Industry News

Cast your mind back to November 2011, only a few months after the launch of Google+. That’s when Google made one of its biggest Google+ification moves. It demoted a long-standing search feature involving the plus symbol so that searchers could instead more easily reach new “Google+ Pages” that had been launched. Today, this “Direct Connect” feature is forgotten and broken. How Direct Connect Worked

When Direct Connect launched, Google promised that people could go directly to popular pages...

Here is the video from last week's SMX Advanced last week with Matt Cutts and Danny Sullivan...

 

Let’s face it – filling out forms sucks. Nobody enjoys it. Nevertheless, a lot of people endure it because it’s the only way get to the good stuff “behind the form”. The easier and simpler you make the process of filling out your forms, the more conversions you are likely to get.

Here’s a case study where simplifying a 3-step lead gen form increased the completion rate by 30%. I made extensive changes to the form, and in this post we’ll go over all of them one by one. Check out the case...

A WebmasterWorld thread has one webmaster claiming he received a reconsideration request rejection notice and in that notice...

As I covered this morning at Search Engine Land - Will Google & Bing Penalize Microsoft Over Their Sponsored Post Campaign For Internet Explorer?
I suspect they will have to.
What happened?
Microsoft seems to have contracted SocialChorus to run a campaign to generate buzz and awareness over their new Internet Explorer. As you know, IE has been getting a pretty bad rap these days.

There are a tremendous number of claims from across the search marketing world that negative SEO (the practice of knocking someone else’s website/page(s) out of search results by pointing spam links at them) is not only possible, but has been done. One of the most recent and, IMO, most credible came via this SERoundtable post (where 48% of respondents to a poll said they were personally able to knock a competitor out of the rankings).

Unfortunately, what we don’t have is a solid, compelling,...

As part of the regular business analysis that I do on an ongoing basis, I like to keep an eye out for acquisitions made by search engines, and look at the technology that those companies being acquired have filed patents for. When I heard about...

As I reported from the airport Thursday night at Search Engine Land, Google's Matt Cutts said the Payday Loan Algorithm was rolling out but truth is, I haven't seen signs of it.
In fact, I've asked many folks in the black hat and spammy categories about this and they've seen nothing. There is only...

Last week, we reported that Google is improving their reconsideration request rejections with more feedback.

Well...