Five most important search marketing news stories of the week

This week, both LinkedIn and Facebook are beefing up their paid social offerings in different ways, while Google seeks to cut off Adwords revenues for fake news sites. And might Google be favouring desktop over its own AMP in its upcoming mobile-first index?

Thirteen things marketers want to know about expanded text ads, direct from Google

AdWords released expanded text ads in late July. Columnist and Googler Matt Lawson answers some FAQs about what you should consider as you expand your own ads.

The post Thirteen things marketers want to know about expanded text ads, direct from Google…

5 steps to optimizing your site for Google’s mobile-first index

Now that Google is officially testing a mobile-first index, columnist Ryan Shelley believes it’s well past time to get aboard the mobile-friendly train. Here, he provides some tips to get you started.

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Google’s advanced verification test in San Diego just dropped over 89% of listings from the 3-pack

Columnist and local search expert Joy Hawkins shows the results of a recent Google My Business advanced verification test and explores the new home services local pack.

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How to avoid an outbound link penalty from Google

We’ve all heard of unnatural link penalties from having a spammy backlink profile, but columnist Tony Edward notes that your site’s outbound links need to be monitored as well.

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Coaxing smarter paid search bidding decisions out of sparse conversion data

Columnist Mark Ballard explains how we can use statistics to supplement our conversion data and intuition when deciding on keyword-level bids in AdWords.

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Google to add presidential, senatorial & congressional election results directly in search

YouTube will also air live coverage of the elections starting at 7:00 p.m. ET on November 8.

The post Google to add presidential, senatorial & congressional election results directly in search appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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Study shows Google’s Possum update changed 64% of local SERPs

How significantly did the Possum update impact local search results in Google? Columnist Joy Hawkins shares data and insights from a study she did with BrightLocal, which compared local results before and after the update.

The post Study shows Google’s Possum update changed 64% of local…

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Opinion: Google is biased toward reputation-damaging content

Why does reputation-damaging content seem to appear so quickly in Google’s search results? Columnist Chris Silver Smith outlines his theory on why Google’s algorithm can give negative content greater ranking ability than it deserves.

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5 ingredients for writing the perfect expanded text ad

Want to succeed with expanded text ads? Columnist Frederick Vallaeys reports on findings from an Optmyzr study of 1.2 million ads to see what characteristics the best-performing ads had in common.

The post 5 ingredients for writing the perfect expande…

Hot off the presses: Make heat maps for device performance

See how your account performs every hour with another handy AdWords script from columnist Daniel Gilbert of Brainlabs.

The post Hot off the presses: Make heat maps for device performance appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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More on HTTPS & Local Citations & 301 Redirects

mueller-tweetMy SEL post, When Going HTTPS Don’t Forget About Local Citations, spurred a minor tempest in a tweetstorm, when reader asked Googler’s John Mueller and Gary Ilyes for their thoughts. As you can see below John emphasized that “you don’t lose PR with 301s”: John was likely referencing this section of my post: Let’s say you […]

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