James McQuivey says, “Today several users of Google Home — Google’s competitor to Amazon Echo with its Alexa intelligent agent — reported that Google was inserting Beauty and the Beast movie promos into their conversations. It’s surprising that Google is already testing this kind of interruption model for a couple of reasons. First, it’s playing catch up to Amazon’s much more mature intelligent speaker product and rocking the user boat with something so blatantly counter to the value of the category so soon feels foolhardy. That said, this will hardly cause... [...]

Ginny Marvin says, “Google’s domination of the US search ad market isn’t letting up. Thanks to mobile in particular, Google will take 77.8 percent of US search ad revenues this year. By next year, for every dollar spent on search advertising in the US, an even eight dimes will go to Google. The remaining 20 cents will be split up among Microsoft, Yahoo, Yelp, Amazon, Ask and AOL, according to eMarketer’s latest report on the US digital ad market. “Google’s dominance in search, especially mobile search, is largely coming from the growing tendency of consumers to turn to their smartphones... [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “Last week, we reported about a new unconfirmed Google ranking update that is going by the name of Fred. Google has not confirmed this update. In fact, they told us they have no comment at all on this. That being said, I spent the weekend collecting sample URLs of webmasters who claimed to have been hit by this update. After reviewing now upward of 100 different sites, I believe this update targets low-value content sites that put revenue above helping their users. The vast majority of URLs shared with me all show the same type of website. A content site, often in a blog... [...]

Tom Capper says, “A little over two weeks ago I had the pleasure of speaking at SearchLove San Diego. My presentation, Does Google Still Need Links, looked at the available evidence on how and to what extent Google is using links as a ranking factor in 2017, including the piece of research that I’m sharing here today. One of the main points of my presentation was to argue that while links still do represent a useful source of information for Google’s ranking algorithm, Google now has many other sources, most of which they would never have dreamed of back when PageRank was conceived as... [...]

SBT team says, “The internet is a place where many things can happen. People use it to inspire, motivate, organize, inform and debate. But like all powerful outlets with minimally regulated environments, the internet has also become a place where disagreements can quickly turn into verbal sparring and even harassment. The removal of face-to-face contact and the anonymity provided by a screen and keyboard emboldens some users to unleash on one another, or rather, troll one another. Since the rapid takeoff of social platforms and the recognition of deeply problematic issues like cyberbullying,... [...]

Michael Cottam says, “When Penguin 4.0 launched in September 2016, the story from Gary Illyes of Google was that Penguin now just devalued spammy links, rather than penalizing a site by adjusting the site’s ranking downward, AKA a penalty. Apparently for Penguin there is now “less need” for a disavow, according to a Facebook discussion between Gary Illyes and Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Land back in September. He suggested that webmasters can help Google find spammy sites by disavowing links they know are bad. He also mentioned that manual actions still happen — and... [...]

Derek Newton says, “Influencer marketing has been a buzzword in public relations, sales and marketing for some time now. Its durability is a testament to its potential power to drive engagements and sales. But it’s also a testament to how little those in it — the brands and influencers alike — really understand it. From the outside, influencer marketing is pretty simple and perfectly tailored to a communications world dominated by social media and content overload. The idea is that those who need to reach key audiences connect with people who have influence in those segments... [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “Since yesterday morning, the SEO industry has been watching an unconfirmed Google ranking update that seems to target more of the link quality aspects of the overall algorithm. Many are calling this the Fred Update, a name we’re also adopting. That came from Google’s Gary Illyes, who has jokingly suggested that all updates be named “Fred.” It’s sticking with this one. We’ve seen more chatter and reports of changes from within the “black hat” SEO community, which generally means that this is a spam algorithm update around links. Last time we reported... [...]

Dave Davies says, “Those who know me know that I’m primarily a technical SEO. I like on-site content optimization to be sure, but I like what I can measure — and now that keyword densities are mostly gone, I find it slightly less rewarding during the process (though equally rewarding via the outcome). For this reason, I’ve never been a huge fan of the “quality content is awesome for rankings simply because quality content is awesome for rankings” argument for producing … well … quality content. Quality content is hard to produce and often expensive, so its benefits need to be... [...]

Ginny Marvin says, “Last summer, Google began a test showing business names in the headlines of call-only ads after the phone number. The change led to better conversion outcomes, and Google is now rolling it out of testing globally. This was one of several announcements made around call-only ads and call extensions Google made on Wednesday. Account-level call extensions For advertisers that use one main number for call extensions, Google is rolling out account-level call extensions this week. These advertisers will no longer have to apply the same call extension to multiple times within... [...]