Keep Writing Quality Content: SEO Bloggers React To Matt Cutts’ Claim “Guest Blogging Is Dead”
Google’s head of webspam, Matt Cutts, caused an uproar in the SEO community yesterday when he published a blog post on his personal blog claiming guest blogging for SEO purposes is dead. In his post, Cutts offered a history of how guest blogging has moved from being a reliable source of…
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SearchCap: The Day In Search, January 21, 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: Will Link Building Soon Be A Thing Of The Past? The other day while working on a client proposal, I came to the sec…
Live @ SMX West: Long-Term SEO & How To Win For Years, Not Days
The life of an SEO can be challenging. Just when you think you’ve got things figured out, have mastered the nuances of hundreds of ranking signals and have perfected your own tactics and techniques to achieve great search engine visibility, someone like Google’s Matt Cutts will write a…
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SPONSOR MESSAGE: Get $50 Credit on Bing Ads
You know how search advertising works: those listed at the top of the results page are clicked most often. You also need clicks from high-quality searchers who are more likely to buy. Begin your trek to the top of the list – visit the Bing Ads solution center on Search Engine Land and save…
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Google’s Product Listing Ads: Adoption, Clicks, Mobile Continue Surge [Study]
Google’s Product Listing Ads (PLA) took over the Google Shopping experience in October 2012. Marin set out to uncover its progress in the retail space in 2013, including rate of adoption, advertising spend, click-through rate and more.
The 2014 Super Bowl Commercials Just Kicked Off
Based on new Unruly Media data, 60 percent of the most shared Super Bowl ads of all time were launched before Super Bowl Sunday. Fittingly, everyone can now get a sneak peek of some of this year’s commercials on the YouTube Ad Blitz pregame gallery.
Google Killed 350 Million ‘Bad Ads’ in 2013
In 2013, Google removed 350 million bad AdWords ads as part of its efforts to prevent abuse of AdWords by both advertisers and AdSense publishers, although unfortunately they don’t detail much about why those particular ads were removed.
Learn from the Pros: See Who’s Speaking at SMX West and Save $200
More than 80 of the world’s most knowledgeable internet marketers will present at Search Engine Land’s SMX West conference, March 11-13 in San Jose, CA. You’ll learn what makes them successful, what keeps them up at night, and what to expect from digital marketing in the next year. You’ll…
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Prioritising SEO Tasks Effectively
How do we effectively prioritise SEO tasks? Every SEO task has a cost to implement and an expected return value, and that drives the prioritisation of each.
Post from Barry Adams on State of Digital
Prioritising SEO Tasks Effectively
Your Approach to Organic Search is Obsolete: How to Evolve in 2014
I started working on organic search visibility in 2006. Back then, you didn’t have to get up too early in the morning to rank (at least not for the long tail). Tactics like directory submissions and article syndication still worked, and on-page optimization was relatively straightforward.
Matt Cutts Says Guest Blogging for SEO Is Dead
There are often changes to the way that Google see various practices undertaken by people looking to improve their organic rankings and yesterday we heard from Matt Cutts that guest posting is now the latest strategy to be placed under the Google micro…
The 3Ps of Content Measurement: Page Rank, Traffic & Engagement
Understanding content at a page level gives you a bird’s eye view of what resonates with a brand’s audience and drives conversions. Here are three ways you can measure the success of your content at a page level in 2014.
Bing’s Duane Forrester On Keyword In Domain Name
Duane Forrester, Bing’s version of Matt Cutts (on some level), posted this long blog post on the importance of keywords in domain names on rankings.
In short…
New Google AdSense Arrows: Square Backgrounds With Thin Arrow
A WebmasterWorld thread is chatting about a new Google AdSense test where the arrows in the AdSense units are once again changing.
I was able to find a picture of this in action on my own personal blog…
Was Expedia Penalized By Google? SearchMetrics Says So.
Yesterday morning Patrick Altoft tweeted to me that SearchMetrics is reporting Expedia lost about 25% of their Google traffic overnight.
SearchMetric is indeed reporting this and I confirmed it with Marcus Tober from SearchMetrics via email…
Google’s Matt Cutts: Guest Blogging For Links Or SEO Is Over & Dead
Yesterday, Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam and the most loved to be hated man at Google, posted on his personal blog that guest blogging is dead at least for link building or SEO purposes…
Will Link Building Soon Be A Thing Of The Past?
The other day while working on a client proposal, I came to the section about link building and had to pause. While everything we include in a proposal is relevant, strategic, and in my opinion, a good tactic, I wasn’t sure I wanted to position it as link building. As someone who has been…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Baidu’s Zeitgeist 2013: stats and trends
Globally, Baidu is the second biggest search engine with around 19% of market share after Google. In China, it accounts for more than 63% of the market – that’s more than 200m unique users.
So what were these 200m+ users looking for in 2013? According to China Internet Watch, fantasy literature has really dominated the engine over the year:
Top 10 search keywords on Baidu during 2013
1. Weather
2. Taobao
3. Wu Dong Qian Kun
4. The Tang Door
5. Mang Huang Ji
6. Zhe Tian
7. Double Chromosphere
8. Baidu
9. Da Zhu Zai
10. Qzone
Five out of Baidu’s top 10 search terms during 2013 (‘Wu Dong Qian Kun,’ ‘The Tang Door,’ ‘Mang Huang Ji,’ ‘Zhe Tian’ and ‘Da Zhu Zai’) are all related to literature. In fact, they are all online novels which can be read at sites such as Qidian.com.
Massive online names, Taobao (ecommerce) and Qzone (social media) also feature in the Top 10. But it is ‘weather’ which grabs the number one spot, due in no small part to smog problems in areas such as Shanghai and Beijing – sometimes lasting over a week and affecting millions of people.
In fact, climatic worries were at the forefront of the minds of searchers across channels and devices, with Taobao reporting in December that ‘hazy weather’ was the biggest keyphrase they were seeing across their site in 2013. ‘Weather,’ additionally, was the top term searched for from Chinese mobiles.
Top 10 mobile search keywords on Baidu during 2013
- Weather
- Train Ticket
- Lottery
- Gold Price
- Constellation
- Translation
- Oneiromancy
- Express Delivery
- Traffic Violation
- Check Time
Baidu sees 130m people use the service from mobile devices every day. While the weather was clearly a subject many Chinese citizens wanted a handle on throughout 2013, the chance of winning the lottery also saw big search activity.
‘Lottery’ ranked as the third highest term in mobile searches while also proving big on desktop devices where users are searching for lottery name: ‘Double Chromosphere.’
Alongside the popularity of Taobao on desktop, ‘Express Delivery’ also reflected the growth in Chinese online retail during 2013 – with many consumers keen to track their express delivery orders on their mobile devices.
One key difference between popular Baidu search terms and those on Google UK is that Chinese consumers often look for things which are inherently linked to digital or online culture such as online books, social media and ecommerce sites.
This contrasts with the celebrities and events we see in the top trending Google UK list, i.e. Nelson Mandela and the Grand National.
A complex set of reasons will be causing these search differences between China and the UK. Aside from the variations between cultural and social habits, the differing ways Google and Baidu choose to present content and the lengths at which the government are able to control certain content will be affecting what users look for and what they find.
For more information check out our Baidu Search Best Practice Guide and our China: Digital Marketing Landscape Report. And, of course, these stats and trends, as well as a wealth of Christmas ecommerce data can be found in the latest edition of our Internet Statistics Compendium.
Baidu’s Zeitgeist 2013: stats and trends
Globally, Baidu is the second biggest search engine with around 19% of market share after Google. In China, it accounts for more than 63% of the market – that’s more than 200m unique users.
So what were these 200m+ users looking for in 2013? According to China Internet Watch, fantasy literature has really dominated the engine over the year:
Top 10 search keywords on Baidu during 2013
1. Weather
2. Taobao
3. Wu Dong Qian Kun
4. The Tang Door
5. Mang Huang Ji
6. Zhe Tian
7. Double Chromosphere
8. Baidu
9. Da Zhu Zai
10. Qzone
Five out of Baidu’s top 10 search terms during 2013 (‘Wu Dong Qian Kun,’ ‘The Tang Door,’ ‘Mang Huang Ji,’ ‘Zhe Tian’ and ‘Da Zhu Zai’) are all related to literature. In fact, they are all online novels which can be read at sites such as Qidian.com.
Massive online names, Taobao (ecommerce) and Qzone (social media) also feature in the Top 10. But it is ‘weather’ which grabs the number one spot, due in no small part to smog problems in areas such as Shanghai and Beijing – sometimes lasting over a week and affecting millions of people.
In fact, climatic worries were at the forefront of the minds of searchers across channels and devices, with Taobao reporting in December that ‘hazy weather’ was the biggest keyphrase they were seeing across their site in 2013. ‘Weather,’ additionally, was the top term searched for from Chinese mobiles.
Top 10 mobile search keywords on Baidu during 2013
- Weather
- Train Ticket
- Lottery
- Gold Price
- Constellation
- Translation
- Oneiromancy
- Express Delivery
- Traffic Violation
- Check Time
Baidu sees 130m people use the service from mobile devices every day. While the weather was clearly a subject many Chinese citizens wanted a handle on throughout 2013, the chance of winning the lottery also saw big search activity.
‘Lottery’ ranked as the third highest term in mobile searches while also proving big on desktop devices where users are searching for lottery name: ‘Double Chromosphere.’
Alongside the popularity of Taobao on desktop, ‘Express Delivery’ also reflected the growth in Chinese online retail during 2013 – with many consumers keen to track their express delivery orders on their mobile devices.
One key difference between popular Baidu search terms and those on Google UK is that Chinese consumers often look for things which are inherently linked to digital or online culture such as online books, social media and ecommerce sites.
This contrasts with the celebrities and events we see in the top trending Google UK list, i.e. Nelson Mandela and the Grand National.
A complex set of reasons will be causing these search differences between China and the UK. Aside from the variations between cultural and social habits, the differing ways Google and Baidu choose to present content and the lengths at which the government are able to control certain content will be affecting what users look for and what they find.
For more information check out our Baidu Search Best Practice Guide and our China: Digital Marketing Landscape Report. And, of course, these stats and trends, as well as a wealth of Christmas ecommerce data can be found in the latest edition of our Internet Statistics Compendium.
Marin: 40 Percent Of Google PLA Clicks To Come From Smartphones By Dec 2014
By now it’s clear that retailers made record investments in Google product listing ads (PLAs) in Q4 2013, as reports from Covario, RKG and IgnitionOne have each shown. Today, Marin Software released its own findings which reinforce the general consensus that PLA performance this past holiday…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.