Industry News

I was playing around on Followerwonk tonight (man that tool is awesome) and was puzzled by the bio search results for “SEO.” Have a look:

 Danny Sullivan’s Twitter profile certainly makes sense, but the ones above him are curious. I’ve never heard of any of these folks (which certainly could be my fault for being more heads-down lately), nor are they brands I recognize. The tweet streams from these accounts frequently contain purely promotional content, often with large numbers of retweets...

Bing is attacking Google over its shift to a pay-for-play shopping search engine through a new “Scroogled” site, pledging that Bing has “honest search.” Great campaign, if it were true. It’s not. Bing itself does the same things it accuses Google of. It’s also another indictment of how little the FTC is doing to protect consumers from “search results” they might not realize are ads. Google Shopping Goes All-Ads

Earlier this year, Google changed to a “paid inclusion” or pay-to-play model of...

“What’s the use of PRWeb?,” tweeted Megan McCarthy of Reuters, trying to digest how that service ended up circulating a fake Google acquisition story. Come along, Megan and others, and I’ll explain one of the sorriest uses, getting crap into Google News and out into news sites.

For those who somehow missed today’s big tech news, PRWeb ran a press release saying that WiFi provider ICOA was being acquired by Google for $400 million. Plenty of outlets carried the news, until denials from both...

It’s been about two months since Google launched a “news keywords” meta tag for news publishers. How’s it going? Why didn’t Google the standard meta keywords tag? The company’s not saying, but it did shed a little more light on how to use the tag.

Google launched the news keywords tag in September, designed as a way for news publishers to work around the fact that often the key terms they want their stories to be found for don’t make it into the story headlines.

The primary reason for...

It can seem odd that people search for “Google” on Google, but they do. And for those who do within Google News, the company has been running ads encouraging them to make Google their homepage.

I noticed this happening in the middle of last month, and you can still see it happening today:

The ad says, “Make Google Your Homepage” with the message “Access Google Conveniently By Setting It As Your Browser Homepage,” as you can see in close-up below:

I’ve seen at least one other...

It’s been about six months since Bing unveiled its Social Sidebar, and the search engine is now testing a new format that drops the gray background and which shows more matching content from friends and social networks. Before & After

Here’s an example of how the Social Sidebar still looks for most people:

Here’s the “after” view, or how it appears to the tiny number of people seeing the new look: The Visual Changes

In terms of visual changes, the new format: Replaces the gray...