Industry News

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...

I know we just reported yesterday about a potential Google update on December 10th but now I am seeing some early chatter, supported by some of the automated rank checking tools...

Wondering when the Super Bowl is being held next year? Don’t depend on Google. The search engine can’t seem to make up its mind.

For the record, Super Bowl 50 will be held on Sunday, Feb. 7, 2016. The exact time still seems not to have been set. But if you ask Google, it sometimes gives the right location (Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California) but the wrong date of Saturday, Feb. 6:



As you can see above, Google’s direct answer for “when is the super bowl” shows Super Bowl 50...

Remember the unconfirmed Google update from November 19th? Well, there is speculation that there are still fluctuations around that update that are continuing to roll out.