Industry News

Catch up on interesting new discussion and industry news.

    The Death of Keyword Ranking Reports? 10 Superior SEO Stats - Whiteboard Friday

    Feb 6, 2014
    We all look at keyword rankings, but are they still a useful metric to report? In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Cyrus Shepard discusses how changes in search have made individual keyword rankings a shaky metric at best, and he presents 10 needle-moving numbers to measure and report instead.

    Death of Keyword Ranking Reports - Whiteboard...

    February 2014 Google Webmaster Report

    rustybrick
    by rustybrick
    Feb 6, 2014
    Here is the monthly recap for all Google webmaster related topics for the past month. January was a pretty wild month with a pretty big update happening on January 8th and 9th, which Google did not confirm...

    Content Marketers Could Become Their Own Worst Enemy

    randfish
    by randfish
    Feb 6, 2014
    Content is powerful. It helps websites and companies earn traffic, earn amplification through social media, build trust with an audience, all at a cost far lower than traditional or online paid marketing channels. But, sometime in the next few years, I’m worried that it may become a more challenging, more risky, and less dividend-paying investment.

    The problem is (or will be) content fatigue. And we’ve no one to blame but ourselves:
    I strongly suspect that the impressions vs. clicks of...

    Wow! See How Much Screen Real Estate Google Is Giving Rivals In Its EU Antitrust Settlement

    dannysullivan
    by dannysullivan
    Feb 5, 2014
    Google’s finally reached a proposed agreement with the European Union over antitrust charges. Judging from screenshots the EU has released, it will give Google rivals unprecedented positioning in Google’s results, sometimes for free, sometimes for a fee.

    Consider how the EU is saying that shopping results will appear, as part of the agreement. The before:

    And the after, based on screenshots that the EU has released:

    In the after, you can see an “Alternatives” section that gives...

    Google Sends Manual Actions For Rich Snippet Spam & Spammy Structured Markup

    rustybrick
    by rustybrick
    Feb 5, 2014
    Rich snippet spam has been an issue since rich snippets came out and eventually added a report rich snippet spam tool. Then Google dropped the amount of rich snippets showing in the search results recently...

    With Nadella’s Appointment, The “Search CEOs” Now Run Google, Yahoo & Microsoft

    dannysullivan
    by dannysullivan
    Feb 4, 2014
    Satya Nadella being named CEO of Microsoft isn’t just big news for Microsoft. It’s big news for search. For the first time in ages, the three major search companies in the US are all run by CEOs who either came out of a search-background or have a solid understanding of it.

    Despite the attention search has gained over the years, I feel like it still gets overlooked as the powerhouse it is. It’s responsible for about half of online ad spending in the US. It’s where the majority of Google’s...

    Google To Bring It On German Link Spammers

    rustybrick
    by rustybrick
    Feb 4, 2014
    Yesterday, Google posted a stern warning on the German Google Webmaster blog telling webmasters that you will be penalized for unnatural links.
    Matt Cutts then Tweeted the same warning saying A reminder...

    Super Bowl 2014: How We Searched

    Vanessa Fox
    by Vanessa Fox
    Feb 3, 2014
    I know, I know. Kids today are all about the hashtags and the Twitters, but turns out, we’re pretty good multi-taskers and are still really into searching too. As has been the case all six years I’ve been looking at how the Super Bowl impacts how we search, we use Google (and Bing and Yahoo) to get more information about everything from snack recipes to players.  The more I watch the stats, the more I imagine that everyone is just sitting at home in front of their televisions, laptop at the...

    DMOZ Drops Over 1 Million Sites From Directory?

    rustybrick
    by rustybrick
    Feb 3, 2014
    Did you notice that DMOZ, one of the oldest and largest human crafted web directories, has removed over 1 million sites and 10,000 editors from their directory...

    Twitter’s New Patent Trove (943 Patents) from IBM

    by Bill Slawski
    Feb 1, 2014
    In November, Twitter disclosed in an amendment to its S1 filing that IBM was demanding licenses for three patents issued in 2006 that it claimed that Twitter was infringing upon. As far as we know, IBM didn’t file a lawsuit against Twitter, and this...