Industry News

The world, it seems, just cannot wait for Facebook to come along and start its own search engine and knock Google off the top of search mountain. The rumors and expectations of this go back for years. Now the latest twist: Yahoo and Facebook will team up together. If you’re banking on that potential alliance taking out Google, much less Bing, let me offer up a reality check. Report: Yahoo & Facebook Talking Search

Let’s start with the current news that has various tech blogs lighting up...

Many times when businesses invest in improving online conversion rates, the practice goes something like this: Brainstorm a list of things that can be changed in the conversion process or on the landing page Determine which are easy to build/test Create a set of A/B or multivariate tests to run through them Allow winning changes to remain

Unfortunately, this process diminishes what CRO can achieve. It’s my belief that conversion rate optimization needs to be a practice that’s separate from...

I spoke at PubCon 2012 last month in Las Vegas. A couple people have asked for my slides, so here they are:





Several of the slides have links to additional information, in case you’re interested. We announced the disavow links tool during my session so that’s what a lot of the slides are about.

Twitter is rolling out an update to its search results that will put a new “Top Photos” section above matching tweets. “Top Videos” may also appear. Twitter will also begin automatically showing tweeted pictures for those searching on the iPhone or with Android devices. Top Photos & Videos

Twitter already shows top photos and images for a search, but these have been placed off to the side of the main search results, like this:



With the change, top pictures and videos will come above...

When is personalized search not personalized search? A recently discovered shift on how Google may alter your search results based on what you — and others in aggregate — previously have searched for may have you wondering how to answer that question.

To understand the latest development, I think it’s helpful to go back and review the “flavors” of personal search that Google has, flavors that often all get mixed together. Let’s dive in. Personalization Based On Geography

Google has long...

This week at Distilled’s Searchlove conference in Boston (which, BTW, is probably the best marketing content I’ve seen at an event, period, including Mozcon – yes, I’m a little jealous), I presented the slide deck below on earning marketing love: Can’t Buy Me Love from Rand Fishkin

For those of you who’ve seen me present this year, or who’ve followed my decks on Slideshare, you can probably tell that this one’s a significant upgrade from the past, and an obvious amalgamation of prior...

One of the things Google promised by moving Google Shopping to the pay-to-play model for merchants was how much the experience was going to improve for shoppers. If that’s the case, I’m sure not seeing it. Come on a little tour. Amazon Don’t Play That Game

The new system began on October 17. Perhaps the most striking change by Google deciding that it would only list merchants if they pay to be included is the absence of a little known online retailer called Amazon. Nope, Amazon doesn’t want...