Google Reveals Top Searches of 2013: From Nelson Mandela to Twerking
Google shares the moments that made up 2013 in its annual Zeitgeist video and interactive site that shows what mattered to people across the globe in the past year; on the top of the list was Nelson Mandela, actor Paul Walker and the iPhone 5s.
Google: We Don’t Control Content On The Web
I spotted a thread that is a common question in the Google Webmaster Help forums about removing content from showing up in Google. The response was even more interesting.
Google’s Eric Kuan…
Google Glass Won’t Replace Unit For Accidental Damage
Deb Lentz, a Google Glass Explorer, slipped on some ice and her Google Glass unit fell off and landed on the pavement. When they landed, the Glass arm snapped off and broke. The shocking part is that when she called Google to replace them…
Google’s Matt Cutts: Our Algorithms Try To Break Black Hat SEOs Spirits
A couple weeks ago, Google’s Matt Cutts was on This Week in Google (TWiG) and on episode 227 Matt had some interesting things to say. He said that Google specifically tries to break the spirits of black hat SEOs…
Big Data Marketing’s Next Frontier: Paid Search
PLAs and other paid search offer an excellent opportunity to capture more customers. Make all your time and money investments pay off by using a data-driven approach to deliver a premium onsite experience that matches the intent of your prospects.
Stolen Moose Heads: An Interview with innocent
In the last few weeks I’ve been putting together a new guide for our Distilled audience: Finding Your Brand’s Voice. It offers practical and detailed advice on how a company can shape its own tone of voice in order to project a unique and consistent persona.
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…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
A Look Back On One Crazy Year Of Link Building
If 2012 was the year of Google Algorithm updates — Moz counted 37 big ones compared to the 15 in 2013 and 21 in 2011 — 2013 was the year that link building suffered from a serious identity crisis. It was sidelined, stretched, swindled and spit back out again more times than your average…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Improving URL removals on third-party sites
Webmaster level: allContent on the Internet changes or disappears, and occasionally it’s helpful to have search results for it updated quickly. Today we launched our improved public URL removal tool to make it easier to request updates based on changes…
Hit By Panda and Confused About Low-Quality Content? Run This Google Analytics Report Now
Getting hit by Google Panda can be confusing for many webmasters. But one important Google Analytics report can help Panda victims get on the right track, and quickly. The post includes detailed instructions for creating and exporting the report.
4 Trends Marketers Must Address In 2014: Audience, Relevance, Social & Mobile
Upon revisiting last year’s post on this topic, a couple of our bold predictions flopped and a couple turned out to be more reality than fantasy. Though we didn’t see Apple monetize the search results served up by Siri, we did see ad formats evolve to increase relevance and user…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Task Management Tools for Digital Marketers
5 of the best online task management tools for digital marketers
Post from Matt Beswick on State of Digital
Task Management Tools for Digital Marketers
Google Glass XE12 Adds iOS, Wink & Breaks Many GDK Apps
XE12 is out and with that comes support for the whole other side of the mobile world, iPhones. Google released the MyGlass App for iOS and quickly pulled it. Why…
Google Zeitgeist Live With Inspiring Video
I like to look back at things, when I have time. Google has published their 2013 Zeitgeist at google.com/zeitgeist.
It is obviously a nice way to look at all the keywords you may have missed out on. But obviously, you should not be targeting keyword…
8 Tips for Building Your Internal Content Marketing Strategy
It can be difficult to keep your own content marketing goals on track when competing with other business goals. But having a strategy helps. Here’s how to create a content strategy that will power you toward where you need to go.
How to build and run an SEO Company: @kaiserthesage asks @SEO_Hacker
I’ve known Sean Si ever since I started blogging, and he’s one of my closest friends in the industry. We used to work together for a few campaigns (I was part of the SEO-Hacker team when it was just starting).
We’ve also been exchanging a lot of ideas about the practice as well as the business end of SEO for the past 3 years now. So I’m also certain that you guys will learn a lot from him too.
The post How to build and run an SEO Company: @kaiserthesage asks @SEO_Hacker appeared first on Kaiserthesage.
The Pros and Cons of Big Data Democratization
Challenges surrounding data democratization abound. Business leaders need to carefully weigh these arguments for and against conservative and liberal data democratization to determine which approach benefits their organization the most.
Everything you type is recorded. Even if you don’t post.

We collected data from 3.9 million users over 17 days and associate self-censorship behavior with features describing users, their social graph, and the interactions between them. Our results indicate that 71% of users exhibited some level of last-minute self-censorship…
The above is an excerpt from a paper titled “Self Censorship on Facebook” written by Sauvik Das from Carnegie Mellon University and Adam Kramer from Facebook.…
The post Everything you type is recorded. Even if you don’t post. appeared first on DEJAN SEO.
Are Google’s changes improving the search experience?
With so many tweaks, as well as major updates, is Google improving the search experience for the user?
Julia Logan, Irish Wonder:
I think it has become more clear than ever before that Google’s ‘improving the user search experience’ mantra is nothing more than PR talk.
Google is a commercial entity, every step it takes now shows clearly that all it cares about is finding more ways to monetise.
Dr Pete Meyers, Marketing Scientist at Moz:
I think too many of the changes have been reactionary in 2013, and many have been driven by fear of losing revenue.
That’s not necessarily to say that those changes are bad for users, but the rapid pace of change hasn’t always given it time to evaluate or understand how back-to-back changes interact for everyday users.
Will Critchlow, Founder and CMO at Distilled:
I think it’s a bit of both. Things that benefit regular users in my opinion:
- Knowledge graph / cards / one-boxes. Almost all are great for users.
- Improved query understanding benefits most regular users (though power users sometimes miss ‘verbatim as default’).
- Most social results have improved.
- Most fresh result and news-based results are useful.
Things that confuse and / or damage UX for regular users in my opinion:
- The rapidly-disappearing ad labelling. The background colour has been getting lighter and lighter and now it looks like it will be replaced by a small icon. I predict fewer users will be aware when they are clicking on an ad.

- The same applies to paid inclusion in product search. Not knowing if you are clicking on an ad or not is a bad UX.
Although I understand why Google is doing it, I believe that some of the penalties we have seen this year have made the search results worse for regular users. When big brands and sites that should be the right answer manipulate the results and get downgraded as a result, that hurts UX, a trade-off Google appears happy to make in the short term.
Kevin Gibbons, UK MD at Blueglass:
Google always likes to keep us on our toes! It will always be looking to improve the search experience for the user, and that can’t be a bad thing.
I think one of the biggest shifts in mindset in 2013 has been that marketers are aligning their strategies much closer with customers and less with search engines.
Andrew Girdwood, Media Innovations Director at LBi:
Google is improving the search experience. The search engine is better than ever before. Search results are better and the search experience feels more appropriate for a wider number of devices.
I’m not a Google slave. My default search engine in my web browser is Bing (ever since Google Reader; what a great prompt for me to try the competition).
I enjoy the GUI improvements made this year and appreciate Google-as-a-destination when I’m searching for information on my smartphone.
Teddie Cowell, Director of SEO, Mediacom:
There is a lot of change going at the moment, it’s true, but search is undergoing a fairly abrupt metamorphosis from something that was relatively basic in function – dishing up lists of links to things, into something quite amazing which can give individuals contextually relevant information, in more useful forms and via more natural interactions than simply having to type requests into a web browser.
I see Google as leading the charge with the innovation and experimentation around this transformation from a caterpillar to a butterfly.
Yes, some of the ideas may prove flawed and some the experiments fail, but it’s a critical stage in the evolution search so we’ll have to live with the changes for a while yet.
Richard Baxter, CEO at SEOGadget:
Google has got to fiddle. What I like about Google is it genuinely bases the entire process of search updates on what’s best for the user. This classic insight from Danny Sullivan demonstrated just how much each change was scrutinised by the group, with the core success metrics being around improvements to user experience.
That’s just organic search though, and I can’t help but feel that when the other guys get involved (local, paid, video) that something’s not quite right.
Case in point: the search results for car insurance are pretty much entirely paid above the fold, with that huge sponsored quote feature (which isn’t awesome – I’ve used it!).
It’s the same with flights – do the search and you get this box with a list of cities that have routes from London: “272 cities with non-stop flights” – it takes up so much space.
How Google decided this was good for the user I have no idea.

Jimmy McCann, Head of SEO at Search Laboratory:
If you’re doing things the right way you’re going to welcome the fiddling rather than condemn it. Updates and tweaks are the only way for Google to get better and the stuff it’s doing with Schema and other projects is making the search results better.
I certainly don’t agree with the doom and gloom merchant outlook that Google is moving everything toward paid.
2014: Are you Winning an Award in Iceland?
EU Search Awards – Will you be Winning in Iceland?
Post from Bas van den Beld on State of Digital
2014: Are you Winning an Award in Iceland?