Report: US Search Ad Spend Rises 12 Percent YoY In Q4 2013; Smartphone CPCs Drop
IgnitionOne released its fourth quarter Digital Marketing Report today, showing that the paid search market in the US continues to grow. Search ad spend rose 12 percent year-over-year in the fourth quarter of 2013. In part as a result of the later kick…
Google’s Matt Cutts On Publishers With Duplicate Content: Use The Canonical Tag
In a video released by Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, Matt said publishers who publish similar or duplicative stories on different URLs may use the rel=canonical tag to help consolidate the PageRank of the stories and avoid any issues with Google. Matt Cutts did say that duplicate…
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Utah Has Highest Google Usage, West Virginia The Lowest
Ad network Chitika has released a new tool that provides a user percentage or traffic market-share breakdown of PC operating system and search usage on a state-by-state basis. Google is the only search engine for now; combined Bing and Yahoo usage can …
Twitter Co-Founder Biz Stone Launches New Social Search App Jelly
Building on the concept, “If you have a questions, there’s somebody out there that knows the answer,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and former Twitter colleague Ben Finkel have launched Jelly, a social search app that uses your social networks to deliver results. According to the…
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WordStream Updates Its Free Google AdWords Performance Grader: Now With Mobile And Automatic 30-Day Reporting
WordStream has released a revamp of its AdWords Performance Grader, the instant AdWords account auditing tool, now dubbed AdWords Grader Plus. WordStream says the free tool, launched in August 2011, has already been used to analyze accounts representin…
Google Webmaster Tools Search Queries Adds More Details & No Longer Rounds Data
John Mueller, Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst, announced on the Google Webmaster Blog that they are no longer rounding the search query data within the Google Webmaster Tools Search Queries report. John said, “data in the search queries feature will no longer be rounded /…
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Pinterest Beefs Up Its Search Chops With VisualGraph Acquisition
Pinterest is looking to improve search and discovery on its website and mobile apps with the acquisition of a company called VisualGraph. It’s a two-person company and both employees — Kevin Jing and David Liu — are starting at Pinterest today. In a statement confirming the…
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Rap Genius Back In Google After 10 Day Penalty, Ranks For Its Name But What About Lyrics?
Lyrics site Rap Genius says that is is no longer penalized within Google after taking action to correct “unnatural links” that it helped create. The site was hit with a penalty for 10 days, which meant people seeking it by name couldn’t find it. That’s been fixed, though…
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Preparing For The Link Apocalypse That May Or May Not Be Coming
Something big is happening to link building. Hummingbird might have been the writing on the wall signaling more changes to come; but, we still have no idea what those changes will actually look like. Will links be less important in 2014? Is it possible that they could go away? Should I start link…
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New Year 2014 Google Logo Keeps On Disco Dancing
Happy New Year! Today’s Google logo ushers in the New Year with the same logo as yesterday’s New Year’s Eve disco-themed logo, with one small change: 2013 is now 2014. The interactive logo includes the same spinning disco ball and vibrating speakers, but now the dancing numbers…
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Google Shopping Expanding 360 Degree Product Images, Making New Hire
Last year, Google began adding 360 degree product views to Google Shopping ahead of the holiday season. This year, the search giant continued to tout the 360 views and have expanded from toys to other consumer products that consumers typically like to …
PPC Excel Tips For Every Level: Part 3, Advanced Level Keyword Research And Data Visualization
We close out our three-part series of Excel tips from Bing Ads Evangelist John Gagnon today with some advanced level tools that, in fact, even beginners can start using successfully today. While many of the tips we’ve covered can also help SEOs as well as PPC practitioners, today’s…
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New Year’s Eve 2013 Google Logo Is Bringing In The New Year With A Disco
Today’s Google logo is celebrating New Year’s Eve disco-style. The interactive logo includes a spinning disco ball, pounding speakers and a light-up dance floor. The numbers for “2013″ dance away, while the number “4″ awaits to takes its spot with glancing eyes….
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PPC Excel Tips For Every Level: Part 2, Faster Campaign Analysis For Intermediates
Today we have more handy Excel tricks from Bing Ads Evangelist John Gagnon. This second installment of PPC Excel tips focuses on intermediate level techniques for speeding up campaign analysis. Paid search managers will benefit, but really anyone using Excel for data analysis will find good…
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Google’s Rap Genius Penalty Results In Huge Traffic Declines For The Lyrics Site
Before Christmas, Rap Genius was outed for link schemes and then on Christmas, Google penalized the site for those link schemes. The penalty is still on and a couple metrics sites show huge drops in traffic for the site, some as much as losing 90% of t…
Link Building 2013: Looking Back At This Year’s Top Link Week Columns
With each passing year, search engine algorithms grow increasingly sophisticated in their ability to identify (and penalize) spammy links. Among other things, this year marked the fourth and fifth releases of Google’s spam-filtering Penguin update (Penguin 2.0 and 2.1, respectively)….
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Google Has Officially Penalized Rap Genius For Link Schemes
Google has penalized Rap Genius for link schemes this morning. If you go to Google and search for [rap genius], rapgenius.com will not be found on the first page. Instead you will find links to their Twitter account, Facebook page, Wikipedia profile an…
The 2013 Santa Tracker List: All The Ways To Track Santa From NORAD & Google
It’s Christmas Eve, time for all good boys and girls to be expecting Santa Claus to be bringing them gifts. But where is jolly old St. Nick on his journey? Once again, there are two major services tracking him: NORAD and Google. Below, our annual review of the tracking sites and methods of…
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PPC Excel Tips For Every Level: Part 1, Huge Time Savers For Beginners (And Beyond)
Excel is that must-have tool for managing, analyzing and reporting on paid search campaigns that is impossible to know too well. Many of us are self-taught — picking up tips and tricks here and there — which makes it even harder to know what shortcuts and secret powers we’re…
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Search Engine Land’s Most-Shared Stories on Facebook for 2013: How To Survive Google, Plus A Joke Here & There
Search marketing friends — welcome, welcome! It’s time for another installment of our Search Engine Land Year In Review series. We’ve toured through the top news stories and those that were most tweeted – now it’s time to scope out the articles, tutorials, resources,…
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