Need To Grow Your PPC Account? Look InTo The Search Queries

One of the most common inquiries I receive from e-commerce clients is how we can garner additional, profitable traffic. Of course, this inquiry can happen at any time during the agency-client relationship, but I want to focus when it occurs after many months of management. To phrase another way, clients want to continue growing after the account has been built and (seemingly) all themes covered.

Expanding into new paid search platforms is a given for growth, but the purpose of this post is to examine an integral part of campaign expansion within AdWords and Bing Ads accounts, the Search Query Report (SQR). We all make use of this report, but I don’t believe advertisers know the true potential it has for account growth.

The most common use for SQRs has generally been to find negative keywords. There will always be terms that can be added as new keywords within existing campaigns and ad groups, but the report is primarily meant to find poor performers for exclusion. However, within dynamic, Shopping, and top-of-funnel campaigns, SQRs are a goldmine for new keywords.

Resource : http://searchengineland.com/

Google to shut down Gtalk on February 16

In two weeks from now, you'll have to make the switch from Google's Gtalk messenger platform to its Hangout (whether they like it or not). Millions of users have been using the Gtalk for long time and they've become so comfortable with it that moving away has never been considered. So, Google has decided to force users by shutting down Gtalk once and for all.

Hangout is the future for Google (so they seem to think) and hence taking down Gtalk is the most logical thing that the search-engine giant can do now. Signs of Gtalk going down became obvious when Google decided to cut support (security and version) for the desktop application bringing its end closer to reality. As highlighted by Google the 'IM service will be wholly replaced by the Hangouts app, which can used only via its Chrome web browser.


Source url : http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-news/Google-to-shut-down-Gtalk-on-February-16/articleshow/46130314.cms

58% Of Local Marketers Will Change Tactics After Pigeon Update

There has been much expert analysis and published research on the impact of Google’s Pigeon Update.

In this post, I am going to share the results of some recent polls we conducted with attendees on a recent InsideLocal webinar, the topic of which was “The Impact of Pigeon.” (Note: webinar recording can be watched here.)

We wanted to measure the experiences and observations of the 600+ SEOs and SMBs on the webinar to see how they compared to the published, “expert” viewpoints.

We asked 4 questions, and here is what we found out.

1. Has Pigeon Delivered Good Changes For Businesses & Searchers?

Respondents: 402

Key Findings:

• 69% believe that Pigeon has delivered good change for searchers
• 53% believe that Pigeon is bad for businesses

Source url : http://searchengineland.com/58-local-marketeers-will-change-tactics-pigeon-update-208812

Google’s Amitabh Kumar Singhal plans to increase Indian Internet users to 500 million by 2017

Google search has answers to most of your questions. But not all. If Amitabh Kumar Singhal succeeds in making the 'Star Trek computer' he set out to build, it just might. At Google, the 46-year old India-born executive is the search czar. Google fields over 100-billion search queries every month, a service which generated most of its $55 billion (Rs 3.3 lakh crore) revenue in 2013.

In India, there is also another important target on his mind-—helping increase the number of internet users to 500 million by 2017. That is more than a twofold increase in less than three years, demonstrating the scale of Google's ambitions in the country.

Source url : http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/how-googles-amitabh-kumar-singhal-plans-to-increase-indian-internet-users-to-500-million-by-2017/articleshow/45029819.cms

Google Enables Multiple AdWords Account Logins

Hear that? That is the communal sigh of relief echoing throughout the paid search world. The days of having several browsers open in order to manage multiple AdWords accounts simultaneously are finally over.
Google announced a new workflow that allows you to switch between Google accounts without having to log out and log in again. Switch accounts and still stay logged into all of them.
To get started in AdWords, click on either the Customer ID or login email in AdWords to open what’s called the account selector. Managers can choose to add more accounts using the “Add Account” button.
This is an example of a seemingly small change that will make a huge difference in user experience and productivity.

Source url : http://searchengineland.com/google-enables-multiple-adwords-account-logins-207069

Best practices for XML sitemaps & RSS/Atom feeds

Submitting sitemaps can be an important part of optimizing websites. Sitemaps enable search engines to discover all pages on a site and to download them quickly when they change. This blog post explains which fields in sitemaps are important, when to use XML sitemaps and RSS/Atom feeds, and how to optimize them for Google.

Sitemaps and feeds

Sitemaps can be in XML sitemap, RSS, or Atom formats. The important difference between these formats is that XML sitemaps describe the whole set of URLs within a site, while RSS/Atom feeds describe recent changes. This has important implications:

• XML sitemaps are usually large; RSS/Atom feeds are small, containing only the most recent updates to your site.
• XML sitemaps are downloaded less frequently than RSS/Atom feeds.

For optimal crawling, we recommend using both XML sitemaps and RSS/Atom feeds. XML sitemaps will give Google information about all of the pages on your site. RSS/Atom feeds will provide all updates on your site, helping Google to keep your content fresher in its index. Note that submitting sitemaps or feeds does not guarantee the indexing of those URLs.

Source ul : http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2014/10/best-practices-for-xml-sitemaps-rssatom.html

Rich Snippet Spam

If you use rich snippets on your websites, you should be aware that Google is now penalizing websites for spamming structured data markup.
The new warning was first mentioned in a forum post on the Google Webmaster Central forums from a user who is asking for clarification about the warning and what the issue could be. It is a manual action penalty based on incorrect usage of markups, regardless of whether it was deliberate spam or simply a mistake.
The warning that would appear in a user’s accounts if they have manual action taken is:

Markup on some pages on this site appears to use techniques such as marking up content that is invisible to users, marking up irrelevant or misleading content, and/or other manipulative behavior that violates Google's Rich Snippet Quality guidelines.

The writing on the wall for penalties related to rich snippets was back in October at Pubcon when Google's Matt Cutts talked about changes Google was planning in regards to rich snippets and dealing with related snippet spam.

Source url : http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2327459/Google-Starts-Penalizing-Sites-for-Rich-Snippet-Spam

To Publish similar or duplicative stories on different URLs use rel=canonical

In a video released by Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, Matt said publishers who publish similar or duplicative stories on different URLs may use the rel=canonical tag to help consolidate the PageRank of the stories and avoid any issues with Google.

Matt Cutts did say that duplicate content won’t hurt you unless you are doing it for spam-related reasons. Cutts also did say that 25% of the web is duplicative, so you really don’t have to worry about it. But I guess in this case, to help with rankings, you may, as a publisher, want to use the rel=canonical tag to help Google know which is your primary page.

Source url : http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-on-publishers-with-duplicate-content-use-the-canonical-tag-181331 

A Little Usage of Duplicate Content Won't Hurt Rankings

Duplicate content is always a concern for webmasters. Whether it's a website stealing content from another site, or perhaps a website that hasn't taken an active role in ensuring they get great unique quality content on their site, being duplicated out of the Google index is a problem.
In the latest webmaster help video from Google's Matt Cutts, he addresses how Google handles duplicate content, and when it can negatively impact your search rankings.
Cutts started by explaining what duplicate content is and why duplicate content isn't always a problem, especially when it comes to quoting parts of other web pages.

It's important to realize that if you look at content on the web, something like 25 or 30 percent of all of the web's content is duplicate content. … People will quote a paragraph of a blog and then link to the blog, that sort of thing. So it's not the case that every single time there's duplicate content it's spam, and if we made that assumption the changes that happened as a result would end up probably hurting our search quality rather than helping our search quality.

Source url : http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2319706/Googles-Matt-Cutts-A-Little-Duplicate-Content-Wont-Hurt-Your-Rankings  

Matt Cutt on Search Spammers

In episode number 227 of This Week in Google on the TWiT network, Google’s head of search spam Matt Cutts answered some questions from the hosts Leo Laporte and Jeff Jarvis. In one question, Matt explained that Google aims to “break the spirits” of spammers in order to encourage them to change their course of action.
The question was posed to Matt from Jeff Jarvis, a well-known journalist and professor, asking him what he learned about the psychology behind spam and spammers. Matt responded that to reduce spam, it is not just about denying the primary goal of earning money but frustrating them to a point, where you break their will and desire to spam.
I transcribed the exact words and how Matt said it:

If you want to stop spam, the most straight forward way to do it is to deny people money because they care about the money and that should be their end goal. But if you really want to stop spam, it is a little bit mean, but what you want to do, is sort of break their spirits. There are lots of Google algorithms specifically designed to frustrate spammers. Some of the things we do is give people a hint their site will drop and then a week or two later, their site actually does drop. So they get a little bit more frustrated. So hopefully, and we’ve seen this happen, people step away from the dark side and say, you know what, that was so much pain and anguish and frustration, let’s just stay on the high road from now on.

Source url : http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-on-search-spammers-we-want-to-break-their-spirits-180215  

A Google initiative for women empowerment in India

  To empower women even further, Google India has launched an initiative called 'Helping women get online' that will encourage women in the country to use the online medium more effectively.

At present, only one third of users who use the Internet are women.Google realises that lack of easy access to Internet, lack of knowledge on how to use the Internet and its relevance in their daily lives are some of the biggest barriers for women to get online.


The initiative aims to help 50 million additional women get online by end of 2014 by undertaking a variety of initiatives across India.

Source url : http://www.dnaindia.com/scitech/report-google-looks-to-empower-women-in-india-launches-help-get-women-online-initiative-1922112 

Why No Pagerank update?

We already knew Google wasn’t likely to update the PageRank meter in the Google Toolbar this year. The head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts, reiterated today that this will stay the case and explained why. Google’s ability to update the toolbar is broken, and it’s not a priority to fix it.

Speaking at Pubcon today, Cutts explained that the “pipeline” to send PageRank updates to the toolbar is broken. Google, feeling that too many people obsess over PageRank, doesn’t see it as important to fix that. Cutts said this probably won’t happen by the end of the year. It repeats his message from earlier this month.

Source url : http://searchengineland.com/pagerank-pipeline-broken-174926 

Top Search Engines and Directories

Search engines – webmasters and search engine optimization (SEO) professionals follow their guidelines for the highest possible rankings on them; paid search marketers pay to be featured on them; and users turn to them when they're searching for answers, information, or entertainment.

Search Engine Watch has been covering search engines since June 1997 and has watched the industry evolve to its current state. Over time, many search engines have come and gone, as users have spoken with their keyboards (and literally with their voices – thanks to voice search technology).


In recent years, search market share has remained mostly unchanged – for much of the world, it's Google followed by every other search engine (in the U.S. the "Big 5" search engines consist of Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask.com and AOL, which combine for hundreds of billions of searches every month). Meanwhile, many of the players have consolidated or have become footnotes in history.

Source url : http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2048976/Major-Search-Engines-and-Directories 

New interface for searches on mobile phones by Google

Ben Gomes, the India-bred techie who oversees Google's handling of 100 billion searches a month, believes a new voice-based interface is needed for the next frontier of search centred round mobile phones and tablet computers.
"Now search is becoming mobile - on phones and tablets. The challenge is that it is on a small screen, so it's hard to type. The opportunity is that it's got a really good microphone and a touch screen," he said.
"It can enable a new kind of interface. So we realised we want to build an interface that was much like the way you talk to some person and ask a question," Gomes said.

Source url :  http://www.indianexpress.com/news/google-focusses-on-new-interface-for-searches-on-mobile-phones/1171356/?wc=EWJvGgpmBQVHGxVx

New Top Navigation: White Top & Box Bar by Google

This morning, Google is rolling out a new top bar navigation style worldwide. They have not yet announced it, but they have been testing various experiments with it. It seems very likely that Google will roll out this new navigation to all Google users over the next few days.

The picture above shows Google has dropped the black bar navigation and replaced it with a minimalistic white top, with fewer links but a box like button, which expands to show you additional Google services.

Source url : http://www.seroundtable.com/google-white-box-navigation-17362.html

In-Depth Articles Goes Live on Google

A month ago, we reported tests of in-depth search snippets from Google - well that test is now a reality. Google announced last night that they will show these in-depth articles in the search results when the query is about understanding a broader topic. Google said this will help 10% of the queries that are seeking more than just a quick answer, really dive deeper into broader topics.

This is launching on google.com in English to start but Google promises to expand this feature to other regions and languages.

Source url : http://www.seroundtable.com/google-in-depth-articles-17191.html

Start Searching India By Google

Google India on Tuesday introduced its 'Start Searching India' campaign here to help internet users get the most out of the web with its search tool.
"Internet is no longer restricted to the domain of working professionals and is fast emerging as a life enriching tool catering to the varied needs of the people from all walks of life," Google India's Director Marketing, Sandeep Menon said on the occasion.
The objective of the campaign is to help Indian users save time, by showing how they can get instant and to-the-point answers to their most common queries, he said.

Source url : http://www.dnaindia.com/scitech/1867616/report-google-kicks-off-start-searching-india-campaign 

Google's disavow tool

Can using Google’s link disavow tool help remove penalties? Yes, the company says. But when it comes to manual penalties, disavowing links alone isn’t enough. With algorithmic penalties, there may be a time delay involved. Below, more about how both methods work.
Over the past few days, I’ve encountered a couple of cases where people are confused about how the link disavow tool works to remove penalties. So, I figured a clarification post was in order. Here’s the situation, all of which I reverified with Google yesterday.

Source url  : http://searchengineland.com/how-google-disavow-link-tool-remove-penalties-154928

Google slammed over suicide videos

Russian consumer rights watchdog has hit out at search engine Google and YouTube over what it called online suicide instruction videos.
“Google Russia and YouTube LLC express their position based solely on a threat to the freedom of access to information on the Internet,” the Rospotrebnadzor watchdog said in a statement.
The watchdog’s statement came after YouTube, Google’s video sharing unit, filed a lawsuit against Rospotrebnadzor over a decision to block a video containing alleged “harmful” material. A preliminary hearing into the case began onFriday.

Source url : http://www.dnaindia.com/scitech/report_russian-watchdog-slams-google-over-suicide-videos_1813137

Google Reader shut down

Google is killing off Reader, its web-based RSS reading service, as part of its latest round of culling little-used or unprofitable products. A spring clean, if you will.
The service will disappear on July 1st, 2013.
Google’s reason for the termination, revealed in a blog post, follows:

“There are two simple reasons for this: usage of Google Reader has declined, and as a company we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products. We think that kind of focus will make for a better user experience.”

Software Engineer Alan Green penned the post and added that “We know Reader has a devoted following who will be very sad to see it go. We’re sad too.”
Happily, users can extract their RSS subscriptions and use them in another reader using Google Takeout.

Source url : http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/14/google_retires_reader/?wc=EWJvGgpmBQVHGxVx