This Week’s Industry News
Compiled by the Rocket Clicks Team
Top Stories
Possible Penalty Coming for Sneaky App Interstitials
Late last year, Google began penalizing websites that used app interstitials. Shortly after this penalty was announced, websites like Yelp got sneaky and essentially built the interstitial into their mobile pages by creating pages with a replica of the interstitial at the very top of the page and the actual content at the bottom. To combat this, Google will be exploring ways to penalize websites that are using a similar work-around either through a manual penalty or an update to the algorithm. Source: Search Engine Roundtable
Home Service Promos Expand to AdWords Ads
Another chapter in the anthology of home service promotions on the Google SERP continues with the expansion into AdWords Ads. Rather than your typical home service ads that have previously appeared, users are seeing AdWords ads specifically for home services when searching for them, with no additional paid ads appearing alongside these results. When clicked, the ads bring users to a landing page that gives users the option to call or text Google to find a local service. Source: The SEM Post
Google Boosts Travel Related Results with ‘Destinations on Google’
With a reported 50 percent increase in travel-related queries on mobile in the last year, Google has steadily ramped up the travel-related features it offers in its search results. Most recently, Google unveiled “Destinations”. This new feature – triggered when someone searches a general location and “destination(s)” – allows searchers to see hotel and flight prices for relevant cities without having to click through to several other websites. Source: Google
New Automated Feature in AdWords: Scheduled Uploads
Recently announced by Google is the ability to set automatic scheduled uploads for AdWords ads. With scheduled uploads, you can update business data on a daily, weekly, or first of month basis. All of this can happen without the need to log in. If you’re using something like ad customizers to put product inventory into your ads, scheduled uploads can make sure that inventory and local prices are accurate. Source: Search Engine Roundtable
See Ya Later Referral Spam
So long, top1-seo-service.com! Good riddance, best-seo-software.xyz! SEOs around the world are rejoicing over the announcement that Google will finally proactively address the referral spam issue in Google Analytics. But, while webmasters are already seeing a significantly lower amount of referral spam in Analytics, it is probably unlikely that Google will be able to filter out 100% of the spam all of the time. Source: The SEM Post
Additional Commentary
Different Platforms to Expand Your PPC Reach Into
Jeff Baum shares 3 different PPC platforms that could be useful to your clients beyond Google and Bing. Yelp Ads allows users to market locally, regionally, and nationally with ads designed to drive engagement through writing reviews or share the business page. Yahoo Stream Ads are a form of native advertising that have a high engagement rate due to the similarities between the ads and the content in the feed. Lastly, Baum recommends Geo-Fencing, which allows advertisers to GPS target their mobile ads which can work wonders for Geo targeted campaigns. Analysis: Jeff Baum, PPC Hero
Where & How do Top Startups Get Their Links?
In this look at when startup tech companies and SEO collide, Moz blog guest author John Doherty examines what types of sites are linking to startups and how those links came about in the first place. Not surprisingly, sites like techcrunch.com and businessinsider.com led the pack in terms of sites that were linking to tech startups. Interestingly, though, Doherty discovered that PR initiatives were far and away the most effective method for these startups to gain links. Analysis: John Doherty, Moz Blog
