Foursquare began life as a gamified social “check-in” app, which offered helpful tips for others as they competed to become “the mayor” of local venues. It evolved into a local search purveyor but after adoption plateaued and investors grew restless, the company pivoted to location intelligence. And although the Foursquare app continues to exist it’s…
Google ads is now 20 years old. At its 15 year milestone, we chronicled AdWords’ evolution into a $60 billion business. We were still talking about Yahoo as a player in search, enhanced campaigns ushered in mobile as a marketing must-do just two years prior and ads-only Google Shopping was three years old. Fast-forward five…
Along with updates for merchants’ holiday Shopping campaign efforts, on Thursday, Google announced consumer-facing updates in Shopping that retail marketers should pay attention to — particularly as it relates to the importance of pricing and promotions. Retail advertisers will also have access to more reporting and performance insights for Shopping campaigns and new customer targeting…
Consumers’ accelerated shift to online shopping will be one of the lasting trends of 2020. Nearly three-quarters (73%) of U.S. holiday shoppers said they plan to shop online more for the holidays during COVID-19, a Google survey found. It’s unclear whether Amazon’s Prime Day shift from July to October will last post-pandemic, but the timing…
Google has confirmed on Twitter much of what we wrote in our story: How Google indexes passages of a page and what it means for SEO. Google wrote “this change doesn’t mean we’re indexing individual passages independently of pages. We’re still indexing pages and considering info about entire pages for ranking. But now we can…
Link building is very time-consuming. Just securing 10-20 links a month can be mind-numbing. But by aligning resources, you can build a program that can help you earn hundreds of links in a month. On October 14, I moderated a sponsored Search Engine Journal webinar presented by Kevin Rowe, Founder and CEO, PureLinq. He shared…
Google has posted another update regarding the indexing issues with mobile-indexing and canonicalization. As of last Wednesday, October 14, 2020, the final indexing issue has been resolved, outside of minor “edge cases.” The statement. Google said “Final update: the canonical issue was effectively resolved last Wednesday, with about 99% of the URLs restored. We expect…
At its virtual SearchOn event Thursday, Google made a range of announcements about how it’s making search more sophisticated and user friendly. The company also announced that it now uses its natural language understanding BERT algorithm on almost every query to better understand search intent. Many of the announcements shared the common underlying theme that…
Google is testing ads for local businesses in Google Maps auto-suggest search results. Thibault Adda, local search specialist at Darden Restaurants, noticed and tweeted about it Thursday. As he typed a search for “Seafood restaurant,” an ad for the seafood restaurant chain Red Lobster appeared in the auto-suggest results before he completed the search query,…
Among the slew of changes to search Google announced Thursday, we wanted to delve deeper into the passage-based indexing announcement. Passage-based indexing updates. “Very specific searches can be the hardest to get right,” said Google, “since sometimes the single sentence that answers your question might be buried deep in a web page. We’ve recently made…