2020 - Page 7 of 25 - Latest News, Headlines at Peter Zmijewski

SEO industry ‘a minefield of dodgy practitioners’: Australian official seeks action

October 5, 2020 news

Small business advocate is calling for new regulation. The office of Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman (ASBFEO) is targeting SEO fraudsters. Ombudsman Kate Carnell has said that the industry is rife with “horror stories” in which small businesses (SMBs) are ripped off by SEO consultants “over-promising and under-delivering.” Advocating for SEO regulation. She has called on Australian SMBs to come forward to tell their stories and intends to present her findings to the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission in an effort to prompt new regulations. Reportedly, the ACCC…

SEM

Solving an age-old SEO-PPC issue: How to bid on your brand name based on incrementality

October 3, 2020 news

There are 4 steps to evaluate your investment of branded keywords – judge performance then segment and calculate incrementality and adjust your targets based on that incrementality. Advertising on branded keywords is often misunderstood. Advertisers either take too much credit for branded keywords, or they deem the impact of branded keywords completely zero (Did eBay just prove that paid search ads don’t work?). The question that is often asked: Should we invest in branded keywords? However, the question we should ask: How much should we invest in branded keywords to have…

Microsoft Promoting Windows on ARM

October 1, 2020 news

Microsoft is promoting Windows on ARM, just months after Apple announced the Mac would move to ARM-based processors. At Apple’s WWDC conference, the company announced it was abandoning Intel’s processors in favor of custom silicon based on ARM. The move has been widely seen as an industry-changing move, one that will force Microsoft and PC makers to follow suit. In fact, former Apple executive and Be, Inc. founder, Jean-Louis Gassée predicted that Microsoft would follow Apple’s lead fairly quickly. A failure to do so would mean giving up the high-performance…

Marketing

Marketers hopeful for late 2021 in-person conferences

September 30, 2020 news

But as virtual events take root in the community, attendees have clear opinions on cost and format, according to our latest Events Participation Index. Marketers’ already low expectations that they could safely attend in-person events this year have bottomed out, according to our latest Events Participation Index, which isn’t surprising as the planet passed a grim milestone of 1 million deaths tied to COVID-19 this week. But despite concerns over second and, in some cases, third waves of the virus beginning to show, many of the 350 professionals we surveyed…

Bing

Bing Results & Ads Now Live On AOL Search

September 29, 2020 news

The Bing-AOL search deal announced last year went into effect over the weekend. It was announced last year, but now it’s official: “Bing powers AOL’s web, mobile, and tablet search, providing paid search ads and algorithmic organic search results to AOL’s properties worldwide.” Citing comScore data, Microsoft now says that Bing is behind “close to one-third of US PC web searches.” Beyond providing web search results for Siri on Apple devices, most of the Bing search volume is on the desktop. Last April, Bing crossed the 20-percent market share threshold…

google

The new releases are from Google’s Search Open Sourcing team. Detlef Johnson on September 23, 2020 at 8:15 am More Last year, Google open sourced the code for the robots.txt parser used in its production systems. After seeing the community build tools with it and add their own contributions to the open source library, including language ports of the original parser written in C++ to golang and rust, Google announced this week it has released additional related source code projects. Here’s what’s new for developers and tech SEOs to play with. C++ and Java. For anyone writing their own or adopting Google’s parser written in C++ (a super fast compiled language), Google has released the source code for its robots.txt parser validation testing framework used to ensure parser results adhere to the official robots.txt specification as expected, and it can validate parsers written in a wide variety of other languages. Additionally, Google released an official port to the more popular Java language. Modern Java is more widely used in enterprise applications than C++, whereas C++ is more typically used in core system applications where performance needs demand it. Some Java-based codebases run applications today for enterprise SEO and or marketing software. Testing and validation. Requirements for running the test framework include JDK 1.7+ for Apache Maven, and Google’s protocol buffer to interface the test framework with your parser platform and development workstation. It should be useful to anyone developing their own parser, validating a port, or utilizing either of Google’s official parsers, and especially for validating your development of a port to a new language. How difficult would this be to use? We should note these are relatively approachable intern-led projects at Google which ought to be consumable by moderate to higher level programmers in one or more of these languages. You can build a robots.txt parser using practically any programming language. It adds perceived authority, however, when your marketing application runs the exact same parser that governs Googlebot. Why we care. If you, or your company, has plans to write or has written a crawler which parses robots.txt files for directives looking for important information (not just) for SEO, then this gives you incentive to evaluate whether using Google’s parser in C++, Java, or one of the other language ports is worth it. The Java parser in particular should be relatively easy to adopt if your application is already written in Java.

September 28, 2020 news

The new releases are from Google’s Search Open Sourcing team. Last year, Google open sourced the code for the robots.txt parser used in its production systems. After seeing the community build tools with it and add their own contributions to the open source library, including language ports of the original parser written in C++ to golang and rust, Google announced this week it has released additional related source code projects. Here’s what’s new for developers and tech SEOs to play with. C++ and Java. For anyone writing their own or…

SEO

The anatomy of an SEO robocall scheme

September 25, 2020 news

With a lot of believable lies behind multiple companies, it becomes clear why it’s so difficult to hold these businesses accountable. Here’s a step-by-step look at what happened during my robocall. On Oct. 11, 2018, I received a phone call and discovered that Classy Brain (my company) was in existential crisis. The end was near – Google was after me. The future looked grim. My clients would leave me one by one. I’d have to lay off employees, close my doors, and “Shutter” my location in Moz Local. My silver…

SEM

What’s going on with Google brand CPC?

September 24, 2020 news

Brands may be at Google’s mercy when it comes to the price of branded traffic, but Columnist Andy Taylor outlines steps they can take to reduce their CPC pain. In Q1 and Q2 of 2017, Merkle (my employer) reported on a positive trend for advertisers that showed a decline in brand cost per click (CPC) year over year. The CPC of brand terms is often determined by Google’s algorithm as opposed to the competitive landscape, so brands are often left to Google’s mercy in determining the price paid for this…