Adam Dorfman says, “A year ago, I wrote in Search Engine Land about how Google is making entities smarter. Since that time, entities have become more important to Google — which means they are more important to businesses that want to be found on Google. It’s time for brands to get better acquainted with entities and why they matter. What are entities, and how have they shaped Google search? An entity, as defined by Google in a recent patent, is: [a] thing or concept that is singular, unique, well-defined and distinguishable. For example, an entity may be a person, place, item, idea,... [...]

Daniel Gilbert says, “In case you haven’t heard, Google has decided to ignore function words and word order for exact match keywords. If you just want to know how to fix this travesty, then scroll to the stopgap solution section where I’m sharing a script from Brainlabs (my employer) which will automatically add so-called “close variants” as negative keywords. Yippee! If you also want to hear me rant about Google’s astonishingly stoopid behavior, then read on… Rant A few years ago (2014), Google eliminated advertisers’ ability to exclude close variants as part of “exact... [...]

Antony Maina says, “Over the years, there has been so much debate about how links, both outbound and inbound, can affect a website’s Google ranking. So it’s not surprising that recently another question has been making the rounds. What’s the SEO Impact of Linking to Wikipedia Pages? Recently, Jon Tromans, a Twitter user, asked webmaster trends analyst at Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) John Mueller whether websites can be penalized for linking to Wikipedia, the well-known online, community edited encyclopedia. While some people might not think that Troman’s concern is a valid one, remember... [...]

Ginny Marvin says, “In the good old days, “exact” meant exact. Then things got fuzzier. Now they’re about to get downright blurry. On Friday afternoon, Google announced another change to the way exact match targeting works in AdWords. Matching for close variants — plurals, typos, abbreviations, adverbs and so on —  will be broadened to include variations in word order and function words in the coming months. With this change, Google may ignore word order and function words when determining whether an ad should trigger for an exact match keyword. Google introduced close variants... [...]

Chuck Moran says, “Influencer marketing is one of the most exciting marketing tactics brands are using today, uniting branded content development with the amplification power of networked social media audiences, within or outside of the social networks themselves. The parallels with PR abound — content married to the distributive power of media/social platforms, and the challenge of measuring the organic impact of an earned media placement. As marketers wade into the burgeoning space of influencer marketing, they should keep in mind what the PR industry has learned when it comes to measurement. To... [...]

Patrick Kulp says, “Ads sold through Google have turned up in some pretty horrific corners of the web lately, and many big advertisers are outraged. The search giant responded to the growing uproar among its client brands on Friday with an unusual public apology and a promise to “do a better job.” “We’ve heard from our advertisers and agencies loud and clear that we can provide simpler, more robust ways to stop their ads from showing against controversial content,” Google U.K. managing director Ronan Harris wrote in a blog post. Google is the biggest advertising... [...]

Barb Palser says, “The Accelerated Mobile Pages project has some big numbers on the scoreboard: More than 860,000 domains are publishing over 35 million AMPs per week, according to stats shared by Google at a recent AMP developer conference, where the company also announced the expansion of AMP to more than a billion additional users in China and Japan. AMP already represents 7 percent of top US publishers’ web traffic, according to Adobe. As the light, fast-loading mobile format is embraced by leading social platforms, e-commerce sites and content publishers, some digital managers are... [...]

Ginny Marvin says, “In the good old days, “exact” meant exact. Then things got fuzzier. Now they’re about to get downright blurry. On Friday afternoon, Google announced another change to the way exact match targeting works in AdWords. Matching for close variants — plurals, typos, abbreviations, adverbs and so on —  will be broadened to include variations in word order and function words in the coming months. With this change, Google may ignore word order and function words when determining whether an ad should trigger for an exact match keyword. Google introduced close variants... [...]

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... [...]