Learn how Google's keyword-matching system operates, including ad selection, bid calculations, and the importance of grouping keywords.
The post Google Ads’ Keyword Matching Process Detailed In New Guide appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Learn how to optimize websites for Bing's AI-powered algorithm with insights from Fabrice Canal's Pubcon keynote.
The post Bing’s AI Algorithm: Insights From Fabrice Canal’s Pubcon Keynote appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Starting from March 29, 2023, the Google Ads API v11 will no longer be available. Developers still using v11 after this date will notice API requests failing.
Depreciation and sunset timetable. Typically, major versions are supported for approximately 12 months, while minor versions have a support lifespan of 10 months.
Migrate asap. To migrate to the newest version, visit the Google Ads API documentation here.
Dig deeper. Read the announcement from Google here.
Why we care. New API updates directly affect the functionality and performance of advertising campaigns. Once a version is sunset, all API requests using that version will fail, potentially causing disruptions to campaign management and optimization. By staying up-to-date with the latest version of the API, advertisers and developers can access new features and improvements, ensuring your campaigns are running efficiently and effectively.
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Microsoft released version 96 of the Bing AI chat feature earlier this morning. This new update brings quality improvements such as a higher response rate to chats and also fewer “hallucinations,” Mikhail Parakhin, the CEO of Bing, wrote on Twitter.
What is new. Mikhail said the two main improvements to Bing AI chat include:
Here are those tweets:
As a reminder, Microsoft had to limit the number of chats due to these issues.
Tone not live. Yesterday, Mike Davidson, Corporate Vice President, Design & Research at Microsoft, on Twitter said the ability to pick a tone for Bing Chat was live for some, but Mikhail said not just yet. It might launch in the coming days, he said.
Why we care. Again, it’s fascinating to follow all these rapid changes from Microsoft on its new Bing AI Chat. Keeping an eye on what Microsoft is doing to improve the quality of the results, how it responds to criticism, and more is something that is not just fun and exciting to stay on top of, but may teach us about how we can leverage these features to garner more traffic to our sites.
I wonder if anyone will pick up on these quality improvements but the speed of these updates to Bing Chat is so much fun to see.
The post Microsoft Bing Chat launches quality improvements appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Managing online reputation can be challenging. You must keep up with Google’s ever-changing algorithms and rich results, including the People also ask box.
Also known as PAA, this Google SERP feature plays a significant role in a brand’s online reputation. A potential client’s first impression of your company can be easily swayed based on the sentiment of the questions and answers presented by the PAA.
Over the last year, my team and I have been studying and testing newer methods of influencing the PAA snippet. We recently found success for a client in the educational services industry struggling with a negative People also ask question about one of their products.
By experimenting with ORM and SEO tactics, we captured the negative PAA and had Google pull a new, positive answer from our client’s FAQ page.
This article shares findings that can help other brands struggling with negative PAA results.
But first, let’s quickly review how Google’s People also ask feature can affect your online reputation.
People also ask is a dynamic feature in the Google search results that provides additional information about a user’s initial query.
This Q&A style feature typically presents 2-4 additional queries. When clicked, an answer snippet will drop down, linking to the webpage from which Google pulled that answer.
Typically, Google will highlight the most salient information of the snippet in bold text, as shown above.
While Google has not explicitly revealed which factors the algorithm uses for the PAA, we suspect they are similar to its search ranking factors, which include relevance, freshness, quality, authoritativeness, and more.
Absolutely.
The PAA typically ranks within the top 2-5 results on Page 1 of Google’s SERPs, which means there is a high likelihood that a user researching your company will see it.
Even with a great website and other high-ranking, positive content on the page, having a negative PAA can make or break your online reputation.
Take Frontier Airlines, for example. Their Page 1 search results appear positive in sentiment, featuring their website, social pages, and other owned content. However, their PAA tells a different story.
PAA questions related to trustworthiness, ratings and frequent cancellations could quickly raise red flags to users researching the airline, causing them to question whether it is the best choice.
Provocative questions like these are also more likely to capture the user’s attention. Curiosity will lead them to look at the answers.
Let’s look at “How is Frontier Airlines rated?”
Having 2.5- and 2-star ratings is not good. Seeing numbers like these can cause the user to question the airline’s quality and safety.
Even if other review sites have higher ratings, this result can plant a seed of doubt in the user, and they may turn to one of Frontier’s competitors instead.
Many ORM and SEO tactics can be used to remedy negative PAA results.
Our current approach is to try and capture that negative PAA result by optimizing a piece of owned content for Google to pull its answer from, and replace the current negative-toned answer with a positive-toned one.
What follows are the steps we took to help our client with their negative PAA result.
Our client struggled with their online reputation due to a negative PAA that repeatedly popped up just below their website when searching their main keyword.
The PAA question itself was not inherently negative. However, Google pulled the answer from a negative blog post that spoke poorly about the client's product.
This threatened our client's business, as users who saw this negative PAA might be turned away from our client's product or other services.
Our initial ORM strategy was to try and push out that negative PAA by promoting the positive PAAs, which ranked below it.
This worked as a temporary fix. However, with Google's dynamic algorithm, we saw the negative PAA return.
Realizing that this PAA was here to stay, our next move was to try to capture the PAA and replace the negative answer with a positive one linked to our client's website.
We start by evaluating if the content we want Google to pull its answer from already exists. If not, we'll need to create that content piece and decide where and how it should be published.
If the content exists but isn't currently being pulled in as the PAA answer, we'll audit the page and see where we can make optimizations and updates.
In our client's case, they already had an FAQ page on their website for us to work with. We chose the FAQ page because its structure matched the PAA question and answer format.
Next, we'll look at the existing page content to see what optimizations are needed. Through researching other PAA questions and answers, we've noticed that the PAA answer quite often matches the wording of the PAA question.
Consider this example:
Above, you can see that the answer "Ice cream was invented by China" follows the same structure as the question "Where was ice cream first invented?"
There are two key elements here:
Keep these points in mind when writing your content. It may help Googlebot when crawling your page to see the association between the page content and any relevant PAAs.
Once we learned that the target page content should match the target PAA, we did an audit of our client's FAQ page and noticed discrepancies between the wording of the PAA question and the wording on the FAQ page.
Our target PAA question read "When was [product] invented?" so we updated the title of our target Q&A section on the FAQ page to match the PAA question text.
We also ensured that the title was an H3 instead of plain text so Google could better understand the hierarchy of the FAQ page content.
Then, we updated the first sentence of the answer text to say, "[Product] was invented in 2011…"
This perfectly mirrored our target PAA question and gave us a higher chance of capturing it with our content.
Since we updated text on the FAQ page, we wanted to evaluate the page code to check if any schema had been previously implemented or needed updating.
For an FAQ page, we'd recommend implementing FAQPage type schema to the code and ensure that the text in the code exactly matches the text on the page.
This prevents any confusion for crawlers and helps emphasize the reliability and quality of the content on your page.
Luckily, our client had already implemented this schema type, so we just needed to update the schema text to match the new on-page text.
Lastly, we targeted the client's FAQ page with ORM tactics, including improvements in click-through rate (CTR), link building, and social sharing. Our goal was to send signals to Google and show that users are interested in the page, find the content valuable, and want to share the content with others.
When looking at CTR improvement for the FAQ page, you'll want to consider your query's monthly search volume (MSV) and the monthly CTR of your target URL.
Stay relative to the MSV and monthly CTR numbers, or else Google may see your engagement efforts as spammy, which can hurt your chances of ranking higher in the SERPs.
CTR and MSV data can be found using tools like Ahrefs and Google Keyword Planner.
Link building should also be intentional, as Google wants to see quality over quantity in backlinks. Find publishers and other third-party sites in the same field as the client, and work with them to write content that mentions the client, with the target keywords as the anchor text for the chosen links.
In our client's case, we found ~8 publishers whose content focused on education and parenting topics. We provided them with the exact anchor tex and supplied the URLs we wanted them to use.
For our target URLs, we chose the FAQ page and the info page for the client's product mentioned in the PAA we are trying to capture.
Many social sharing strategies can increase engagement to your target page.
If your company has a connection to any influencers, you can send them the FAQ page and other target URLs and ask that they share them on their social media, along with relevant hashtags and keywords.
You can also encourage friends, family members, and followers to share on their social media.
Be sure to avoid incentives with this tactic. You don't want to appear like you are "buying" shares. We're looking for genuine engagement here!
Additionally, if the target URLs have a comment section or any other interactive feature, you can encourage your social media followers to leave comments or interact with the target page.
We used several social sharing tactics for our client to help increase their FAQ page engagement.
A few weeks after implementing these ORM and SEO tactics, the PAA question was updated to pull its answer from the exact section on our client's FAQ page.
The PAA question and answer remain relatively consistent. We are continously targeting the FAQ page to solidify its spot in the PAA.
The post Case study: How to get rid of a negative ‘People also ask’ result appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Google provides an update on upcoming FLEDGE features and services in the Privacy Sandbox proposal, giving more direction for PPC and SEO.
The post Chrome FLEDGE Update Provides Hope For PPC & SEOs appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Google Ads simplifies location targeting. Low-impact options removed, targeting experience improved.
The post Google Ads Announces Changes To Location Targeting Settings appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Google’s Search Ads Week kicked off with two new tools to help advertisers deliver faster creatives and better performance.
Create new assets with Google’s AI. Google’s goal is to help advertisers deliver effective ads to their target audience by having a variety of relevant creative assets available. To achieve this, they now offer a setting called “automatically created assets” which generates new ad components based on an advertiser’s existing assets and landing page. This setting allows responsive search ads to show potential customers the best combination of assets.
Now, the open beta for automatically generated assets is available to all advertisers in English. Early adopters who have used this feature for headlines and descriptions have seen an average increase of 2% in conversions, with a similar cost per conversion, for ad groups that use responsive search ads.
New improvements coming to assets. As part of this update, the following improvements will roll out in the coming weeks:
Additional languages for automatically created assets will be launched later this year.
Connect with new customers on Search. A new customer acquisition goal for Search campaigns has been launched globally. This goal utilizes Smart Bidding and first-party data to optimize campaigns and attract new customers during peak periods. By combining the new customer acquisition goal with bidding strategies like Maximize conversion value with a target ROAS, advertisers can prioritize and target high-value customers.
Early adopters. Numerous businesses have already utilized this goal to reach out to potential new customers. Baltic Born, a fashion retailer, is an example of one such business with an ambitious revenue growth target. To expand their customer base beyond repeat customers in a highly competitive market, Baltic Born implemented the new customer acquisition goal for Search along with a target ROAS value-based bid strategy. As a result, they were able to achieve a 73% increase in new customers and a 36% rise in revenue.
The new customer acquisition goal has two modes that help you to reach your campaign goals:
Dig deeper. You can read more about the new tools on the Google Ads Help website. You can also register for Search Ads Week here.
Why we care. The new tools make it easier for advertisers to expand your customer base and grow your business by connecting with potential new customers. The goal utilizes Smart Bidding and first-party data to optimize campaigns during peak periods, making it easier for businesses to prioritize and find high-value customers.
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Google has recently announced new tools to enhance search ads' performance with artificial intelligence (AI).
The post Google Introduces AI-Powered Search Ads appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
In 2012, Google confirmed the Panda Update 3.3 as well as a noteworthy change to local search rankings.
Panda 3.3 was a refresh of the Panda system, meaning none of the signals Panda looked at were new or had changed.
While Google Panda got the headlines at the time, there was some other noteworthy news about improvements to local search results, which Google referred to as “Venice”:
Improvements to ranking for local search results. [launch codename “Venice”] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.
And also this:
Improved local results. We launched a new system to find results from a user’s city more reliably. Now we’re better able to detect when both queries and documents are local to the user.
This turned out to be a significant local search update.
Google’s algorithm would essentially localize a user’s search results on broad queries that had local intent. This was entirely different from pre-Venice. Put more simply:
Where in the past a search such as ‘seo’ or ‘jacket’ would have simply returned Google’s non-local result set, now Google will include results specific to your location (whether you have actively set your location or not: Google will locate you based on your IP address).
Chris Liversidge, Why Google’s Venice Update Fundamentally Changes Global SEO
Read all about it in Google Confirms Panda 3.3 Update, Plus Changes To How It Evaluates Links, Local Search Rankings & Much More
2022: The new map let you zoom, pan, hover and click to see more details on the map.
2020: You could test your pages in real time to see how Google displayed your how-to pages on smart displays.
2020: The move was intended to expand the reach of Yotpo-managed reviews content for retailers.
2019: This consolidated your http, https, www, non-www, m-dot, etc into a single property to get an aggregate view of your site’s performance and errors/warnings in a single property.
2019: Diet supplements company was buying fake reviews from a vendor Amazon itself had previously sued in 2016.
2019: Pointy offered a way to gain more SEO visibility and compete with Amazon.
2018: Google couldn’t be held liable before being notified of a ‘clearly recognizable violation’ of individual rights.
2018: Google report dug into three years’ worth of data on removal requests and exposed the delisting criteria.
2017: Google was testing a new format for their local search results on mobile when bringing up the Google Maps local finder.
2017: Google was rolling out the Google Assistant to more devices.
2017: Searching for nearby GPs and hospitals on Bing UK would surface information pulled from the country’s publicly-funded national healthcare system.
2015: Changes included some subtle but welcome usability updates and the ability to edit the text of keywords that already had been synced.
2015: The latest images showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more.
2014: Without promising a fix, the tool asked people to share their original content URL, the URL of the content taken from them and the search results that triggered the outranking.
2014: Smart Annotations automatically pulled information from an advertiser’s landing page in an additional line of text in their ads.
2014: A user took advantage of Map Maker to create fake FBI and Secret Service office listings using his own phone number, and even managed to intercept calls to both agencies.
2014: Boost aimed to help marketers scale the taxing process of creating, testing and reporting on search and social ad creative.
2013: The idea was that if you do a search, you’ll see matching information from your calendar showing within Google’s search results, when it was relevant.
2013: Google got the liability treatment of a “publisher” without the corresponding freedom of expression protections accorded to newspapers.
2012: Mobile search usage had nearly 100 percent penetration among smartphone owners, most of whom searched at least once a week.
2012: Despite moving away from the large black navigation menu on the web, it seemed Google was testing that exact same version on mobile.
2012: Overall, neither really got the winners right.
2010: Microsoft essentially told Google “get over it.”
2009: Google said it would be conducting “visual experiments early next month” that would start with the link: queries and focus on “blogroll detectors” in the matching algorithm.
2009: A starting list of who’s out there from the search engine world.
2009: Would the introduction of paid ads on Google News lead to legal issues for Google?
2009: The latest images showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more.
2008: The major search engines announced that site owners could store their XML Sitemap files in any location – even on a different domain than the one referenced in the Sitemap.
2008: The EFF wanted to know what was said between Google and Jane Horvath, a former US Justice Department privacy lawyer who now worked for Google.
2008: “If we didn’t succeed at the PC, they wouldn’t have a business,” said Craig Mundie.
2008: It attempted to knit all of Yahoo’s recent acquisitions and ad network properties together.
2007: The AdWords Editor program was updated with extra features.
2007: A complainer wanted to use search ads to air his gripes.
2007: How, when and where Google, Microsoft Live Search, Ask.com and Yahoo showed crawl dates for pages.
2007: A reprise of the “it’s early days” and search is just past its “first generation” comments we’ve heard from Microsoft execs many time before
2007: “We noted your suboptimal experience with our Google pen and are thus pleased to send you — at no charge — a replacement set.”
2007: Flickr was in many ways the company that helped define “Web 2.0” and was its poster child for quite some time.
These columns are a snapshot in time and have not been updated since publishing, unless noted. Opinions expressed in these articles are those of the author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.
< February 26 | Search Marketing History | February 28 >
The post This day in search marketing history: February 27 appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Does your brand have a strategy behind its content marketing?
It should.
Planning is integral to achieving that ever-elusive return on investment (ROI).
Even if you’re not a natural planner, you’ll probably agree that most tasks are easier to achieve if you plan first.
For instance, planning your meals for the week vs. winging it. Going grocery shopping with a planned list vs. nothing. Planning a trip vs. stepping off the plane with no idea what you’ll do or where you’ll go.
Some people get excitement from living life in the unknown. But, for most of us, whether we want to save money, eat healthier, or get a seat at that hip restaurant on vacation, planning is essential.
The same is true of content marketing.
Without a strategy, your content marketing efforts are far more likely to go nowhere and do nothing.
I’d argue that profitable content marketing is impossible without a solid content strategy.
To answer the inevitable “why?”, let’s discuss why content strategy matters most.
But first, what is a content strategy?
A content strategy is a plan that lays out how you will ideate, create, publish, promote, and manage content.
A content strategy helps define your brand’s goals, workflows, guidelines, budget, team structure, and content rules. It definitively answers these questions:
All of these questions are vital to answer if you create content. And if you formulate a content strategy, all of them will be addressed before you publish a single article. That’s key.
If you’ve been paying attention, content strategy is a huge deal.
Why?
Because smart content marketing gets incredible results, and those results will cost 62% less to achieve than traditional or paid advertising.
But to get those results, you need a strategy, because a strategy is a map that will lead you to profitable content that earns ROI. Here’s why.
97% of businesses reported using content marketing as part of their overarching marketing strategy, according to a Semrush survey. However, only 57% reported having a documented strategy, and a mere 19% said their strategy was advanced.
The clincher? 78% of businesses who said their content marketing was “very successful” also had a documented content strategy.
What does it all mean?
Most businesses use content marketing, but many aren’t realizing its full potential.
To do that, you need a content strategy. And, you need it documented.
It matters because, without a documented plan, your content efforts will be scattershot. And scattershot efforts lead to scattershot, unpredictable results.
That is, if you earn results at all.
Here’s what doing content marketing without a strategy looks like:
A small brand decides to start a blog. One or two staff members who also happen to be creative are tasked with managing it.
They’re not sure where to find topics, so they look at what their competition is doing and follow suit. They post whenever they have time, so publishing is sporadic and scattered. They post about the topics their main competitor posts about with little differentiation. And when the brand gets busy, the blog falls silent for months.
A year later, the brand checks in with the blog results – and finds none. They conclude blogging is a waste of time.
Yes – in this instance, it is. But that’s because the brand in question started wrong from the get-go. They treated content marketing as an accessory that could be done in spare minutes of the day without much effort.
The truth is, if you want content marketing to work, you have to regard it as another vital business activity – and a content strategy helps you get there.
You need to plan how, when and why to do it, and who you’ll do it for. You need to strategize so your brand can post consistently and regularly (because consistency leads to better results) – and that will require more than somebody’s spare time.
Reality check: It will require dedicated effort from someone whose 9-5 work consists of content creation and nothing else.
How will you direct that person? How will you allocate the resources to employ or pay that person? How do you ensure the created content will earn results? You have to plan. You need a content strategy.
If you want results from content, you must ensure your entire brand and team are on the same page, working under the same expectations and toward the same goals.
A documented content strategy aligns all those things like puzzle pieces snapping together to form a complete picture.
Think of building a content strategy as laying out your battle plan for increasing brand awareness, drawing in more website traffic, nurturing your audience, increasing conversions and sales, or whatever goal you decide is most important.
Achieving these goals will require many moving parts, different people, and plenty of tools (like a publishing platform, SEO tools, a content calendar, social media scheduling tools, editing tools and content checkers, collaboration tools, and more).
But the strategy accounts for all these pieces and explains how they fit together.
That’s why you and your team should make decisions about and record the who, what, where, when, and why so your content has its best chance of succeeding.
As we've explained, you need investment to ensure content marketing can work. You don't just need people who will plan, create, manage, promote, and distribute content. You need people who know what they're doing. And you need tools your people can use to facilitate all of those stages.
But what if the marketing budget isn't up to you? Then you need buy-in from higher-ups.
How do you get content marketing buy-in? By laying out a strategy with goals, a trajectory, metrics to track, and a budget.
The strategy serves as proof that you know what you're doing. Even further, it serves as a detailed guide for other people on how you plan to execute content successfully.
That makes it a powerful document to have on your side when you're working to earn buy-in from bosses, department heads, clients, executives, and anyone else who holds power to invest.
Only 40% of marketers say they have a documented content strategy, according to a recent Content Marketing Institute survey.
This statistic hasn't budged in the last few years.
But, year after year, marketers with a documented strategy outperform their peers who don't have one.
For that reason, they have a competitive edge. You need a documented strategy guiding everything you do in your content marketing to earn that edge over the competition.
The power of a content strategy lies in the finished document and the physical act of creating it.
When brands sit down to figure out this content thing, they crystallize key areas vital to success:
With all this in mind, we shouldn't be surprised that marketers who strategize content and write down that strategy are regular top performers.
Bottom line: If you want that competitive edge, you'll join that club.
A content strategy at the heart of your content marketing will determine whether your efforts will fly – or fall flat.
Unfortunately, most brands are approaching content marketing with a laissez-faire approach. They might even be getting "okay" results.
But the thing is, "okay" should not be the standard.
That's because content can achieve great heights for any brand, regardless of industry or size.
Think of that: Content has immense power to grow your brand.
But to tap into that power, you must have a content strategy.
The post Why content strategy matters most appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Microsoft is testing a new setting for “tone” in the new Bing AI search and chat experience. You can sent the tone to be creative, balanced, or precise – this way, you can tailor the type of responses you get from the Bing AI chat.
What it looks like. Here is a screenshot that was posted by Mike Davidson, Corporate Vice President, Design & Research at Microsoft, on Twitter:
What it does. Mike Davidson said, “some users will see the ability to choose a style that is more Precise, Balanced, or Creative.” I personally do not see this feature yet, so I cannot really test it out but Microsoft is testing it to a subset of those invited to test the Bing Chat AI feature.
By the description, either Bing will respond with a more precise, maybe factually accurate response or a balanced response that shows multiple sides of the argument, or creative, maybe a response that is a bit more out there.
More changes to Bing AI chat. In addition to the above experiment of setting a tone, I noticed other updates to Bing AI chat this weekend.
Why we care. It is fascinating to follow all these rapid changes from Microsoft on its new Bing AI Chat. Keeping on eye on what Microsoft is doing to improve the quality of the results, respond to criticism and more is something that is not just fun and exciting to stay on top of, but may teach us about how we can leverage these features to garner more traffic to our sites.
The post Bing AI Chat testing setting the tone of the responses appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Tracking form submissions is a crucial aspect of marketing success as it allows organizations to gather valuable data about their audience and their preferences.
The post Form Tracking With Google Analytics (Via WordPress And GTM) appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
In 2015, Google announced it would expand its use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal, beginning April 21.
This algorithmic change would have a “significant impact” in the mobile search results, impacting all languages worldwide, Google said.
However, when April came, the general consensus was that Mobilegeddon was fairly insignificant, for all the hype and panic their Feb. 26 announcement created.
Google also announced that apps indexed by Google through App Indexing would begin to rank better in mobile search. Google said this only will work for signed-in users who had the app installed on their mobile device.
Read all about it in Mobilegeddon Cometh: New Google “Mobile Friendly Update” To Reward Sites Beginning April 21.
2021: Google published a list of best practices to help ensure that its search engine understood the products that were being referenced.
2020: Google was sending notices to sites that had mobile-first indexing issues.
2020: A tool for those tired of manually weeding through placement reports to exclude inappropriate websites and apps from display campaigns.
2020: Search Console users could download complete information (instead of just specific table views) from almost all reports.
2020: A Burberry bag was showing up with a “view in 3D” option in the Google search results.
2019: Google said you could download the data from the interface or the API before they turned it off completely.
2019: Average position was one of the few constants for more than 15 years. But with the removal of right rail ads, in particular, its utility sharply declined.
2019: The other change was that name of the business would move to the description line.
2018: One tool showed how a site stacks up against the competition on mobile. The other aimed to drive home the impact mobile speed can have on the bottom line.
2018: Google’s John Mueller confirmed a reporting glitch with the crawl stats “time spent downloading a page” report in the Google Search Console for on Feb. 20 and 21.
2018: In a new structure, the Google Shopping business unit bid against other Comparison Shopping Engines in the ad auction to give the competing engines “equal treatment” as mandated in the ruling.
2018: Google added a new feature to help non-English speakers expand their English-language vocabulary.
2016: Google’s John Mueller said you could use AMP to become mobile-friendly, but AMP itself was not a ranking signal.
2016: Google review snippets returned after a bug caused them to drop out of much of the search results for about a week.
2016: Google AdWords reports weren’t downloading or printing. Bing Ads had reporting delays that affected the Web UI, mobile and API.
2016: Users would be able to change the color of the Google logo using a “finger painting-like” feature.
2016: The latest images showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have and more.
2014: Cutts answers the question: “Should I focus on clarity or jargon when writing content?”
2014: Rankings were restored and most traffic was returning to the affected websites.
2014: Even if you moved your penalized site to a new domain name and didn’t redirect the penalized site, Google might still find it and pass along the bad signals.
2014: The company officially announced the launch of Flexible Conversion Counting, and advertisers would see new columns in AdWords.
2014: Google released some case study performance results on the new campaign type.
2014: All you had to do was go to Google, search for [american idol] or [idol] during the voting window, and select from your favorite finalists.
2014: Users could also use the “What’s Here” option to quickly get lat-long coordinates for any spot on the map.
2014: The company announced $1.573 billion in Q4 revenue, a 50.3% increase over 2013.
2014: Beck was Third Door Media’s Social Media Reporter from March 2014 through December 2015.
2013: Edmonson confirmed that Panda “caused a massive loss of traffic and revenue.” But HubPages wasn’t planning to change course; the planned was to improve quality.
2013: It seemed as if Google was testing hiding the search box completely from the Google search results page.
2011: The biggest “content farm” type brand that seemed to have suffered was Associated Content.
2010: Testing would continue until May, when it launched the new user interface.
2010: Google expanded the choices in its Search Options panel with the announcement of a tool to refine searches by location.
2010: Members of the European Union’s data protection group urged Google to make changes to its Street View mapping/photo service and warned that Google might be breaking EU laws.
2009: After testing ads for the past few months, Google News officially rolled out ads on Google News search results to all US based searchers.
2009: The first tweet was in binary and translated into “Feeling Lucky.”
2009: Google added geo-tagged Panoramio photos to StreetView images.
2009: Rimm-Kaufman shared early first quarter PPC data showing the weak trends in retail for search advertisers.
2009: Yahoo eventually did issue a weather report confirming that there are ongoing updates that would be “completed very soon.”
2009: Yahoo announced that Facebook enhanced results were now turned on by default across search results.
2009: “For us working at Yahoo!, it means everything gets simpler. We’ll be able to make speedier decisions, the notorious silos are gone, and we have a renewed focus on the customer.”
2008: Automatic Matching was a way for Google to help advertisers utilize their full budget towards keywords that they may have not been targeting.
2008: Google updated their AdSense terms and conditions to include better verbiage for new products and features, as well as an update to their privacy requirements.
2008: Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang said the Microsoft takeover bid had been “a galvanizing event for everyone at Yahoo.”
2008: Minimum bids could be lower or higher than $0.10.
2008: Yahoo planned to unveil a project code-named “Search Monkey,” a set of open-source tools that allow users and publishers to annotate and enhance search results associated with specific websites.
2008: Yahoo Buzz was a site where “buzz-worthy” news articles were highlighted based on user votes,
searching activity, and email sharing.
2008: The first feature was similar to a live chat box that you could add to any webpage and chat with anyone via your Google Talk or Gmail account.
2008: Google joined a consortium of Asian companies to build an undersea transpacific fiber optic cable that would provide much greater bandwidth capacity between the United States and Japan.
2007: Google’s advertiser reports would begin listing the sites where each ad runs.
2007: Google was giving more detailed reports on the malware issues with a specific site and they were also sending email notifications to webmasters about these malware warnings.
2007: Spotted in the wild.
2007: It appeared that Google registered Google Payment Australia PTY. LTD. in Australia.
2007: The Fair Trade Commission said the contract enabled Google to “one-sidedly cancel advertisement deals” with publishers.
2007: Microsoft plans on building out a specialized search engine focused on delivering medical information to consumers.
2007: The real challenge was figuring out how to work with content owners, not speech recognition.
2007: Pew asserted that roughly 13.5% of U.S. Internet users were accessing the Internet over mobile phones (or their equivalents).
These columns are a snapshot in time and have not been updated since publishing, unless noted. Opinions expressed in these articles are those of the author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.
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