Barry Schwartz says, “Every year we like to get a Googler who is close with the ranking and search quality team to give us future thinking points to relay to the search marketing community. In part two of our interview with Gary Illyes of Google, we asked him that question. After a little bit of coercion, Illyes told us three things: (1) Machine learning (2) AMP (3) Structured data He said: Well I guess you can guess that we are going to focus more and more on machine learning. Pretty much everywhere in search. But it will not take over the core algorithm. So that’s one thing. The other... [...]

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... [...]

Andy Taylor says, “At the recent SMX East conference in New York City, Google’s Jerry Dischler announced a number of paid search updates that should roll out in the near to immediate future. Among them, two in particular stand to expand the footprint of Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA). Here are the changes you need to know about, starting with the most impactful. RLSA membership duration expanded to 540 days Since beta testing all the way back in 2012, RLSA has been restricted to include only those users who visited an advertiser’s website within the past 180 days. This meant... [...]

Christi Olson says, “Attribution is the science behind assigning values to individual touch points throughout a customer’s decision journey. It’s not only a key driver in how we currently optimize marketing campaigns, but attribution is also used for media mix modeling and developing media budgets. Herein lies the problem: marketers tend to look at attribution within our own channel silo, so it’s not easy to understand the full picture of a multi-channel environment. As search continues to evolve in form and function, it’s raising some important questions around how we think about... [...]

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,... [...]