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Well look at that! Search traffic to news sites has dropped over the past eight months, according to how BuzzFeed tracks referrals to sites within its network. A change of user behavior? Or perhaps more the result of “Dark Google” and “Not Provided?” Come on, I’ll explain how Google may be making itself look like […]
In August of last year, a number of German lawmakers were pressing proposed “ancillary copyright” legislation that would have required Google and others that indexed or aggregated news to pay for links or excerpts from those news items. The proposed law was championed by German magazine and newspaper publishers who, like their counterparts in the US, are seeing […]
Google has downgraded the Toolbar PageRank scores for several dozen UK operated newspapers and news sites today. It is believed the reason Google has downgraded their PageRank scores is because they were selling links on a massive scale. Google Penalizes Sites Selling Links As you may remember, in October 2007, Google went on record that […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. From Search Engine Land: Will Facebook’s Graph Search Be Big For Bing Advertisers? Following Facebook’s announcement of Graph Search a few weeks back, there’s been no shortage of analysis and speculation on what the move […]
Yesterday, the Judiciary Committee of the German Bundestag — Germany’s national parliament — held an expert hearing on a proposed “Leistungsschutzrecht” law for news publishers. The law, known as “ancillary copyright” in English, would require search engines and others — perhaps even Facebook, Twitter and individual bloggers — to pay news publishers if they link […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: A/B Testing From Search To Conversion As I mentioned in a previous post, search marketers should work on finding the middle ground between a high CTR (appealing ads) and a high […]
Just over three months ago, Google launched the news keyword meta tag designed to let news publishers have a better chance of ranking for words they might not have included in their headlines. Adoption rate so far? Only about 5% of the sources within Google News use the tag, according to new data provided by […]
Google dodged a bullet in Germany this week as prosecutors in Hamburg decided, after a lengthy investigation, not to pursue criminal charges against the company over Street View WiFi data collection. Essentially prosecutors found that Google lacked the requisite “criminal intent” to justify prosecution. Google faces another, arguably more daunting legal challenge in Germany however. […]
“What’s the use of PRWeb?,” tweeted Megan McCarthy of Reuters, trying to digest how that service ended up circulating a fake Google acquisition story. Come along, Megan and others, and I’ll explain one of the sorriest uses, getting crap into Google News and out into news sites. For those who somehow missed today’s big tech […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Auto Industry Benefiting From Growth In Mobile Search Approximately one-third of all search traffic for auto industry related terms comes from mobile devices. This underscores why it is critical for auto […]
It’s been about two months since Google launched a “news keywords” meta tag for news publishers. How’s it going? Why didn’t Google the standard meta keywords tag? The company’s not saying, but it did shed a little more light on how to use the tag. Google launched the news keywords tag in September, designed as […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Bing’s Voice Search On Xbox Now Searches The Web, Too Microsoft is expanding Bing’s capabilities in the living room with news today that Xbox users can search the web via their […]
Google has sent a letter to the French policy makers about a proposal to charge Google for linking to their content. France 24 reports Google threatened French publishers by telling them they will not pay to link to their content and if they are forced to, Google will simply stop linking to them. The official […]
At Define Media Group, we jokingly say that we are unafraid to be the best in the world at an industry that is imploding faster than Amanda Bynes’s career. With many major media conglomerates as bedrock clients and hundreds of news and magazine titles under our watchful eye, the following thoughts represent our attempt at saving […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: The E-commerce Product Video That Increases Revenue Per Visit Which video recipe will make your cash register ring more often and more loudly? It was the end of a 12-hour video […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Back To The Future: Google Announces A Meta Keywords Tag Just For News Articles Grab your flux capacitor and fire up the Delorean, folks. We’re going back to the future: Meta […]
Grab your flux capacitor and fire up the Delorean, folks. We’re going back to the future: Meta keywords are back. Well, technically, it’s not the same meta keywords tag that died years ago for traditional SEO purposes. No, it’s a new news_keywords metatag that Google just announced today and only works for news publishers that […]
For ages, Google has encouraged people to build links in order to rank well. But in the wake of the Google Penguin Update, it’s become painfully clear to me how many people have failed to understand the inherent quality links part of that link building message. Consider this a wake-up call. Yes, you want links, […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Google Shuts Down Patent Search, Google Related Toolbar, One Pass & Vaccine Finder After only eight months, the Google Related toolbar is headed to the dead pool. That’s one of several […]
After only eight months, the Google Related toolbar is headed to the dead pool. That’s one of several Google products being phased out in the company’s latest “spring cleaning” announcement, along with the One Pass payment system for news publishers, Google Patent Search losing its own home page and Google Flu Vaccine Finder. Google Related is […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Yandex Joins Bing, Yahoo In Using Nokia-Navteq Map Data Russian search giant Yandex announced that it will be licensing data from Nokia-owned Navteq to offer better and more comprehensive maps coverage […]
For large organizations, keeping a close watch on keyword targeting and on-page optimization across an entire site or network of sites is not an easy task. At the enterprise level, a single site can have millions or tens of millions of pages, and larger organizations such as news publishers may have 20-30 different sites or […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: The Growing Need For SEO In Political Campaigns It’s going to be a while before we see a political campaign that’s “less digital” than the last one. Budgets keep getting bigger, […]
Last week, I released the results of a survey of Google News Ranking Factors with some of the top news SEOs in the business. While there has been plenty of response regarding the Top 10 Most Important Factors, I thought it would be helpful to take a closer look at the Top Negative Factors. In […]
Today at the Online News Association conference, Google introduced a new link rel attribute that news organizations can use to mark their best work. You can mark up to seven pieces of content per week. Google News will use this information as a signal for labeling news stories as “featured” on the Google News home […]
Today, Google announced that they will no longer be crawling news sites with Googlebot-News and instead will crawl news sites with Googlebot, the same bot that crawls sites for web search. However, you can still block your content from being indexed in Google News by disallowing Googlebot-News in robots.txt or using a meta robots tag. […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Google Dominates Online Video, In Hunt For Hulu By unique viewer count (per comScore) YouTube is more than two and a half times the size of the next largest US video […]
We’re another step closer to the US Federal Trade Commission launching an expected antitrust investigation of Google. If it does, the FTC will join the EU and Texas in doing broad investigations. But Google’s been examined for antitrust issues many times before this and mostly come through OK. Here’s our comprehensive guide to Google and […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Meet +1: Google’s Answer To The Facebook Like Button Nearly a year after Facebook Like buttons spread out across the web, Google has announced its own rival, the +1 button. It […]
How did we go from the New York Times seeming to single out visitors from Google with a “5 free visit per day” policy to supposedly all search engines being limited in such a way? And what’s up with there being no limit for visitors coming from anything that’s not a search engine, including Twitter […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Visualizing Google’s Dominance Of Mobile Advertising A report on mobile apps report released today by security firm Lookout is being used to discuss the relative sizes and growth of Apple and […]
The Google Blog announced a new tool to help news publishers earn money online with their content. The system is called Google One Pass and it enables publishers to use Google to charge for content and subscriptions to their content. Google said, “publishers can maintain direct relationships with their customers and give readers access to […]
With the amount of content published online seeming to expand dramatically every year, Google says it’s experimenting with two new meta tags that it hopes will help it identify the original sources of online content. They’re called syndication-source and original-source and here’s a look at what they do and how publishers can use them. What […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Google Making Location More Obvious, Prominent I’m not seeing it exactly but Google has said the company is making location more “transparent” or more obvious to users so that they can […]
While many news organizations chase traffic by matching their news coverage to what’s listed as “hot” on Google Trends, Twitter, and elsewhere, a new report says hard news coverage actually makes the most money for major news publishers. Perfect Market, a company that works with publishers to help them make more money from search engine […]
The Google News blog announced they added a new section to the right hand column of Google News. The new section is called “Spotlight Video” and shows news related videos for that day. Google said the Spotlight Video works like the popular Spotlight News section. Google explained, “Spotlight articles are selected by our computer algorithms, […]
Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt has quite famously been on record many times talking about how the web is full of garbage. It’s a cesspool out there, he’s said. Today, a short fast look at how his own company pollutes the web. Right now, one of the “trending topics” on Google is the word “chocomize,” as […]
Via paidContent comes news that Google might launch a micropayment system for newspapers by the end of the year. paidContent references this article from the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, which says Google is encouraging publishers to try out a system called NewsPass. In its article, paidContent describes NewsPass like this: La Repubblica says that, with […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Battle Lines Being Drawn Over Twitter-based Ads A battle appears to be brewing over the promise of monetizing Twitter and, more specifically, over the placement of ads on the Twitter platform. […]
How much money does Google keep for itself from AdSense ads that publishers carry? Unless you’re a big publisher, Google — which preaches “data liberation” — doesn’t say. But thanks to an anti-trust investigation in Italy, Google may share how much it keeps. At least, that is, to Italian newspaper publishers. It’s a simple enough […]