I’ve had the opportunity to audit hundreds of AdWords accounts over the last decade. I’m happy to say that the “face-palm” horrible accounts that I see are decreasing in volume as the bar is raised in our industry towards effective management. I am starting to see the opposite problem though – overly optimized accounts. That’s […]
Archives for 2014
Bing Index Quality Team Plans Increased Webmaster Communications
In a brave move, Igor Rondel from the Bing Index Quality team has a new blog post where they admit they need to do a better job at communicating with webmasters. Now, they aim to make this change with more frequent announcements from their team about changing and insights, in addition to what webmasters hear […]
Google+ Now Allows Nicknames Instead of Real Names
One of the major concerns people have had with Google+ is that users could not use a nickname or a fake name as their name on the social media platform. Instead, Google+ had a strict policy that only real names were allowed. Google+ has now made the change that opens up the platform to names […]
State of the Industry – Real SEOs Solve Problems
The most important is the one we’ve foisted on ourselves. Search engine optimization has an ongoing reputation problem. SEO has always been a controversial practice. There’s an air of manipulation inherent in SEO which is similar to the air of manipulation around other forms of prominence marketing. Though professional SEO is really about clarity, many […]
Google Adds Warning in Mobile Search Results for Flash Sites
Does your webpage use Flash? If so, Google will now show a warning to all mobile users, warning them that the site “may not work on your device” with the option to “try anyway”. Even more significant is the fact this warning will replace the entire description for the search result, meaning if your site […]
Google Webmaster Tools Adds Hreflang Troubleshooting
For SEOs who are dealing with international issues for a website, there is some great news from Google. Google Webmaster Tools has announced that International Targeting is now available to all users. International Targeting, which was previously in beta, enables advertisers to debug errors with hreflang implementation. The markup hreflang, sometimes referred to as href-lang, […]
Google AdWords Advertisers Can Merge Google My Business Location Information
Google has announced new feature that will allow AdWords advertisers to link their AdWords account to their Google My Business account, which will allow advertisers the ability to easily set up location extensions at the account level. This feature will make it much easier for businesses to manage location extensions for the advertisements both on […]
The Role of Reputation in the Google Quality Rating Guidelines
In the brand new version of the Google Quality Rater’s Guidelines, they stress the importance of the rater’s judging the reputation of an author and a website. So it definitely raises the question of how Google might be looking at reputation on a larger scale and how they might be planning to incorporate parts of […]
What QVC Can Teach You For PPC
According to QVC, they reach approximately 85 million American homes and add more than 194,000 new customers each month. Wouldn’t you like to accomplish just a fraction of that with your search marketing? As I recently watched a QVC program, I realized we are not so different, shop at home and PPC. We both have […]
Google Indexes Far Fewer Tweets Than Previously Believed
With marketers paying so much attention to the social media power of Twitter, there hasn’t been a close look at how well tweets by users on Twitter get indexed nor how much of an impact those tweets have on Google. Google does not currently have data directly from Twitter (aka “the firehose”) to index tweets. […]