Category: Search Engine News
When Matt Cutts announced the unveiling of the latest Penguin update, you probably thought as many other webmasters thought-- it’ll finally clean up the leftover garbage that slipped through the loopholes of the previous Panda and Penguin updates. As Google guru Matt Cutts stated in a Webcast shortly after the release of Penguin 2.0, the latest update is going to “have a pretty big impact on web spam. It’s a brand new generation of algorithms. The previous generation of Penguin would essentially only look at the home page of a site. The newer generation of Penguin goes much deeper and has a really big impact in certain small areas.”
It’s pretty clear the update had a big impact on web spam-- it ranked higher while quality sites plummeted. Not to mention, users are reporting their search experience has dramatically declined since the update. Wait a minute… aren’t the updates meant to promote the search experience? As SEOWizz puts it, ...
Continue Reading
Matt Cutts, Google’s master of search spam, made the rare move of announcing the search engine giant’s release of the latest version of Penguin last week. The move, as expected, has sent webmasters and SEOs heart rates through the roof wondering if their sites will be impacted and how badly.
New blog post:Penguin 2.0 rolled out today goo.gl/fb/U7llH— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) May 23, 2013
The move from Cutts to announce that Penguin 2.0 was rolled out on 22 May was rare as Google tends to keep its lips shut when it comes to announcing the specific release of Penguin and Panda updates. After discussing the updates frequently over the past month, it seemed only natural that Cutts would break with trend and immediately inform webmasters of Penguin’s release.
Why Penguin 2.0?
While the latest release of Penguin algorithms is technically the fourth release of such software programs at Google, it is officially referred to as Penguin 2.0 because of the nature of this...
Continue Reading
If you’re running advertorials, paid content, or native advertising on your site make sure the ads and content associated with your sponsors are properly disclosed, or else you might find your entire website excluded from search results.
That’s basically the gist of Matt Cutt’s latest GoogleWebmasterHelp video (see below).
In the video, Cutts reminded users of Google’s long-time policy regarding paid links and content. The policy states that paid links should not pass page rank, and should therefore be labeled as nofollow. In addition, webmasters must see to it that all advertorials, paid content, and native ads on their site are clearly and conspicuously labeled accordingly (i.e. use words like “sponsored” or “advertisement”).
Fair enough.
However, according to Cutts, Google’s webspam team has been seeing problems regarding advertorials, native advertising content, or paid content that aren’t being disclosed...
Continue Reading
If you’ve been trolling tech and online advertising blogs lately then you’ve most likely caught wind of Microsoft’s Scroogled Campaign against Google. The campaign, which first launched in November, was created mainly to bash Google and promote Microsoft products such as Bing, Windows Phone, Outlook and more. It’s as anti-Google as can be and so far it has attacked the search giant’s paid inclusion in shopping search results, Gmail, Google Play, and most recently, Chrome.
In case you aren’t up to speed with Scroogled, below is a timeline that details how Scroogled made its way into the interwebs and what it’s saying about the almighty Google:
November 28, 2012 – Scroogled Launched
Microsoft first launched Scroogled.com in late November where it attacked Google’s Product Listing Ads . According to the site:
In the beginning, Google preached “Don’t be evil” – but that changed on May...
Continue Reading
As Google continues to strengthen its chokehold on the U.S. search market and keep the competition at bay, the industry's best minds struggle to develop new tools and strategies to cope with Google's dominance and find a way to breakthrough and regain a foothold in an industry that has long been controlled by Google. As Yahoo's Marissa Mayer approaches one year on the job as CEO, she is looking to revamp Yahoo's approach and breathe new life into the competition for number one in the search industry.
It was announced last week that Mayer and Yahoo! are in the process of developing several new tools and strategies to try and revive Yahoo's prospects of regaining market share in the lucrative search ad industry. As of 2012 the industry brought in roughly $19.8 billion in revenue related to search advertising. As of the end of the first quarter of 2013, Google held 67% of the search engine marketplace in the U.S., bringing with it a sizable chunk of that $19.8...
Continue Reading
Log on to Google.com any given day and enter a search query for a random person, place, or landmark and you are no doubt going to be bombarded with page links, suggestions, and image previews related to your term. Bing.com recently added a new expansion to its Snapshot feature that allows the search engine to make better associations between places, people, and things.
Bing’s Snapshot feature is found on the right hand side of the page when users use the search engine and provides images of relevant people, places, or “things” that correlate to the query term. Using a new technology it calls “Satori,” Bing is seeking to provide better image results that draw a clear correlation between subjects.
Bing posted the following statement on its official blog on 21 March:
Today, we are inviting people to check out Snapshot to experience our expansion of Satori.
Since its introduction in June, we have expanded Satori to include a significantly...
Continue Reading
There has been a lot of chatter online and within the SEO community over the last week that a major update for Google’s Panda algorithm was going to be released in the very near future. Many SEO professionals took to the web on Friday 15 March declaring that Panda 25 (the latest update) had in fact been released. Other professionals claimed that the release date was set for Monday 18 March; and all the while Google remained hush releasing only the following statement through a spokesperson:
“I don’t expect us to tweet about or confirm current or future Panda updates because they’ll be incorporated into our indexing process and thus be more gradual.”
SEO professionals and Google officials could go back and forth for days about whether or not Panda and Penguin updates have been released, are just rumors, or are still in the works. The best way to get to the bottom of it is to look at a timeline of events from the past week that point to a planned...
Continue Reading
There is no writing a headline for this news story that wouldn’t result in most readers thinking “duh.” Telling the world that Bill Gates believes Microsoft’s search engine Bing is a better product than rival Google, is like telling the world Steve Jobs felt the iPhone is a better product than a Samsung Galaxy S III. Gates, the richest man in America, founded Microsoft along with Paul Allen and served as the executive chairman of a company that went on to become the largest personal computer software company in the world.
Gates no longer serves as the executive chairman for Microsoft, though he does retain a position as a non-executive chairman, but that hasn’t stopped him from promoting the company’s Bing search engine. Although he now devotes his full attention to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, that didn’t stop him from boasting about Bing’s superiority in a recent “Ask Me Anything” conversation on...
Continue Reading
A recently released report from Marin Software has found that searches conducted on mobile devices are gaining more and more ground against their desktop and laptop competitors. The report was released this week and included data from 2012; data which suggests that by the end of 2013 mobile searches will account for one-third of paid-search clicks online. The study collected data from 13 regions of the globe, including the U.S., UK, Europe, Australia, and China.The report from Marin Software was entitled “The State of Mobile Search Advertising in the World,” and looked at paid-click, Cost-per-Click (CPC), and conversion trend data from around the globe with a particular emphasis on the mobile sector. What Marin found was a steadily increasing trend, in the U.S. in particular, toward mobile devices in online search clicks and spending.From January to December of last year, Marin found a 9.2% increase in the share of clicks from mobile devices from 14.2% up to 23.4%. The...
Continue Reading
Yahoo and Google have rarely seemed to have a particularly friendly relationship, especially in regards to the ad business for their respective search engines. However, the two companies announced yesterday that Google would be providing relevant display ads for Yahoo sites worldwide. This agreement is not exclusive, and Google will not be the only company providing ads for Yahoo. The fact that it is one of them, though, is a major development in the relationship between the two companies.
Yahoo and Google created significant waves in the SEO community in the middle of 2012, when the two companies discussed forming a more close-knit advertising relationship. In fact, one possibility that was discussed was that of Google essentially handling all of Yahoo’s advertising duties for them. A deal this extensive never materialized, but the somewhat more scaled-back agreement the companies just announced indicates that the lines of communication are still open...
Continue Reading
