Could we finally be seeing a long awaited Penguin update, something that has been more than 10 months in the making? Last month John Mueller revealed that the engineers were currently working on Penguin. But there have been many more questions raised recently about just why we haven’t seen a Penguin update refresh yet. But […]
Archives for 2014
All Exact & Phrase Match Keywords Turning Into Close Variant Keyword Matching
If you are still using exact or phrase match keywords, you should be aware that Google AdWords will be applying close variant keyword matching next month. This also means the many advertisers who were disabling close variants for exact match keywords will no longer be able to do so. Who Will This Affect? Because of […]
Are You Making These Costly Retargeting Mistakes?
When I audit Adwords accounts, I often see accounts where there are still no remarketing campaigns. For others, I see an old remarketing campaign that somebody “tested” at some point and was then turned off due to poor success metrics or very low volume. Most commonly, I see accounts running remarketing, and though the metrics […]
Bing Moves Into Conversational Search
Google made a big splash when they announced they were moving into conversational search and now Bing has announced that they too will be doing the same. “For all kinds of searches, Bing lets you ask a question the way you would ask a friend,” says Yan Ke, Principal Development Lead, Bing Relevance Team. “For […]
Google Penalties Reappearing In Manual Spam Action of Webmaster Tools
If you have had a manual action spam penalty lifted in Google Webmaster Tools, yet aren’t seeing an expected bounce back in the rankings, you might want to have an other look at your manual spam actions in Google Webmaster Tools once again. It seems that some penalties are showing back up, even after a […]
The Anatomy of Google Plus Hover-over Card (and Why Care)
Whatever anyone has to say about the future of Google Plus, I really like the platform in its current state. It is more indepth than Twitter and less personal than Facebook and it gives lots of opportunities to establish yourself in the niche (at least certain niches like travel, technology and definitely search and social […]
Invalid Traffic: Five Steps to Boost Trust and Safety for Advertisers – AdRoll Followup
Several weeks ago there was a weird issue where webmasters were noticing a greatly increased number of direct traffic referrals with some off similarities, such as older versions of Internet Explorer. As it continued, webmasters began to realize it was a retargeting spammer, and one of the largest retargeting networks, AdRoll, was the most noticeable […]
Is Google AdWords Incorrectly Forwarding Call Extensions? Why You Should Check Your Ads!
Call extensions have been a pretty popular option for local businesses looking to make it easy for potential customers to reach them. AdWords offers two varieties – one where you list and use your own phone number, or another option with call tracking where Google assigns one of their own tracking numbers and then forwards […]
Google Officially Makes Low-Quality Guest Blog Posts a Quality Violation
Matt Cutts warned early this year that guest blogging for SEO was dead. Then Matt Cutts announced Google took action on a large guest blog network, and it was Ann Smarty’s MyBlogGuest that was penalized. And now guest blogging has made its way into Google’s Webmaster Guidelines as a violation. Brian Ussery was the first to […]
FDA Watching What Claims Companies are Liking & Retweeting
Most companies don’t think twice about “liking” or “favoriting” what customers are saying when talking about their products or their brand. But it turns out the FDA is paying close attention and going after those companies who are liking or favoriting claims which are not proven. The FDA has sent out at least two warning […]