Year-end is a good time to review your programs to get them ready for the next year. Typically, this time of year things slow down due to the holidays you might have some time to focus on the recommendations below. Year-end Recap It is critical that you develop a year-end recap and send it out […]
A new Dilbert cartoon makes fun of the Google employee 20% time to work on whatever they want. As many of you know, Google has a policy to let their engineers spend 20% of their time work on anything they want. Products like AdSense came from it. But is the 20% time really all that […]
US Senators Herb Kohl and Mike Lee are urging the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether Google unfairly favors its own properties in search results. Kohl and Lee are both members of the Senate’s antitrust subcommittee — that’s where Google’s Eric Schmidt testified in-person back in September on the same subject — and have jointly […]
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 Removes Author: Search From Google News You can no longer search for articles from specific authors in Google News. As Barry Schwartz reported this morning on Search Engine Roundtable, using […]
You can no longer search for articles from specific authors in Google News. As Barry Schwartz reported this morning on Search Engine Roundtable, using the author: firstname lastname command at Google News brings up no results now, and Google has disabled it on purpose. If you think it has something to do with the rel=author […]
Despite what you may see in Google’s search results these days, the search engine tells us that, no, there’s been no expansion of Sitelinks recently. We’ve received emails here at Search Engine Land HQ and seen tweets asking about the appearance of Sitelinks on sub-pages that previously didn’t have them. We’ve also seen them show […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) Stalls In Congress The U.S. House Judiciary Committee abruptly adjourned today without voting on the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA), a controversial measure that would […]
Search engines have “won a major victory” in their battle against so-called content farms. So says the current issue of New Scientist magazine, in an article that’s also available online. New Scientist asked University of Glasgow computer scientist Richard McCreadie to study 50 search queries that are “known to be a target of content farmers.” […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Googlebot Identifies Smartphone Content With New User-Agent Google has announced that its mobile crawler now has a user-agent that’s specific to smartphones. The company has already had a user-agent that targets […]
Google has announced that its mobile crawler now has a user-agent that’s specific to smartphones. The company has already had a user-agent that targets feature phones. The new Smartphone Googlebot-Mobile user agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7 (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +https://www.google.com/bot.html) […]
Google has introduced a new report in Google Webmaster Tools named “Author Stats.” Author Stats shows you how often your content is showing up on the Google search results page. This will show up under Google Webmaster Tools in the “labs” section in Webmaster Tools. It shows the impressions and clicks of the stories found […]
Google released the Google Zeitgeist 2011 today. Google made several lists this year and even broke them down by country. You can play with the interactive lists at googlezeitgeist.com. Those in the picture above are included in the “fastest rising searches” category, including Rebecca Black, Google+, Ryan Dunn, Casey Anthony, Battlefield 3, iPhone 5, Adele, […]
Yesterday, I made an assumption that Google would put all Panda updates on hold until after the holiday season. Google tweeted yesterday afternoon that there would be “no major Panda updates until the new year.” The last Panda update we had was labeled a “minor” update on November 18th and since then, it has been […]
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 Letter From Santa To The Search Community December, 2011 The North Pole Dear Search Community: Thanks so much for your many letters to the north pole. Your nicely written texts […]
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 Buys Clever Sense: An Answer To Siri? As is being widely reported Google has bought startup Clever Sense, which earlier this year launched the local-mobile recommendations app Alfred. Alfred is […]
Google gets a mention in The Simpsons this week, future Google, that is. Google has enslaved half the world, apparently, but as Lisa Simpson puts it, it’s still a damn fine search engine. Within the the Ultranet of the future, Lisa accesses Google through the Google door: “Right, it’s Dr. Suess’s birthday,” she says, when […]
Last Monday, Google announced that they had released “new markup for multilingual content”, see the webmaster tools blog post here. Even for those of us that work in the field of looking after global websites, this produced relatively unexciting headlines along the lines of “Google Launches New Multilingual Markup — Wow”. Big yawn. In fact, digging […]
Holiday deal sites that Bing banned from its search listings just before the busy shopping days of Black Friday and Cyber Monday have now been allowed to return. They include a site run by the group that created the entire Cyber Monday concept. Banned: Not Your Usual Suspects We reported previously how the sites had […]
Measuring Social Media ROI Presentations from SMX Social Media Marketing, December 2011 Sure, social media has had plenty of hype, and everyone is "sure" of its value. But how do you prove that it offers a true return on investment, especially if you’re trying to persuade clients or management to invest marketing dollars in Facebook, […]
Google+ & Google +1 – What Every Marketer Needs To Know Presentations from SMX Social Media Marketing, December 2011 Google+ is a new social aspect to Google allowing people to share photos, places they’ve been, videos, links and status updates. Google +1 is a way for people to indicate what they like within Google’s 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: Seven Mobile SEO Myths Exposed Not too long ago, the article Mobile SEO is a Myth got a lot of people fired up about the foolish notion that mobile SEO is […]
Not too long ago, the article Mobile SEO is a Myth got a lot of people fired up about the foolish notion that mobile SEO is a construct developed by salesmen to sell more SEO services. I responded in the comments to the author’s points, and have addressed this point in multiple articles over the years, so […]
Annual US retail spending is roughly $4 trillion according to the US Commerce Department. And while e-commerce is growing very rapidly, it remains less than 5 percent of total retail sales. Historically, most search marketers have focused almost exclusively on e-commerce sales. But a new study finds that the real impact of paid search is […]
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 Images Carousel For Tablets & Better Movie Results For Phones Google announced two new improvements to mobile interfaces. The first is a new look for image results on tablets called […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Two New Bing UI Tests Spotted The folks at Liveside.net, an independent blog that covers Microsoft’s online efforts, have posted screenshots of two new Bing user interfaces that some of their […]
SEO: one channel to rule them all? A new “merchant confidence survey” from lead-gen company MerchantCircle/Reply.com, among 2,500 US small businesses, finds that search engine optimization is the marketing channel they would choose if they could choose only one. The question asked was: “If you had to put all your marketing time and budget into […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: 4 New Year’s Resolutions Every Digital Marketer Can’t Live Without Over the last 6 months in this column we have looked at all aspects of the overlap between search and display, […]
Google’s early gaffe of not adequately addressing the demand for brand pages for Google+ has quietly given way to several new business-oriented Google+ features for in-house marketers to utilize. Brand pages, social extensions and a trusted verification process are all features in-house marketers should immediately engage with to increase their Google+ counts and brand profiles. […]
Pot Pie Girl has been busy the past couple months, first by publishing the Google quality raters guidelines and then by analyzing the forums to see how they rate things. One thing she said was that she believed these quality raters can raise a red flag at Google and lead to a downgrade in your […]
SMX is returning to Israel this January 15, 2012. SMX Israel will take place in Jerusalem, Israel at the Inbal Hotel on Sunday, January 15th. It is just about a month away and we urge anyone interested to register immediately – it only costs $150! The agenda is now live over here and we are […]
Chinese search engine Baidu will reportedly spend nearly a half-billion dollars to bring small businesses online and, among other things, train 100,000 search marketing professionals in China. As reported by both NASDAQ and AMP, Baidu will make a $470 million investment in China’s online market between now and the end of 2015. The NASDAQ article […]
First Google questioned Mitt Romney’s chances of winning the US presidential election. Now it’s suggesting that Austria is less important than Australia. You Say Austria, Google Says Australia In a search for Austria’s biggest companies, Google automatically changes the query and searches instead for Australia’s biggest companies: Forbes spotted the glitch, which is the second major problem […]
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 Super Early Bird Rates Expire Soon – Register Now, Save $400 February 28 – March 1 in San Jose, CA Attend SMX West and get expert insights and real-world-proven […]
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 Image Search Adds Social Sharing & Continuous Scrolling Yahoo announced two new features on Yahoo Image Search, social sharing and continuous scrolling. Social Sharing On Images: Yahoo Images enables you […]
Yahoo announced two new features on Yahoo Image Search, social sharing and continuous scrolling. Social Sharing On Images: Yahoo Images enables you to share the images you find on Yahoo Image Search with your friends on Facebook or Twitter, not Google +. When you click on an image result and are taken to the larger […]
Google announced a new markup to communicate multilingual content to Google’s spiders. The new link element is rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x” where you define the language and location in the hreflang area. Here are examples of how you may use it respectively: https://www.example.com/ – contains the general homepage of a website, in Spanish https://es-es.example.com/ – is the […]
Google Survivor Tips Presentations from SMX East – NYC, NY, September 2011 Although Google says only 12% of all websites were affected by its recent "Panda" update, many legitimate websites felt the sting of new ranking algorithms. But fear not: If your site was "pandalized" you can get back into Google’s good graces by following […]
Duplication, Aggregation, Syndication, Affiliates, Scraping, and Information Architecture Presentations from SMX East – NYC, NY, September 2011 We’ll sort through the bewildering world of near duplication due to issues such as manufacturer feeds into your site, syndication to other sites, international sites, and aggregation of data sources. How can a well-planned information architecture mimimize the […]
Schema.org, Rel=Author & Meta Tagging For 2012 Presentations from SMX East – NYC, NY, September 2011 The search engines have been kind to SEOs recently, adding a number of new tools that when used properly promise to improve visibility and rankings for certain types of content. Schema.org, a joint alliance between Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo […]
Real Answers For Technical SEO Problems Presentations from SMX East – NYC, NY, September 2011 Some technical SEO issues can be really tough to troubleshoot and fix. We’ll dive deep into how to diagnose the root cause of issues and how to get them fixed once and for all. [flv:https://searchengineland.com/video_assets/east11/ppt/553.flv 364 264] Moderator: Vanessa Fox, […]