Search Week in Review for April 16, 2011
Here’s a recap of this week’s columns and news stories for the week of April 10 to 16, as reported by Search Engine Watch.
Search Engine Optimization
PR Is Not A White Hat SEO Technique by Nichola Stott
Doing public relations with a purely SEO objective could leave your organization open to reputation damage. A PR campaign with substance, content, story, and depth isn’t necessarily legal or ethical.
What Google Says vs. What Google Does by Gareth Owen
Google keeps promising improvements but is failing to deliver — especially when it comes to exact match domains, which are ranking better than ever.
SEM Basics
Introduction to Google PageRank: Myths & Facts by Rob Chant
Clearing up the confusion about what Google’s PageRank algorithm is, how it works, how important it is, and how we can use data based on it.
Search Advertising
How Social Media Affects Paid Search by Alex Cohen
As AdWords and +1 evolves, Google will monetize not just what you do, but who you are. We’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg of how social media will impact paid search advertising.
Inside the adCenter Quality Score — Or Should We Call It Competitive Score? by Joseph Kerschbaum
Exploring the attributes of the adCenter Quality Score, how these scores affect your performance, and how you can optimize your account for better rankings.
Geotargeting: A Great Local Search Option by Jeremy Hull
Breaking out separate geotargeted campaigns is a great tactic that will quickly improve the performance of any national Google AdWords account. Here are four steps to help you get started.
ClickEquations Take Guess Work Out of Testing PPC Ad Copy by Jonathan Allen
Testing ad copy is essential to the efficient running of a paid search campaign. Step in, ClickEquations Text Ad Zoom. A new feature designed to help marketers sort ‘the wheat from the chaff’ in PPC ad copy testing.
Bing, Ask Buying Ads On Google Doodle News Search Results by Frank Watson
The popularity of Google Doodles has not been overlooked by Bing and Ask, both engines are buying low costing paid search traffic for Yuri Gagarin figuring the people who click thru may stay and use Bing News or Ask.com.
Analytics & ROI
How to Effectively Measure Display/Search Results Using Lookalike Geographies by Ammon Brown
Here’s how to measure the impact of search on display and vice versa using an experiment that analyzes the results of each campaign on two demographically similar geographies.
Social Media Marketing
4 Steps for Evaluating Risk in Social Business by Jacob Morgan
A guide for organizations on how to understand and assess risks in the social business space.
Link Building
3 Link Marketing Strategies for Online Retailers by Justilien Gaspard
Link development for an online retailer has its challenges. Here are three strategies.
Local Search
Google Places Eats Hotpot: What’s it Mean for Local Search? by Brent Rangen
Google has decided to drop the Hotpot name and merge it with Google Places, which is how Google should have set it up initially.
Google Tags Out With Bad Team Coordination by Frank Watson
Google announced it is dropping the Tags feature for its Places product – a feature they were selling to small businesses to promote their location and products or services through Google Maps.
Bing Business Portal Helps Business Control Their Listings On Bing by Thom Craver
Business owners, stake your claim! Bing has released the Bing Business Portal into the wild.
Mobile Search
Searching is the 2nd Most Popular Activity On Tablet Devices by Brent Rangen
Google’s mobile ad business, AdMob, has conducted a survey of 1,431 users to find out how people use their tablet (devices).
Tablet Device Usage Overtaking Print, Radio & TV [Infographic] by Jonathan Allen
The shift in attention from traditional media platforms to “the second (dual) screen” is an important change for marketers to note, so we visualized the data in the AdMob report to help you make more sense of it.
Enterprise SEM
Google’s Panda Update + Social = New Enterprise SEM Opportunities by P.J. Fusco
The elimination of link farms and content scrapers, along with the introduction of signals from authoritative social media networks, have combined to create new opportunities for enterprise-level search marketers.
International Search
Why Facebook is Wiping Out Orkut in India & Brazil by Michael Bonfils
When Facebook’s destruction of Orkut began and why Facebook is driving these massive populations to start using it at such an astonishing rate.
Google’s Panda Update Hits the UK: Early Winners & Losers by Danny Goodwin
Many websites in the UK today are feeling the impact of Google’s Panda update, one day after it was officially rolled out to all English-language Google users.
New Google Panda UK Stats: Article, Price Comparison Sites Slammed Hard by Danny Goodwin
New early data released today by SISTRIX indicates that article sites, price comparison sites, and business directories have taken the biggest falls in Google’s organic search results.
Panda, Google’s High Quality Sites Algorithm, Officially Adopts User Feedback As Search Signal by Jonathan Allen
So the rumors are true. Pandapocalypse is coming to a location near you. But if your site is not English language, you may still have nothing to fear.
S. Korean Companies Claim Google’s Android Blocking Competing Search Apps by Danny Goodwin
The owners of South Korea’s largest search engines have filed complaints against Google with the country’s Fair Trade Commission, alleging that local phone carriers and manufacturers were banned from embedding their search applications on mobile devices running on Google’s Android operating system.
Richard Trevithick Inventor Of Steam Locomotive Gets Google Doodle by Frank Watson
Richard Trevithick, British inventor of the first functioning steam locomotive, received a Google Doodle on Google UK for his 240th birthday. Trevithick was born in 13 April 1771 and died 22 April 1833.
The Search Industry
3 Website Exploits — Are You Protected? by Kristine Schachinger
Examining three common attacks that can hurt your visitors and rankings, and tips on how to prevent your site from being hacked.
comScore March 2011 Search Engine Market Share [Infographic] by Danny Goodwin
Google saw some small gains for the first time since September, according to comScore’s March 2011 U.S. search engine market share rankings.
Hitwise: Bing-Powered Search Rises to 30% by Danny Goodwin
Bing, which now powers Yahoo’s organic search results, accounted for 30 percent of all U.S. searches in March.
State of Search: Strong SEM Industry Growth Projected in 2011 by Brent Rangen
PPC is as significant as ever, the SEM industry is stronger than ever and projected to grow 16 percent this year, and the Microsoft-Yahoo Search Alliance was well-received. Those are just a few of the takeaways from SEMPO’s State Of Search Marketing Report 2011.
SearchIgnite Boldly Re-Launch As IgnitionOne by Jonathan Allen
SearchIgnite, an online marketing platform technology company, has rebranded itself as IgnitionOne to coincide with the launch of it’s new “digital marketing suite”.
Hitwise Reports Paywall Causes Decrease in Overall Visits to NYTimes.com by Greg Jarboe
Experian Hitwise data says The New York Times paywall has caused a decrease in the overall visits to NYTimes.com of 5 to 15 percent.
Google News
Google Reports Q1 2011 Earnings, Record Revenue of $8.58 Billion by Danny Goodwin
CEO Larry Page was in the spotlight as Google reported $8.58 billion in Q1 2011 revenue — a 27 percent increase over Q1 2010 when the company reported $6.77 billion in revenue.
Google Testing Double Column Sitelinks? by Jonathan Allen
David Lindop, Senior SEO Manager at MediaVest Manchester, recently posted a screenshot of something that caught our eye – double column search results.
Was Google’s Marissa Mayer Snubbed in Local + More Reorg Notes by Danny Goodwin
Google CEO Larry Page made waves in his first week back at the helm last week, promoting seven executives to senior vice president to head their individual business units and making a couple noteworthy changes to Google’s business operations.
Google Buys PushLife for $25 Million by Danny Goodwin
Google has acquired Toronto startup PushLife for a reported $25 million, potentially another piece of the rumored Google Android Music service and iTunes competitor.
Google Trends Extinguishes Hot Topics by Danny Goodwin
Hot Topics on Google Trends are history. Google now is simply showing the top 10 Hot Searches — what Google users are searching for the most, updated hourly.
Google Trends Topics Not so Hot Right Now by Danny Goodwin
Realtime results on Google Trends are more like a trip into the past today. Google’s Hot Topics, found on Google Trends, and usually updated regularly, appear to have not changed since last week.
Google Trivia: Boredom Breaker or Google Research Tool? by Sarah Carling
Today Google announced the launch of Google Trivia, a new online game that allows you to search for answers, while posing the questions in such a way that there is no easily searchable answer.
Google Looks to Reduce ‘Virtual Regret’ by Sarah Carling
Google is funding research from Tel Aviv University’s Blavatnik School of Computer Science to teach computers to understand and utilise hindsight in order to more accurately predict the future.
Is Charlie Chaplin’s Body Missing Again? New Zealand Chaplin Doodle Is A Mystery by Frank Watson
Google Doodles are done to honor an event – a historical persons birthday such as locomotive engine inventor Richard Trevithick’s 240th earlier this week or the 50th anniversary of manned space flight. But the Doodle on the New Zealand search engine homepage has a picture about Charlie Chaplin.
Yuri Gagarin Gets Google Doodle On 50th Anniversary Of Man In Space by Frank Watson
Whilst the space race may be over, 50 years ago the race to get a man in space was a hot topic and Russia’s Yuri Gagarin first manned space mission was global front page news. Google honored the achievement with a worldwide Google Doodle.
Is Yuri Gagarin Google Doodle Nod To Space Race Or Possibly Cyberspace Race? by Frank Watson
The Google Doodle honoring the first manned space flight by Yuri Gagarin brings back memories of the Space Race between the US and the Soviet Union during the Cold War of the last century, but also could be seen as a mirror to the new Search Race that national search engines from the United States, Russia and China are now competing in.
Video Marketing
How to Become a YouTube Partner by Greg Jarboe
Want to become a YouTube Partner? Here are some things a small channel can do to meet YouTube’s requirements.
AOL Video Ranked #2 Most-Trafficked Online Video Platform by comScore Video Metrix by Greg Jarboe
ComScore Video Metrix has just released the March 2011 U.S. Online Video Rankings and the big news is that AOL Inc. now ranks #2 in total unique visitors behind Google Sites, which continue to rank #1.
Where Is The U.S. Watching Online Video & How Often? [Infographic] by Jonathan Allen
Where people go to watch online video metrics is currently a more interesting statistic than search share because, whilst the top position rarely changes (it’s always YouTube), the other players shift positions quite a lot.
Happy Tree Friends Give a Lesson in Copyright by Sarah Carling
This copyright lesson from YouTube featuring the homicidal, suicidal and just plain crazy cute fluffy characters of Happy Tree Friends highlights some of the risks of copyright infringement, and explains what sorts of content are subject to copyright.
Yuri Gagarin First Orbit Full Length Film Featured on YouTube by Jonathan Allen
First Orbit, a film made to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first man in space, and celebrate the first International Day of Human Space Flight was featured on YouTube.
SES Conference & Expo
Amber MacArthur To Share Social Media Tips at SES Toronto 2011 by Greg Jarboe
Amber MacArthur will be the opening keynote speaker at SES Toronto 2011.
Search News & Headlines Around the Web
Search Week in Review 2011 Archives
April 9 | April 2
March 26 | March 19 | March 12 | March 5
Feb. 26 | Feb. 19 | Feb. 12 | Feb. 5
Jan. 29 | Jan. 22 | Jan. 15 | Jan. 8
Get the latest search marketing news delivered to your inbox.