Archive for 'Search Engine News'

Feb17

Tina Wilson

0

SEO Lessons from the NYT JC Penny Google Link Building Exposé

On February 12, 2011 the New York Times released a scathing report on how Google had failed to identify a paid link building scheme that saw retailer JC Penny owning highly specific, and presumably valuable, search terms during the lucrative holiday season. In the article, the NYT suggests that by design JC Penny gamed the Google algorithm to place in the first position for a multitude of keyword phrases, in some cases outranking well known brands for their own name. It further blasts Google for not catching on to what JC Penny was doing, insinuating that Google somehow did not [...]

Jan18

Charlotte Bourne

1

Keep an Eye on Bing Webmaster Tools

Last year’s Yahoo!/Bing merger increased the importance of optimizing for Bing, since the engine now accounts for additional market share. But optimizing for Bing has been a bit hard to do, partially because of limited functionality within the Bing Webmaster Tools interface. Bing Webmaster Tools got a facelift in the middle of last year that left it with minimal functionality. However, a few recent changes show there’s been some nice development with the tool. Bing has been particularly bad at handling duplicate content. Bing didn’t have the same parameter handling capabilities that you can find in Google Webmaster Tools, but [...]

Dec16

Charlotte Bourne

0

Significant new features from Bing

Significant new features from Bing

The Bing Search Summit was held yesterday in San Fransisco, and Bing announced a significant list of new features. Much of Bing’s strategy builds on the same principles as those presented during their 2009 Search Summit. In this post we’ll review the highlights of last year’s Bing Search Summit and take a look at the new features introduced this year. The keynote for the 2009 Bing Search Summit was Satya Nadella, SVP of Microsoft’s Online Services Division. At the time, Bing demonstrated its current state of search through the following graph, highlighting the problems people were having with Bing search [...]

Oct05

Ian Everdell

4

Eye Tracking Google Instant: Does It Change Searcher Behavior?

If you’re not in New York, or decided to go to one of those “more exciting” sessions at SMX this morning, you will have missed being the first to hear about whether Google Instant is changing user behavior. But fear not, I’m offering a recap of the preliminary findings here. Methodology We did two things to collect some user feedback: a 20-person lab study with eye tracking, and an online survey. For the survey, we got about 150 responses from our newsletter, Twitter, email, and other social sharing of the invite. Questions were basic use and preference questions about Instant, [...]

Sep23

Charlotte Bourne

1

Google Instant Impacts on SEO Measured

We’ve been keeping an eye on the impacts of Google Instant for our SEO clients, monitoring both the changes in the length of keyword queries driving traffic to sites and the change in the number of impressions in the Google search engine. We recently ran an analysis for one of our clients of the length of keyword query (whether it is one-word queries such as “dog” or two-word queries such as “dog catcher”, etc.) for the two weeks leading up to Google Instant compared to the two weeks prior. For this particular client, three-word search queries are the main driver [...]

Sep17

Ian Everdell

2

Yahoo! and Bing Making User Interface Changes Too

Everybody’s talking about Google Instant – is it faster, is it easier, is it a better experience? But they’re not the only ones tweaking their interface in the hopes of changing the search experience. In the last couple of days, both Yahoo! and Bing have announced changes to the way they present search results as well. Yahoo! takes a stab at presenting a richer experience when you search for entertainment-related information, and Bing has used the power of HTML5, Windows 7, and IE9 to make the search experience more desktop-like. Let’s look at Yahoo! first. Yahoo! the Entertainer Announced in [...]

Sep15

admin

4

Google Instant and what it means to your business.

Google frequently deploys new technologies that are designed to benefit the user and provide the best search experience. Google’s goal is to serve up the most relevant websites based on a search query (or with Google Instant, what it thinks a query might be). Which web pages rank for search queries depends on the same SEO fundamentals as always: having quality content optimized for relevant keywords along with inbound links that support the authoritativeness of your site. It’s too early in the implementation of Google Instant to describe the precise effect it will have, or even if it will be retained [...]