SMX East 2014 Day Two Live Blog Coverage
Day two of Search Marketing Expo East is now complete and below is some of the live blog coverage we found throughout the day. BuzzFeed Founder Jonah @Peretti Talks SEO, Social at #SMX, BruceClay.com #SMX Liveblog: 25 Examples of Structured Data You Ca…
SearchCap: Google Crawling, CTR Study & Focus On The User
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Up Close @ SMX East: How Ads Influence Organic Click-Through Rate On Google If the SERPs are a zero-sum game, where…
Up Close @ SMX East: How Ads Influence Organic Click-Through Rate On Google
If the SERPs are a zero-sum game, where drawing a click in one place takes it away from another, how are ads influencing organic click-through?
The post Up Close @ SMX East: How Ads Influence Organic Click-Through Rate On Google appeared first on Sea…
So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen Yahoo Directory
Yahoo will be shutting down Yahoo Directory as well as Yahoo Education and Qwiki. The Directory will officially shutter on December 31, 2014.
Three Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting an Agency
I was initially introduced to Dreyfus model of skill acquisition by Merlin Mann, one of my favorite go-to’s for anything around productivity and the world of work. This concept changed the way I thought about problems and about expertise. The model basically describes a stage in the learning cycle where we are “advanced beginners”, which follows the […]
The post Three Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting an Agency appeared first on Ross Hudgens.
Say Goodby to Yahoo Directory
Yahoo directory will be coming to a close this December, 2014. It’s a sad day, or at least it seems like it is.
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A New Click Through Rate Study For Google Organic Results
Advanced Web Ranking has released a study showing fresh data on the click-through-rate from Google’s organic search results. The data was taken from Google Webmaster Tools Search Queries reports from large accounts back in July 2014. On average, 71.33% of searches resulted in a page one…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Google On How They Know When To Slow Or Stop Crawling Your Web Site
Today at SMX East, Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst, Gary Illyes shared with the audience two technical ways Google determines when GoogleBot, their crawlers, should slow down or stop crawling your web site. One of the more important factors with SEO is to ensure the search engine crawlers…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Microsoft skips past windows 9 and jumps right to windows 10
According the the new york times, windows 10 will look a
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Jackie Hole: State of Digital Summer School, Learning from the Experts
What things do you need to learn to become an expert in Digital Marketing? Experts are telling you. Jackie Hole talks about education in Digital
Post from Bas van den Beld on State of Digital
Jackie Hole: State of Digital Summer School, Learning from the Experts
How User Intent Will Forever Inform Successful Keyword Strategies
Forget trying to keep up with the thousands of algorithm changes that happen every year. Focus on what really matters and you’re golden.
The post How User Intent Will Forever Inform Successful Keyword Strategies appeared first on Search Engine Land.
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Record numbers streamed World Cup games from mobile devices
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) recently released some information regarding World Cup view
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Google AdWords PLAs Automatic Item Updates
Google announced a new feature to help reduce the number of ad disprovals due to there being price mismatches between your PLAs feed and what is displayed on your web page.
This is called “automatic item updates” and can be enabled if you have impleme…
Google Wants Ideas For Live Webmaster Hangouts Topics
Google is now frequently conducting live webmaster hangouts with normally one Googler and then nine other webmasters on the Google Webmaster Google+ page.
Google’s John Mueller does a ton of them and he said he is ready to schedule a bunch more but wa…
Google Smartphone Icons Now Testing Again
Back in August 2012 we saw Google testing smartphone icons in the search results and then they went away. Google seems to be testing that again.
Artem Russakovskii from Android Police spotted it in the wild, as have others…
Google’s Online Order Shipment Comes With Search Algorithm Help Request
Thomas Steiner, a PhD Customer Solutions Engineer for Google in Hamburg, Germany placed an order online at Lieferello for some cold beverages and in his order shipment box he found this colorful letter. In a sense, they bribed Thomas with an extra fre…
SEO Is No One-Trick Pony
What exactly is SEO? It’s certainly not any “one thing,” but instead a combination of many factors that lead to a successful SEO strategy.
Google Carousel Eye-Tracking Study: The Big Winner is AdWords
In addition to the Local heat maps & CTR studies that I shared yesterday , Mediative also looked at the behaviors around the Carousel in their study: The Evolution of Google Search Results Pages and Their Effects on User Behaviour”. As with the 7-pack information yesterday, there are limits to this study. The CTR are particularly […]
Panda 4.1: what’s it all about?
What is Google aiming to achieve with Panda 4.1?
Google’s Panda updates are always aiming for quality enhancement of the search engine results.
The first Panda update was known as the content farm update, because it was mainly directed against thin content that was placed on large scale platforms such as ehow or ezinearticles.com.
Panda 4.0 was a major rework of the whole Panda implementation in the algorithm. So Panda 4.1 is just the continuation of what Google did with 4.0.
Where are you seeing the biggest changes so far?
You can see that a Panda update was rolled out just on our list of winners and losers. There is always a pattern on the sites on these lists.
Panda updates are query based. That means that the impact is not on all queries, only a specific set of queries and that’s why you can find a pattern. The changes we saw this time are again directed against a lot of thin content and aggregator sites.
Sites like FindTheBest, Pearltrees or Socialcomments.org aggregate content and present it in a nice, easy-to-consume way.
But they are aggregators which means no unique content and it’s also aggregated like a search engine. And Google doesn’t want search-in-search to rank highly.

Based on what you have seen so far, has Panda 4.1 achieved what Google wanted?
This is a question that only Google can answer. Google is never finished.
Every new iteration of Panda or other updates will increase the quality. But with all the redundancy in the World Wide Web, Google has a lot to do to filter out the noise and increase the relevancy of the results step by step.
What kinds of signals does Google look for to determine low-quality, thin content sites and pages?
There are two different kind of signals. Quantitative signals are based on content and site structure. Qualitative signals are based on user behavior.
For the quantitive signals it is Google’s mission to find sites with unique and rich content. Content with an added value for the user. And with all the data that Google has, it is the next step to take the user signals and weight the results against a group of other results.
Results with worse than average user behavior are sites with a bad user experience. Google is using both signals to determine which results are relevant for the user based on their query.
When a site has too many ‘bad’ signals, the whole site can be dropped out of the rankings. Panda is not just based on some keywords on a website. It always hits a huge part of the page, that’s why Panda is a serious issue.
What is your advice for sites hit by Panda?
Housekeeping! Many sites just have too much thin content. They have to add value to these pages, find redundant pages and merge them or just delete them if it’s old outdated content.
But importantly, if you don’t do anything it will get worse. These pages that just keep their thin content will have the so called slow-death phenomenon.
They gradually lose visibility over time until nothing is left. That’s why companies should build a Panda proof site before they are affected.
What do you think Google will be looking to deal with in the next update?
Google always wants to improve and to deliver the right result for the right time in the right context.
There will be many more updates where content relevancy will be the key.
At SMX East; Presenting on Google and the Semantic Web
The Semantic Web is making an even stronger appearance recently at Google than it has in the past. With knowledge panels, carousels listing all kinds of things (and people and places), structured snippets merging query answers with question answers into a single snippet, OneBoxes of many different kinds, and even Hummingbird responding better to longer […]
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