WMT: Google Gets Personal With SEOs?

Christmas morning, I got something I never expected: a personal email from Google. And it truly felt like a gift! Right out of bed, I had my 3 cans of Red Bull and checked my messages, as usual. Initially, I wasn’t surprised to see that I had an email from Google. I figured it was […]

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The Bing Dilemma: What To Do With The Little Search Engine That Can’t

The challenge that Microsoft faces in the online search landscape could be a business school case study: how to capture market share from a competitor whose very brand (“Google”) has become synonymous with the act of searching online. Imagine that you are the person at Microsoft…

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Rap Genius Back In Google After 10 Day Penalty, Ranks For Its Name But What About Lyrics?

Lyrics site Rap Genius says that is is no longer penalized within Google after taking action to correct “unnatural links” that it helped create. The site was hit with a penalty for 10 days, which meant people seeking it by name couldn’t find it. That’s been fixed, though…

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Mastering PPC: How Did You Come Up With My Budget?

What a coincidence that we both have the same New Year’s resolution for 2014: to crush it with PPC advertising. To do that, we determined a budget to pay for our PPC efforts. Management may ask – how did you decide on the budget amount? Luckily, Google and Bing have tools that provide cost estimates. […]

The Global SEO & Content Marketing Landscape

Search unifies people across the globe, and search engines are the catalyst for making that connection. For global brands, optimizing for different search engines and different cultures increases awareness, visibility, traffic and conversions. Global S…

EU: Google Antitrust Concessions “Unacceptable” As Second Study Condemns “Rival Links”

European Union competition commissioner Joaquin Almunia announced Friday in a Spanish radio interview that Google’s second round of concessions in its current antitrust settlement proposal were “unacceptable.” The main obstacle to settlement is still Google’s treatment of…

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Mastering PPC: PLAs – Mysteriously Murder Your eComm Competition with PLAs

Let’s say you are an online retailer of books, and you’ve noticed that in the last 6 months your traffic has been slowly declining. Your average position doesn’t appear to be slipping; your ad copy hasn’t changed, and yet… declining traffic. You do a few test queries to investigate and find: This. Your ad, while […]

Yandex Does What Google Can’t: Provides Bitcoin Exchange Rates

How much is one US dollar in UK pounds? Google will give you a direct answer to that and many other currencies with the conversion tool that’s built into its search results. But when it comes to Bitcoin, Russian-based Yandex seems to have won the honor of being first to support conversion of…

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Google’s Matt Cutts On Search Spammers: “We Want To Break Their Spirits”

In episode number 227 of This Week in Google on the TWiT network, Google’s head of search spam Matt Cutts answered some questions from the hosts Leo Laporte and Jeff Jarvis. In one question, Matt explained that Google aims to “break the spirits” of spammers in order to encourage…

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Report: Google PLAs Deliver 4X Revenue Lift For Retailers In Early Holiday Season

It’s probably not too surprising to hear that retailers have doubled their year-over-year spend on Google product listing ads this holiday season thus far. After all, the paid format of Google Shopping had just rolled out in the fall of 2012. What is stunning, however, is the four-fold…

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Sponsored Study Argues Google’s “Rival Links” Don’t Drive Enough CTRs To Rivals

Google’s original antitrust settlement proposal, negotiated with the European Commission, was attacked by Google competitors and critics as being a token concession to competition. Anti-Google lobbying group FairSearch.org sponsored a consumer study that argued Google’s presentation of…

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Google Adds “Now” Content, Features To iOS Maps Apps

In October, Google started adding Google Now style cards to its PC Maps. Now, Google is adding some of those same features to its iOS Maps apps. If you update Google Maps for iOS and sign in, you can now see flight, hotel, and restaurant reservations from Gmail in Maps — and then search or…

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How Google AdWords’ Ad Rank Algorithm Update Increased Brand CPC’s by 600%

On October 22nd Google announced that ad extensions will now be a factor in ad rank as well as the importance of ad extensions eligibility to display in your ads. As with all algorithm changes no one really knew what this meant for performance or how this was going to affect our PPC campaigns. The initial conversations were that […]