Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
From Search Engine Land:
- Starbucks & The Economist Admit To Using Google+ For SEO More Than Social
Last Friday, a New York Times report on Google+ spotlighted Starbucks and The Economist as two brands currently using Google+ to impact search efforts. Alex Wheeler, Starbuck’s vice president of global digital marketing, told The New York Times, “When we think about posting on Google+, we think about how does it relate to our search […] - Google Adds, Then Pulls, Advice Not To Block Ad Landing Pages From Its Crawler
On Wednesday/Thursday of last week, Google added a new guideline to their Webmaster Guidelines to “not block a destination URL for a Google Ad product” via your robots.txt file. 24-hours later, Google reversed that guideline and put the webmaster guidelines back to exactly how they were Wednesday morning. Here was the addition and then what […] - Bing: Don’t Be Held Hostage Over The Perfect Domain Name
Duane Forrester, Bing’s Senior Product Manager, posted on the Bing Webmaster Blog that you should not be too crazed over picking an expensive domain name for your new web site. He said, even when you buy old domain names that are pricy, those domain names may have some bad history. Domain names with bad history […] - Lessons From Google On Optimizing Your SEO
Dan Cobley, Google UK’s Managing Director, recently revealed that Google’s infamous 2007 “50 Shades of Blue” experiment involving ad links in Gmail increased revenue by $200 million a year. These results switched the balance of power from design-driven to engineering data-driven decisions, and famously led Google’s top designer, Doug Bowman, to ultimately to resign in frustration. […] - Madoogle SEO Game: Angry Birds As SEOs
Friday we covered an SEO computer game named Donkey Cutts, a play off Donkey Kong. Today, I was informed of another SEO computer game launched about a month ago named Madoogle. This game is a play on Angry Birds, where you swap out the birds with SEO personalities and the pigs with black hats. The […] - Google Publishes Full Text Of EU Antitrust Agreement
This afternoon on its European Blog, Google’s General Counsel Kent Walker exposed the full text of the company’s third-proposed and tentatively accepted antitrust settlement agreement with European Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia. Almunia previously declined to make the full agreement available. The document, dated January 31, 2014, is quite long (embedded below) and contains extensive examples of […] - For Robocop, Bing Imagines The Future Of Search In 2028
What will search look like in 2028? That’s a question that the folks at Bing were tasked with answering for the new movie, Robocop. (Well, “new” as in a remake of the 1987 original that just hit theaters this week.) In a blog post this week, the Bing search folks shared a few screenshots showing […]
Recent Headlines From MarTech, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:
- Report: New Global Internet Growth Will Mostly Be Mobile
- What Marketers Need To Know About Mobile Usage During Holiday 2013
- What Does Omni-Channel Brand Marketing Look Like?
- Get To Know: HootSuite’s VP Of Marketing
- The Less You Read, The More You Share?
- Twitter Trends Now Showing In 50 Additional International Locations
- Marketing Land Summit Preview: “The Coming Paradigm Shift In Mobile Marketing” By MobileMoxie’s Cindy Krum
- KLM Becomes First Airline To Take Payments Via Twitter
Search News From Around The Web:
Industry
- Finding an Address for the Next Wave of Innovators, Bing Search Blog
- More on Mayer’s Search Plans for Yahoo: The “Three S’s” and Slipping Through a Microsoft Loophole, Re/code
Local & Maps
- Visitors to online directories & IYPs drops 22% in 2013, BrightLocalBrightLocal
- Which Sites Do Consumers Use to Find a Local Business? Why YP.com is Facing Headwinds, Mike Blumenthal
Link Building
- Build brand awareness by getting better links, Branded3
- Complete Guide to Smart Manual Link Cleanup, Steve Brownlie
- Google Updates Pt. 2: Getting to Know the Penguin Algorithm, WrightIMC
- NetVoucherCodes.co.uk Push Out ‘The Donkey Cutts’ Game Amid Claims of Negative SEO, David Naylor
- New Rules for SEO Mechanics & Link Building – It’s a Race You’re Probably Not Winning, Online Marketing Blog
- Q: How Many Links Should you Build in 2014? A: All of Them, Search Engine Journal
Searching
- Calling All Coders: Bing Code Search Arrives, Bing Search Blog
- Computing for the Gold: Exploring Olympic Science with Wolfram|Alpha, Wolfram|Alpha Blog
- Five ways in which search is evolving, Econsultancy
SEO
- 4 Black Hat SEO Techniques to Avoid: How to Build Traffic the Right Way, Search Engine People
- Google: Going HTTPS Won’t Noticeably Change Your Rankings, Search Engine Roundtable
- Panda UJan14 – Uncovering the Google Panda Update from January 11, 2014, hmtweb.com
- SEO for Penalized Websites, Kaiserthesage
SEM / Paid Search
- Getting the Right Message Across with Clear and Accurate Ad Copy in Bing Ads, Bing Ads Blog
- GoogleBot Follows Up To Five Redirects In One Crawl, Search Engine Roundtable
- Pleading the Case for Conversion Rate Optimization, PPC Hero
- Reminder: Change to contentBid setting in “Display Network Only” campaigns, Google Ads Developer Blog
- The BIG List of Common and Uncommon Landing Page Best Practices for PPC, Clix Marketing PPC Blog
Search Marketing
- Maximize Your Click Through Rate: Tips on Writing Killer Ad Copy, Vertical Measures
- The Journey of an Average SEO – True Story, Epicster
- The Ultimate Guide to Keyword ‘(Not Provided)’, Spyder Trap
