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Russian search giant Yandex has announced a deal with Facebook giving them direct access of public data. Posts will pop up in Yandex’s blog search results, where it will join results from other blogs and social networks including Twitter.

Google+ Local

Google Bulk Upload: Verified Listings Or Just Another Data Feed?

Mike Blumenthal

January 17, 2014

Does a Google Bulk upload create a verified listing or is it in reality just another data feed? Unfortunately it is the latter. Danny Sullivan and Greg Sterling have been covering the recent multi listing hijacking of hotel pages at Google. The hijackers essentially were able to take control of numerous hotel listings and insert […]

Why Guest Posting and Blogging is a Slippery Slope – Whiteboard Friday

randfish

January 16, 2014

Posted by randfish

While guest posting can be a wonderful way to build your authority and earn links, it takes a huge amount of effort, and it’s easy for marketers to start slipping down the “Guest Posting Slope of Madness.” One of Rand’s predictions for marketing in 2014 is that Google will begin to crack down on low-quality guest posts, and in today’s Whiteboard Friday, he clears up some of the misconceptions that can lead to a downhill slide.

Whiteboard Friday – Why Guest Posting and Blogging is a Slippery Slope

For reference, here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard!

Video Transcription

Sarah: Howdy Moz fans. This is Sarah Bird, and I am the new CEO and that’s why I am doing Whiteboard Friday. Today, we’re going to talk about guest blog posting because that’s SEO. Okay, so the first thing you have to do is think of something [Rand guides Sarah aside] …

Sarah to Rand: But I’m the new CEO, and that means I do the …

Rand: Howdy Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday, which I will still be doing for, well for a very, very, very long time to come I hope. Today I wanted to tackle a tricky topic. I know it’s going to be a controversial one because a lot of folks in the SEO space do a lot of guest posting and guest blogging, but there’s a challenge here. So I made some predictions last week, a couple weeks ago now, in the new year about what 2014 will bring.

One of those is that I predicted that Google will be taking some webspam action, essentially the Webspam Team will be building an algorithm to target guest posters, people who do a lot of guest posting and a lot of guest blogging at scale to get links back to their site in order to rank. This is a very common strategy that many, many folks use, and here’s why it’s a slippery slope.

So oftentimes we start up, up here. You’re sort of super white hat, and “Oh, yeah you know I’ve got some great stuff to share, but my site doesn’t get all that much traffic so maybe I should go and see if Huffington Post or Mashable or maybe the Moz Blog or any of these sources will take it because I have a great post.”

Hey, what do you know? A lot of the time if you have something relevant and useful and great to say and you have some great ideas to share, some great visuals, some data, fantastic. You can get those guest posts on those big sites. Then you start to slide down the slope a little. You think, “Oh, yeah, that Huff Post piece went really well, and hey, I got a link. I got a live link out of it. Maybe that link will help me rank a little better, boost my authority, and I don’t know, that’s kind of nice. I should do some more guest posts and get more links. Maybe I’ll find some sites that can send me some traffic and boost my profile and authority out in the sphere and get a few more links.”

This is still totally, pretty much fine, pretty much okay. But then you slide down this little slope. There’s this devious little part right here, between the I’m doing this for kind of authority boosting and traffic sending reasons and I’m just doing this for the link.

So you slide down the slope, and then you get, “Oh, man, finding decent sites that will take my guests posts is really hard, and I keep having to write really good stuff and come up with new ideas because they all want unique content. You know what? Maybe I’ll just start going to any places that I can go where I’ll get a link. Then eventually you slide down into this sort of total black hat territory where you are, “You know, I bet I could scale this and even automate it. I’m going to use a team of outsourced writers, and I’m going to use a team of outsourced placement specialists. I’m going to write some little thing to scrape through the links I download from OSC from my competitors and scrape through the Google results and find any place that’ll take a guest post, who’ve taken five or more with spammy anchor text before, because that’s what I want.”

Oh, brother. That’s why I call this the guest posting slope of madness. Madness! It is madness, because think about what happens here. Essentially you’re going down this slope, and maybe you’re seeing results, more and more results, but you don’t know whether these links and these links that you’ve slid down into are actually really helping you or whether the authority and the profile that you’ve built from these good ones and all the other good marketing activities and the things your product is doing and your brand is doing are helping you, and you might think these are. So you keep doing them and then bam! You get smacked by a Penguin or the guest posting algo or whatever it is that comes next, and you have to go and try and get these folks to remove all these links, you have to disavow them, you’ve got to send your reconsideration requests, you’re out of the search results for weeks or months at a time, usually months, sometimes years.

What have you done to your site? What have you done to your SEO? What if you had taken all this effort and energy and put it into just doing this stuff and then once you built up this authority doing most of the posting on your own site where people would be linking to you?

One of the frustrating things about guest posting that people forget all the time is that when you are putting content somewhere else, especially if that’s good content, especially if it’s stuff that’s really earning traffic and visibility, that means all the links are going to somebody else’s site. Somebody else is earning most of the attention awareness, and granted some of that is transferring on to you and that’s why we do guest posting. But you have to be aware of that, and that leads me into some flawed assumptions.

Flawed assumption number one: More links are always better. This is not the case. This is not the case. I have seen many, many sites with just a few, a handful, a few dozen to a few hundred great links far outranking their brethren with thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of links. All links are not created equal.

Less editorial restriction is better. When you’re guest posting you’re like, “Oh, they’re so picky, these editors. Man, they want me to jump through all these hoops. Let me find some place that’ll just take whatever I’ll throw them.” Guess what? If they take whatever you’re throwing them, they’re taking whatever the rest of the Internet is throwing them, and we all know what the rest of the Internet looks like.

Number three: The link matters more than other factors, other factors like traffic and influence and credibility. Also not the case. I’ll be totally honest. I will take a great guest post that refuses to link to me or that only no follow links to me if I know that 5,000 or 10,000 people are going to read that piece and a few hundred people are going to re-tweet it and a few hundred people are going to like it on Facebook, because that is boosting my influence and my authority, and that is creating all kinds of things that will have second order effects that impact my SEO and my broad web marketing far better than just a link.

When should you guest post and blog? Well, like I said, if you’re trying to reach that new audience, that new audience that another site or page or blog has captured, great. Guest posting is a wonderful choice. For example, let’s say here at Moz we’re trying to reach into the design community. We might go to some wonderful web design sites, Smashing Magazine, for example, and say, “Hey. Would you guys want maybe a good resource on SEO for designers?” They might say, “Yeah, great we’d love you.” Perfect. That’s a perfect marriage there.

In addition to creating a relationship with another organization through content, I also love this. This is a great way to build some early stages of relationship with another company before you do a formal partnership, and it helps to see whether there’s kind of an overlap between your two organizations’ audiences, such that you might want to do a deeper kind of relationship, maybe a sponsorship or an investment together, project or product together.

Quick note here. For your marquis content, your best stuff, I strongly — see how I’ve underlined strongly — strongly suggest using your own site. Reason being, if you’re going to put wonderful stuff out there, even if you think it could do better on somebody else’s site, in the long term you want that to live on your own site.

The last note I’ll make is that Google’s Webspam Team has been telegraphing for nearly a year that they are coming after sites that are using guest posting tactics at scale. You’ve heard comments from Google’s Head of Webspam, that’s Matt Cutts. You’ve seen comments on the Google Webmaster blog. You’ve heard them talk about it at conferences. If you’re not getting the message, they are sending it directly to all of the folks in the SEO world that guest posting and guest blogging are targets for webspam in the future.

So just be very, very careful please and stay up and don’t fall down this slippery slope. All right everyone, thanks so much. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Google PPC SEO

Part Three: Paid & Organic Report Data

Harris Neifield

January 16, 2014

AdWords came out with the paid and organic report in late August. The paid and organic report had the potential to provide data that is no longer available in Google analytics due to the Google secure search update (not provided). Getting data back would be great for both SEO and for SEO-PPC integration. I wrote two posts […]

Channel: Local Google: Maps & Local Search Engine Land Search Engines: Maps & Local Search Engines Top News Uncategorized

Local SEOs Sound Off On Google+ Local Hijackings

Greg Sterling

January 16, 2014

Earlier this week Danny Sullivan reported on the hijacking of thousands of local hotel listings within Google+ Local. Those listings had been replaced by third-party hotel booking services. And while it’s unclear how long those third party links were in place, several knowledgable people have…

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Channel: Other Search Engine Land SearchCap Uncategorized

SearchCap: The Day In Search, January 16, 2014

Barry Schwartz

January 16, 2014

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Covario: Global PPC Click-Through Rates Hit New Highs, Spend Up 17 Percent YoY In Q4 Though the numbers vary, the Q4 reports we’ve covered all point to…

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Channel: Industry Search Engine Land SEM Industry: Conferences SEM Industry: Search Marketing Expo - SMX SMX & DMD Alerts Uncategorized

SMX West Early Bird Rates Expire In 2 Weeks – Register Now & Save!

Search Engine Land

January 16, 2014

Join the most accomplished internet marketers in the world at SMX West, March 11-13 in San Jose, CA. Check out the agenda, featuring three days of tactic packed sessions, the highest-level networking anywhere, and much more. Six in-depth workshops also…

Search Engine Watch Uncategorized

Google, Bing Gain Search Share to End 2013

Danny Goodwin

January 16, 2014

Google’s search share was at near record levels in the U.S. in December, while Bing also continued its pattern of slowly growing its share, according to the final 2013 installment of comScore’s monthly look at U.S. search engine rankings.

SEO Book Uncategorized

Google’s Chris DiBona On Search Ecosystem Diversity

Aaron Wall

January 16, 2014

It’s hard to deny that some folks working at Google are geniuses. It’s also hard to deny the disconnect in their messaging.

As Google locked down their “open” ecosystem (compatibility as a club, abandonware, deleting privacy settings, extensions required to be installed from store, extensions required to be single-purpose, forced Google+ integration, knowledge graph scrape-n-displace, “We could either sue him or hire him,” etc.), I thought an interview of one of their open source evangelists would be entertaining.

Chris DiBona delivered:

Can you imagine if you didn’t have the malware protection and the process isolation of Chrome, that Chrome brought to other browsers? Can you imagine surfing the web the way it is right now? It’s pretty grim. There’s a lot of malware. You end up basically funnelling people into fewer and fewer sites, and therefore fewer and fewer viewpoints and all the rest.

Sometimes large sites serve malware through their ads. Ad networks are one of the best ways to distribute malware. The super networks core to the web ecosystem are home to much of the malware – even GoogleBot was tricked into doing MySQL injection attacks. But even if we ignored that bit, it doesn’t take much insight to realize that Google is achieving that same kill diversity “goal” through other means…

This Mozcast chart always looks the same. As the web grows, Google allows less and less of it to appear in search. http://t.co/PRX4NGHZfH— Dan Thies (@danthies) September 4, 2013

…as they roll out many algorithmic filters, manual penalties, selectively enforce these issues on smaller players (while giving more exploitative entities a free pass), insert their own vertical search services, dial up their weighting on domain authority, and require smaller players to proactively police the rest of the web while Google thinks the n-word 85 times is totally reasonable on their own tier-1 properties.

We have another post coming on the craziness of disavows and link removals, but it has no doubt gone beyond absurd at this point.

Failed reconsideration requests are now coming with this email that tells site owners they must remove more links: pic.twitter.com/tiyXtPvY32— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) January 2, 2014

With WMT admission that linkspam MUST be removed we are past tipping point; it’s now a risk to not engage in neg SEO against all comp. #sad— Cygnus SEO (@CygnusSEO) January 2, 2014

Why is diversity so important?

Dissent evolves markets. The status quo doesn’t get changed by agreeing & aligning with existing power structures. Anyone who cares to debate this need only look at Google’s ongoing endless string of lawsuits. Most of those lawsuits are associated with Google (rightly or wrongly) taking power from what they view as legacy entities.

Even on a more personal level, one’s investment returns are likely to be better when things are out of favor:

“Investors should remember that excitement and expenses are their enemies. And if they insist on trying to time their participation in equities, they should try to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy only when others are fearful.” – Warren Buffett

In many markets returns and popularity are inversely proportional

Investing in Internet stocks in 1999 was popular, but for those who stayed too long at the party it was a train wreck. Domain name speculators who bought into the carnage a couple years later did well.

Society is so complex & inter-connected that its very easy to think things run far more smoothly than they do & thus buy into to many fibs that are obviously self-evident until the moment they are not.

Popularity is backward looking, enabling the sheep to be sheared.

Unfortunately depth & diversity are being sacrificed to promote pablum from well known entities in formats that are easy to disintermediate & monetize.

Think about it: an actual scientist who produces actual knowledge should be more like a journalist who recycles fake insights! This is beyond popularisation. This is taking something with value and substance and coring it out so that it can be swallowed without chewing. This is not the solution to our most frightening problems – rather this is one of our most frightening problems.
– Benjamin Bratton

Innovative knowledge creation and thought reading tattoos — the singularity is near.

Categories:

internet

Search Engine Watch Uncategorized

Yelp CEO Confirms Sting Operations to Clean up Paid Reviews

Pierre Zarokian

January 16, 2014

In a recent interview, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppleman discussed what his company has been doing for the past two years to combat fake reviews, and how the Yelp team studies fake reviews, seeking commonalities and abnormalities they can filter for.

Baidu Channel: SEM covario Covario studies Google: AdWords Microsoft: Bing Ads paid search trends ppc trends Search Ads: General Search Ads: Mobile Search Search Engine Land Stats Stats: General Uncategorized

Covario: Global PPC Click-Through Rates Hit New Highs, Spend Up 17 Percent YoY In Q4

Ginny Marvin

January 16, 2014

Though the numbers vary, the Q4 reports we’ve covered all point to solid year-over-year increases in paid search spending. Covario’s Q4 analysis of the global paid search advertising landscape is no different. Based on results from their high tech, consumer electronics and retail…

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Global paid search spend increased in 2013: stats

Christopher Ratcliff

January 16, 2014

Here’s the global paid search activity for Q4 2013:

Regional

The USA’s search spend was up 17% quarter-on-quarter and 9% year-on-year.

However Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) showed a small decline in search spend, with quarter-over-quarter spend declining 1% and year-on-year declining 8%. This possibly due to an overall decline CPCs.

Ad effectiveness has improved in EMEA though, with a 60% increase in click-through-rates (CTR) compared to 2012.

The Asia/Pacific region (APAC) showed a 5% rise in search spend over Q3 and by 21% year-on-year. This was driven by a 13% rise in CTRs and a 20% rise in click traffic.

Search engines

Google continues to dominate with 84% of the world’s paid search market share. Advertising spend in Q4 with Google was up 7% from the previous year.

The Yahoo-Bing Network holds 8% of the world’s paid search spend market share. Year-over-year quarterly spending grew 23%. Q4 saw a 6% rise from Q3.

Baidu received 20% of APAC’s Q4 budgets, with 75% going to Google. Baidu has 80% lower CPCs than Google and higher than average CTRs, resulting in 55% of all clicks in APAC.

Here’s a closer look at global search engine market share.

Mobile

Mobile now represents 20% of total search spending worldwide.

The ad spend between smartphones and tablets widened in Q4 to 34% for smartphones and 66% for tablets.

For more information on PPC, download our Paid Search Marketing Best Practice Guide or check out this guide to what is paid search and why do you need it?

bing ads trends Channel: SEM Google google adwords trends Google: AdWords Google: AdWords: Product Listing Ads Microsoft Microsoft: Bing Ads paid search trends q4 ppc reports rkg Search Ads Search Ads: General Search Ads: Mobile Search Search Ads: Product Ads Search Engine Land Stats Stats: General Top News Uncategorized

RKG Report: PLAs Fuel AdWords Growth, Bing Ads Spend Rises Sharply In Q4

Ginny Marvin

January 16, 2014

RKG has released its Q4 2013 Digital Marketing Report, and as other reports have indicated, paid search saw solid year-over-year growth in the holiday quarter. Paid search spend among RKG’s retail-heavy client set rose 23 percent year-over-year. Overall click volume increased 19 percent, and…

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Channel: Mobile mobile marketing Mobile Search mobile seo Search Engine Land Search Marketing: Mobile SEO: Local SEO: Mobile Search Uncategorized

There’s No SEO Without Mobile SEO

Bryson Meunier

January 16, 2014

It’s 2014, which means we are officially one year away from the year that Kelsey Group predicted mobile search will eclipse desktop search. Are you making your mobile resolutions to ensure you’re ready for when that time comes? I’d like to start the new year with a short…

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

SEO Best Practice – Introduction to SEO, Changes and Ranking Factors

Econsultancy

January 16, 2014

This report is part of Econsultancy’s renowned SEO Best Practice Guide and has been created with the help and frontline insight of globally-esteemed SEO practitioners, in order to give you the edge in your natural search marketing activity.

Built on the foundations of our previous, highly-renowned report, this document will help you understand search marketing like never before.

The SEO Best Practice Guide is invaluable for anybody working in internet marketing, or looking to appoint an SEO agency, or simply trying to secure better search engine rankings.

It has been created with the help and frontline insight of globally-esteemed SEO practitioners, in order to give you the edge in your natural search marketing activity.

Introduction to Our Guides

How this guide is structured

Features of this guide

About Econsultancy

Introduction to Search Marketing and SEO

What is search marketing and SEO?
Why is it important?
Market context
Getting to grips with the fundamentals

Have you heard of the tail of search?
Savvier searchers
Anatomy of a SERPs page
The different types of organic search result

Goals, objectives and KPIs

The difference between goals and objectives
Setting SMART objectives
The value of KPIs

Opportunities, challenges and risks

SEO opportunities
SEO challenges
What are the risks?

Integration with other marketing channels

Paid search
Display advertising
Affiliate marketing
Offline marketing

Regulations

Changes in SEO Since the Last Report

Updates from the search engines

Algorithm update: Hummingbird
Algorithm update: Panda
Algorithm update: Penguin
Algorithm update: Venice
Algorithm update: EMD

Interface updates
Transparency and alerts
The drive to disavow
Paid inclusion
Updates from the SEO industry

Content marketing
Outreach and engagement
Data and analytics
Click through optimization

Debate around Google+

Ranking Factors

Focus on the customer to get the rank
The science behind rank
How search engines are evolving algorithms
How this is expected to change
Key dos and don’ts

Appendix 1: Acknowledgements

Lead author
Expert contributors

A free sample document is also available for download.

SEO Best Practice – Mobile, Local and International SEO

Econsultancy

January 16, 2014

Built on the foundations of our previous, highly-renowned report, this document will help you understand search marketing like never before.

The SEO Best Practice Guide is invaluable for anybody working in internet marketing, or looking to appoint an SEO agency, or simply trying to secure better search engine rankings.

It has been created with the help and frontline insight of globally-esteemed SEO practitioners, in order to give you the edge in your natural search marketing activity.

Introduction to Our Guides

How this guide is structured

Features of this guide

About Econsultancy

Mobile SEO

Why do mobile SEO?
Development for mobile SEO

Responsive web design
Mobile optimised site
Technical considerations

Mobile indexation

robots.txt:
META robots tag
link rel=”alternate”
Mobile XML Sitemap
Canonicalisation

Mobile content

Viewport meta tag
Display/hide content per viewport
Responsive images

Mobile performance

Page speed
CDN (content delivery networks)
Dynamic (or “lazy”) loading
Structured data
Click-to-call links
Option to view the full site

Mobile SEO marketing

The factors driving mobile marketing growth
What are people doing?

Understanding mobile search behaviour
Mobile keyword research
Understanding the mobile SEO algorithm
Link building for mobile

Reciprocity

Mobile landing pages
Key dos and don’ts for mobile SEO
Useful resources for technical mobile SEO

Local SEO

How local SEO has evolved:

The Google Venice update:
Personalisation
Google Places pages and Google+ Local pages
Zagat reviews

Local SEO ranking factors

Place page factors
On-page factors
NAP listings and citations
Link signals
Review signals

Social and local SEO
The most impactful signals
Key dos and don’ts

International SEO

The global search engine market
Defining an international SEO project

Auditing current international organic search status
Auditing current international search activity
Approach to translation: automated vs. native support
Targeting your international audience

Your international SEO goals and targets
Developing an internationally optimised web presence

Organising your international URL structure
Country targeted website URL structure
URL Structure for language targeted websites

Translating or localising
Language and country targeting for web content

Hreflang annotations
Content language meta tag
Search engine webmaster tools

Growing your international web popularity

Defining an international link building campaign
Executing an international link building campaign

Measuring international SEO success

Following up your international search activity

Appendix 1: Acknowledgements

Lead author
Expert contributors

A free sample document is also available for download

SEO Best Practice – Measurement and Reporting for SEO

Econsultancy

January 16, 2014

Built on the foundations of our previous, highly-renowned report, this document will help you understand search marketing like never before.

The SEO Best Practice Guide is invaluable for anybody working in internet marketing, or looking to appoint an SEO agency, or simply trying to secure better search engine rankings.

It has been created with the help and frontline insight of globally-esteemed SEO practitioners, in order to give you the edge in your natural search marketing activity.

Introduction to Our Guides

How this guide is structured

Features of this guide

About Econsultancy

Measurement and Reporting For SEO

SEO measurement

The role of web analytics
Identifying goals, objectives and KPIs
Defining data needs
Ecommerce and non-ecommerce tracking
Ensuring data is validated
Metrics for SEO
Using campaign tracking parameters

SEO reporting

Defining requirements
Essential SEO reports
Using segmentation
Role of dashboards
Custom reports
Importance of goals and event tracking

SEO analysis

Importance of context
Questioning data
Role of Voice-of-Customer data
Multi-channel funnels and attribution analysis
Universal analytics and SEO

Role of testing and optimization

What can you test?
Creating a testing plan
Case study

Known data anomalies for SEO

(not provided)
iOS search

Tools of the trade

Web analytics platforms
Market analysis tools
SEO performance tools
Browser extensions
Technical performance tools
Voice-of-Customer tools.
Page engagement tools
AB and MVT testing tools

Key dos and don’ts for SEO measurement and reporting

Appendix 1: Acknowledgements

Lead author
Expert contributors

A free sample document is also available for download.

SEO Best Practice – Planning and Strategy for SEO

Econsultancy

January 16, 2014

Built on the foundations of our previous, highly-renowned report, this document will help you understand search marketing like never before.

The SEO Best Practice Guide is invaluable for anybody working in internet marketing, or looking to appoint an SEO agency, or simply trying to secure better search engine rankings.

It has been created with the help and frontline insight of globally-esteemed SEO practitioners, in order to give you the edge in your natural search marketing activity.

Introduction to Our Guides

How this guide is structured

Features of this guide

About Econsultancy

Planning And Strategy

Understanding the darker side of SEO

Whitehat SEO
Greyhat SEO
Blackhat SEO

Understanding Google penalties

Manual penalties
Algorithmic penalties

SEO strategy – the planning process

Setting a realistic strategy
Balancing SEO and paid search
How PPC can help SEO

Audience analysis, search behaviour and keyphrase selection

Which search terms should you target?
Understanding search behaviour
Time-related variations in keyphrase use
Understanding different types of keyphrases
Grouping and categorising keyphrases
Keyphrase identification and selection process

Auditing current performance

Relative performance
Performance benchmarking
Site inclusion for natural search
Link and domain popularity for natural search
Evaluating alternative SEO approaches
Site speed
Page metrics vs. key term metrics
Benchmarking content performance
Mobile vs. desktop
Page performance
Benchmarking correctly

Site inclusion and reinclusion requests

Filing a reconsideration request

Setting goals, objectives and KPIs for SEO
Key dos and don’ts for SEO strategy

Appendix 1: Acknowledgements

Lead author
Expert contributors

A free sample document is also available for download

Tips, tricks and how-to posts

Tools

Stats

Case studies

Career stuff and management posts

Algorithm changes

Opinion

Reports

What awesome SEO resources have you seen recently?

Video Transcription

Why is diversity so important?

Regional

Search engines

Mobile

Contents

Contents

Contents

Contents