Former Googler: Links That Change Are Trusted Less By Google’s Algorithms
A former member of the Google search quality and web spam team, Pedro Dias, said publicly on Twitter yesterday that “Google is less likely to trust a link once it has changed from the first time it was seen.” So if you changed the anchor text or URL path of the link, the value and…
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Report: Apple Accelerating Crowdsourced Maps Improvements
According to a couple of reports (Reddit and MacRumors) Apple has stepped up the pace of map-data corrections and improvements. The MacRumors report, from a couple of weeks ago, says that changes are being implemented weekly. The Reddit thread says they’re happening nightly — at 3 am…
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Google Notifying Publishers For Right To Be Forgotten Removals
Now that Google has been removing results from the European versions of Google in response to the EU’s Right To Be Forgotten requirements, many webmasters are now receiving notifications of these removals. Last night, around 10pm EST, I received a notification for a site I have verified…
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Bing Ads Doubles Number Of Keywords Advertisers Can Review In UI To Support Larger Accounts
Bing Ads has taken another step toward supporting larger accounts. Yesterday the ad network announced it had updated its user interface so that advertisers can now review accounts with up to 100,000 keywords in the Keyword Tab. As part of the updates, …
Bing Adds Khan Academy Courses & Book Finding Results
Bing has added two new search features for the school break season. (1) The ability to search for free online courses offered by the Khan Academy. (2) The ability to search for books that you can buy online, pick up at a local library and/or view fully…
The 10 Most Important Paid Search Developments So Far In 2014
It’s been a big year so far for product listing ads on both Google and Bing. Google started putting more ads in the Knowledge Graph. Bing followed Google’s lead on combining tablet and desktop traffic. And Google said it would begin stripping paid search queries from referrer strings….
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Google Webmaster Tools Beta International Targeting Reports
Google is currently beta testing a new international targeting report within Google Webmaster Tools. The new International Targeting report is designed to help webmasters who have international sites and use href lang markup understand common mistakes …
Why Everyone In The EU May Look Like They’ve Made A “Right To Be Forgotten” Request In Google
Google began removing listings in response to the EU’s new Right To Be Forgotten mandate last week. As promised, Google is also disclosing to searchers when such removals have happened. However, it is also confusingly reporting that removals may have happened even when they have not. Welcome…
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Supreme Court Rules Street View “Wiretapping” Class Action Can Proceed Against Google
According to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. Supreme Court will not review a U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision allowing a class-action lawsuit that argues Google violated the federal “Wiretap Act” when it intercepted private email and other personal data. The appellate court decision…
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Google: Redirecting A Penalized Site To Penalty Free Site Likely Won’t Negatively Impact The Site
On Friday, Google’s John Mueller answered a question I proposed in a Webmaster/Search Helpdesk Hangout about the issues around a penalized site being redirected to an unpenalized site. The question was, what if a competitor takes a site that has a severe penalty and 301 redirects it to my…
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The robots.txt Celebrates 20 Years Of Blocking Search Engines
Today is the 20th anniversary of the robots.txt directive being available for webmasters to block search engines from crawling their pages. The robots.txt was created by Martijn Koster in 1994 while he was working at Nexor after having issues with craw…
Bing Ups Its Twitter Game: Rolls Out Hashtag & Twitter Handle Search Features
Starting this week, Bing users are going to see even more Twitter content in search results. As a result of an exclusive partnership between the two companies that started in 2009, tweets have been showing up in Bing search results for some time. With Bing’s latest round of new…
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Foursquare To Charge For Local Database — Will Partners Balk?
According to a report in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) Foursquare will soon be charging a small number of partners to use its Venue Database. Recently Microsoft and Foursquare agreed to a $15 million investment/licensing deal that brings Foursquare content to Bing search results and Windows Mobile….
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Google Goes All-In With “OK, Google” Hands-Free Search
The evolution of voice-controlled search into a virtual personal assistant took another step forward with Google’s announcement that all Android-powered devices (KitKat or above) will now respond to the “hotword” OK, Google. Users can initiate a search or control and carry out any…
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WATCH: Microsoft’s Cortana Keynote At SMX Advanced 2014
You’re probably pretty familiar already with Siri and Google Now, the personal assistant-type technologies from Apple and Google, respectively. Each has its own approach to the idea of providing information and answering questions without needing a traditional search box and search query. You…
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Google Beefs Up AdWords Location Extension Reporting And Targeting
Google has rolled out a couple of enhancements for paid search advertisers with brick-and-mortar locations. A new distance report for ads with location extensions show performance broken out by distance from your businesses, ranging from 0.7 miles to o…
Google Analytics Now Separates Brand And Non-Brand PPC Traffic
Brand and non-brand paid search terms typically perform very differently and most paid search teams analyze these sets of keywords separately. To make this task easier, Google has added a handy feature to Analytics that automatically segments brand and…
PR Newswire’s Answer To Their Google Panda Troubles: Taking Action On Press Release Spammers
When Google released its most recent modification to the Panda algorithm, Panda 4.0, on May 20th, one of the sites reportedly hit hard by the update was the large press release distribution company, PR Newswire. The company’s answer to recover from the algorithmic penalty is to “take…
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Remarketing Lists For Search Ads Can Now Use Conversion-Based Automated Bid Strategies In AdWords
Now when you enable AdWords conversion-based automated bid strategies in your Remarketing Lists For Search Ads campaigns, the predicted conversion performance of those remarketing lists will influence the bidding. Google announced on its Google+ page t…
Android TV Shows Knowledge Graph Search Results
Google’s just announced Android TV is a significant improvement over the original Google TV. It doesn’t require a game controller or bulky remote to work (though a game controller can be used for Google Play Games). And you can search for content with your voice. The UI is simple and…
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