The launch of iPhone 5 was perhaps the most awaited electronics launch ever. In connection with it there was a rampant speculation on the influence it will have on the mobile market.
But as for mobile search perspective, iPhone 5 is pretty much more of the same.
New Players Could Change the Game
Earlier this month took place a launch of Nokia’s new smartphones, but not as many people looked forward for it.
Interflora is recovering after its penalty. The major flower delivery service is popping up in Google’s search results in just about 2 weeks after it was caught. It is already back for most of its rankings, including the company’s name and ‘florist.’ However, such a quick recovery raised a lot of questions among SEO specialists, asserting that it’s almost impossible to fix all violations in such a short period.
A lot of the search giant’s penalties are really temporary and are due until a breaker corrects all failures that don’t meet Google’s SEO guidelines. There were cases when offenders managed to regain their visibility in Google’s search results in a 90 and even 60-day timeouts, including J.C. Penney in 2011 and the Google Chrome website, correspondingly. However, it’s a precedent with Interflora when the penalty had effect for 2 weeks only.
On the Google’s Inside Search Site where you can observe the inner processes of search mechanisms, you may notice a new section called “How Search Works.” There is an animation that explains the search procedure. You will be able to get acquainted with the major algorithms and search features. In this separate section, you will find a 43-page document about the guidelines for search raters, a slide presentation that illustrates the removal of spam, a list of requirements for a content sample that you should follow in order to avoid content deleting being regarded as spam.
The special animation is accessible only in English now but you can use the text version in 43 languages.
Microsoft announced a major update to its Bing Maps on February 28. The company introduced so called ‘top of the world’ imagery, which are high-resolution images. Bing expanded the total coverage of its Maps, adding cloud filtering and ocean topography.
Bing claimed it had updated more than 13 million square kilometers of satellite imagery. The change now provides Maps users with high-resolution images from the comfort of their mobile devices or laptops.
Google is about to start launching surveys ads and TrueView offering in AdMob and games. The announcement was made by Susan Wojcicki, Google’s Senior Vice President of Advertising, at an IAB conference.
As explained by Wojcicki, ad surveys were developed to facilitate the measurement process of the impact of video and display campaigns for marketers. Earlier, brands used only simple metrics, including impressions and clicks, to determine the level of the ‘brand lift’ from their video and display ad campaigns. As noted by Wojcicki, the new way is more effective.
Marissa Mayer, the current Yahoo CEO, has announced that members of the company’s staff wouldn’t be allowed to work from home any more. According to a memo released by Mayer on February 22, the decision is conditioned upon a desire to increase productivity and communicational culture within the company.
The memo obliges hundreds of remote workers to relocate from their homes to Yahoo’s office by June 1. Those employees who disobey the order will be dismissed.
Google has posted a new Webmaster Help video, where the company’s head of the webspam team Matt Cutts tells about various types of messages the search giant sends out through its WMT. According to Cutts, Google sends out hundreds of thousands of notifications each month. Given that the web is enormous and there are millions of spam pages that are created every hour, Google has to take great pains disclosing spam. The latter results in about hundreds of thousands of messages it sends out each month.
Although there are a lot of different categories of spam notifications outlined in the search giant’s webmaster guidelines, Google sends out only about ten different kinds of messages. For example, keyword stuffing and hidden text would make one kind of message.
According to the antitrust settlement Google signed with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in January 2013, the search giant agreed to allow advertisers to simultaneously manage their ad campaigns on Google AdWords and on other ad platforms. From now on, advertisers will be able to export ad campaigns from AdWords to third-party ad networks that use Google’s API. That was mentioned in the search giant’s announcement about updates to its AdWords API terms made on February 22, 2013.
GlobalWebIndex reports that Google+ is currently one of the most used social platforms - behind Facebook, but ahead of Twitter and LinkedIn. Given that, the research firm advises marketers not to ignore it as Google+ contains a lot of communities that can be useful for marketers.
Below are listed 12 communities on Google+ that are advisable for marketers to join and participate.
Bing announced some changes to its auto-suggestion feature on February 21. In 2010, Autosuggest was developed by Microsoft and is called to help users to get the search results faster by offering a set of words or phrases that fit the first keywords of their search. According to the company’s Senior Program Manager Dan Marantz most recent claim, Bing’s auto-suggestions will now operate much faster and the given results will be much more accurate.
On Bing official blog it is said that the company had incorporated two new enhancements to its auto-suggestions. Bing reported that they brought navigational queries to the forefront of auto-suggests and made search query history operation within the feature more extensive.
