to fix poor SEO work done to a site thanks to the recent Penguin update targeting webspam and the bad link warnings sent from Google. The only current way to discredit a link is to have it removed as reverse nofollow functionality for webmasters simply doesn’t exist. One recent example of a link removal request was particularly […]
Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman are on the stage at SMX London to interview Amit Singhal. Amit is a Google Fellow, a honorary title reserved for Google’s most accomplished engineers, and he has spearheaded Google’s core ranking team since 2000. He’s also a key influencer of Search Plus Your World, Google’s search experience centered around […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Smartphone Bot Case Study: The Google Smartphone Bot On Holiday In Australia While Google’s new smartphone bot has been announced, it does not appear to be widely deployed yet; at least […]
While Google’s new smartphone bot has been announced, it does not appear to be widely deployed yet; at least that is what I said during a recent presentation in Sydney, where I had the pleasure of meeting Alistair Lattimore (Al). Al does CRO, SEO and agency management for Mantra Group, which is the second largest […]
Majestic SEO announced a new set of link metrics they came up with that should give Google’s PageRank metric and SEOmoz’s MozRank a run for their money. Majestic SEO’s new metrics are named Flow Metrics and are grouped into two categories; trust flow and citation flow. Citation Flow is a number of predicting how influential […]
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 Big Data Changed Crime Fighting & Is Changing The Practice Of SEO In the mid 1990’s, New York city Mayor Rudolph Giuliani introduced a technology-based crime measurement system called CompStat. […]
Shari, are you crazy? Search engines don’t have emotions! What does emotional design have to do with SEO? A lot more than you might think.
It’s that time again: April comScore qSearch data are coming out tomorrow. But the financial analysts are releasing it first to their clients and others who’ve subscribed to their missives. According to our source, comScore will report that both Google and Bing have made small, incremental gains since last month and seen modest growth since last […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Snapshot, Sidebar Oh My: Live Blogging the Bing Search Summit Danny and I are here at the Bing Search Summit in San Francisco. For a comprehensive overview of the new Bing […]
Danny and I are here at the Bing Search Summit in San Francisco. For a comprehensive overview of the new Bing features, see Danny’s article on the “new Bing.” Microsoft’s Qi Lu has just taken the stage and is talking about the launch of the new Bing. He’s discussing the need to “reorganize the web […]
Earlier this year, Google made its results more social with Search Plus Your World. Now Bing has reshaped how it handles social information as part of its “The New Bing” launch. Which does better, Google’s blended search+search model or Bing’s more segregated approach. Let’s look at some examples. Hey Google, How’s New Girl? I thought I’d start […]
Bing announced a relaunch of its search engine today, with a big emphasis on bringing social into search. But wait! Didn’t Bing already have social as part of its search experience? Yes, but now the search engine hopes to do it better, especially by largely off-loading social elements into a new sidebar area. The new […]
In this column, we routinely write about some fairly advanced topics: Next-level optimization, automated bidding algorithms, hyper-targeted search campaigns, paid vs. organic search, etc. Lost in all this is the underlying discussion around the need to hit your financial goals. The majority of large enterprises engage in annual planning, which means that as SEM managers, […]
It’s been about two weeks since Google launched its Penguin Update. Google’s happy the new spam-fighting algorithm is improving things as intended. But some hurt by it are still wondering how to recover, and there remain concerns about “negative SEO” as a threat. I caught up with Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s web spam […]
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 Great Adwords Options For Boosting Conversions We all know that Adwords is the most used system in the world to drive paid traffic to websites. The Adwords system is an […]
Last November, Google tested a new “Sources” section in its search results, in the third column where ads normally appear. It seems the testing is underway again, showing extended information about actors, films, musicians, people and more. It also seems likely everyone may see this extended information soon, and that it’s the “search refresh” the […]
Google now faces antitrust investigations on multiple continents. The US FTC recently hired a prominent outside litigator in a sign that it may be preparing to bring an action against the company. But does Google have a “slam dunk” defense against such a case (at least in the US) under the First Amendment of 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: Can There Really Be 85 Types Of Unnatural Links? I apologize upfront for the title bait. If it worked, good. What’s ironic is I think if every link builder got together […]
Google announced on the Webmaster Central blog that they have cleaned up Google Webmaster Tools. The three changes include: (1) Updated Dashboard (2) New Left Hand Navigation (3) Home Compact View Here is a picture of the revised dashboard: The new navigation was changed to be more representative of the content and tools within the […]
More than any other time in its existence, Google has been changing up the game for marketers. With co-founder Larry Page taking the reins as CEO, Google has instituted major algorithm shifts, killed products and changed the rules for search marketers. These changes have caused pain for some, but have also created siginficant opportunities 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: Wikipedia Appears On Google’s Page One 46 Percent Of The Time, Compared to 31 Percent On Bing [STUDY] A new study suggests that Wikipedia gets better visibility on Google than it […]
A new study suggests that Wikipedia gets better visibility on Google than it does on Bing. While that may not surprise much of the SEO industry, it contradicts what some Google employees have previously said, as well as another recent study on Wikipedia’s search visibilty. Last week, Conductor released updated data about Wikipedia’s search visibility, […]
Even though Google has launched a smartphone bot to improve mobile search results and the user experience on smartphones, it doesn’t mean that everything in mobile SEO has changed. Google is still detecting what handset users are searching from, and adapting the results that they send based on the handset; some phones are set up […]
If it’s the first Friday of the month, it must be time for Google to share its latest list of search quality updates. And, like clockwork, Google didn’t disappoint today — the company has posted a list of 53 changes that affect search results. This list is particularly interesting because of all the upheaval happening […]
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 Street View Shows ‘Secret Base’ In Israel, But Military Says It’s Not Secret At All Some in Israel are calling foul after images of what’s described as a “secret base” […]
Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Inktomi was the search engine that many SEOs focused on when optimizing their sites – they powered Yahoo, HotBot and many other portals and search engines. But soon later, Google began to dominate and Inktomi was bought out by Yahoo for just $250 million. Diego Basch, a […]
Today the Google Analytics team announced that we will start seeing backlink URLs in their newly released Social Reports. According to the announcement post, written by Ilya Grigorik, Software Engineering Manager, Google Analytics (and PostRank Founder): “These reports provide another layer of social insight showing which of your content attracts links, and enables you to […]