A good summary on Google’s latest update: Penguin

SEO and the Flight To Quality | RKG Blog.

The Panda update puts a premium on original, high-quality content and clean, canonical sites. Duplicate content can be a bigger problem now than it was before the update hit. The rule of the day post-Panda is a ‘less is more’ strategy and a focus on user engagement. Now Penguin puts a premium on natural links and anchor text. In early 2011 we preached that SEOs should quit obsessing on anchor text. For those who followed my advice back then, congratulations. You’re well positioned to take marketshare from those who may have taken shortcuts in the meantime.

EBay, Wal-Mart search for revved-up search engines | Reuters

Bizarro headline of the day:

EBay Inc and Wal-Mart Stores Inc are developing new Web search engines to better compete against Amazon.com Inc in the fast-growing e-commerce market.

via EBay, Wal-Mart search for revved-up search engines | Reuters.

In an article about search engine competition, there’s no mention of Google until the very end, no mention of Yahoo, and one mention of Microsoft.

Apple made $1 billion off Google last year by having it as the default search engine in Safari

Schachter believes Google searches on Apple devices resulted in $1.3 billion in gross revenue. He believes Google has a 75% traffic acquisition cost associated with that revenue. As a result, Google only gets $335 million in net revenue from searches on iOS and Safar

via How Much Google Pays Apple For Search On The iPhone.

Fred Wilson keeps telling startups to not invest in Marketing

And this is good because:

Because then we can keep using it as a major competitive advantage.

Crusadify – Ideas to Make B2B Marketing Not Suck – Why I hope Fred Wilson keeps telling startups to not invest in Marketing.

[edit: added intro to put quote in context]

Fred’s been saying this for a while and when he mentioned this last year, this was my response:

That’s Fred Wilson’s advice. I had mixed feelings about his original post because although the message felt wrong, if legions took it as gospel, it means less competition for me in any channel other than earned media and social media!

Google, where people get information about [fill in the blank]

This is research from Pew Internet and American Life Project.  You can fill in the underlined part with just about anything else and search engines will dominate as the number one source.  This is not going to change anytime soon.

People looking for information about local restaurants and other businesses say they rely on the internet, especially search engines, ahead of any other source.

via Where people get information about restaurants and other local businesses | Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Google’s Crawler Now Automatically Detects Smartphone Content — SiliconFilter

Some SEO related news about mobile optimized websites:

The idea here is to ensure that Google’s mobile search can now direct searchers immediately to the smartphone-optimized version of a website.

via Google’s Crawler Now Automatically Detects Smartphone Content — SiliconFilter.

Meet Google’s Biggest U.S. Search Advertisers | Digital – Advertising Age

 

The top spender is IAC/InterActiveCorp, owner of Ask.com, Match.com, Citysearch and other companies that depend on buying long-tail search terms in bulk. Ask, in particular, buys lots of cheap keywords and remarkets them to advertisers bidding on like keywords.

via Meet Google’s Biggest U.S. Search Advertisers | Digital – Advertising Age.

Google’s “business is very much at risk, their core search business,” Borthwick said.

Older post– Some interesting quotes from Borthwick that come with high shock value.  Here’s one:

Google’s “business is very much at risk, their core search business,” Borthwick said. “Google+ is far better than anything they’ve done before….In my mind the jury is still out on whether it’s enough for people to actually use.”

via Betaworks CEO: Google’s Search Business Is Very Much At Risk – Venture Capital Dispatch – WSJ.

Google will maintain their hegemony as long they have access to open data. If there is a high quality signal coming from a social media site, as long as it’s open, Google will crawl it and rank it, along with links from the rest of the internet that go into determining their SERPs.  Discovery via social media, if expressed as a web link, iis just one signal out of many for Google.

How strong are network effects in search?

This is an older article..

I think I’ve addressed this question before.  My feeling is that it’s strong up to a certain point and it’s a cop out for Microsoft to be using this as an excuse.  I’m not doubting the power of data and feedback loops but Bing has enough scale and traffic and they have a lot more low hanging fruit to pick than Google.

Also remember that Microsoft has access to people searching on Google so they have a lot more data than the queries being performed on Bing.

Once it starts, this cycle of prosperity snowballs — more users, more data, and more ad dollars. Economists call the phenomenon “network effects”; business executives just call it momentum. In search, Google has it in spades, and Microsoft, against the odds, wants to reverse it.

via With the Bing Search Engine, Microsoft Plays the Underdog – NYTimes.com.

What a Google Penalty Looks Like

This guy got penalized by Google.  He made some adjustments and got in touch with Google to let them know.  This is how his traffic gradually climbed back:

Below is the graph of how the Google penalty played out. I wasn’t surprised by the 90-day duration of the penalty: I had read other reports of similar link-based actions. I didn’t expect, however, the gradual ramp-back of the the “penalty release” period. In all, it took about 4 months to get back to normal traffic.

via What a Google Penalty Looks Like | Mitch Fournier.