Could we finally be seeing a long awaited Penguin update, something that has been more than 10 months in the making? Last month John Mueller revealed that the engineers were currently working on Penguin. But there have been many more questions raised recently about just why we haven’t seen a Penguin update refresh yet. But […]
All Exact & Phrase Match Keywords Turning Into Close Variant Keyword Matching
If you are still using exact or phrase match keywords, you should be aware that Google AdWords will be applying close variant keyword matching next month. This also means the many advertisers who were disabling close variants for exact match keywords will no longer be able to do so. Who Will This Affect? Because of […]
Are You Making These Costly Retargeting Mistakes?
When I audit Adwords accounts, I often see accounts where there are still no remarketing campaigns. For others, I see an old remarketing campaign that somebody “tested” at some point and was then turned off due to poor success metrics or very low volume. Most commonly, I see accounts running remarketing, and though the metrics […]
Google Penalties Reappearing In Manual Spam Action of Webmaster Tools
If you have had a manual action spam penalty lifted in Google Webmaster Tools, yet aren’t seeing an expected bounce back in the rankings, you might want to have an other look at your manual spam actions in Google Webmaster Tools once again. It seems that some penalties are showing back up, even after a […]
The Anatomy of Google Plus Hover-over Card (and Why Care)
Whatever anyone has to say about the future of Google Plus, I really like the platform in its current state. It is more indepth than Twitter and less personal than Facebook and it gives lots of opportunities to establish yourself in the niche (at least certain niches like travel, technology and definitely search and social […]
Is Google AdWords Incorrectly Forwarding Call Extensions? Why You Should Check Your Ads!
Call extensions have been a pretty popular option for local businesses looking to make it easy for potential customers to reach them. AdWords offers two varieties – one where you list and use your own phone number, or another option with call tracking where Google assigns one of their own tracking numbers and then forwards […]
Google Officially Makes Low-Quality Guest Blog Posts a Quality Violation
Matt Cutts warned early this year that guest blogging for SEO was dead. Then Matt Cutts announced Google took action on a large guest blog network, and it was Ann Smarty’s MyBlogGuest that was penalized. And now guest blogging has made its way into Google’s Webmaster Guidelines as a violation. Brian Ussery was the first to […]
Google AdWords Quietly Launches Display Select Only Campaigns
In November 2013, Google announced a new campaign type “Search Network with Display Select”. These are primarily search campaigns but include highly relevant keyword/contextual targeted (more stringently targeted than regular keyword/contextual targeting) impressions on GDN. Small advertisers have seen some promising results with the campaign type, but adoption in enterprise level accounts, where splitting search […]
New Google AdWords Extension for Mapped Local Product Results
Google is testing a new type of local result, but this time they are styled as local shopping ads, showing on a map where a product can be bought. Moz was the first to spot the change with a query for “gas grills”. It seems to only be a test at this time, as many […]
Google Starts Warning Websites That Redirect Mobile to Homepage
A couple of months ago, Google warned webmasters that they would be showing an alert in the Google search results to mobile users who were attempting to go to an internal page of a website but the website itself redirects all mobile users to the homepage instead. Now, Google has started sending letters to websites […]