SEO

ICYMI, Microsoft has ambitious plans: to double the size of its ad business to $20 billion. So why is this big news? Google and Meta are showing signs of fading, making more room for emerging platforms like TikTok, Amazon and Instacart. Wait, what about Microsoft Ads? Microsoft’s search and news advertising revenues have consistently grown

Happy Monday! The Google Ads dashboard may be down for some users. We’re investigating reports of an issue with Google Ads. We will provide more information shortly. The affected users are unable to access Google Ads. Please see the dashboard for updates: https://t.co/0AqTKCl6Ts — AdsLiaison (@adsliaison) January 23, 2023 The Google Ads Status Dashboard. The

Google deduplicates featured snippets In 2020, Google rolled out a global change to featured snippets that resulted in any URL only appearing once on the first page of search results, instead of twice. Google said there would be no change to its overall set of web search results. There would still be 10 unique listings,

Google explains the “core” algorithm In 2016, Google’s Andrey Lipattsev explained the “core” algorithm. This happened following the news about Panda becoming part of Google’s core algorithm. SEOs wanted to better understand what being part of Google’s core algorithm meant. Put simply, it meant that an algorithm is consistent enough that Google doesn’t have to

On Thursday, a diverse group of individuals and organizations defended the liability shield of Big Tech in a crucial Supreme Court case regarding YouTube’s algorithms. This group included businesses, internet users, academics, and human rights experts, with some arguing that removing federal legal protections for AI-driven recommendation engines would have a major impact on the

Google has just rolled out Performance Max experiments, and Twitter has taken notice. Why we care. If you’re an advertiser using Performance Max, you can use this feature to test changes to your account before applying them permanently. Recommendations as experiments. Last year Google launched the ability for advertisers to apply recommendations as experiments. In

Although we hesitate to use the term post-pandemic with any confidence, marketing takes place today in a space changed — perhaps irrevocably — by COVID-19. Yes, marketers are making their way back to the workplace; many conferences and expos are back in person; it’s possible to meet and greet prospects face-to-face instead of face-to-video. But

Every article you can find online about Google ranking factors will tell you there are at least ~200 or so odd variables that contribute to how a site will perform in the SERPs.  That being said, there’s an enormous difference between what might impact SEO, what’s actually confirmed as a ranking factor, and what is

Blog posts are quite possibly the most common content type that exists. You read them, I read them, we all read them – but which ones actually made an impact on you? Which blogs gave you useful information? Which ones made you think, or taught you something new? Most importantly, which drew you closer to

Facebook Graph Search arrives In 2013, Facebook announced a new experience that it called Graph Search. Facebook Graph Search relied heavily on Likes and other connections to determine what to show as the most relevant search results for each user. At launch, Facebook Graph Search only included people, photos, places and interests. Facebook Graph Search wasn’t a

R.I.P. AMP In 2022, we revealed what happened when Search Engine Land shut off AMP. TL;DR: “We have seen very little disruption to our traffic and have reaped the benefit of having a clearer picture of our audience analytics.” We didn’t see any year-over-year declines in traffic that we could tie to AMP aside from

When Google announced the helpful content update, many in the SEO industry expected AI-generated content to get hit hard.  I was expecting AI-generated content to get wiped out by this supposedly sweeping update, comparable to 2011’s Panda algorithm update. Yet, no major impact was recorded.  Soon after, Google released the October 2022 spam update and

All the buzz these days is around AI, artificial intelligence, as a Googler killer, Bing’s plans to add ChatGPT, and also as a tool, we can use for our own websites. Recently, Bankrate was highlighted as having some of its content written by machines but reviewed by human editors, and the SEO community wanted to

Google Business Profiles will only allow product pricing when the price is a single price, not a range of prices, starting on February 15, 2023. Also, Google said that it will no longer allow custom call to actions in Google Business Profiles. Google’s message. Google posted a message in the Google Business Profile products section

As we begin 2023, it’s a good time to reflect on the macro-level trends we’ve observed last year.  Here are a few trends that I believe have some staying power and should be considered as you build out your 2023 search marketing strategies. 1. A slow economy and heightened focus on efficiency In case you

Between the roll-out of the helpful content update and the emphasis of E-E-A-T on every query and search result, Google is clear about the significance SEOs should place on good, valuable content in 2023. Given that, I’d like to break down the approach, process, and resources my team uses to tackle content this year.  I’m

Intent research vs. keyword research In 2020, Frédéric Dubut of Bing told us: “Keyword research are probably going to become slowly obsolete and you’ll need to switch to intent research as a practice.” Barry Schwartz asked Google’s John Mueller about Dubut’s statement. Here’s what Mueller said: “There’s probably always gonna be a little bit of

The Spam Clock in 2011, startup search engine Blekko launched a spam clock that estimated 155 million spam pages had been created since Jan. 1 of that year. Blekko said 1 million spam pages were being created every hour. How bad was Google’s spam problem then? Big. But as Danny Sullivan pointed out at the