Brett Middleton says, “Everyone running a PPC account typically has a budgeting question they are trying to figure out. For those with a tighter ad budget, the question becomes, “How do I get the most leads for this limited amount of spend I have?” Larger accounts run into their own problems; finding points of diminishing returns and making small gains in efficiency while maintaining spend levels at a point that generates the growth you need can be a headache. If you take away one point from this, it’s that search impression share may be the most ignored primary metric for most... [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “Google is going to create a separate mobile index within months, one that will be the main or “primary” index that the search engine uses to respond to queries. A separate desktop index will be maintained, one that will not be as up-to-date as the mobile index. The news came today during a keynote address from Gary Illyes, a webmaster trends analyst with Google, at Pubcon. Illyes didn’t give a timeline in his talk, but in a follow-up with Search Engine Land, he confirmed that it would happen within “months.” Google first announced that it was experimenting... [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “The Google Penguin real time algorithm which started rolling out on September 23, 2016, has now rolled out fully to all of Google’s data centers. The recovery aspect of this new Penguin algorithm started a bit after September 23 — aroundSeptember 28. Now that all data centers have the new code, those sites impacted by previousGoogle Penguin issues should have seen a recovery at some level if they took the necessary steps to clean up their links. As we covered early, Penguin looks at the link source for the most part — so if you still have very spammy links pointing... [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “Google has quietly announced on Google+ that they are removing a Google Search Console feature that is almost nine years old — the ability to remove sitelinks from displaying in Google search. The feature was first introduced back in October 18, 2007, and today has been shut off. It let webmasters tell Google that they don’t want a specific URL to show up in the featured sitelinks section in the Google search results. Sitelinks are the sublinks found under a search result snippet in Google. Google said they are removing the feature to “simplify things.” Google... [...]

Jacob Baadsgaard says, “Have you ever opened up a paid search report and felt a jolt of fear? Maybe your new campaign wasn’t performing well. Maybe you’d inexplicably spent a ton on AdWords and had nothing to show for it. Maybe it was just more bad news in a losing fight for profitability. Regardless of your particular situation, if you’ve been in paid search for long, you’ve probably had that gut-wrenching feeling at some point. Turns out, there’s more to that feeling than you might have thought. After a series of rather extraordinary events, it’s become clear to me that there... [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “Here’s another nugget of information learned from the A conversation with Google’s Gary Illyes (part 1) podcast at Marketing Land, our sister site: Penguin is coined a “web spam” algorithm, but it indeed focuses mostly on “link spam.” Google has continually told webmasters that this is a web spam algorithm, but every webmaster and SEO focuses mostly around links. Google’s Gary Illyes said their focus is right, that they should be mostly concerned with the links when tackling Penguin issues. Gary Illyes made a point to clarify that it isn’t just the link,... [...]

Glenn Gabe says, “In part one of this series, I covered a number of important points about Google’s quality updates (aka Phantom). I tried to provide a solid foundation for understanding what Phantom is and how it works, explaining its history, its path since 2015 and how it rolls out. In part two, I’m going to dive deeper by providing examples of “low-quality user engagement” that I’ve seen on sites affected by Phantom. I’ve analyzed and helped many companies that have been impacted by Google’s quality updates since May of 2015, and I’ve seen many types of quality problems... [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “In A conversation with Google’s Gary Illyes (part 1) podcast at Marketing Land, our sister site, Gary Illyes told us that Google is looking at ways to measure brand awareness in search. Gary Illyes said this when we asked about how Google sources featured snippets with Google Home voice assistant. Gary explained that measuring brand mentions, without links, is hard, but the user experience team at Google is looking at ways to do this. In context, Danny Sullivan asked Gary what publishers get out of Google Home saying the name of the site. Is there any ranking benefit... [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “In the A conversation with Google’s Gary Illyes (part 1) podcast at Marketing Land, our sister site, we learned that Google adds labels to your links. These labels can add classifications or attributes to the link, including whether the link is a footer link, whether it’s impacted by the latest Penguin update, whether it’s disavowed or other categorizations. A link can have multiple labels that make up the value and meaning of that link, which ultimately helps Google determine how to rank the related documents on the web. Google’s manual actions team may look... [...]

Ginny Marvin says, “Searchmetrics has released a new study today showing the impact of the ever-changing user interface of the Google search results. The study says that now, Google is less likely to show 10 organic blue links. Instead, Google shows only 8.5 blue links on average but supplements those links with featured snippets, app packs, knowledge panels, images, videos and more. You can download the full report over here, but here are some highlights: Organic blue links drop from 10 to 8.5 per search query: Searchmetrics says you are less likely to see 10 links on a Google search results... [...]