Google To Replace Smartphone User-Agent To Improve Smart Phone Indexing
Google announced they are replacing the old smartphone crawler user-agent with a new one in order to make it possible for Google to index more smartphone content. Zhijian He, a smartphone search engineer at Google said that the previous user-agent “made it impossible for Google to index…
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3 Surprising Benefits Of Retargeting
As retargeting becomes more widely used and better understood, its reputation is improving. Marketers are learning to avoid creeping people out through better targeting and less intrusive messaging. Early adopters now have a year or two (or more) of ex…
An Easy Way To Check What Referrer Data Google, Bing Or Yahoo Pass To Your Secure Site
With the three major search engines migrating their default searches to secure search, over SSL/HTTPS, marketers and webmasters want to know what referrer and analytics data will be passed to them and what won’t. The majority of Google is secure search, Yahoo yesterday defaulted all searches…
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Are PDFs Optimal For SEO? The Pros And Cons
I expect that most everyone working in SEO knows that PDFs are indexable by search engines. PDFs can also appear with an authorship-rich snippet in Google SERPs. But, just because a file format can be indexed doesn’t always mean that it’s the ideal approach. Today, I’d like to…
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Live @ SMX West: Breathing New Life Into A Tired Paid Search Campaign
If you’ve been doing paid search for a while, you’ve undoubtedly run into a situation where you’re working on a campaign that’s been moderately successful, but has essentially been on autopilot and isn’t taking advantage of any new features that could enhance its…
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Google Adds A Knowledge Graph Popup To Search Results, But Is It Good For Site Owners?
Google has announced the formal rollout of a test that some searchers have been seeing for a few days now — a test that associates a Knowledge Graph popup with certain web pages in desktop search results. The popup adds more information about certain search results, which sounds like it…
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SearchCap: The Day In Search, January 22, 2014
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’s Matt Cutts: We Don’t Use Twitter Or Facebook Social Signals To Rank Pages Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, released a video…
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Google’s Matt Cutts: Facebook & Twitter Pages Are Treated Like Any Other Web Page On The Internet
Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, released a video today answering the question, “are Facebook and Twitter signals part of the ranking algorithm?” The short answer was no. Matt said that Google does not give any special treatment to Facebook or Twitter pages. They are in…
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Yahoo Search Goes Secure, Taking Referrer Data — An Indicator Of Yahoo’s Popularity — With It
By default, searches on Yahoo.com are now done through a secure server. That means more protection for searchers but less data for search marketers about how they are receiving traffic. Any visits from Yahoo done via search will appear as if someone ca…
Google Now Changing The Top Search Filters Based On Query
Google is now dynamically changing the top search menu/filters based on the search query entered by the searcher. So now, what options you see at the top might differ or be in a different order based on the query you enter into Google’s search box. A Google spokesperson told us this based on…
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Study: Display Ads Drive Search Clicks After Two Weeks
Though there have been several studies on the impact of display ads on search queries, researchers from Harvard and Ozyegin University in Turkey sought to bring academic rigor to this discussion. Their findings are contained in a Harvard Business School paper entitled, “Do Display Ads…
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Buyer Beware: 5 Tips For Spotting SEO Charlatans
I have written numerous times on the many myths that abound in SEO. But it seems that no matter how many times I try to bust these myths wide open, they still persist. Perhaps I am fighting an uphill battle here because the world of SEO unfortunately h…
Google Webmaster Tools Crawl Errors Reports Now Showing Errors On Final Redirect URL
Google’s John Mueller announced on the Google Webmaster blog this morning that the Google Webmaster Tools team has updated the crawl errors report to show errors on the final URL of the redirect, as opposed to the origin URL of the redirect. What this means is that Google is now showing the…
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Are You Using Your B2B Marketing Personas Effectively?
Is your company using customer avatars or marketing personas effectively? The idea of persona-driven marketing appeals to practitioners for a wide variety of reasons. It’s part of what I’d call core inbound marketing dogma. Yet, marketers are admitting that they’re not really…
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Pinterest Adds Vegetarian, Vegan, Gluten-Free & Paleo Filters For Recipe Related Searches
Pinterest has updated its search features, making it possible to filter for vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free and paleo ingredients or recipes when performing food-related searches. According to the announcement, Pinterest is rolling out the new search fe…
Expedia & Google: No Comment From Both About Possible Expedia Penalty
Expedia appears to have been hit by a Google penalty related to unnatural links. So what do Google and Expedia have to say about the situation? No comment. As covered yesterday, the visibility of Expedia listings in Google appears to have recently plun…
Keep Writing Quality Content: SEO Bloggers React To Matt Cutts’ Claim “Guest Blogging Is Dead”
Google’s head of webspam, Matt Cutts, caused an uproar in the SEO community yesterday when he published a blog post on his personal blog claiming guest blogging for SEO purposes is dead. In his post, Cutts offered a history of how guest blogging has moved from being a reliable source of…
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SearchCap: The Day In Search, January 21, 2014
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Will Link Building Soon Be A Thing Of The Past? The other day while working on a client proposal, I came to the sec…
Live @ SMX West: Long-Term SEO & How To Win For Years, Not Days
The life of an SEO can be challenging. Just when you think you’ve got things figured out, have mastered the nuances of hundreds of ranking signals and have perfected your own tactics and techniques to achieve great search engine visibility, someone like Google’s Matt Cutts will write a…
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SPONSOR MESSAGE: Get $50 Credit on Bing Ads
You know how search advertising works: those listed at the top of the results page are clicked most often. You also need clicks from high-quality searchers who are more likely to buy. Begin your trek to the top of the list – visit the Bing Ads solution center on Search Engine Land and save…
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