Surprise: Yahoo Maps Gets A Facelift, New Features

Shortly after she became Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer declared (disappointingly) that she wasn’t going to invest in Local. In turns out that what she meant was she wasn’t going to go head to head with Google in Maps. Her predecessor Carol Bartz had outsourced maps (to Nokia) and she…

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Delivering Revenue From SEO Reviews

What’s the point of product reviews? Links? Branding? Building trust? Ultimately, revenue. Every piece of SEO should be related back to increasing revenues for a website. Let’s look at two cases of product reviews that can and should be implemented that abide by the updated laws of Google. Google more recently added exchanging goods or services […]

Google Keyword (Not Provided)

Just a follow up on the prior (not provided) post, as Google has shot the moon since our last post on this. Here’s a quick YouTube video.

The above video references the following:

Matt Cutts when secured search first rolled out:

Google software engineer Matt Cutts, who’s been involved with the privacy changes, wouldn’t give an exact figure but told me he estimated even at full roll-out, this would still be in the single-digit percentages of all Google searchers on Google.com.

This Week in Google (TWIG) show 211, where Matt mentioned the inspiration for encrypted search:

we actually started doing encrypted.google.com in 2008 and one of the guys who did a lot of heavy lifting on that, his name is Evan, and he actually reports to me. And we started that after I read Little Brother, and we said “we’ve got to encrypt the web.”

The integration of organic search performance data inside AdWords.

When asked about the recent increase in (not provided), a Google representative stated the following:

We want to provide SSL protection to as many users as we can, in as many regions as we can — we added non-signed-in Chrome omnibox searches earlier this year, and more recently other users who aren’t signed in. We’re going to continue expanding our use of SSL in our services because we believe it’s a good thing for users….

The motivation here is not to drive the ads side — it’s for our search users.

What an excellent time for Google to block paid search referrals as well.

If the move is important for user safety then it should apply to the ads as well.

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Google’s Matt Cutts: Google Does Not Penalize For Broken HTML

In a video published today by Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts – Google confirmed that they do not penalize sites that have broken or invalid HTML. Matt Cutts said, “so Google does not penalize you if you have invalid HTML, because there would be a huge number of web pages…

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Which Are the Best Link Audit Tools?

Link audits have become the bread and butter service for many SEO companies these days, and they all have their favorite tools. Add to that the constant fear and confusion over which links are hurting Websites and you have a lot of angry, frustrated clients who want results. People occasionally ask me why certain links don’t appear in their favorite auditing tools. For example, suppose you acquire a link from a Website that gets a lot of traffic but when you check Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs, Majestic SEO, et. al. you don’t see the link. Should the link be counted in reports for clients? The very fact this question is asked at all shows that a lot of people have really misfired on link auditing. The problem is not with the tools, my Padawans, it is with your expectations and the expectations you set for your clients. Link Auditing Tools Can Never See the Whole Picture This isn’t a situation where “good enough” matters. When you’re dealing with expectations (your own or someone else’s), you have to understand and accept that no tool is ever going to provide you with all the information you need. A typical SEO response is, […]

Google AdWords Debuts Ready Image Ads: Enter A URL, Get IAB-Sized HTML5-Ready Display Ads

The latest roll-out from Google AdWords could dramatically change the number of advertisers running display campaigns — and whether anyone gets paid to make display ads anymore. While that might sound far fetched, the launch of Ready Image Ads introduces a slick new option for advertisers who…

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New Countries Added to Places for Business Category Tool – Volunteers Needed

We have just upgraded the Google Places Category tool with categories for the new dashboard from: UK – United Kingdom contributed by Andrew Loy, Occupancy Marketing NL  – Netherlands contributed by Eduard de Boer (Netherlands) FR  – France contributed by Ken Fagan Aus  – Austria contributed by Petra Kraft IT – Italy contributed by Andrea Scarpetta CA – Canada contributed by Darren Shaw […]

White Papers: Key To B2B Enterprise SEO Power

Enterprise marketers, particularly in the B-to-B space, often find content development a difficult proposition. The company’s thought leaders, although happy to pontificate, are often afraid of committing to a writing schedule – and the marketer, admi…