Google has made a surprise announcement of a new Google restructuring, with Sundar Pichai named as the new Google CEO. Larry Page becomes CEO of Alphabet, Google’s new parent company while Sergey Brin has been named Alphabet’s president. Google timed their announcement with the launch of the new Alphabet website, at abc.xyz. Other named subsidiaries […]
Archives for August 2015
Bing & Yahoo Add Sponsored Video Ads to Search Results Page
Both Bing and Yahoo are now showing sponsored video ads directly within the search results. Here is how the ad looks initially, similar to the ads we recently spotted Bing testing that has a thumbnail image beside the text version of the ad at the top of the search results. But instead of just a […]
Google Now Indexing Images in PDF Files
When Google first began indexing PDFs, they advised webmasters to create HTML pages for any images, as they would not be indexed from within the PDF. This appears to have changed, as the GoogleOS blog has noticed that PDF images are now being included in the Google search index. Images from PDFs can be included […]
Google Ignores Links to 404 Pages
Last week, Gary Illyes from Google commented that 404 error pages do not cause a Google penalty. Yes, you will lose traffic to those pages if they had been “real” pages previously, but just having many 404s on a site does not cause a penalty specifically because you have many 404s. He was asked follow […]
Google Local 3-Pack Results With Ratings Selection
With the new 3-packs that are showing up in the search results, Google has also added a new ratings feature into the 3-pack that allows searchers to only see results above a certain star rating. Here is how it appears when there is a rating option in the 3-pack. They seem to appear for all […]
Yahoo Now Testing Grey URLs in Search Results
Yahoo is testing yet another color scheme change. This time, instead of the usual turquoise URLs they usually run in their search results, they are going for the monochrome look with grey URLs matching the snippet text and blue titles. Aaron Wall was the one to spot this test and he notes that the ads […]
New Google Knowledge Cards With Multiple Dates
We have all seen the many Google knowledge cards that show dates for queries such as “when is Black Friday.” But now Google is running them with multiple dates in the card for some queries when the keywords “month” or “week” are in the search query. Here is an example for “nurse’s week” in the […]
Google Local Shakeup: 3-Pack Only, 7-Pack Removed; Addresses & Phone Numbers Gone
We have some more big changes happening in the local space for Google local business listings. Over the course of the day Thursday, Google began switching over the usual 7-pack local listings to all 3-pack, AKA Snack Pack local results. This means that instead of showing 7 businesses in the pack and in the map, […]
Are Brand Keyword Costs Rising in Google AdWords? Experts Speak Out
Adage recently ran an article stating that advertisers are seeing the costs in brand terms rising in Google AdWords costs. Several different marketing agencies are claiming the price of branded cost-per-click Google AdWords has ballooned by as much as 141% in the last four to eight weeks, causing speculation to swirl throughout the industry. So […]
Bing Adds New Warning to Online Pharmacies in Search Results
Bing has announced a change active in their search results for US searchers that displays a warning when someone attempts to click through to a pharmacy that has been cited by the FDA. Here is what the new warning looks like when someone clicks through to an FDA cited pharmacy. When a user clicks on […]