Posts tagged affects
Google “Freshness” Update Affects 35% Of Searches: Winners & Losers
Nov 8th
Searchmetrics has measured the impact of last week’s “freshness” updates to Google’s search ranking algorithm, which affected around 35% of all searches. By measuring SEO visibility, Searchmetrics found that a clear category of sites gained prominence as a result of the update, while the few sites that lost are all over the map.
Sites that benefited from the update tend to be content sites and brand sites with frequent updates. Many are news sites, but others are travel sites or other consumer sites. The sites that lost in this update are more of a grab bag. Many of them are government websites or less time-sensitive news organizations.
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The update, built upon Google’s new Caffeine search infrastructure, determines when certain search queries should return more timely content, instead of older pages that might rank higher in absolute terms. For example, a search for “olympics” is likely to want results for the 2012 Summer Olympics, rather than the Wikipedia page for “olympics.”
Searchmetrics measures SEO visibility of sites across the Web. Its results are adjusted to eliminate outliers in either relative or absolute terms. In the Caffeine update, the biggest winner was last.fm, which shares the music its users are listening to right now. It gained in SEO visibility by 12.56%. Comcast.net lost the most ground, falling 23.02%.
Caffeine winners:
Caffeine losers:
See the Searchmetrics blog for the full list.
Google Search Going Real-Time
Google’s Caffeine update is its latest effort to gather its own real-time search signals after its 2009 deal with Twitter expired. With social data from Google+, Google now has a range of ways to determine timeliness and relevance of Web content. It offers true real-time search within Google+, and it surfaces Google+ posts in Web search results.
Do you find Google’s adjustments to the timeliness of search results helpful, or do you prefer absolute page rank?
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
How Link Placement Affects Clicks on Twitter
Oct 24th
When it comes to crafting social status updates to ensure maximum exposure and click-throughs, many of the tried-and-true methods seem somewhat obvious. Posting at certain times of day, for example, can have a dramatic impact on performance. Makes perfect sense.
Sometimes, effective optimization can come from places you didn’t expect, and the only way to find out is by analyzing a large set of cold, hard data.
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That’s exactly what Dan Zarrella does for a living. The self-proclaimed “social media scientist” at HubSpot examines large datasets from sources like Twitter and Bit.ly and then publishes some of his findings.
Recently, Zarrella discovered that where the link is located in a given tweet can actually have a big impact on how many people click on it. Tweets that included the link about a quarter of the way through the tweet got clicked the most, even though it’s common practice to include the link at the tail end of a tweet.
To figure this out, Zarrella took a random sample of 200,000 tweets and used the Bit.ly API to figure out the click-through rate on each one. He cross-referenced that with where the link was located in each tweet and came up with the heat map below.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Mobile Landing Page Quality Now Affects AdWords Quality Score On Mobile Ads
Sep 21st
Google wants you to get your website optimized for mobile users and they’ve just introduced an incentive for you to do so. Today, after Google’s afternoon webinar “From Why to How” on mobile optimization, they announc…
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
A Portrait Of Who Uses Social Networks In The US (And How Social Media Affects Our Lives)
Jun 16th
Did you know that out of all social networking users 92% partake in Facebook, 29% participate on MySpace, 18% are on LinkedIn and Twitter is the least utilized network with just 13% usage? Or that males on LinkedIn nearly double the number of females, yet female usage of Twitter almost doubles male…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
A Portrait Of Who Uses Social Networks In The U.S. (And How Social Media Affects Our Lives)
Jun 15th
Did you know that out of all social networking users 92% partake in Facebook, 29% participate on MySpace, 18% are on LinkedIn and Twitter is the least utilized network with just 13% usage? Or that males on LinkedIn nearly double the number of females, yet female usage of Twitter almost doubles male…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Zero-Day “Cookiejacking” Hack Affects All IE Browsers, But Is It Serious?
May 27th
A sophisticated new hack has emerged as a zero-day exploit for all versions of Internet Explorer. Dubbed “cookiejacking” it is a way for hackers to take control of users browser identities and thus be able to impersonate them on Facebook, Twitter or any encrypted bank or retail site.
A play off the now familiar “clickjacking” term, cookiejacking is enabled when a hacker gets a user to drag and drop and item on a website enabled for the hack. It was discovered by Italian security researcher Rosario Valotta who has presented it at two European security conferences earlier this year before publishing it on his blog. Given the nature of the attack and specificity of the attack, is this something that Internet Explorer users really need to worry about?
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Essentially, cookiejacking is enabled when a drag and drop from a malicious website gets an iframe to load a cookie from an Internet zone to a personal zone (one that has access to your cookies). See below for a demonstration.
Valotta told Reuters that he published the game on Facebook and was able to get 80 cookies on his server from his 150 Facebook friends.
Microsoft told ComputerWorld that it does not see the attack as serious, given the specific requirements of the hack. Yet, with things such as Facebook games and applications, (think, “put the ball in the hoop to win a prize”), cookiejacking could become a very real threat when implemented into the wild of the Web.
“In order to possibly be impacted, a user must visit a malicious Web site and be convinced to click and drag items around the page in order for the attacker to target a specific cookie from a Web site that the user was previously logged into,” Jerry Bryant, a group manager with the Microsoft Security Response Center, told ComputerWorld.
Facebook has recently improved its security to limit the affect of clickjacking on the site, but cookiejacking could be a whole different story because of how users interact with a Web page. Internet Explorer 8 was initially loaded with native clickjacking protection.
Time will tell if the cookiejacking exploit becomes a ubiquitous threat on the Internet or if Microsoft steps up and closes the loophole on Internet Explorer 7, 8 and 9 before it can become a problem.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Google Panda Update Seriously Affects Popular UK Sites – AccuraCast
Apr 19th
 BBC News |
Google Panda Update Seriously Affects Popular UK Sites
AccuraCast Data from German SEO tools developer, SISTRIX, has revealed that article sites, price comparison sites and business directories, in general, have suffered a setback. Searchmetrics has released some initial data on the matter. … Google and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance… Demand Media: No, Google Didn't Kill Us Disruptive Demand Media Fights Disruptive Third Party Claims |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Google Farmer Update Affects Gambling Industry – Online Casinos Pro
Mar 9th
 Reuters Blogs (blog) |
Google Farmer Update Affects Gambling Industry
Online Casinos Pro Marketing in the online gambling industry is based heavily on SEO and other content production strategies, spawning many websites dedicated solely to earning ad revenue and selling outbound links. Content on these websites is also used to promote … BizziBiz Helps Local Businesses Capitalize On New Search Algorithm Google's New Algorithm Puts Content in the Driver's Seat Searchengineoptimisation.co.uk Comment on Bing's Response to Google |
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