Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Move Over, Wikipedia: Amazon May Be The King Of Google Rankings While the SEO industry has spent years decrying how well Wikipedia seems to dominate Google’s rankings, it may be that […]
While the SEO industry has spent years decrying how well Wikipedia seems to dominate Google’s rankings, it may be that Amazon.com is the real king of visibility. For most of the past 18 months or so, Amazon has shown up on the first page of Google search results more often than Wikipedia and currently lands […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Firefox To Use Google Secure Search By Default; Expect More “Not Provided” Keywords To Follow The popular Firefox browser is on track to use a secure method of searching Google by […]
SEOmoz has announced the SEOmoz Industry Survey is now open and ready for you to take. You can take the survey online over here. The last time SEOmoz ran this survey was two years ago, you can see the results of that survey over here. The survey has 54 questions and should take you about […]
The popular Firefox browser is on track to use a secure method of searching Google by default, a change that will help prevent potential “eavesdropping” of what people are searching for. It will also further reduce the ability for publishers to know how people find their sites in Google — except for Google advertisers. A […]
A year and a half ago, changes to Microsoft’s adCenter interface appeared maybe once or twice a quarter. This year, stay tuned for monthly updates bringing everything from Broad Match Modifier, a desktop version for the Mac, a special version for small businesses, and more integrated interactive ads on Bing. “When we talk about 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: New Ad Status Info Added To AdWords Google is providing AdWords users with a new way to figure out whether their ads are approved, or not, and why. The new feature […]
Google’s about to make a change to how it reports referrer information for those using its Chrome browser. As a result, some analytics programs may begin listing search visitors as if they instead came directly from Google without doing a search, though major packages will probably adjust OK. The change was posted on the Google […]
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 Only 46% Of Time, Study Shows Wikipedia doesn’t pwn Google nearly as much as the SEO industry thinks it does. In fact, according to a […]
Wikipedia doesn’t pwn Google nearly as much as the SEO industry thinks it does. In fact, according to a new Conductor study, Wikipedia showed up on the first page of Google’s search results only 46 percent of the time in a study using 2,000 unique keywords. Conductor used one thousand informational keywords (like “lyrics” and […]
Dr. Richard Qian from Bing’s core search team wrote a blog post on the Bing Search blog named Bing Search Quality Insights: Reducing Junk. This is part of Bing’s ongoing effort to provide search quality insights on how Bing works. Bing here explains how they handle removing bad links from the Bing search results, 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: Bing Fires Two Marketing Execs Over Vendor Issues Microsoft has seemingly spared no expense on pushing its Bing search engine at star-studded entertainment events, such as the recent Sundance film festival. […]
Earlier this week, I wrote about my disappointment that granular data (the number of URLs reported, the specifics of the errors…) was removed from Google webmaster tools. However, as I’ve been talking with Google, I’ve discovered that much of this detail is still available via the GData API. That this detail was available through 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: Too Much SEO? Google’s Working On An “Over-Optimization” Penalty For That Google’s Matt Cutts announced that Google is working on a search ranking penalty for sites that are “over-optimized” or “overly […]
Google’s Matt Cutts announced that Google is working on a search ranking penalty for sites that are “over-optimized” or “overly SEO’ed.” Matt announced this during a panel Search Engine Land’s Editor-In-Chief, Danny Sullivan and Microsoft’s Senior Product Marketing Manager of Bing at SXSW named Dear Google & Bing: Help Me Rank Better!. The audio for […]
Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, said on his Google+ page that using the new TLDs will not give you a ranking boost in Google. Matt Cutts said, “I don’t expect a new TLD to get any kind of initial preference over .com, and I wouldn’t bet on that happening in the long-term either.” […]
Google has lifted the 60-day paid link penalty Google Chrome was given the first week of January. Now if you search for [chrome], [browser] or similar searches, the Google Chrome landing page will once again show up on the first page of the search results. Here is a picture showing the page ranking in position […]
Think you know the web searcher goals and behaviors that are important for long term search engine visibility? Take this quiz and find out.
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 An SEO Positive Company Culture My message today is to tear down the walls: not the ones in your website but in your company, between and within divisions. […]
Bing has been very upfront about the fact that people and social stats can power search results. A new implementation of social data was spotted in the wild by techie-buzz.com who found Twitter trends making their way into the search results pages. The query in question was for a hot topic (Pepsi Next) that had quite […]
The Wall Street Journal is out with a story saying that Google is about to make one of the biggest changes in its history of offering web search, providing more direct answers and gaining “semantic” smarts to understand more about what words mean. I’m scratching my head, since Google already does this. Methinks Google’s PR […]
It’s not your imagination. Google is showing a new “Latest Posts” section for some Google+ pages and profiles alongside its regular results, in the space where ads have traditionally resided. The format allows people and brands on Google+ to occupy more of the top-half of the search results page. Google told us about the change: […]
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: Demographic Bidding Being Eliminated To Clear Way For New AdWords Features Though it hasn’t been announced, a few eagle-eyed folks have noticed a change to Google’s Help pages that says […]
Marketing firm Slingshot SEO is picking up where Microsoft left off. Five years ago Microsoft/Atlas began trying to educate marketers and the marketplace about the fact that more online sources than the “last click” were responsible for conversions. This was partly an effort to undermine the centrality of Google, which gets lots of credit 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: Google Research: Yes, You Still Need To Keep Buying Search Ads Though most marketers likely think of their SEO activities and their paid search advertising as complementary, you’ve probably wondered, at […]
Though most marketers likely think of their SEO activities and their paid search advertising as complementary, you’ve probably wondered, at one time or another, what would happen if you paused your CPC ads entirely or just cut them back dramatically. Google’s research folks covered this topic back in July of last year, when it concluded […]
Google’s latest blog post provides details and a video from Maile Ohye about how they handle the pagination attributes within a page’s source code. You can use these attributes to indicate pages in a series (such as a multi-page article or set of product listings), which enables Google to cluster the pages into a single entity […]
Nearly two years ago, I wrote about creating a Global Search Center of Excellence and since have had the opportunity to keynote a number of company search summits, conference panels and then last week at the International Search Summit at SMX, I spoke for an entire session on how and why you should use your […]
The good folks over at Stone Temple Consulting released an in-depth interview with Bing’s Principal Group Program Manager for Bing Social Search, Paul Yiu. The Bing social search team integrates social content and indicators into the search results to add both personalization and relevance to the search results. Bing currently ties in data from both […]
Google has just revamped the crawl errors data available in webmaster tools. Crawl errors are issues Googlebot encountered while crawling your site, so useful stuff! I originally started this article by writing that in most cases, these changes are for the better and in only a few (really maddening) cases, useful functionality has been removed. […]
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’s Photosynth App Goes Worldwide After 6 Million US Downloads Microsoft’s Photosynth iOS app, which has been available to US users for almost a year, is now available worldwide and includes […]
How does Google create its search algorithms, its recipes for making the listings and search results you get? For the first time, the general public gets a glimpse into the decision making process, through a video that Google has posted of one of its search quality meetings. The Video I was fortunate enough to witness […]
SEMPO & Econsultancy have teamed up again this year to run the State of Search Marketing Survey. The survey will cover topics including budgets, marketing objectives, and the latest trends in paid search, search engine optimization (SEO), and social media. SEMPO and Econsultancy are asking those in the search and social communities to take the […]
Last week the Pew Internet Project released findings of a survey on search, personalization and targeted advertising. In a nutshell, survey respondents had a very positive view of search and the quality of search results. Yet the majority gave an unequivocal thumbs down to search personalization (and behavioral targeting). This isn’t necessarily a contradiction or paradox […]
Ah, the IT team: The land where SEO dreams go to die. The bigger the institution, the harder it is to pry a few tiny SEO tweaks out of the developer group. They’re resource-constrained, buried in the poop that the entire company dumps on them and, by the time you get to their office, not […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Four Seriously Cool Information Resources As a librarian, researcher and frequent blogger, I’m constantly coming across incredibly useful online information resources that are most effectively searched using their own site search […]
As we covered last week, Google’s search results for a search on “santorum” have gotten a lot cleaner recently. The change was featured on The Rachel Maddow Show last night, and Search Engine Land’s coverage got a big shout-out. The clip is below, as well as an update on all things Santorum and Google. Santorum […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Ask.com Launches New Visual Q&A App “Pollroll” It seems like there are a million apps launching or promoting themselves in connection with the upcoming SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. Among them […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Effective B2B Link Building – Webcast Next Week Features Debra Mastaler Search Marketing Now will host a webcast next Wednesday, March 14 at 1 PMEST. “Effective B2B Link Building” will feature […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: When The Going Gets Tough, The Links Get Blamed Links are usually the first thing that people look at when something happens in the SERPs. Surely, if your rankings fall, you […]