AdWords Rolls Out New Features, Another Guest Blog Network Feels Google’s Wrath, & More

Latest AdWords Innovations

Adwords reveals new features. Highlights include: More robust ads and options for advertising your apps and new tools in the interface. These tools include, bulk editing of campaigns directly in the interface, automated bidding for ROAS, CPA, and clicks, and enhanced reporting. Other updates include estimated cross-device total conversions, with an offline component in the works.

Source: AdWords Blogspot

New Addition to Schema.org Announced

The new addition focuses on actionable items for a website. The expansion includes actions, potential actions, and entry points. The changes will allow the search engines to understand connections between multiple entities.

Source: Search Engine Watch

Google Analytics Combines Data

A major change to Google Analytics has integrated web data and app data into one report. This has been done in an effort to help webmasters understand how visitors interact across multiple different digital platforms. As a result, visits are now sessions and visitors are now referred to as users.

Source: Search Engine Watch

Google Allowing Users To Subscribe To Topics

Users can now take advantage of a new feature with Google Trends that allows you to subscribe to specific tops or specific locations. From there, users can receive notifications from Google via email. Although similar to Google Alerts, it will not notify nearly as frequently as Google Alerts once did.

Source: Search Engine Watch

Another Guest Blog Network Receives Penalty

PostJoint is the newest guest blogging network to be hit with the penalty. Google’s warning to PostJoint mentions “unnatural inbound links.” Little information is known at this point as to how much this has affected other websites who relied on PostJoint for guest blogging. Despite the penalty, PostJoint says that the company will still carry on.

Source: Marketing Land

Schema Markup Showing in 1/3 Of Search Results

In a recent study by Searchmetrics it was revealed that roughly 36.6% of Google’s search results included at least one rich snippet of information that came from Schema.org. Searchmetrics also found that only 0.3% of domains are using Schema markup code on their sites.

Source: Search Engine Land

Bing Launches Bing Predictions

Bing Predictions will use social signals and search query data to predict outcomes and events. Bing is kicking off the new feature by predicting the results of voting-based reality TV shows. For example, a user can search “The Voice Predictions” and they will see a carousel of contestants and their prediction for how they will do on the show.

Source: Search Engine Land

Cutts Explains How To Research Domains Before Purchase

In a new Google Webmasters a user explains that you bought a domain through a registrar only to find out that it had a spammy past and asked Cutts what could have been done to avoid that. Searching the sites domain to see if it is indexed, viewing past versions on archive.org, and requesting analytic screenshots before purchase were among Cutts suggestions.

Source: Google Webmasters on YouTube

Yahoo Testing New Search That Resembles The Knowledge Graph

The website All Google Testing noticed a test being run by Yahoo in which the right column of Yahoo’s search results page noticeably resembles the features of Google’s Knowledge Graph. Search Engine Land was unable to recreate the results but shared a video of the search in action published by All Google Testing.

Source: Search Engine Land

States Pressuring Google For Help With Online Drug Sales

State prosecutors from 24 states are pressuring Google to enforce to crack down on rogue Internet pharmacies that sell counterfeit prescription medicine and illegal drugs. Prosecutors believe Google is profiting billions off of the advertising from such websites. Google claims they disabled millions of paid ads in 2013 alone.

Source: Washington Post

Indexing Of Android Apps Expands On Google SERPs

A project that began in December has now expanded in a recent announcement by Google. Now users who search can go directly to the relevant content the search results return via apps already installed on their phone. The announcement notes the feature is now available globally and includes 24 new apps to the feature. Google also provided best practices when adding deep links to sitemaps and website.

Source: Search Engine Journal

AdWords Trends From Google’s Earnings Reports

Although Google didn’t hit growth expectations for Q1 this year, they still are up 19% year-over-year for revenue. Interestingly for advertisers, 68 percent of that revenue came from Google sites including AdWords, Maps and YouTube. Mobile cost per clicks have dropped from last year, however they are closer in line with desktop CPCs.  Advertisers should be utilizing all of the targeting and products being introduced to keep CPCs from rising too much.

Source: Search Engine Watch

Rank In A Post-Secure Search Age

Rank is no longer the end all, be all metric it once was. But even post secure search, in an era when rank is more fluid than in the past, it’s still important to pay attention to. Jim Yu of Search Engine Watch offers up new ways to think about rank and its relationship to the success of your business in a post on Search Engine Watch.

Analysis by: Jim Yu, Search Engine Watch

Getting the Most Out of LinkedIn

LinkedIn is often overlooked as a resource when developing an SEO strategy. George Aspland offers up his tips for using LinkedIn to improve organic search visibility

Analysis by: George Aspland, Search Engine Land

6 Changes To SEO Google Hasn’t Made Yet

While Google has certainly made plenty of changes to the way it approaches organic search over the past year, there are a few changes SEOs have predicting for some time that Google still has yet to make. Rand Fishkin offers up six predicted, but yet to be realized changes including: valuing on-topic links more than other links, social signals making an observable impact on ranking, and more.

Analysis by: Rand Fishkin, Moz

Leveraging Bid Simulations For Maximum Return

Any search marketers interested in marginal cost and revenue numbers should read Benjamin Vigneron’s recent article on Search Engine Land. In it he describes how to see diminishing returns affect your paid search campaigns in 5 steps.

Analysis by Benjamin Vigneron, Search Engine Land

Preparing Your PPC Plans for Inevitable Changes

Although paid search advertisers have avoided any major changes to data provided to them in AdWords in the most recent list of Google updates, it is still good to be prepared. Sam Owen from Search Engine Land describes in detail what a search advertiser could do if search query data were to become “not provided”.

Analysis by: Sam Owen, Search Engine Land

7 Misconceptions About Call Tracking for Lead Gen Clients

Many lead generation clients hold beliefs about call tracking that convince them not to use it. Most of these are founded from an incomplete understanding of how call tracking works and why it can be beneficial to them. Andrew Lolk from White Shark Media talks about the most common misconceptions about call tracking and argues that they are indeed a must for lead gen clients.

Analysis by: Andrew Lolk, White Shark Media

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