Rand Fishkin Questions Matt Cutts' Statement Regarding Encrypted Searches

Rand Fishkin has (albeit indirectly) appropriately called out Matt Cutts via Twitter - and because Rand garners the sort of respect throughout the SEO community, Cutts actually responded. As many of you know, and as I discussed earlier this month, Google is encrypting searches for those that are signed in to a Google account. As a result, the keyword data for these individuals is no longer available within the Google Analytics reports. Regardless of what Google's intentions were for doing this (was it truly to address privacy concerns?), Cutts had stated that the number of people searching online while signed in only makes up a single-digit percentage of the total number of searchers. And because of that, the implication was that it shouldn't have a negative impact on running a search marketing campaign as the keyword data lost would be minimal. 

Yahoo! Site Explorer Shutting Down

For years, Yahoo! Site Explorer has been the primary backlink and competitor analysis tool for webmasters in the search engine marketing community. If you wanted to look in to the backlink profile of a client's or competitor's website, all you had to do was plug the URL in to the search box of the tool and it would return that data instantaneously. Earlier this month, however, Yahoo! announced that they would be shutting down Site Explorer, ultimately due to the recent merger with Microsoft (Bing). This news wasn't all that surprising for many, but has others scrambling to determine what backlink analysis tool they can rely on moving forward.

Bing and Yahoo Merger Not Paying Dividends

In an effort to match Google's presence in the world of search marketing, Microsoft (Bing) and Yahoo merged so that each search engine displays Bing's results for a search query. At the time, for Yahoo this seemed like a step in the right direction, as Bing has made somewhat of a strong push so far in 2011 to capture our attention through advertising and increase their market share as quickly as possible. However, Yahoo announced recently that their second quarter revenue generated from search is down 15% from last year at this same time. And it turns out the reason why may be somewhat complex.

Is Google Voice Search Accurate?

IndOn June 14th at the Inside Search event, Google introduced a search by voice feature for their Chrome web browser. Essentially, the feature mimics the application that was developed for the Android smart-phone. The feature, which Google has dubbed "Search Out Loud," has been rolled out across the United States and is available on Chrome 11 and later versions of the browser. Understanding how the feature works is not extremely difficult, and in reality, it will not have a major impact on search engine optimization. The question is, does it work and how accurate is it?

Google Tags Eliminated for Google Places Profiles

Two weeks ago, I discussed Google Tags advertising, an option that the search engine had rolled out recently that allowed businesses to increase their Google Places profile visibility in the map results. Well, merely ten days after writing that post, Google had officially eliminated Tags after a fairly short campaign. There hasn't been a whole lot of feedback from Google as to what caused them to remove the option for Places profile owners (no surprise here), however, I believe that there is enough information regarding local search to make an inference.

Google Tags Advertising

Most recently I have discussed the emphasis Google has put on Google Places, what businesses will benefit most from having a well optimized Places profile, and how the increased visibility of the map results in the organic results pages affects ranking positions. As the organic landscape continues to morph, it is essential that businesses trying to broaden their online presence understand and keep up with the supplemental features Google rolls out that can be incorporated in to a Places profile. One of the more recent features is Google Tags, and I want to address exactly what Tags are, what benefits may be realized from taking advantage of them, and finally, some of the potential drawbacks of using Tags.

SMX West 2011: Takeaways for the SEO Industry

It was the search marketing event of the year. For two full days, people from the search engine marketing community gathered for SMX West in San Jose, CA to attend sixty sessions that featured more than one hundred speakers who discussed the latest trends in SEO. It was also an opportunity for many to try and come away with as much information as possible regarding the future landscape of the industry. As expected, Google's Matt Cutts was in attendance and was under siege with a multitude of questions surrounding the recently implemented farmer's algorithm change.

Google's Search Engine Results Sting of 2011

Bing, owned by Microsoft, has recently come under fire after Google released allegations on the 1st of February that a sting operation conducted towards the end of 2010 revealed similar search results between the two engines. Google stated that they are convinced Bing has been copying certain search engine result listings.

The suspicions grew in May 2010 when Google noticed that Bing, without correcting the misspellings, was showing identical search results to those of Google for misspelled search queries. Over the next several months, Google claims that more similarities began to surface within the top 10 listings of the first page. Additionally, Google claims that the percentage of identical listings for the number one position increased also.