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Search Engine Land

SearchCap: The Day In Search, May 16, 2012: 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 Launches Knowledge Graph To Provide Answers, Not Just Links Hinted at for months, Google formally

Google Launches Knowledge Graph To Provide Answers, Not Just Links: Hinted at for months, Google formally launched its “Knowledge Graph” today. The new technology is being used to provide popular facts about people, places and things alongside Google’s traditional results. It also allows Google to move toward a new way

With Fix In Place, Wolfram Alpha Explains How Siri “Recommended” The Lumia By Mistake: It wasn’t Siri that was recommending the Lumia as the best smartphone to some last week; it was Wolfram Alpha. That won’t happen again, now that Wolfram Alpha has made changes to to fix problems it had dealing with customer

3 Guidelines To Scale Your SEM Team: There is a phenomenon within organizations that causes productivity to decline as teams grow larger. This phenomenon is described in economics as a diseconomy of scale and is caused by at least three factors including increased communication costs, duplication of effort, and

Did Google Drop 100+ Small Directories: Yesterday I covered a WebmasterWorld thread where SEOs were complaining that Google has been removing tons of free web directories from their index. I conducted some random tests and did notice some of these free web directories not coming up

Do Search & Display Really Belong Together?: The premise is simple – PPC and display are both media buys trying to achieve similar outcomes; both are forms of ‘bought media’ and now with display moving to a biddable environment both now require quantitative skill sets to manage

Early Stage Landing Pages At The Top Of The Funnel: For many B2B and considered purchases, buyers go through several stages of evaluating the market and choosing a seller. Different stages naturally benefit from different kinds of landing pages and conversion strategies. Here, we’ll take a look at the very

Bing’s New Social-Friendly Search Interface Now Live: The new Bing interface, with a healthy dose of social connections and discovery, is now live for all users. Bing’s announcement today says that anyone can access the new interface at www.bing.com/new, but you should also see a new message

How To Use The Keyword Funnel To Understand Searcher Intent: Keyword research can give you great insight into customer problems, needs, desires, and intent.I like to categorize keyword categories themselves into a total of *ten* funnel stages. After performing my initial keyword categorization (sort of into micro-categories), I like to

SearchCap: The Day In Search, May 15, 2012: Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: A Glossary Of 15 Really Useful International Search Marketing Terms A conversation with a number of

A Glossary Of 15 Really Useful International Search Marketing Terms: A conversation with a number of international search marketers recently showed that their range of experience ranged from expert to beginner, despite their influential career positions. By the way, this doesn’t mean they weren’t all highly talented people – their

SPONSOR MESSAGE: Social Marketing for Search Marketers: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube best practices This white paper discusses: Three strategies for maximizing Twitter’s impact on SEO Tips for Facebook ads, events, groups and places Common principles between social and search marketing Download nowPlease visit Search Engine Land

The Social Funnel: What You Lose When You Ignore It: I’ve written often about the dangers of ignoring social media in SEO (and vice versa), but I’m here today to write about another danger: ignoring social benefits in the traditional sales funnel. It’s frustrating that people continue to treat social

What Tim Tebow Can Teach You About Link Building: If I learned one thing during my years as journalist, it was that headlines will make or break you. There’s probably a good number of you reading this solely because of this headline, but stay with me, people: There is a

Funny Google Matt Cutts Mashup Video: It has been a long couple months for the search marketing community between the Penguin update, a Panda refresh, the link notifications and the parked domain bug – you guys need a laugh. Sam Applegate put together a hysterical parody

In Wake Of Penguin, Could You Be Sued For Linking To Others?: Many webmasters have been desperately trying to fix poor SEO work done to a site thanks to the recent Penguin update targeting webspam and the bad link warnings sent from Google. The only current way to discredit a link is to have it removed

Live Blogging: Interview with Amit Singhal, Google Fellow: Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman are on the stage at SMX London to interview Amit Singhal. Amit is a Google Fellow, an honorary title reserved for Google’s most accomplished engineers, and he has spearheaded Google’s core ranking team since 2000.

SearchCap: The Day In Search, May 12, 2012: Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Smartphone Bot Case Study: The Google Smartphone Bot On Holiday In Australia While Google’s new smartphone

Smartphone Bot Case Study: The Google Smartphone Bot On Holiday In Australia: While Google’s new smartphone bot has been announced, it does not appear to be widely deployed yet; at least that is what I said during a recent presentation in Sydney, where I had the pleasure of meeting Alistair Lattimore (Al).

5 Local Linkbuilding Ideas For The Post-Penguin/Panda Era: I have been fielding a lot of calls from sites big and small that believe they got hit by Penguin, Google’s “over-optimization” algorithm. Or maybe it was Panda? Who knows? Traffic is down and everybody is freaking out. I have

Aaron Wall's SEO Book.com

GWT notice of detected unnatural links to http://www.seobook.com/: I am already getting fake webmaster tool notification messages using the above subject line & the following message:Hello dear managers of http://www.seobook.com/! My name is Olivia, and the issue I’m gonna to discuss is for

Ha! Bullets Can't Hurt ME: Negative SEO vs SabotageJust about any independent SEO worth their weight who publishes a number of websites has at least once hit a snag & been filtered or penalized. A person can say not me but how do they operate

Google AdWords Ads Add Album Cover & Song Preview: Before I get any drops of jupiter hate on the following...I was typing in training.seobook.com & somehow accidentally hit enter after typing train & when the URL completion didnt work I got the following SERP.If you click the feature video

The Google Penguin Update: Over-Optimization, Webspam, & High Quality Empty Content Pages: Huge UpdateGoogle recently launched their webspam Penguin update. While they claim it only impacted about 3.1% of search queries, the 3.1% it impacted were largely in the commercial transactional keywords worth a lot of money category. Based on the number

GoogleBowling, Negative SEO & Outing: Excessive Complexity & Unintended ConsequencesSergey Brin recently said:You have to play by their rules, which are really restrictive. The kind of environment that we developed Google in, the reason that we were able to develop a search engine, is the

Consumer Ad Awareness in Search Results: For the following study, we asked Does this search result have ads on it? to 1,000 searchers, per search results. Due to these surveys requiring a smaller image (to fit the

Which Source Do You Trust Most?: Which do you trust most as a source of advice on important issues?People tend to trust friends & family and the mainstream media far more than they trust websites & search engines.Vote All (1204)

How Did You Choose Your Primary Search Engine?: When you search, how did you pick your primary search engine?Most people use the search engine which they believe has the best relevancy, whatever their computer came with, or what a friend recommended.Vote

How Many Search Engines?: How many search engines do you typically use in a given month?Most people only use 1 or 2 search engines in any given month.Vote All (1223) 148.9% (+3.1 / -3.1)226.2% (+2.9 / -2.7)39.1% (+2.2 / -1.8)44.7% (+2.0 /

Search Again or Click On the Second Page of Search Results?: If you use a search engine but dont find what you are looking for, which are you more likely to do?People are more likely to search again with a new keyword than they

Citation Labs Review - Here's Why I Use it: So what are we calling it today? Link building, link prospecting, content marketing, linkbait, socialbait, PR ? Whatever it is and whatever sub-definitions exist for the process of finding quality, related websites to link back to yours is difficult and

General Consumer Awareness of SEM & SEO: Which of the following have you heard of?More people have heard of paid search / AdWords than have SEO / link building. One of the big issues with this question is that since

Paid Placement in Search Engines: In the below poll we didnt make any distinction between AdWords & organic SEO investments. If we did I am not sure how it would have impacted the voting.How do you feel about

Content Locking Ads: Google recently launched a consumer insights survey product, which quizes users for access to premium content.How do users get access to these poll questions? Google locks premium content behind them, likeso:

Ad Retargeting: How do you feel about companies tracking your online behavior to target ads?Surprisingly, nearly 1 in 11 people like ad retargeting. However, over 3 in 5 people dislike it.response

Google+ Integration: As publishers we tend to be quite concerned with the over-promotion of Google+ because it carves up the search landscape, is potentially another hoop that we have to jump through, and in some

Editorial Objectivity: Should search engines be able to preferentially promote their own services in their search results?Nearly 3 in 4 people think that search engines should not be able to preferentially promote their own services.voteAll

Jim Boykin Interview: Internet Marketing Ninja Jim Boykin has promoted link building since before I even knew what SEO was. Nearly a decade later so many things have changed in SEO (including renaming We Build Pages to Internet Marketing Ninjas), but he still

Patience is a Virtue: Sorry I havent blogged as much lately, but one of our employees recently had a child and Google sending out so many warning messages in webmaster central has created a ton of demand for independent SEO advice. Our growth in

Review of Jim Boykin's Free Broken Link Tool: Jim Boykin recently released a free, but powerful tool, that can help you check on broken links, redirects, in addition to helping you generate a Google Sitemap.Being a free, web-based tool you might think its a bit

SEOmoz

9 Lessons from 1,000 SEO Questions: Posted by Dr. PeteI spend a lot of quality time in Private Q&A here on SEOmoz, and I recently passed a milestone – 1,000 private

17 Types of Link Spam to Avoid: Posted by Carson WardIf the last few months of ranking changes have shown me anything, it's that poorly executed link building strategy that many of us call white hat can be more dangerous than black-hat strategies like buying links. As

Response Codes Explained with Pictures: Posted by Lindsay

Project Management for SEO (2012 Edition!): Posted by Tom CritchlowSo here's the truth - I used to suck at project management. But over the years I've determinedly turned myself into a half-decent project manager. Why? What was the driving force?Project Management Is A Tool For Effecting

Colossal Day of Craziness!: Posted by MozCTOHello, I am Anthony Skinner, the CTO of MozLand!Many of you were affected by several SEOmoz tool issues that happened last week, unfortunately all colliding into one colossal day of craziness on May 3rd. We want to first

The Penguin Update - Whiteboard Friday: Posted by robkerrySEOmoz and I don't always see eye to eye on industry issues, but I still have a lot of respect for the company. In fact SEOmoz is still the website that I send people to, when they want

The Real Impact of the Google SmartPhone Crawler (Part 3): Avoiding Mobile Mis-Indexing: Posted by SuzzicksThis post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The authors views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views

The Noob Guide to Link Building: Posted by iPullRankThe Noob Guide to Online Marketing is arguably the greatest single post of all time. If you don’t agree, well, it’s at least my favorite.

Whiteboard+ on Google's Penguin Update: Posted by randfishYesterday, I filmed some quick thoughts on Google's Penguin update. You can find the full video on our Google+ page:In it, I cover a few unique

Are You Setting Up WordPress For SEO Success?: Posted by evolvingSEOOr do you find yourself feeling a bit like Gary Coleman...

Creative Link Building for Ecommerce Sites: Posted by Stephanie ChangSome of the greatest challenges my previous ecommerce clients have faced have revolved around developing a cohesive and long-term content/link building strategy. They’ve done all the changes they can on the technical backend of the site, incorporated keywords

How To Survive Google's Unnatural Links Warnings & Avoid Over-optimisation: Posted by Modesto SiotosThis post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The authors views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the

Convincing Upper Management aka Justifying your Existence - Whiteboard Friday: Posted by Marshall SimmondsToday we have special guest Marshall Simmonds joining us in the Moz studio to present this week's Whiteboard Friday. Marshall is the Founder and CEO of Define Media Group. He is also a pioneer in the field

Penguins, Pandas, and Panic at the Zoo: Posted by Dr. PeteGoogle’s war on lovable critters escalated on April 24th with the release of the “Penguin” update (originally dubbed the “webspam update” by Google). While every major algorithm update causes some protest, post-Penguin panic seems to be at near

Drive Failures Affecting Some Customers' Rankings and Reports: Posted by Thomas McElroyLate Sunday night through Monday, the harddrives responsible for most of our rankings system failed. These failures have resulted in slower rankings collection, but has not resulted in lost data.What does this mean for customers?The main features

How to Become a Blogging Superstar: Posted by neilpatelThis post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The authors views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views

Mozscape Update: Our Largest Index Yet, 159 Billion URLs: Posted by AndrewDumontOver the last few months our engineering team has been working feverishly on a new index. Our crawlers were extremely successful, but, we ran into a few bumps in the road along the way. Those proverbial bumps shifted our expected launch

Moz's $18 Million Venture Financing: Our Story, Metrics and Future: Posted by randfishToday is a good day. Whether you're a Mozzer, a fan of what we've built, a Seattle-startup supporter or even tangentially involved in the field of web marketing, there's reason to celebrate. After 5 years of organic growth

The Real Impact of the Google SmartPhone Crawler (Part 2): Generating Mobile Redirects Properly: Posted by SuzzicksThis post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The authors views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views

Gathering More Data: Time to Take and Share the 2012 Industry Survey: Posted by Erica McGillivrayBecause we want to gather the best data from a wider sample set, we've extended the Industry Survey deadline until Friday, May 18th. Help your fellow online marketers and take the 2012 Industry Survey today.Our biannual survey

Matt Cutts

Example email to a hacked site: Beyond clear-cut blackhat webspam, the second-biggest category of spam that Google deals with is hacked sites. The most common reaction we hear from webmasters is “The problem is with the Google search. There is nothing wrong with our website.” That’s

New 30 day challenge: No news: I haven’t given an update on my 30 day challenges in, like, forever. So here goes: - In 2011, I paused my 30 day challenges to do a “six month challenge”: training to run a marathon. I ended up running

Eventful Events: Every so often real life catches up with you in ways you didn’t expect. My wife broke her foot a few days ago. She took a unfortunate spill off a stepstool, but she’s telling everyone it was a ninja fight.

It’s time to stop PROTECT IP: A couple months ago, I wrote this about SOPA: SOPA galvanized the tech community, from start-ups to venture capitalists to the largest web companies. SOPA was an unexpected shock and a wake-up call. Well, guess what? Now the internet is

Sharing a search story: I’ve been reading a lot of the coverage of the Search plus Your World launch and I wanted to share my story and then clarify something. I love to stay up until early in the morning playing Werewolf. In early

Larry Lessig on the corrupting influence of money: Larry Lessig has a new book called Republic, Lost which discusses the corrupting influence of money on politics. I would highly recommend the book, because it gets to the heart of why things so many things in Washington, D.C. seem

Beware of fake Matts leaving comments: A lot of the time, I dispel misconceptions by leaving comments on blogs. That works great, except for the rare occasion when someone pretends to be me and leaves a rude, fake, or otherwise untrue blog comment. Over the previous

Progress against SOPA: When I did my blog post about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) last week, things looked quite grim. The fight isn’t over, but there’s been a lot of great developments in the last few days. If you’re not familiar

I need your help–please. Call your congressperson?: (This is post is my personal opinion.) Normally I don’t like to ask people for help, but I could really use your assistance. If you’ve ever watched one of my webmaster videos, or if I’ve responded to you on Twitter,

Grow a moustache and fight cancer!: For my next 30 day challenge, I’ll be growing a mustache to raise awareness and money for men’s health issues, and specifically prostate cancer research. Men of search and SEO, please join our team. You can raise awareness, or raise

Halloween costume: stickman from xkcd: For Halloween this year I asked people on Google+ what I should be for Halloween, and someone suggested going as the blackhat stick man from xkcd. You know, this guy: That sounded like a good challenge. I finished the costume

Halloween Pumpkin: Portal Turret!: I made a Portal turret for my Halloween pumpkin! I was trying to think of things to carve: vampire Android? R2-D2? Zoidberg? Then I thought: I could do a character from Portal 2! I was going to carve something like

New 30 day challenge: going vegan!: Okay, I’m starting up a new 30 day challenge: I’m going to eat vegan for the next 30 days. That means no meat, dairy, or eggs. I’m curious to see how it will go.

What cool new websearch ideas should Google launch in 2012?: Even though this year is nowhere near finished, a lot of people at Google are already thinking about things to launch next year. So I wanted to put the question out: what cool things would you like to see Google

Busy few weeks: I’ve been out of town (hiking in Yosemite and traveling to the East Coast) for two out of the last three weeks, so things are a bit crazy. Besides the usual email overload, there’s a project at work–not related to

Traveling for a week: For the next week or so, I’m going to be hiking in the back country of Yosemite. That’s assuming that my legs hold up: after finishing the San Francisco Marathon at the end of July, my knees and ankles have

Submit video topics for mid-2011: Sometime soon I’m planning to record some new webmaster videos. I created a Google Moderator page where you can post video suggestions and vote topics up and down. Instead of short 1-2 minute video answers to quick questions, I’d like

Good Books for Summer Reading?: It’s summertime, so I’m looking for a bunch of fun books to read. I just ordered two books by John Scalzi (Fuzzy Nation and The God Engines), two books by Dean Karnazes because I’m training to run a marathon (Run!:

Goal: getting email under control: Each year I try to settle on a small set of big goals for the year. Last year my big goal was to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro. This year, I settled on 2-3 goals I wanted to achieve: 1. Go skydiving.

A rel=canonical corner case: I answered an interesting rel=canonical question over email today and thought I’d blog about it. If you’re not familiar with rel=canonical read these pages first. Then watch this video about rel=canonical vs. 301s, especially the second half: Okay, I sometimes

Search Engine Watch

Ford Retains Confidence in Facebook Ads as GM Quits: Automaker tells ClickZ it will continue advertising on the social site. While General Motors may halt Facebook advertising, according to a Wall Street Journal story today, Ford has a different attitude toward paid promotions on the social site.

Life After Google Penguin – Going Beyond the Name: Dont try too hard to look for dates and names of updates. Rather, look more to the effects as Google’s algorithm evolves so you can adapt accordingly. What really matters is that Google is looking harder at link spam now,

7 Time-Saving Google Analytics Custom Reports: The right Custom Reports can be incredible time savers. Instead of spending time digging around for important metrics, you can find what you need separated neatly into columns for some analysis that will lead to some actionable insight.

Piwik Open Source Analytics: A Primer: With a focus on privacy and keeping data safe, Piwik is a web analytics package that aims to be a free software alternative to Google Analytics. Here are some of Piwik’s features and how it compares to other top-billing analytics

Make Second Tier Search Engines Part of Your Lead Generation Strategy: Google and Bing can only get you so far. If you work in an extremely competitive industry you may find yourself paying anywhere from $30 to $50+ per click. Working with second tier engine/networks can provide an abundance of traffic

Social Media Ad Spending Forecast to Hit $9.8 Billion by 2016: Social media advertising revenues in the U.S. will grow from $3.8 billion in 2011 to $9.8 billion in 2016, according to BIA/Kelsey’s U.S. Local Media Forecast (2011-2016). The leap would represent a compound annual growth rate of 21 percent.

Embattled Yahoo CEO Leaves With $7 Million After 5 Months: Yahoo has their fifth CEO in as many years, as Scott Thompson stepped down in the scandal over his padded resume. Investor hedge fund Loeb will exert greater control with three board seats, while Ross Levinsohn takes the interim CEO

5 Vital Facebook Reports Every Community Manager Should Know: Learn how Facebook Insights reports and public data sources can help you understand, at a granular level, the way your community consumes the stories you create, your fans demographic information, and how users are engaging with your competitors.

PPC Warfare: Get Out of the Trenches & Gain a New Strategic Perspective: Sometimes you need to take a step back and review the PPC battleground from afar. Extract yourself from keyword-level analysis and take-in the bigger picture. Here are some motivational and rejuvenating tactics to help get you back on track.

Yahoo Genome Brings Big Data to Advertisers: The big data-driven audience targeting system will combine Yahoos registration, search, and behavioral data with information from 25 data sources, along with advertiser data, to perform predictive modeling for ad targeting and optimization.

A Facebook Search Engine to Rival Google? Users Dislike That Idea: A new survey finds 48 percent of respondents dislike the idea of Facebook launching its own search engine to directly compete with Google and Bing. The same survey also found Facebook could potentially capture 22 percent of the global search

Facebook's Instagram Purchase Faces Government Review: Facebooks $1 billion acquisition of photo-sharing service Instagram is reportedly facing delays of several months, as U.S. regulators probe the deal. As part of the investigation, the Federal Trade Commission has contacted Google and Twitter.

Facebook App Center Announced: Facebook has unveiled plans for its App Center service, which will allow developers to offer their applications to users as both free and paid applications on the iOS and Android mobile platforms, as well as desktop- and web-based applications.

Yahoo Search Market Share Losing Streak Extends to 8 Months: Yahoo’s share of the U.S. search engine market continued to further dwindle in April, continuing a downward slide that began eight months ago in September, according to comScore – though Experian Hitwise paints a somewhat different picture.

Yahoo’s Search Extends Market Share Losing Streak to 8 Months: Yahoo’s share of the U.S. search engine market continued to further dwindle in April, continuing a downward slide that began eight months ago in September, according to comScore – though Experian Hitwise paints a somewhat different picture.

How to Get Rid of Unwanted Backlinks: Hit by a Google penalty because low-quality sites are linking to yours? This process will help you conduct a backlink audit of your website, drill down to identify bad links, and share tools to help you hunt down people who

5 Advanced (But Simple) SEO Analyses You Should Perform With Visitor Intelligence: Collecting the right data and attributing it to the right sources will help you understand how SEO impacts your business. Learn how to structure your data to enable analysis and reporting and SEO analyses you can perform with visitor intelligence.

Multi-Channel Ads: The Importance of 'Scent': TV or Mass Media ads create awareness and possible interest, so PPC, display or Facebook ads should pick up where the other ads leave off. But they can’t pick up anything unless they also carry a scent trail of keywords,

Google Search Results Test Adds More Instant Answers: Some Google users in a test group are seeing a big change to their search results. Search queries for movies, TV shows, people, sports teams, music, books are among those triggering these direct answers directly on Google’s search result pages.

Google Webmaster Tools Gets a Facelift: Google Webmaster Tools has a new look that augments the new functionality Webmaster Tools received last month. The changes include a new look to the dashboard, redesigned menus and a style that more tightly integrates with other Google properties.

Pronet Advertising

How To Market Your Infographics: Tom is the online marketing blogger for Quantum SEO Labs, the link building service company. It is no secret that infographics have become the new ‘it’ thing. Well established as a fantastic way of marketing your content, it is easy

Mobile Marketing: What You Need to Know: Mobile marketing is gaining traction when it comes to online marketing. But despite the advantages that it poses, there are still a lot of businesses that don’t make use of its power to leverage their brand. On the other hand,

AdWords Bid Simulator, Now Available at Campaign Level: It’s difficult whether a marketer needs to increase or decrease his or her bids without any idea of how it could affect an ad performance. Although it has nothing to do with magic, the bid simulator can give insight on

Facebook Fan Page SEO for Real Estate: The last couple of years have seen the Facebook fan page become an all-important part of any realtor’s marketing strategy. Virtually everyone who is anyone in real estate operates a page on Facebook these days – but just having one

SEO Tips You Can Borrow from SEO: There are times that effective pay-per-click strategies can work for search engine optimization and vice versa. In addition, whatever you gain or loss with one can affect your decision for the other. Because a tiny tweak on your PPC campaign

Facebook Tests “Highlighted Posts”: A spokesperson confirmed that Facebook is testing a way for users to promote their post for a certain amount. The test is limited to a small number of users, and it features a “highlight” button next to Like and comment

Bing Re-launches Search Engine with Social Sidebar: Last Thursday, Bing announced its new search engine that puts the spotlight on social search. Although social search on Microsoft’s search engine is nothing new, they off-loaded the social elements on a new sidebar area. With the “new Bing,” users

Boosting Your Page Rank on Search Engine Result Pages: If you want to drive more traffic for your website, you have to boost your presence on search engine result pages. With the World Wide Web housing billions of domains and indexed pages from around the world, every business can

New Bulk Listing Management Tools Land on Google Places: Managing multiple businesses in real world can be carried over online sometimes. Because of that, Google upgraded its bulk listing management tool on Google Places for businesses with multiple locations. What Users Should Expect After hearing plenty of feedback, the

The Patent War in Mobile Arena: Last year has seen the rage of mobile patent wars, as phone makers are applying for, purchasing and suing their nearest competitors over their copyrights. This war in the mobile industry started after Google acquired Motorola Mobility. Who’s Suing Who?

Google Gets a Clean Webmaster Tool: Last May 7, Google announced that they’ve cleaned up their Webmaster Tool. The changes include updated dashboard, new left hand navigation and home compact view. A Peek Inside the Updated Dashboard In hopes that the new navigation will be useful,

SEO Basics for Small Businesses: If you’re new to online marketing, Search Engine Optimization may sound technical for you. However, this strategy is important if you want to establish your brand’s online presence. If you know what to do, you will realize that SEO can

Social Media Boost in Medicine: Threats and Reality: Like the members of nearly every other niche in 2012, those in the medical profession, including doctors, are increasingly turning to social media and blogging for both personal and professional use. While that may seem an innocuous thing to some,

AdCenter Migration in UK, Ireland and France is Now Complete: Last May 4, the Microsoft and Yahoo! Search Alliance announced that the adCenter migration from Yahoo! Search Marketing for advertisers in United Kingdom, Ireland and France is now complete. The migration started last February following the previous move of all

Creating a Domain Name that Works for Your Business: If you’re serious about establishing an online presence for your business, you should start with grabbing a great domain name. Having a domain that will help your brand stand out will make it easy for your target market to remember

Foursquare Adds “Check-in History” Feature: Last May 4, location-based social media network Foursquare added its latest feature, the Check-in History. This will enable users to review their whole check-in history, including images, tips and who else was there. On the other hand, this will allow

What You Need to About Internet Marketing: Promoting your business online is not easy as it seems. It requires that you research who your target audience is, how you can make your website search engine-friendly, and how you can make your content look professional to your audience.

What Is Strange Facebook Language?: Tom Chu is the SEO manager at PsPrint, an company specializing in online printing. PsPrint offers an array of free tools, for example it lets you make your own business cards online In the early 90′s, the Internet became, for

Using Twitter to Promote Your Brand: Aside from being a micro-blogging site, Twitter has proved itself to be an effective online marketing tool. However, some businesses make the mistake of using it as a mere promotional device. If you want to benefit from your Twitter marketing

Common Mistakes to Avoid in Facebook Marketing: Facebook is one of the largest platforms that businesses use when it comes to social media marketing. However, there are companies who still struggle to master its basics. In having an effective Facebook marketing campaign, it’s important that you know

SEO Black Hat

Google Lied about Manually Changes: The Lie was told here by Udi Manber, and repeated by Matt Cutts. And I quote:‘At Google we do not manually change results. For example, if we find for a particular query that result No. 4 should be result No.

Clicksteam For Dummies: How The Ranking Factor Works: Since the majority of people can’t seem to figure out how clickstream data could be used as a Search Engine Ranking Factor, without ever scraping the actual page, I’ll give you a hint.

Bing is Just Better: Google is scared. They call Bing’s Results “a Cheap imitation”, but the fact is that Bing is now consistently delivering better results.

Bing is Just Better: Google is scared. They call Bing’s Results “a Cheap imitation”, but the fact is that Bing is now consistently delivering better results.

Anti PR SEO – Made Profitable by Google: Hows that old saying go? No publicity is bad publicity.

Epassporte Dropped by Visa: Pretty amazing the did that all at once like that: leaving epassporte high and dry.

It’s Google Reads My Mind!: Scary how they just know what youre gonna search for.

Search Engine Roundtable

Daily Search Forum Recap: May 16, 2012: Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...

Google Update Brewing? What Is Going On?: These are typically signs of an update happening in Google. Maybe a Panda or Penguin refresh? Maybe a new Google bug? Maybe a new penalty or an old one being run again? Or maybe it is something completely different or

Google Maps Now With Home & Work Saved Locations: One of my pet peeves with Google Maps is that it doesnt remember my home or office location, even though I am signed in. So I have to type it out each time I want to check directions or time

Google AdWords Travel Season Advertisers Inforgraphic: Zee, a Google AdWords representative...

Vanessa From Google Places Offers Weekly Video Recaps: Exciting news for you local SEO nuts out there that love watching videos - Googles Google Places community manager. Vanessa Schneider is now producing weekly videos recapping the most exciting topics in the Google Places Help forum...

Google & Facebook Can Work Together: Timeline Timeline

Daily Search Forum Recap: May 15, 2012: Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...

Google's Algorithms Find Stuffed Title Attributes As Sneaky: I spotted a thread at Google Webmaster Help where a site owner was upset his page was not ranking well.Googler, John Mueller took a look and noticed an unusually high amount of title attributes used on the page...

Free Directory Sites Dropping Out Of Google?: A WebmasterWorld thread has one SEO noticing that Google has started to purge their index of the free directory submission web sites.He said that about 50% of the free directory submission web sites are no longer to be found in

Bing Search Update? Crawl Changes?: There is a single post at WebmasterWorld where a senior member is complaining that Bing has reduced the number of pages they have indexed of his site. He said he had about 500,000 URLs URLs indexed and now he only

Video Parody: Google's Cutts On Ranking #1: Sam Applegate put together this awesomely funny video mashup of Matt Cutts on how to rank number one in Google. As you can see...

Classy: Google Chrome Wrist Watch

Daily Search Forum Recap: May 14, 2012: Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...

Google Penguin 1.1 Update Underway? Recoveries?: There are some reports of major shuffling going on in the Google search results as of yesterday. I believe from the reports that it may be a Penguin update - but I do not have confirmation from Google on this

Google Places Bug: Videos Go Missing: Yet another Google Maps bug to report but to be fair, they might all be related - this one is of the videos not showing on Google Maps/Places landing pages for businesses.A Google Places Help thread has confirmed reports from

Yahoo Loses Another CEO: This Is Beyond Ridiculous: Yahoo has been going through CEOs like toilet paper recently.Their latest CEO...

Ad Review Center Missing Google AdSense Ads To Review?: A WebmasterWorld thread has several reports from Google AdSense publishers that the Ad Review Center has some recent bugs disabling the ability to see new ads for review.Around May 8th...

comScore & Hitwise Release April Search Market Share Reports: Hitwise released their April search market share report and comScore released theirs.Both sources say that Bing powers just about 30% search market share (between Microsoft and Yahoo properties together). Hitwise says Google dropped in market share...

LinkedIn Bike Parked At Google

Happy Mother's Day From The Search Industry: I wanted to wish all the mothers out there a very happy Mothers Day! To celebrate the special day, the search industry has put together tons and tons of logos.

SEO Chat

Using Semantics for Keyword Research: Semantics concerns the meaning of words historically a weak area for search engines. Over the years weve seen vast improvement in Googles ability to understand what searchers mean when they enter keywords. You can capitalize on this fact by

Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson Resigns: Just ten days after the revelation that Scott Thompson did not, in fact, hold the computer science degree he claimed on his resume, the new Yahoo CEO is resigning his position. Thompson, who replaced Carol Bartz, held the position barely

Bing Launches Social Sidebar: When Microsoft cleaned up Bings results pages earlier this month, a number of observers wondered if it was trying to imitate an earlier, less cluttered version of Google. In actuality, the software giant was clearing the decks for a new

Write Content For the Four Buying Personalities: In my previous article I talked about four main goals or personas you should keep in mind when writing content for your website. Your visitors display a lot more variety than that, though. Four different visitors could have the same

Write SEO Content for Your Visitor`s Goals: How do your websites visitors spend their time online? That can vary not only from person to person, but at different times with the same person. Why? Users pursue a variety of different goals. If you keep this in mind,

Guest Posting: How to Find and Seduce Your Editor: You know all the benefits that writing a guest post for a well-read blog in your niche can offer. You know you can write great content because youre an expert in your field. But how do you get into guest

Title Tags: Not Just for Keywords Anymore: I very nearly titled this article The Truth About Keywords in Title Tags. I didnt because Im no longer sure that anyone has all of it. If youre ready to rethink one of the most basic things youve ever learned

Penguin Joins Panda in Google Web Spam War: Early last week, Google began using a new algorithm to help it combat webspam from black hat SEOs. Dubbed Penguin, it aims to eliminate from the search engines listings websites that engage in certain shady practices. But how well does

Facebook Releases Negative Report Before IPO: Could Facebooks cash machine be slowing down? Thats one possible conclusion observers can draw from the paperwork the company recently filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. While its not likely to slow down investors, its not the best news

Increase Traffic With the Triangle of Trust: If youve never heard of the triangle of trust before, keep reading. Its an easy way for you to get tons of traffic, top search positions, and more sales.

Google CEOs to Search Asteroids for Resources: Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and current Google CEO (and co-founder) Larry Page are investing part of their considerable fortunes into a search operation of a very different sort. Named Planetary Resources, the new company hopes to find something worth

Will Scamming Slaughter Social Search Signals?: In the old days, black hat SEOs bought links from other websites to manipulate the signals seen by Google. The practice got them to the top of the SERPs until the Panda updates. Now, some SEOs are buying likes

What`s Behind Blekko`s Spike in Popularity?: Blekko, the little hash tag search engine that could, will likely see four times the traffic at the end of this month that it saw at the start of January. While still a drop in the bucket compared to Google,

The Challenge of SEO for Large Enterprises: Search engine optimization for a large company or organization comes with challenges not typically encountered when doing SEO for small business websites. How do you get everyone on the same page, when SEO affects so many people and departments? This

Social Media Optimization Tips for Your Blog: Convincing visitors to share your blog posts on social media sites isnt really hard. Its more a matter of moving barriers out of their way and making it easy for them to share like setting your dogs food and

Yahoo Reorganizes in Face of Dropping Market Share: The ax started falling at Yahoo last week and it wasnt pretty. About 2,000 employees got pink slips. With the latest report from comScore, though, one might be forgiven for wondering if it was the correct 2,000.

Viral Writing: the Beauty of Controversy: Id never heard of Samantha Brick before last week, when her article for the Daily Mail in the UK went viral as did its follow-up. Literally thousands of readers posted nasty comments and shared her article, while many journalists

20 Unusual Things You Can Do To Promote Your Site: Its hard to come up with an idea to promote your site or business that really makes it stand out. Offering discounts is fine, but how memorable is it? Keep reading for some unusual (and very cool) ideas that you

Yahoo Layoffs Beginning This Week: Yahoos new CEO, Scott Thompson, appears set to leave his mark on the troubled search company. Many in the media reported plans for massive layoffs at Yahoo starting the middle of this week, followed by restructuring next week.

Matt Cutts: Let Googlebot Crawl JavaScript, CSS: Last week, Google webspam guru Matt Cutts posted a short video that he described as a public service announcement to webmasters. In it, he asked them to stop blocking Googlebot from crawling JavaScript or CSS.

Online Marketing Blog

Interview: The Future of Cloud Marketing Software with Vocus CMO Jason Jue: At TopRank Online Marketing, we are fortunate to provide consulting to quite a few innovative B2B companies that serve other marketers. A great example of that is PRWeb and parent company, Vocus, both long standing clients. In late 2011 Vocus welcomed

Channel Your Internal Marketing Warrior: 4 Tips for Strengthening Your Marketing Plan: In March of this year I made a decision: I wanted to get healthier. The problem I have always faced is that I didn’t see the point of exercise, just for the sake of exercise. Treadmills and stationary bicycles never

5 Ways to Optimize the Business Value of Attending Conferences: TopRank receives a lot of value from having me speak at conferences but you don’t have to be a speaker to realize a positive return from events. Small, large online or offline, there are numerous ways to optimize and maximize your

Online Marketing News: Take Action on Social Data, LinkedIn Gets the Scoop, Google Reigns Supre(...): Actionable Social Analytics This recent infographic by awareness takes a dive into social analytics. In an era where virtually every brand is online, it is essential that action is being taken off of the data we are collecting from social networks.

Holistic Optimization Across the Sales Cycle: Optimize Speaking Events May & June: When you have a business that relies on attracting new business online the sheer volume of options can be confusing. Should offline advertising efforts transfer to online? Maybe email marketing? What about SEO or the hot topic, social media? So

What Are the Most Important Social Networks for Business?: If you’ve been involved with marketing on the web for 10 years or more, could you have imagined what the web looks like today back in 2002? Considering the changes over the past year between Google, Facebook, Pinterest and Mobile,

It’s Like Deja Vu All Over Again: 4 Tips for Improving Marketing for Small Business: At some time or another we have all experienced that eerie sense of familiarity where we’ve “been there” or “done that” before. Whether it is an actual memory or simply a “brain fart”, deja vu is an interesting experience. Let’s

Search Engine Journal

A Keen Mind in Sheep’s Clothing: Zuckerberg moves almost as fast as you can say “hoodie.” While we were feasting our eyes on the media’s fascination regarding Mark’s choice in clothing, Facebook donned itself in two more acquisitions. I say ‘more,’ in reference to the few-week

‘Relevancy is King’ Says Google VP at SMX London: In his opening keynote at SMX London, Amit Singhal, VP and Google Fellow, who rewrote the original Google algorithm upon his hire in 2000, said today that “Relevancy is King”. He added that Google looks at a combination of three

Facebook Update: Higher Target IPO Price Resulting in Stakeholder Liquidation: On Tuesday, the world’s largest social network raised the target IPO price range to $34 to $38. If Facebook shares sell at the upper limit ($38), the social network will raise about $12.8 billion and its market value will be

Why Did GM Drop Facebook Advertising?: I am sure you heard yesterday that GM stopped investing in ad space on Facebook. New research on Facebook advertising performance from WordStream may offer a few clues as to why General Motors discontinued advertising on the massive social network.

5 Local Resources to Boost Your Local Rankings: Local search engine optimization (SEO) is a specialized form of SEO focused on optimizing businesses and their websites for optimal visibility in local search engines. Local search takes into consideration not only the keyword the searcher entered, but also the

Most Popular SEJ Articles for April 2012: April was a big traffic month for us and that means we had some fantastic and informative articles you should read. Below are the top 10 articles based on traffic numbers. Happy reading! 1). 24 Eye-Popping SEO Statistics by Eric

Advertising on SEJ Made Easy with BuyAds.com & iSocket: Interested in advertising your company or SEO tool on Search Engine Journal? Thanks to our new partner BuyAds.com, you can now avoid contacting me altogether ;) We now offer direct advertising on SEJ via BuyAds.com’s self-service ad platform, which is

Visualizing Link Data With Screaming Frog and Excel Part 1: When Google rolled out penguin there was a tizzy online. Site owners freaked out, SEOs began running tests and searches to figure out what exactly happened. One of the characteristics that seemed to be popping up was over use of

Google-Backed Offshore Power Project Moving Forward: A Google-backed project, the Atlantic Wind Connection, cleared the first of many regulatory hurdles yesterday. The U.S. Department of the Interior said that no competitors have an “overlapping competitive interest” and cleared Atlantic Grid Holdings LLC to proceed with an

Report: CTR by Browser Version — Chrome and Safari: Chrome Google Chrome has only been around since 2008, but the company has pumped out 18 releases of the software in those five short years, with two more in working development. While users of older Chrome versions have a relatively

How to Improve Productivity When Working with AdWords: Are you an online marketing expert and thinking about launching an AdWords account? Currently using AdWords but find that it just takes up too much of your time throughout the day? Any experienced AdWords user will know that when setting

5 Tips for Conducting Semantic Keyword Research: With the recent launch of Google’s “Penguin” algorithm change – which aims to cut webspam detected through a number of different avenues including low value backlinks and keyword stuffing – deploying proper keyword optimization across your websites will become more

Google Considering $100M Meebo Acquisition: According to several inside sources, Google is reportedly in serious talks to acquire the social platform Meebo. Although Meebo CEO Seth Strenberg has not commented on the negotiations, Google is expected to pay approximately $100 million for the seven-year-old technology

Google Chrome Commercial Pulls on the Heart Strings: One thing that irritates me more than anything is stupid commercials. Some are so incredibly bad I just can’t believe that big brands have paid for the commercials to be made. So last night I am watching TV and this

4 Content Techniques That Will Improve SEO & Sales: On the back of Panda, Penguin and any other updates Google has stored in the Zoo, writing SEO content has become more and more about delivering a better user experience. Gone are the days of keyword laden text that reads

Friday Humor: Avengers Style: Joffrey Baratheon vs. Stark / Iron Man Source: a6.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net via Melissa on Pinterest Thor Jersey Style Source: smosh.com via Melissa on Pinterest Hulk’s Father Source: Uploaded by user via Melissa on Pinterest All Women Need an Ironing

SEOmoz Spam Research Project to Provide Marketers Useful Information: Rand Fishkin, the CEO of the popular SEO software company SEOmoz, recently announced a new project related to webspam research. The goal of the project is to better understand and devalue the amount of “link equity” that passes from pages

Yahoo ‘Whoops’ Dominoes: Pick a concern, any concern. That’s what some Yahoo internal minds could be thinking about the brand’s present state of affairs. Where could the trail of anxiety begin? How about at the notion of trailing another search engine with a

Rand Fiskin Discusses Myths, Realities, and Precautions of Negative SEO: This Whiteboard Friday video is very educational and is a great tool to help business associates, managers and even clients understand how critical it is have a solid SEO monitoring and maintaining your website(s) and SEO. Rand explains how negative

How to Use Social Media for Powerselling: Interview with John Lawson: We’re all familiar with the concept of making money off the internet. Some of us may have even been burned by get-rich schemes that lure people in with the promise of quick returns with minimal effort (translation: truckloads of money

Graywolf's SEO Blog

Shoeboxed.com Review – Receipt Scanning & Business Card Scanning Software: The following is a review of Shoeboxed.com, a receipt scanning and business card scanning service. To be honest keeping receipts, accounting, or any book keeping work is pretty much something I hate. I can’t tell you how many times I’d

Why Offline Stores and Small Businesses Need to Embrace Online Shopping and Build Better Websites: I recently wrote a story How Brick and Mortar Stores Can Use eCommerce to Drive Sales about tips that eCommerce stores can use to drive traffic to their brick and mortar locations. However, what really needs to happen is offline

Does Your Small Business Need a Facebook and Twitter Social Media Account: It’s 2012 and social media and social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook are constantly mentioned on mainstream media, news and entertainment websites, and broadcast programs. Print ads for everything from movies to toothpaste have those ubiquitous little Facebook and

Why Website Owners Should Be Using Pinterest: A lot has been said and written about Pinterest in the past few weeks and months, from how marketers can use use it to drive traffic to how affiliate spammers are using it to generate income. However, I’m going to

Why You Need Different Templates for Your Website: Recently I’ve been talking with some friends who don’t fit into the traditional SEO, publisher, or writer-with-delusional-dreams-of-becoming-a-famous-blogging-rock-star categories. They want to build and run websites in their spare time about subjects they are interested in. But they don’t want them

Why You Need Different Types of Web Pages: Received exception: HTTP-Error: 301 Moved Permanently RuntimeError: HTTP-Error: 301 Moved Permanently At line 549 in ‘client.rb’ (inside method ‘do_rpc’) At line 420 in ‘client.rb’ (inside method ‘call2’) At line 410 in ‘client.rb’ (inside method ‘call’) At line 34 in ‘metaweblog.rb’

SEO Secrets, Tips & Tricks – Why it’s Not Worth Your Your Time: Whenever I go to conference, or at least a dozen times a week by email, I get asked what are some “SEO secrets” or hey what keywords do you rank for, and can you show me some of your websites.

How to Cross Post From Twitter to Your Facebook Page: One of the questions I get asked by clients who are developing a social media strategy is should I cross post my Facebook posts to Twitter and vice versa, or does everything need to be unique? IMHO you need to

Facebook Brand Page Timeline Checklist: Starting March 30th, all Facebook brand pages and profile pages will be switching to the new timeline format. Some brands have already made the change, but, if you haven’t, here’s a handy checklist of items you need to be aware

Online Reputation Management and the “Spaghetti Method”: Online reputation management (ORM) is a huge, and growing market. For others it means they have a huge public relations problem. I have worked with a few companies and individuals with just such a problem. I’ll tell you the story

Thanks to This Month’s Sponsors Feb 2012: I’d like to say thanks to the people who sponsored the blog this month, without them there wouldn’t be regular posts here. Text Link Ads – New customers can get $100 in free text links. BOTW.org – Get a premier

The Epic Failure of Google+: In the past, I’ve not been shy about hiding my dislike for some of Google’s practices. In fact, I’ve called them everything from an arrogant bully to an incestuous circle jerk, trapped in a filter bubble world . But recently

SEO 101: Getting the Right URL Structure: On my list of top 5 problems I encounter when doing client work, the number one problem is poor URL structure. In this post I’ll go over the basics, how to get it right, what are the most common problems,

Why the iPad, Flash, Adobe Products and User Agent Detection Really Do Matter: Being the owner of a Macbook Pro, iPhone, and iPad, you might consider me an Apple Fanboy. I can tell you I’ve been involved in web development long enough to tell you that the current state of usability on the

Why Google Thinks SPYW is a Good Idea and You Probably Don’t: In a recent statement Larry Page said if you don’t get SPYW then maybe you shouldn’t work at Google. To understand why he thinks this is such a good idea–and why the rest of the world thinks it isn’t–we need

How to Write Blog Posts For Your Existing and Repeat Customers: When you run a corporate blog sometimes it’s difficult to come up with interesting topics on a regular basis. In the past I’ve spoken about a few options like creating a series, how to posts and evergreen content. In this

Using Social Media Profiles for ORM: Whenever you are involved in an ORM (Online Reputation Management) campaign, your goal is to displace negative results in the search engines with positive results. In a previous post we looked at creating microsites. In this post, we are going

10 Commandments of Affiliate Web Design: This is a guest post by Gab Goldenberg, author of the advanced SEO book. Get a free chapter on link building here and check out his book affiliate program – the site boasts a 5.5% conversion rate to sale! Affiliate

Creating Microsites for ORM: Generally speaking, Using Microsites is a bad idea. However, Using Microsites is a good idea is when you are conducting an ORM campaign (Online Reputation Management) and are looking to displace some negative or unfavorable results. In this post, I’ll

Building Links & Driving Traffic with How To Posts: When you are looking to build links and drive traffic, one of the time tested methods that continues to work is creating “how to” style posts. In this article, we’ll look at some examples and discuss how to get the

All credits go to the authors of these sites. Without their hard work Original Signal would not exist. Last updated on May 17th 2012 05:25 | Contact