Industry News

Merry Christmas to all of you who celebrate today. There is literally no SEO news today, at least none I can find worth posting today. So I figured I would share the different logos, themes and designs the search industry has come up for Christmas...

Where’s Santa Claus? When will he arrive? Those are questions millions of children around the world are wondering this Christmas Eve. To help, two wonderful services stand ready as usual: NORAD Tracks Santa and Google Santa Tracker.

We here at Search Engine Land also stand ready, as usual, with our own tradition: the annual review of both services and how to get the most out of them, whether you’re accessing them from the web or a smartphone, or even by making an old-fashioned voice phone...

Today is Festivus, when you should be airing your grievances and putting up the Festivus pole — assuming you celebrate the entirely fictional holiday invented by the Seinfeld television series in 1997. Google’s again in the spirit providing everyone with their own Festivus pole.

Just search for “festivus” on Google, and you’ll see the pole to the left of Google’s search results:



The pole even has a little stand way down at the bottom of the page. At the top, the page reminds you...

What do a site on Bitcoin and a Polish bank have in common? Both are ranking well in Google for searches about downloading games, something neither offer. The reason? Both may be victims of a new hacking onslaught revolving around gaining top listings on Google and redirecting visitors to other sites. How Bait & Switch Hacking Works

With bait-and-switch hacking, someone gains access to a site and begins publishing pages on topics that the site itself doesn’t normally cover. The site...

Leigh Miller – Yankee Stadium, francis_leigh, Some rights reserved

A couple of months ago, I wrote about a Google patent that involved rewriting queries, titled Investigating Google RankBrain and Query Term Substitutions. There’s likely a lot...

Google's Zineb Ait Bahajji announced on Google+ that they added a new filter to the Google Search Console report for apps named Search Appearance. This report will show you by keyword and other metrics who clicked the install button for your app...

Over the course of a few days in mid-December, I ran a survey asking folks about their experiences at conferences and events in the marketing world. 248 people replied, primarily via Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn. Despite the small number of questions, I found the responses immensely valuable and quite interesting. A few even caught me by surprise. SMX Munich in 2014 (via Web & Tech)

To start, let’s look at which conferences were most popular/attended in our field:



Not...

Forget mobile first, now it's HTTPS first. Google announced last night that they will be indexing HTTPS by default from now on. That means GoogleBot will start crawling HTTPS equivalents of HTTP pages...