This Week’s Industry News
Compiled by the Rocket Clicks Team
Top Stories
Does Penguin Penalize or Devalue?
When Google released the Penguin algorithm update last week, many SEOs were curious as to what it meant for disavow files. Traditionally, webmasters that obtained spammy links could see their site penalized or demoted in the rankings. Now, however, it appears that Penguin will “devalue” a domain’s spammy links – meaning they will neither help nor hurt a domain – instead of dropping the site in its rankings. Source: Search Engine Roundtable
New Sitelink Layout Launched on Google
Experts have recently picked up on a new test Google has been doing with the way sitelinks are being displayed. Rather than the typical 2 by 2 format that we are used to seeing, they are now seeing four linear links directly underneath the ad. The sitelinks line up underneath the ad one by one and seem to take up more space than your typical sitelink group. Source: Search Engine Roundtable
App vs. AMP or: The War of Three Letter Words that Start with ‘A’ and End in ‘P’
Last week, news broke that AMP pages will beat out links to in-app content in Google’s search results. This news essentially told webmasters that offer both an app and AMP content that searchers will never be directed to their app. Some were, of course, not happy with this news and when Barry Schwartz took to twitter to get some clarification he was told that quality apps still get a ranking boost regardless of the presence of AMP content. Needless to say, there is still much confusion in the SEO community about what sort of content wins out in the SERPs. Source: Search Engine Roundtable
Google Makes it Easier to Track Call Conversions
From a recent Google+ post by Google, it was announced that implementing and tracking call conversions has become much easier for advertisers. Now, only one auto-generated conversion tracking tag per landing page needs to be implemented. Google stated that “you no longer have to separately add a Javascript snippet for each instance a phone number appears on your landing page.” This is a welcome change that can save a lot of time with setting up call tracking for AdWords. Source: Search Engine Roundtable
Additional Commentary
The Myth of the Duplicate Content Penalty
In this guest post for Search Engine Land, author Patrick Stox attempts to dispel the notion that duplicate content is the villain that many SEOs make it out to be. Stox begins by defining what duplicate content is and then follows it up with a collection of “thoughts” that Google has had on duplicate content over the years. For example, Google has stated in the past that duplicate content doesn’t result in a penalty and that they always try to determine the original source of the content and display only that result. Finally, although he insists that we shouldn’t be worried about a duplicate content penalty, Stox does admit that duplicate content should be kept to a minimum by utilizing things like canonical tags and redirects. Analysis: Patrick Stox, Search Engine Land
Strategies to Improve Remarketing Performance
PPC Hero Michael Knight offers several advanced strategies to improve the performance of your Remarketing efforts. His first strategy is to use analytics audience lists, which allows for extra details like number of pages visited or time on site. He also recommends splitting out audience lists by stages of the sales funnel, like sending top of funnel groups to product and content pages and using seasonal messaging year-round to users who have already made a purchase. Knight’s final advanced recommendation is to try other ad formats based on your audience, like video or Gmail ads. Analysis: Michael Knight, PPC Hero
