Barry Schwartz says, “Every year we like to get a Googler who is close with the ranking and search quality team to give us future thinking points to relay to the search marketing community. In part two of our interview with Gary Illyes of Google, we asked him that question. After a little bit of coercion, Illyes told us three things: (1) Machine learning (2) AMP (3) Structured data He said: Well I guess you can guess that we are going to focus more and more on machine learning. Pretty much everywhere in search. But it will not take over the core algorithm. So that’s one thing. The other... [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “Google has launched a new testing tool for AMP (accelerated mobile pages). The new tool is available at https://search.google.com/search-console/amp and from within the Google Search Console. The tool works on your mobile device and uses Google’s “live web-search infrastructure” to analyze the AMP page with the real Googlebot — so the result is done in real time. It tests the validity of the AMP markup and structured data on the page related to AMP. If issues are found, you will be able to click on them to see details. Even the line in the source-code will be... [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “Google is going to create a separate mobile index within months, one that will be the main or “primary” index that the search engine uses to respond to queries. A separate desktop index will be maintained, one that will not be as up-to-date as the mobile index. The news came today during a keynote address from Gary Illyes, a webmaster trends analyst with Google, at Pubcon. Illyes didn’t give a timeline in his talk, but in a follow-up with Search Engine Land, he confirmed that it would happen within “months.” Google first announced that it was experimenting... [...]

Julie Ask says, “Google held an event in San Francisco this week to announce several new consumer products – a smartphone, a wireless speaker, Wi-Fi routers, a virtual reality headset and an updated Chromecast solution. All showcased an emerging strategic direction for Google and some killer engineering and design skills. None of it impressed as much as the demos of Google Assistant – Google’s virtual assistant. What is a virtual assistant, you ask? A virtual assistant is another name for an intelligent (personal) assistant. Virtual assistants orchestrate agents or services from third... [...]

Andy Taylor says, “At the recent SMX East conference in New York City, Google’s Jerry Dischler announced a number of paid search updates that should roll out in the near to immediate future. Among them, two in particular stand to expand the footprint of Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA). Here are the changes you need to know about, starting with the most impactful. RLSA membership duration expanded to 540 days Since beta testing all the way back in 2012, RLSA has been restricted to include only those users who visited an advertiser’s website within the past 180 days. This meant... [...]

Christi Olson says, “Attribution is the science behind assigning values to individual touch points throughout a customer’s decision journey. It’s not only a key driver in how we currently optimize marketing campaigns, but attribution is also used for media mix modeling and developing media budgets. Herein lies the problem: marketers tend to look at attribution within our own channel silo, so it’s not easy to understand the full picture of a multi-channel environment. As search continues to evolve in form and function, it’s raising some important questions around how we think about... [...]

Brett Middleton says, “Everyone running a PPC account typically has a budgeting question they are trying to figure out. For those with a tighter ad budget, the question becomes, “How do I get the most leads for this limited amount of spend I have?” Larger accounts run into their own problems; finding points of diminishing returns and making small gains in efficiency while maintaining spend levels at a point that generates the growth you need can be a headache. If you take away one point from this, it’s that search impression share may be the most ignored primary metric for most... [...]

Nikki Gilliland says, “Working with social influencers has become commonplace for brands over the past few years, particularly in the fashion, beauty and lifestyle sectors. In fact, with consumers now preferring the authentic voice of the influencer over even the biggest brands, we are beginning to see a shift in power, with influencers desiring greater control and even more autonomy. ‘The Voice of the Influencer’, a new Econsultancy report published in association with Fashion & Beauty Monitor, delves into this topic. Here are a few key takeaways from the report, detailing how brands... [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “Google is going to create a separate mobile index within months, one that will be the main or “primary” index that the search engine uses to respond to queries. A separate desktop index will be maintained, one that will not be as up-to-date as the mobile index. The news came today during a keynote address from Gary Illyes, a webmaster trends analyst with Google, at Pubcon. Illyes didn’t give a timeline in his talk, but in a follow-up with Search Engine Land, he confirmed that it would happen within “months.” Google first announced that it was experimenting... [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “The Google Penguin real time algorithm which started rolling out on September 23, 2016, has now rolled out fully to all of Google’s data centers. The recovery aspect of this new Penguin algorithm started a bit after September 23 — aroundSeptember 28. Now that all data centers have the new code, those sites impacted by previousGoogle Penguin issues should have seen a recovery at some level if they took the necessary steps to clean up their links. As we covered early, Penguin looks at the link source for the most part — so if you still have very spammy links pointing... [...]