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HTTPS Pages on Front Page of Google Could Reach 50% by June 2017 by @MattGSouthern http://ift.tt/2lfEI0H Dr. Pete Meyers from Moz revealed that HTTPs pages on the front page of Google search results could reach 50% by late May/early June 2017. Since Google announced it would be giving a small rankings boost to HTTPS sites, the amount of HTTPS pages ranking on the front page has been steadily increasing. Last July, HTTPS pages made up 30% of the results on Google’s front page. Now it’s at 45%, and by June it could reach 50%. That’s a considerable jump in the amount of HTTPS pages on the front page in a relatively short amount of time. This certainly raises a lot of questions, but perhaps none more important than whether this is due to the rankings boost or because there is an increase of HTTPS sites on the web. Meyers cleared up this question, stating that he believes it is due to sites switching to HTTPS as opposed to Google’s algorithm favoring HTTPS sites.
With that being said, Meyers also believes Google will increase its preference towards HTTPS as more sites make the switch:
Does that mean your site should make the switch now if it hasn’t already? That’s a loaded question with many considerations, Meyers adds.
Currently HTTPS for SEO is mostly hype, Meyers said, but that hype has turned into a reality of more HTTPS sites on the web.
SEO via Search Engine Journal http://ift.tt/1QNKwvh February 23, 2017 at 02:18PM
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New Google My Business Guidelines State Virtual Offices Not Allowed for Service-Area Businesses by @MattGSouthern http://ift.tt/2lLzUTO According to new Google My Business (GMB) guidelines, it is not acceptable for a service-area business to use a virtual location. The post New Google My Business Guidelines State Virtual Offices Not Allowed for Service-Area Businesses by @MattGSouthern appeared first on Search Engine Journal. SEO via Search Engine Journal http://ift.tt/1QNKwvh February 23, 2017 at 01:09PM New Google Cooking Cards Spotted in Google Now by @MattGSouthern http://ift.tt/2lBozne New cards have been spotted in Google Now which display recipe suggestions based on search history and previously read articles. The post New Google Cooking Cards Spotted in Google Now by @MattGSouthern appeared first on Search Engine Journal. SEO via Search Engine Journal http://ift.tt/1QNKwvh February 23, 2017 at 12:38PM Google Upgrades Gboard for iPhone with Voice Typing, New Emoji, and More by @MattGSouthern http://ift.tt/2kSlodW Gboard, Google's alternative mobile keyboard, has been updated on iPhone with support for voice typing, new emoji, and new languages. The post Google Upgrades Gboard for iPhone with Voice Typing, New Emoji, and More by @MattGSouthern appeared first on Search Engine Journal. SEO via Search Engine Journal http://ift.tt/1QNKwvh February 23, 2017 at 12:14PM Google Releases Tool to Help Filter Out Hurtful Comments Online by @MattGSouthern http://ift.tt/2l5jAtl Google has released a new API for publishers which uses machine learning to filter out hurtful comments online. The new tool, called Perspective, can be integrated into any publishing platform which utilizes online comments. Perspective cross-references comments against a human-generated database of comments that have already been labeled as offensive. When a new comment is posted, Perspective will rate it based on how closely it resembles the hundreds of thousands of abusive comments in Google’s database. If it has been determined that a comment is abusive, Perspective will notify the commenter in real time, which you can see in the example below: Comment sections have become so volatile as of late that many publishers have opted to remove comment section altogether, rather than trying to moderate them. Perspective aims to make it easier to moderate abusive comments before they go live. Google revealed Perspective is currently being tested with the New York Times’ comment section. As more sites integrate the API with their publishing platform, Perspective will continue to learn and grow its database of toxic comments, making it even more efficient over time. Currently, Perspective is only able to flag abusive comments left in English, but that could change over the next year if it ends up catching on with publishers. SEO via Search Engine Journal http://ift.tt/1QNKwvh February 23, 2017 at 09:24AM How to Repurpose Your Content Like a Champion by @MrDannyGoodwin http://ift.tt/2mcK9BS Tired of coming up with new content ideas? Just replicate your successes! Here's how to repurpose your most successful content like a champion. The post How to Repurpose Your Content Like a Champion by @MrDannyGoodwin appeared first on Search Engine Journal. SEO via Search Engine Journal http://ift.tt/1QNKwvh February 23, 2017 at 08:50AM SearchCap: Google penalty, the KKK & Gboard http://ift.tt/2kRADDS Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. The post SearchCap: Google penalty, the KKK & Gboard appeared first on Search Engine Land. Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article. SEO via Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing http://ift.tt/fN1KYC February 23, 2017 at 07:26AM Natural News was not banned from Google over fake news http://ift.tt/2l4DIvv Natural News, a controversial alternative medicine website according to Wikipedia, has been delisted from Google. The news site themselves confirmed being removed from Google and recently claimed Google banned them because the site was pro-Trump. Google has confirmed the site was not removed for its political views but rather because of a webmaster guidelines violation. A Google spokesperson told Search Engine Land:
Natural News said in its post that “Google sent no warning whatsoever to our ‘webmaster tools’ email address on file with them,” but not all penalties will receive a notification via Google Search Console. More extreme and deceptive violations will not receive such notifications. While some are suggesting the ban is related to Google’s interest in tackling the web’s “fake news” problem, Google has nothing in its webmaster guidelines about such sites. Google would not penalize or delist a web site for “fake news,” let alone being controversial. (Even some who dislike Natural News aren’t sure it qualifies as fake news.) Google has many penalties that can result in a site like Natural News being demoted or delisted but, like we said above, fake news is not one of them. SEO via Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing http://ift.tt/fN1KYC February 23, 2017 at 06:26AM Four U.S. Presidents in the KKK? Google’s latest problem with featured answers http://ift.tt/2lKqacJ If you’re trying to research U.S. Presidents who may have been Ku Klux Klan members – don’t believe everything you see on Google. While there appears to be no conclusive evidence any actually were Klan members, Google lists four. A Google search for “presidents in the klan” returns a featured answer listing four specific U.S. presidents. Technically called a “featured snippet,” this is where Google has so much confidence that the facts from a website are absolutely correct, it elevates the website’s content by displaying it in a special box above all other listings: The site providing this answer actually took the content from another site that, in turn, appears to be using an article posted in various places across the web, making it difficult to know who, or what site, originally published the content. Wikipedia — which isn’t perfect, but is under constant review by editors — dismisses the charges against presidents Warren G. Harding and Harry S. Truman. The other two, William McKinley aren’t discussed. The failed direct answer came to our attention via Peter Shulman, a professor at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, who tweeted about it after a student cited Google as a reference:
A related search for “presidents in the kkk” gives the same featured answer. A search for “presidents in the ku klux klan” also serves up a featured snippet, but with a slightly different list of U.S. Presidents pulled from a different source. This isn’t the first time one of Google’s featured snippets led users astray. Three years ago, Google claimed Barack Obama was the King of the United States. In June of 2015, a featured snippet pointed users to a religious website for queries asking, “what happened to the dinosaurs.” Last year, Google gave a one-sided answer to a political question, and elevated an answer for “are women evil” — which resulted in this embarrassment happening on Google Home: While, technically, this is a different issue than Google’s fight to combat fake news, an argument can be made that Google’s failed featured answers play right into the larger problem around false news sources being widely circulated online. About The AuthorAmy Gesenhues is Third Door Media's General Assignment Reporter, covering the latest news and updates for Search Engine Land and Marketing Land. From 2009 to 2012, she was an award-winning syndicated columnist for a number of daily newspapers from New York to Texas. With more than ten years of marketing management experience, she has contributed to a variety of traditional and online publications, including MarketingProfs.com, SoftwareCEO.com, and Sales and Marketing Management Magazine. Read more of Amy's articles. SEO via Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing http://ift.tt/fN1KYC February 23, 2017 at 05:20AM A review of free PPC reporting solutions from Google http://ift.tt/2lv2EzX Doing PPC reporting right often involves some trade-offs between time and money. The perfect report takes a lot of time to build — time that could have been spent improving the performance of an account. A quick and repeatable report, on the other hand, is usually generated through a tool that costs money. So the arrival of Data Studio, which offers very customizable reporting, and now does so at a cost of $0, warrants an investigation to determine how it can help account managers. Because the tool suite of my company, Optmyzr, also includes PPC reporting, spending the time to evaluate Data Studio made sense to me. So if you’re overworked and can’t really spare a few hours to look at Data Studio yourself, get my take on it here in a quick 10-minute read. I’ll even share a handful of cool reports you can make. Why trust my opinion? Because my personal credibility in this industry hinges on being helpful to advertisers. So while I’ve got skin in the game, for this post I put on my agency hat and tried out Data Studio to see where it shines and where it might fall short for search marketers. What is Data Studio?While Data Studio is not new (it was announced in March of 2016), it wasn’t a tool for most of us because there was a five-report limit per user — hardly enough for the average consultant or agency. Anyone who needed more reports had to buy a license for Google Data Studio 360. With the recent announcement that this limit no longer applies to the free version, Data Studio is worth a new look for anyone who balked at the high price before. Free PPC reporting options from GoogleBut if you’re looking for a free reporting tool, Data Studio is hardly the only offering from Google. So I’ll also share some pros and cons of the free solutions that have been around a bit longer: Google Analytics and AdWords. Google AnalyticsGoogle Analytics (GA) is primarily a tool for analyzing what users do on a website. So if you want to look beyond cost and conversions from PPC, GA is a great solution. It can help explain why clicks convert. It’s also very good at showing acquisition data from other channels so you’re not limited to reporting only what happens in AdWords. But while it automatically knows what traffic comes from Twitter, Facebook and more, it knows nothing about campaign details or costs unless you do some serious work setting up UTM tracking tags and importing cost data. In this case, you’re paying for a free solution with your time. GA is not a purpose-built reporting or dashboarding tool, so it may not be as sophisticated as you’d like. It does have some capabilities like custom dashboards that can be emailed on a schedule. Pros
Cons
AdWords campaign management reportsThe vast majority of AdWords advertisers use nothing more than AdWords itself to analyze the results and get reports. As a result, the reporting capabilities in the campaign management interface is primarily geared to meeting the needs of the account manager, rather than the executive team. This means reports are fairly bland, comprised mostly of tables and simple charts. While the new interface will improve on this, for now, most of us are still stuck with the old version that doesn’t lend itself well to creating pretty reports for stakeholders. Because reports in this part of AdWords also happen to be in the same place where changes are made, an insight can instantaneously be turned into action. The bigger trends and insights may not be as obvious to see — but that’s where the Report Editor comes in handy, and I’ll cover that further below. Pros
Cons
AdWords Report EditorFor a truer form of reporting, AdWords has the reporting tab. Their Report Editor provides a more robust, drag-and-drop environment for exploring, manipulating and visualizing data. The reports you find here can be used to create more robust variations of the tables found in the Campaign management section, or to create interesting aggregations through pivot tables. You can also make great-looking visualizations, like charts that highlight key findings. In a way, it’s like they brought some of the most useful functionality from Excel or Google Sheets right into AdWords. AdWords Product Management lead Jon Diorio recently told me, “one of our Report Editor goals was to eliminate the time wasted constructing pivots and charts from downloaded data.” The benefit is that the tedious step of fetching fresh data from AdWords is no longer needed. When reports become much easier to repeat, account managers are more likely to gain the right insights to improve performance. While the tool is definitely a time-saver compared to doing the same analysis in a spreadsheet, it only allows one analysis at a time to be shared, so it still leaves the work associated with building a great multi-page report to be done manually every time. That said I’ve heard whispers that AdWords has begun beta testing just such a dashboarding solution. Pros
Cons
Google Data StudioData Studio is the newest free reporting tool from Google. It’s great for doing analysis on a variety of data sets, including MySql databases, Google Sheets and several Google products like BigTable, AdWords, YouTube, Analytics and DoubleClick. As with most Google products, direct integrations with the other big players are sorely missing, and for agencies, that means there’s no integration with Bing Ads, Facebook Ads or others that compete with Google for advertising dollars. Unlike GA and the AW solutions for reporting, this product is built specifically for reporting and dashboarding, so the output is better-looking, and if done right, a report created here can help communicate the right story about an account to an executive. But Data Studio was not built primarily for advertisers, and that shows in the lack of a few things a typical agency might want from a reporting tool: the ability to show ad text data, scheduling of reports and the ability to leverage one report template against a large number of clients. Pros
Cons
Five things to try in Data StudioWhile it may not be the Holy Grail of PPC reporting that we’ve been looking for, Data Studio is still an awesome tool with plenty of powerful and useful functionality that you should take advantage of. Here are some useful PPC things I was able to do. 1. Create an executive MCC dashboardThe Google MCC dashboard is the starting place for an account manager’s daily optimization routine and provides a great overview of the performance of several accounts at once. We’ve heard from agencies using our tools that executives want to get access to this type of tabular overview data. But granting an executive access to AdWords may not always make sense, either because they might be drowned in too much data or they might accidentally interfere with the work you’re doing. Data Studio provides a way to create your own version of an MCC dashboard that can easily be shared with anyone you want, even when they don’t have access to AdWords. And thanks to the recently enhanced AdWords MCC integration in Data Studio, it’s very easy to pick just the accounts from an MCC to include (as long as they use the same currency). 2. Create a custom heat map tableTables are great, but they can take some time to read and understand. If you want to combine the level of detail you get from a table with an easy-to-grasp data visualization, try a custom heat map table. You can build the table with up to 10 levels of segmentation to get a very granular view. For example, use lots of segments and color coding to help quickly identify portions of an account that might be ripe for an optimization. 3. Show third-party call-tracking dataEven though Data Studio doesn’t integrate directly with call-tracking vendors, you can still include that type of data if you maintain it on your own SQL servers or in a Google Spreadsheet. The graph above is an example I created using call-tracking data from CallRail, which I added to a Google Sheet with Zapier. This data can then be rendered in a variety of interesting ways. Here, I show both a graph with the number of calls received every day and the overall total for the last 30 days. Since every call is a row on the spreadsheet, to get the count of calls, I used one of my favorite capabilities in Data Studio: custom calculations to sum it all up. Specifically, I used the formula COUNT(Date) to get the total calls by day. 4. Use calculated fields to show how big your account isThere are some nifty functions that can help calculate new metrics from the underlying data in Data Studio. For example, use the function COUNT(Ad Group) to show how many ad groups there are. Then apply a data filter to a dimension like Ad Group Status to show just how many of those are active, paused or deleted. In this example, we’ve calculated the number of active ad groups in one account, as well as the number of keywords that currently have a Quality Score of 6, and what the highest and lowest Quality Score is for any active keyword in the account. 5. Remove complexity from reports by normalizing campaign namesAccount managers use different campaign naming conventions depending on the strategy of their account structure. For example, someone employing an alpha/beta structure may name one campaign “Widgets – Alpha” and another “Widgets – Beta.” The recipient of a report probably only gets confused when they see your naming convention, so why not standardize the names? Renaming things is possible by using a text manipulation function to create a new calculated field. For example, create a field for “Normalized Campaign Name” that removes the alpha/beta notation. The resulting report is automatically reaggregated so that the report becomes much easier to digest for an executive. The specific function I used in this case was REPLACE(REPLACE(Campaign, “alpha”, “”), “beta”, “”) ConclusionThere are several free reporting solutions from Google that can help PPC account managers with the creation of reports for their stakeholders. Unfortunately, there is no reporting solution, whether free or paid, that is going to be the perfect solution for everyone. So be ready to compromise, whether it’s on cost, time savings or features. But ultimately, a powerful tool that is free to use, like Data Studio, should have a place in our toolboxes because it can help streamline some common tasks. Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here. About The AuthorFrederick (“Fred”) Vallaeys was one of the first 500 employees at Google where he spent 10 years building AdWords and teaching advertisers how to get the most out of it as the Google AdWords Evangelist. Today he is the Cofounder of Optmyzr, an AdWords tool company focused on unique data insights, One-Click Optimizations™, advanced reporting to make account management more efficient, and Enhanced Scripts™ for AdWords. He stays up-to-speed with best practices through his work with SalesX, a search marketing agency focused on turning clicks into revenue. He is a frequent guest speaker at events where he inspires organizations to be more innovative and become better online marketers. SEO via Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing http://ift.tt/fN1KYC February 23, 2017 at 02:57AM |
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