Marcus Tober says, “Managing your online reputation in search is not something you can leave to chance. What are the key things you should consider? UC Davis (part of the University of California) is an example of what happens when things go wrong: the school was reportedly forced to spend $175,000 to help clean up negative references about it that appeared online after an incident when student protesters were sprayed with pepper spray by campus police. As so much of what people do online starts with search, a big part of managing your online reputation relates to search engines: trying... [...]

Greg Sterling says, “According to the The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), Google is considering incorporating ad-blocking into a new version of Chrome. It would be enabled by default on both the desktop and mobile web. Because of Chrome’s dominant global position, there could be a significant, industry-wide impact. However, the WSJ report hedges and says that an announcement could come within weeks or not at all. Google has come out strongly against ad blocking in the past but is also trying to punish or eliminate certain kinds of ad units and practices, especially on the mobile web (e.g.,... [...]

Matt McGee says, “There are more changes coming to the Google Analytics interface. Today, the company announced plans to give users a new home/landing page that’ll show right after login. The new home page will show a curated set of data from various reports, including real-time data, traffic sources, user location, devices used to visit your website and so forth. There’s some customization involved, too — users with goals or e-commerce will see a different home page than those without, for example. The various widgets (for lack of a better term) on the new home page will also offer... [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “Google released its annual web spam report yesterday, documenting some of the company’s spam-fighting activity in 2016. One of the most eye-catching data points for me was that Google has sent out over 9 million messages related to web spam in 2016; that number was more than double the 4.3 million messages in the 2015 report. The other metric that stood out was that hacked sites continue to rise, this time by 32 percent from 2015 to 2016, but it was a 180 percent increase from 2014 to 2015 in the previous report. Here are some data highlights from this year’s report: 32... [...]

Murray Newlands says, “Businesses of all sizes across the world are leveraging the help of influencers for their B2B marketing. B2B influencer marketing is a cheap and efficient way to create successful marketing campaigns spanning a variety of marketing channels without investing a huge amount of time into them. But the real question is: What is Influencer Marketing? Influencer marketing is the process of integrating people of influence into your marketing strategy in order to increase: The number of visitors to a website The number of “likes”, “shares”, and “follows”... [...]

Danny Sullivan says, “Google has neither censored nor banned the Infowars site, despite what some headlines out there say. The company did, however, rescind an example that its quality rater contractors received using Infowars and other sites in terms of how to judge page quality generally. Memorandum has a round-up on the news, including a Business Insider take that gets the situation generally right. The news came from Mike Cernovich’s blog, which gets it incorrect with a headline saying “Google Takes Out Major Contract to De-List InfoWars from Its Search Index.” Infowars itself... [...]

Tess Townsend says, “Google has added a new shopping feature in Image Search called “style ideas” that shows users perusing fashion merchandise what specific items look like paired with others. A preview of the feature, launching in mobile search, demonstrates a search for a purse from Zara. Below the carousel of products similar to the purse is a grid of photos of various models pairing the purse with a jean jacket, gray suede boots and a pastel pink hijab. The new feature is clearly aimed at getting people looking at products to think of Google as a place to start shopping searches... [...]

Ginny Marvin says, “Quality Score reporting in the AdWords interface leaves much to be desired. Only the current Quality Score is available, and granular details are contained in individual pop-ups that make analysis cumbersome. That could be changing. Avner Pinchover shared a blog post on the Israel version of the Inside AdWords blog with Search Engine Land that describes a series of new columns of Quality Score metrics coming to the AdWords UI. It was posted back on March 10 and seems to have received little attention. It was removed for some reason yesterday. (The archive can be found... [...]

Emma Hichliffe says, “Google’s own version of LinkedIn — or maybe Greenhouse? or Jobvite? — is almost here. The tech company debuted a new sign-in page for Google Hire, an as-yet-unspecified service that’s part of the jobs/career space. According to a report in Axios, the program will be a job applicant tracking system, most similar to Greenhouse and Lever. Employers will reportedly be able to use the service to post job listings and then accept and manage applications. Google acquired Bebop, a startup focused on productivity and enterprise tools, in 2015. Google Hire is... [...]

Ginny Marvin says, “Quality Score reporting in the AdWords interface leaves much to be desired. Only the current Quality Score is available, and granular details are contained in individual pop-ups that make analysis cumbersome. That could be changing. Avner Pinchover shared a blog post on the Israel version of the Inside AdWords blog with Search Engine Land that describes a series of new columns of Quality Score metrics coming to the AdWords UI. It was posted back on March 10 and seems to have received little attention. It was removed for some reason yesterday. (The archive can be found... [...]