SEO

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web...

Posted by Dr. Pete The long-awaited Penguin 2.0 (also called "Penguin 4") rolled out on Wednesady, May 22nd. Rumor has been brewing for a while that the next Penguin update would be big, and include significant algorithm changes, and Matt Cutts has suggested more than once that major changes are in the works. We wanted to give the dust a day to settle, but this post will review data from our MozCast Google weather stations to see if Penguin 2.0 really lives up to the hype. Short-Term MozCast Data First things first - the recorded temperature (algorithm "flux") for May 22nd was 80.7°F. For reference, MozCast is tuned to an average temperature of about 70°, but the reality is that that average has slipped into the high 60s over the past few months. Here's a 7-day history, along with a couple of significant events (including Penguin 1.0): By our numbers, Penguin 2.0 was about on par with the 20th Panda update. Google claimed that Penguin 2.0 impacted about 2.3% of US/English queries, while they clocked Panda #20 at about 2.4% of queries (see my post on how to interpret "X% of queries"). Penguin 1.0 was measured at 3.1% of queries, the highest query impact Google has publicly reported. These three updates seem to line up pretty well between temperature and reported impact, but the reality is that we've seen big differences for other updates, so take that with a grain of salt. Overall, the picture of Penguin 2.0 in our data confirms an update, but it doesn't seem to be as big as many people expected. Please note that we had a data collection issue on May 20th, so the temperatures for May 20-21 are unreliable. It's possible that Penguin 2.0 rolled out over two days, but we can't confirm that observation. Temperatures by Category In addition to the core MozCast data, we have a beta system running 10K keywords distributed across 20 industry categories (based on Google AdWords categories). The average temperature for any given category can vary quite a bit, so I looked at the difference between Penguin 2.0 and the previous 7 days for each category. Here they are, in order by most impacted (1-day/7-day temps in parentheses): 33.0% (80°/60°) – Retailers & General Merchandise 31.2% (81°/62°) – Real Estate 30.8% (90°/69°) – Dining & Nightlife 29.1% (89°/69°) – Internet & Telecom 26.0% (82°/65°) – Law & Government 24.4% (79°/64°) – Finance 23.5% (81°/65°) – Occasions & Gifts 20.8% (88°/73°) – Beauty & Personal Care 17.3% (70°/60°) – Travel & Tourism 15.7% (87°/75°) – Vehicles 15.5% (84°/73°) – Arts & Entertainment 15.4% (72°/62°) – Health 15.0% (83°/72°) – Home & Garden 14.2% (78°/69°) – Family & Community 13.4% (79°/70°) – Apparel 13.1% (78°/69°) – Hobbies & Leisure 12.0% (74°/66°) – Jobs & Education 11.5% (88°/79°) – Sports & Fitness 7.8% (75°/70°) – Food & Groceries -3.7% (70°/73°) – Computers & Consumer Electronics Retailers and Real Estate came in at the top, with just over 30% higher than average temperatures. Consumer Electronics rounded out the bottom, with slightly lower than average flux, oddly. Of course, split 20 ways, this represents a relatively small number of data points for each category. It's useful for reference, but I wouldn't read too much into these breakdowns. "Big 20" Sub-domains Across the beta 10K data-set, we track the top sub-domains by overall share of SERP real-estate. Essentially, we count how many page-1 positions each sub-domain holds and divide it across the entire data set. These were the Big 20 sub-domains for the day after Penguin

Jennifer Lopez launched a new mobile brand aimed at the Latino market that she describes as the first social shopping and social commerce environment in wireless.

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 Glass Diary, Part 4: Local Search & Navigation Remember that first Google Glass video? It was published a little more than a year ago and gave the world its first glimpse at what Google had in mind for Glass. Even though Google described it as “an early concept video,” you can clearly see that local search and navigation was a key aspect of [...] Search In Pics: Google Robots With Lightsaber?s, Bloomberg Cutting Google Cake & The Simpsons Street View In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the Web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more. Android Bathroom Signs: Source: Google+ Bike To Work Day At Google Germany: Source: Google+ Bloomberg Cuts [...] Google Voice Search Coming To iOS, Chrome For Android Gets An Update Google released a couple of new UI features with the latest Chrome update for Android yesterday and announced that voice search will be coming to Chrome for iOS “soon”. Android Updates With the Android update, the long search URL box is gone and search queries in Chrome display in the omnibox. And now, while browsing, [...] 5 Excel Skills Every Marketer Should Know One question I get asked a lot is this: what Excel skills are most important for marketers to learn? I have whittled that interminable list down to five skills that I believe are absolutely essential for marketers to know, presented below in order of importance. Table Formatting I believe that table formatting is the baseline [...] Bing Officially Releases Bing XML Sitemap Plugin 1.0 After releasing a preview of the Bing sitemap plugin a few months ago, Bing is ready to officially launch the Bing XML Sitemap Plugin 1.0 to the public. This sitemap plugin allows webmasters to easily create XML sitemap files for their websites that can be submitted to Bing Webmaster Tools or other search engines. It [...] Foursquare Updates Android & iOS App With New “Super-Specific” Search Filters Foursquare has added new search filters that allow Android and iOS users to make “super-specific” searches, filtering by price, locations where users have or haven’t checked in before, locations ‘friends have checked in’, if a location is ‘open now’, and if a location is ‘offering specials’. To demonstrate how specific users can be when searching for [...] Report: Google To Bid For Waze — To Shut It Down? According to a just-published Bloomberg report, Google is preparing a bid for Waze. Earlier this month, rumors indicating Facebook was in late-stage acquisition talks with Waze for roughly $1 billion appeared online. Other parties (Apple, Microsoft) may now also be interested in the social mapping service. According to the Bloomberg report: Waze is fielding expressions [...] Recent Headlines From Marketing Land, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing: Founder Of First Bid-Based PPC Search Engine Launches New Mobile Ad Solution Instagram Restores Blocked Accounts After “Temporary Glitch” Local Search On Google Glass: Part 4 Of The Google Glass Diary Series iAd Becomes First Mobile Ad Network To Earn Media Ratings Council Accreditation Defining Success On Pinterest New: Google AdSense Ad Code For Responsive Design, A/B Testing & More #DontDeleteMyAccount Panic On Instagram Over Account Deletion Rumor More Antritrust Pain For Google: FTC To Probe Display Ads Biz Search News From Around The Web: Business Issues Android’s Market Share Is Literally A Joke, Tech.pinions Google Follows Amazon’s Lead on New Shopping Site, Delivery, Other Services, Wall Street Journal Google Plans to Develop Wireless Networks in Emerging Markets, Wall Street Journal Microso

AT&T AdWorks, a burgeoning advertising network that reaches across mobile, online, and television, is entering the next phase in cross-channel ad targeting.

Google says that the new benchmarking tool will help marketers build context around their display ads and compare their own performance to relevant data points.

Over the past few days I spotted two webmasters asking about a Bing Search update. With all the domain clustering and penguin chatter dominating the SEO space...

One of the largest wants/needs of Google AdSense publishers is to be able to make their AdSense ads work with responsive design web sites. Although Google won't do it for you automatically...

Very busy week with Google releasing the major next generation Penguin update, Penguin 2.0. Bing also may have made a search update a few...

As you know, Penguin 2.0 #4 is live and webmasters and SEOs are buzzing about that. The thing is, some misconceptions about Penguin 2.0 are driving me absolutely crazy. Matt Cutts, in his video about this update, talks about how Penguin 2...