Andrea Francis says, “Every marketer has a story about getting penalised by Google. Evidence suggests that though many websites have been penalised (not just by the big updates, but also by one of the thousands of tiny little manual Google updates), the average marketer or webmaster hasn’t noticed. According to Kissmetrics, only 5% of penalised websites are submitting a reconsideration request every month to recover their rankings. Since we are all reliant on search engines for traffic, we have to stay in the know about the latest updates — and make changes if we’re affected. Not... [...]

Christopher Lochhead says, “Asking why Google created Alphabet is the wrong question. The right questions to ask are: Why did Google miss social networking? How is it that limo company Carey didn’t see the opportunity in smartphone-powered transportation and Uber’s founders did? Why did it take SAP until 2011 to get into cloud apps, twelve years after the founding of Salesforce.com? And how come most of the innovation in technology security is coming from startups and not Symantec, McAfee, or Bluecoat? Existing Markets Have Gravitational Pull We believe the answer to these questions... [...]

Roy Hinkis says, “When Moz undertook this year’s Ranking Correlation Study (Ranking Factors), there was a desire to include data points never before studied. Fortunately, SimilarWeb had exactly what was needed. For the first time, Moz was able to measure ranking correlations with both traffic and engagement metrics. Using Moz’s ranking data on over 200,000 domains, combined with multiple SimilarWeb data points—including traffic, page views, bounce rate, time on site, and rank—the Search Ranking Factors study was able to measure how these metrics corresponded to higher rankings. These... [...]

Jack Simpson says, “Google is increasingly valuing ‘quality content’ when it comes to search rankings, according to a new report. This isn’t exactly news to most marketers, but the way in which Google determines quality is evolving. According to the study, positive signals such as the amount of time spent on a page are having an increasingly significant impact on rankings. This means it’s more important than ever to keep the reader engaged. With that in mind, I’m going to use this post to try and explain how you can achieve ‘quality content’ on your site based on some of the... [...]

Farooq Bhatti says, “Street View Trusted, formerly known as Google Business View, is a tool for businesses to showcase their premises via a virtual tour hosted on the world’s leading search engine. Utilising the same technology as Street View, the platform allows businesses to show their ambiance, décor and style to online users in a visually engaging manner. The Basics Unlike Street View, the photography is taken by independent local photographers that are trained and certified by Google. The photos are subject to Google quality assurance inspections to verify that the imagery and user... [...]

Greg Sterling says, “The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that The European Commission (EC) is expanding its antitrust probe of Google. Currently, the EC is in the late stages of its vertical search inquiry and has filed formal charges, which Google has until August 31 to rebut. It’s at an earlier stage of investigating Google’s management of the Android operating system. According to the Journal report, the EC is now investigating whether Google “abuses its dominance in advertising contracts with website operators and copies content from rival sites.” The first question goes... [...]

Parry Malm says, “What is the deal with referral spam? Aside from it being mega annoying, pointless, and stupid? If you use Google Analytics, you definitely know what I’m talking about. It’s those almost-real-but-actually-fake-spamming-links that show up on your analytics and screw up your KPIs. It annoyed me. So I figured out how to get it off my dashboard, and here’s how. At my company we keep a close eye on our Google Analytics web stats, probably like you. Yesterday, we popped into our real-time stats and noticed a bunch of sessions from around the world. Hey wow, that’s pretty... [...]

Martin Beck says, “If this sounds familiar it’s because Google started incorporating tweets on search results for US users on mobile devices in May. Now it has expanded the feature to the desktop for all English language searchers globally. The company had already extended mobile access to English users worldwide. What it means is that tweets will show up in a carousel in the main column of search results when they are relevant. Twitter isn’t required for people to see the tweets; those who click through while not being signed onto Twitter will be taken to the network’s logged out experience“. Tweets... [...]

David Nield says, “ Google’s attempt to kill off C just got a new development: Today, the company announced a new update for Go, its own 6-year-old programming language, bringing it to version 1.5. It’s the sixth major update since Go’s inception in 2009, and it finally removes all traces of the C language it’s built on. Putting out their own coding language has become a hallmark of many tech giants today: Just as Microsoft had C#, others tout their own efforts, like Facebook (Hack), Google (Go) and Apple (Objective-C/Swift). Some go the open-source route like Hack... [...]

Farooq Bhatti says, “Big changes have been introduced in the way local businesses are presented on Google search results.  Since early August 2015, Google altered the usual seven pack local listing to a smaller three pack (aka snack pack) listing across all its sites worldwide. How businesses react to these changes will define how easily consumers can find them. Let’s take a look at what the new search results look like and what insights we can gain from them“. How the Google Snack Pack update impacts local search ‘Econsultancy’ Blog  [...]