Compiled By Rocket Clicks Staff

Google Releases 52 April Algorithm Changes

April was Ground Zero for Google’s Penguin and Panda 3.5/.6 updates, and Google outlines some of their most significant features (along with others) in their monthly transparency blog post. Among the updates:

-          A 15% bigger index base.

-          Improving on-page keyword scoring.

-          Better understanding of “fresh” seeking queries.

-          Better local results based on user location search intent.

-          Smarter, more relevant sitelink choices.

Source: The Official Google Inside Search Blog

Semantic Search Is One Step Closer To A Permanent Google Reality

Google has hinted at its extensive research into semantic-based technology that would allow its algorithm to guess user intent based on related terms rather than a literal keyword interpretation. We’ve provided a screen shot example below:

It appears the first implementation of Google’s semantic update is becoming a permanent fixture in its search results. This is a significant update in the sense that it provides users searching for information (the majority of searches) with an answer without requiring a click.

Source: Search Engine Journal

Bing Search Gets Three Columns

Bing’s current Google-y looking search results may look quite different for everyone over the next few weeks. The Burger King of search engines is moving closer to a three columned approach. The layout consists of the standard results on the left, a middle column with more detailed information (similar to Google Sources), and a right column with social media expert/user commentary on the query in question.

The social layout is one area where Bing could have an advantage over Google, who opted for a Google+ only promotional strategy. Bing, in contrast, is able to display data from much more popular social networks (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare).

Source: Search Engine Watch

Showdown: Google Vs. Antitrust Regulations

Google and legal nerds unite! Google is facing worldwide anti-trust lawsuits, and the U.S. leaning towards RSVPing to the party. However, Google’s purported First Amendment-based defense strategy adds a new level of intrigue to this story.

Commissioned by Google themselves, a UCLA law professor has concocted a legal brief arguing that, since search results are ultimately editorial speech/judgments, they cannot be regulated by standard anti-trust laws. Basically, search results are a form of speech as protected as newspaper columns.

Source: Search Engine Land

‘Sources’ Tests Are Back, With Books, Movies, And Music Galore

It seems that Google is rehashing its November 2011 testing of “Sources” results, which display people, movies, books, music, and television shows relevant to a given query. Because most, if not all, searches involving these various nouns are informational in nature, it’d be a good idea to bet on this change becoming permanent sometime in the near future.

Source: Search Engine Land

Google Lumps All Your Places Editing Into One Area

Many businesses, local and national (obviously), have more than one location. As such, Google has responded to this quiet dilemma by offering a new bulk listing option for Google Places. The management tool will now allow businesses to edit all of their locations in one spot, and search their listings by location and fix errors individually.

Source: Search Engine Land

Facebook Profiles Offer A New Form Of ID Verification

Kids hoping to utilize fake IDs might now have to get a fake Facebook account to match.  Bouncers in some countries are now asking to see potential patrons’ Facebook pages on their smartphones. The justification is that it is just another way of verifying the person is who the traditional ID they present says they are. Still, the practice has already drawn criticism from several organizations who claim it is a violation of the basic right to privacy.

Source: BBC

A Real Life Transformer: He’s No Optimus Prime, But He’ll Do For Now

In news of the cool and ominous, it appears that transforming machines are not too far outside the realm of reality. Mashable has a video of the Bravo Robot, a toy car that literally transforms into a standing robot in a few seconds. It’s not nearly as fast as the movie Transformers, but it’s a step in that direction. Color me skeptical, but I doubt it’d do much against a Decepticon invasion at this point in time, even with Shia LaBeouf and Michael Bay at its side.

Source: Mashable

Who Would’ve Thought Internet Explorer Would Stymie Innovation?

It has been over 10 years since Internet Explorer became the one and only useable browser in South Korea. In a late 1990s effort to further secure e-commerce transactions, South Korea’s government decided to require all users to provide a digital certificate as proof of their identity. The problem is that the certificate only runs with a Microsoft ActiveX plug-in.

The result a decade later has been an IE monopolistic rule over the South Korean Internet, a suppressed market for innovation, and a convoluted bureaucratic process requirement if any business or company wants to use an alternative to the ActiveX plug-in.

Source: Tech Dirt

Notable Commentary

Filled With Natural Links

85 Unnatural Links On The Web, 85 Unnatural Links, Take One Down, Notify Google, 84 Unnatural Links On The Web

There’s a bit of hyperbole in the headline above, but the same could be said of the actual headline in Eric Ward’s recent Search Engine Land piece on unnatural links. Eric identifies 15 different species in the Internet wild, and explains the grey area that often surrounds these prevalent creatures.

Analysis By: Eric Ward, Search Engine Land

E-Commerce Link Building Got You Down? Fear Not, For There Are Creative Possibilities Abound

Link building has its share of difficulties, but no strategy under that umbrella is harder than consistently finding resources for e-commerce links. Stephanie Chang has a good article on SEOmoz on how to think outside the box when you’re attempting to build links to product pages without the benefit of compelling content.

Analysis By: Stephanie Chang, SEOmoz

Corporate Culture Matters

Harvard Business Review says the most successful companies are those with an excellent corporate culture. With motivation to succeed and grow, employees will want to stay on-board and create opportunities in a job they love.

Analysis By: Harvard Business Review

Don’t Bother Watching The Travel Channel; Dan Pink Has Got You Covered

Who better to offer advice for traveling than Dan Pink, a nationally renowned public speaker? Pink offers 12 travel tips in a short video, coincidentally recorded in an airport.

Analysis By: Mark Frauenfelder, BoingBoing

Natural Anchor Text Optimization Is Crucial

One of the major components of the new Penguin update seems to address anchor text over-optimization of backlinks. The finding highlights just how crucial natural anchor text optimization is. A solid natural anchor text profile is composed mostly of strongly branded anchor text, some broad/partial match keyword anchor texts and other anchor texts (click here, website etc.). A natural anchor text profile only uses an exact keyword match anchor text in very rare instances.

Analysis by: Adam Thompson, Search Engine Journal

Predictive Data Analysis Part Of The 21st Century Dairy Industry

Now the dairy industry is using genomic mapping to determine which bulls will produce the best offspring.  This isn’t the first time dairy farms have analyzed data to decide which bull would ultimately sire offspring. The difference is in the past, a bull’s semen would be tested by using it to impregnate about 50 cows. Then data would be collected on how much milk each of his resulting daughters produced. Now by looking at certain genetic markers, scientists can predict which bull will produce the best offspring without the need for a proven test, and so far predictions based on genetic data have been extremely accurate.

Analysis by: Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic

Compiled By Rocket Clicks Staff

Google Social Analytics Feature Backlink URLs, Social Conversations

In addition to general traffic information from social networks, Google Analytics’ Social Reports will soon feature backlink URL reports. The “Activity Stream” tab, accessible through clicking on a specific URL under the Social Pages’ section, shows where the page is being linked, as well as any comments users make on the linking page.

Source: Search Engine Land

Bing Simplifies Search Results, Still Looks Like Google

Bing has been soliciting feedback from users throughout the previous few months, and just recently updated their search results to reflect to give the people what they want: a stripped down, easily scan-able results page. The most notable changes include the lack of a left sidebar, and the exchange of a top nav bar on a white background for the old dark grey navigation panel. Strangely enough, it looks more like Google than their previous design. See for yourself:

Old:

New:

Source: Search Engine Watch

Pinterest Fights Copyright Concerns With New Tool

One of the largest criticisms of Pinterest has been its laissez faire approach to copyright infringement. Thankfully, the Internet’s trendiest social network has found a way to counter those concerns. Partnering with Flickr, Pinterest now features an easy-to-use attribution tool that is attached to each pin from the photo management site. The same principle can be applied to pins from Behance, Vimeo, and YouTube.

Source: The Huffington Post

Congress Addresses The Employer-Facebook Privacy Problem

Facebook is the talk of the town, and by town I mean national government. The U.S. House Of Representatives has just introduced the Social Networking Online Protection Act, which would ban employers from obtaining online login information from prospective employees. This is the first time that the Congress has adopted a bill calling for the illegality of Facebook screenings prior to employment.

Source: Search Engine Journal

AdWords Will Automatically Rotate Ads After 30 Days

Habitual ad testers love the punctually even rotation of AdWords campaigns. However, the “rotate evenly” setting has been updated to automatically default to “optimize for clicks” if ad copy is not changed within 30 days. Previously, ads could be rotated on a regular basis from here to infinity.

Source: Search Engine Land

Google Autocomplete Accused Of Bigotry

Google’s autocomplete feature faces a new lawsuit in French court. The autocomplete result in question relates Rupert Murdoch and a Google suggestion to complete the search as “Rupert Murdoch Jewish.” The suit, filed by SOS Racisme, claims Google is mislabeling celebrities and associating them with a frequently persecuted religion. This isn’t the first time Google has faced legal action due to autocomplete results. Still, the company maintains its autocomplete search feature accurately reflects the diversity of content on the web, both good and bad, without human intervention.

Source: Search Engine Journal

A Blogger Swears Off The Internet For A Year

Paul Miller, a senior editor at technology news site The Verge, has dropped off the Internet grid. Although he will continue writing, Miller stated he will not use the web for the next year, instead relying on phones (gasp!), personal connections (ack!), and flash drives (ew!) to gather sources and write stories. Just like they did in the old timey days of 1992.

Source: CNN

Got $28 to $35? Buy A Share Of Facebook Stock!

Facebook’s IPO is close at hand, and the social network recently set initial per-share prices between $28 and $35. At best, the initial public offering could raise up to $11.8 billion, which would beat Google’s 2004 IPO. On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal valued Facebook at somewhere between $85 billion and $95 billion.

Source: The Washington Post

SEOmoz Secures $18 Million In Venture Capital Funding, Posts Hilarious Meme-Based Press Release

In one of the most unique press releases ever conceived, SEOmoz announced they have received $18 million in Series B funding from The Foundry Group and Ignition Partners. Through a series of memes, the release details how the influential SEO company twice failed to raise significant venture capital funds, before reaching this pivotal point in their history as an industry leader.

Source: SEOmoz

(Not Provided) Hits Journalism, Publisher Websites Hard

Google’s (not provided) update has been the bane of SEO keyword researchers since its implementation, and it appears that more than Internet marketing professionals are getting hit by the change. According to the Ponyter Institute, 29% of their April search traffic was (not provided) in nature; this is a 6.5% increase over their 22.5% total in November.

While Google’s underestimated impact of the change is not surprising, it’s clear that Google’s user base is still expanding. Until that growth halts or slows, we can expect to see (not provided) continue to dominate the top of any site’s keyword referrals (often followed by brand names, as in Poynter’s case).

Source: Search Engine Land

Notable Commentary

From Mavens Of The Written Word

A Message From The Very Elated Rand Fishkin

SEOmoz CEO Rand Fishkin addresses the company’s past, present, and future in the wake of their much-celebrated infusion of cash. Fishkin lays out his expectations, thanks the two VC investors, and outlines how the company plans to use their great responsibility that comes with their increased Internet marketing industry power.

Analysis By: Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz

Here Are Some Deep Linking Tactics To Spice Up Your Link Building

Externals links to your homepage are nice. Links to deeper pages on your site are stupendous. Neil Patel explains why link building to pages other than your home base is vital towards boosting the relevancy and exposure of your website. He also outlines some methods for collection these often hard-to-get links.

Analysis By: Neil Patel, Search Engine Journal

The Limitations Of Google Analytics New Social Reports

Google Analytics’ new social reports offer a wealth a new data on social media, but they’re not the all encompassing data collection and filtering tool many speculated they would be. The reports, which collect data from 400 social media sources, do provide a lot of new information.  In Marshall Sponder’s eyes some of it is useful and a lot of it isn’t. The criticism is that the reports provide a lot of information, but fail to interpret it effectively or provide context to make its application to real world scenarios easier.

Source: Marshall Sponder, Search Engine Watch

Using Shareable Content to Improve SEO

Matt Williams, co-founder of No Yelling, an Australian based driving school, recently developed a new linen-inspired background for Google Docs. No Yelling submitted a blog post detailing the new background to 30 high authority sites and Tech Crunch picked up the article within 15 minutes of being alerted. While No Yelling was already ranking number one for their major keywords, the links increased traffic to their site and they believe will boost their minor keyword rankings.

Source: Angela Wilkinson, Web Analytics World

Point/Counterpoint: History Says Google, Facebook May Be Irrelevant In Five Years

On the surface, Google and Facebook seem like Internet entities that are too big to fail. But, Eric Jackson contends they can if they fail to adapt and optimize themselves for the mobile smartphone platform. Conversely, George Anders argues that Eric Jackson is crazy, and both giants are more than prepared to take on the rapid change that often engulfs the technology world.

Analysis By: Eric Jackson, Forbes

Analysis By: George Anders, Forbes

The AdWords 30 Day Rotation Change Is Just The Worst

Some people really didn’t like Google’s changed policy towards ad rotations. Crystal Anderson of Seer Interactive is one of those people, and lays out her argument in a clear, concise manner.

Analysis By: Crystal Anderson, Seer Interactive

Doctor Who Has A Cure For Your Marketing Message Deficiencies

There’s a reason Doctor Who is the world’s longest running science fiction television show. Thanks to creative, timeless storylines, the British phenomenon has lasted over 30 years, and shows no signs of slowing down. There’s a lesson in there about how to craft a marketing message built for the long haul.

Analysis By: Tea Silvestre, CopyBlogger

Compiled By Rocket Clicks Staff

The Google Penguin Has Struck!

Google’s much-anticipated Penguin Update has started its lumbering charge to destroy spammy SEO everywhere. Google claims it only affects 3% of searches, and the websites most impacted will be ones that have pages that exist strictly for SEO purposes. Some common features of these sites include: keyword stuffing, saturated internal links in anchor text, cloaking and bad redirects, and intentionally duplicated content.

Source: Search Engine Land

Google Breaks Down Quality Score Issues Into Three Categories

Quality Score has long been crucial in measuring AdWords account performance, and Google has reformatted it in a more granular fashion. The metric will now be broken down into three categories (expected click-through rate, ad relevance, landing page experience). A rating of average, above average, or below average will be assigned to each component, allowing advertisers to better diagnose any issues with their campaigns.

Source: Search Engine Land

Google Keyword Tool And Traffic Estimator Look, Feel Different

Keyword and Traffic Estimator Tools were the latest victims of Google’s recent redecoration binge. Now, keyword ideas can be lumped together by theme, and the isolated, no-login-required version of the Traffic Estimator is now moving to Florid, so to speak. This tool now necessitates an AdWords account login.

You can also view traffic estimations based on select keywords, and Google has now made it possible to graph these estimates based on past account performance.

Source: Search Engine Land

Google Related Toolbar Among Features Company Will Scrap

Google is doing away with the Google Related toolbar, which offered contextual information about the Web page being displayed in the main browser. Apparently, the feature never really caught on.

The move is part of a spring cleaning of sorts. In addition to phasing out the Related toolbar, Google is scrapping Google Patent Search in favor of a revamped patent search, shutting down Google One Pass, the company’s payment system for publishers and has passed over its Flu Vaccine Finder to HealthMap.

Source: Search Engine Land

Facebook Advertising Analytics Beef Up Like Jose Canseco

Facebook is revamping its advertising analytics to a near 100% customizable form. Specifically, they will not long just track Likes and Clicks. Rather, advertisers (once the program rolls out in the coming weeks) will be able to track @mentions, number of comments from a user, check-ins on Facebook Places, and more.

Basically, nearly everything a user does that involves your brand on Facebook can now be tracked, resulting in a comprehensive understanding of your company’s social demographics.

Source: Search Engine Watch

Confirmed: Microsoft Pitched Bing To Facebook

Reports have surfaced that indicate Microsoft did in fact try to sell Bing to Facebook. While Facebook declined the offer, the fact an offer existed suggests Microsoft may not be fully invested in braking into the world of search.

Source: Search Engine Land

Come June, Foursquare Will Offer Paid Ads

Foursquare will be the newest member of the paid search advertising club in June. The company confirmed rumors that it would be selling paid ads on its network at the start of summer. In the age of local search optimization, and zip code ad targeting, this is great news for restaurants, retailers, and other companies with a hyper-local focus.

Source: Search Engine Watch

Google Sells Smartphones Directly To Consumers

As of this past Tuesday, Google is attempting to sell smartphones directly to consumers through the Google Play Store. Phones will be $399 and can work with multiple wireless carriers. This is an improvement from a previous e-commerce flop in 2010, when Google attempted to sell a $529 phone with only a T-mobile carrier. Needless to say, I think they probably have figured out the e-commerce game this time.

Source: New York Times

Facebook Is About To Go All Public Up In Here

May 17th: Mark it down. That’s the day Facebook will officially become a publicly traded company, according to TechCrunch. The estimated valuation of its IPO is around $100 billion, in case you were wondering.

Source: Gizmodo

Google Drive Opens A Cloud To The Masses

Google announced the launch of Google Drive today, Google’s answer to cloud storage. The basic 5GB level is free, but for a monthly subscription fee, users can get either 25GB ($2.49/mo) or 100GB  ($4.99/mo). As much as 16 Terabytes is available if you feel like backing up a few thousand movies for some reason.

Source: CNet

Firefox Murders Favicon In URL Bar

Citing malicious sites using sneaky tactics such as Favicons resembling padlocks to give a false sense of security, Firefox has eliminated the address bar Favicon in its most recent build.

Source: The Next Web

Notable Commentary

From Illuminated Minds

Adapting To The SEO Climate Change Brought On By The Google Penguin Update

Like the Quentin Tarantino version of Mr. Popper’s Penguins, the Google Penguin Update began pecking at the hearts of SEO spammers everywhere a little over a week ago. The update also affected a significant number of white hat SEOs, so Danny Sullivan was nice enough to offer a medic post to help stitch up some of the lesser quality parts of you or your clients’ SEO profiles.

Analysis By: Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land

Judging The Winners And Losers Of The Google Panda 3.5 Update

The NFL Draft isn’t the only event getting shotgun analysis this weekend. Danny Sullivan rules on the winners and losers of Google’s recent spam busting Panda update.

Analysis By: Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land

These Six Changes To Your SEO Campaigns Need To Be Made Immediately

Google’s over-optimization penalty is looming on the horizon, so Rand Fishkin has devoted an entire Whiteboard Friday to explaining how every SEO will be affected, and how they can prepare for the change with minimal damage.

Analysis By: Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz

Google Release Information On Its Fight To Stop Bad Ads

Recently, Google has shed light on its manual review process for suspect ads and how it trains new hires to the ad quality team. The release of details comes in response to criticism surrounding malicious and counterfeit ads being displayed by Google and is part of an effort to be more transparent about the company’s practices.

Analysis By: Pamela Parker, Search Engine Land

SEO Analytics, Middle Earth-Style

Beautiful, awesome post by Ian Lurie, geeking out over how to present SEO analytics as only Ian Lurie (and probably a few of us here) can. If you read one article on how to communicate SEO value this year, make it this one. Particularly if you can recite lines from Tolkien in your sleep.

Analysis By: Ian Lurie, Portent

User Generated Content And How Search Engines Might Rank It

Bill Slawski was very busy this week, covering Bing’s move towards SPYworld-like results and Google’s acquisition of Circuit City video rental patents. However, his most significant post involves how search engines may rank user generated content, which encompasses message boards, forums, user reviews, blogs, blog comments, and more.

Analysis By: Bill Slawski, SEO By The Sea

‘Pay What You Want’ Not Such A Bad Pricing Model

Five years after Radiohead allowed fans to pay what they wished for their album “In Rainbows,” new research suggests the “Pay What You Want” model does hold some merit. While the fear of appearing cheap discourages some potential consumers from buying, it also motivates many to pay a little bit more than expected when setting their own price.

Analysis by: Jane J. Lee, Science Magazine

How Amazing Bosses View Business And A Workplace

Utilizing past discussions with some of the world’s foremost CEOs, Geoffrey James runs down a list eight deep of the most popular core beliefs of these business leaders.

Analysis By: Geoffrey James, Inc.

Why Click Through Rate Matters To Conversions

Benjamin Vigneron believes that click through rate and conversions are related. Vigneron urges readers to keep an eye on CTR to maintain conversion volume and to try to maximize profit margin. In the end, he says the correlation is mostly about relevance and engagement level.

Analysis by: Benjamin Vigneron, Search Engine Land

Compiled By Rocket Clicks Staff

AdWords Now Auto-Fixes Misspellings, Keyword Variations

If you have keyword lists containing intentional misspellings, plural forms, and other slightly different versions of that keyword, Google AdWords has now made them nearly obsolete. A new feature automatically corrects these phrases for your lists, and Google claims in limited tests it has resulted in a 3% uptick in search clicks. What’s most important here is that you can opt out of this to maintain closer control of the keywords. This is done in the Advanced Settings under “Keyword matching options.” Also, this is not going into effect until Mid-May.

Source: Search Engine Land

A Scary Successful Case Study In Negative SEO

Two SEO professionals posted the findings of their negative SEO case study on Traffic Planet’s message board. Their conclusion, along with a supporting conclusion from a separate but similar study posted further down the thread, is that it’s entirely possible to spam link a website to certain Google doom, even with the current safeguards against competitor black hattery. This is a legitimate concern for ethical SEO professionals, and should be monitored carefully.

Source: Traffic Planet

The $1 Billion For Android’s Soul Has Begun!

The Oracle vs. Google court battle began this week. Oracle claims Google knowingly based the technology behind the Android platform on its Java software system without attempting to acquire a license. The tech giant is seeking $1 billion in damages for violating intellectual property laws, while Google claims they had support of Java’s original creator, Sun Microsystems, and did not need a license.

Source: Search Engine Watch

Study Reveals Yellow Pages Beat Google In Local Accuracy

A local search study conducted by Implied Intelligence revealed some interesting results: Yellow Pages and Superpages, a Yellow Pages subsidiary, serve more accurate local listings than Google. The study involved multiple local business-based websites and focused on evaluating informational accuracy, informational richness, duplicate listings, and coverage of businesses.

Source: Search Engine Land

Google Goofs With Parked Domain Penalty

Internet marketing message boards were aflutter with concerns over their clients’ abrupt drop from Google’s rankings. The search engine admitted there was a glitch in the part of its algorithm that recognizes parked domains. It was possibly a part of Google’s announced changes to further penalize websites with all ads, and no content.

Source: Search Engine Land

Yahoo Gets Some Good Revenue News From 2012’s First Quarter Report

Finally, there’s some good news for Yahoo stockholders and employees. The tech company reported expectation-beating revenue in Q1 ($1.22 billion – a 1% increase year-over-year). Search revenue ($470 million) rose 3% compared to 2011’s first quarter, Yahoo media pageviews increased 10%, and time spent on Yahoo communications and community properties rose 14% and 8%, respectively.

Source: Search Engine Land

Google Announces Stock Split, Sees Trading Price Drop 4%

A day after Google announced it would be splitting its stocks among voting and non-voting shareholders, the price dropped by 4%. The cause was mostly attributed to the “surprise” nature of the switch, but some analysts are predicting ugly things for the company and its shareholders moving forward.

Source: TechCrunch

Google Masking Street View During Investigation: $25K Fine

Google was accused for violating eavesdropping law with private user data collection because of Street View mapping. Although there is no precedent for unsecured Wi-fi networks, the Federal Communications Commission was still able to fine Google $25,000 because Google deliberately delayed the investigation.

Source: Search Engine Watch

Facebook Buys Instagram Before Twitter

Facebook recently bought Instagram for $1 billion (you may have heard of this already). Twitter, however, expressed interest in purchasing the feature months before the Facebook purchase. Jack Dorsey, one of Twitter’s co-founders was a backer of Instagram and invested in its growth and development.

Source: Mashable

A JS Bookmarklet To Instantly Check Page Traffic

This is totally boss. Internationally renowned snappy dresser, Tom Critchlow, of Distilled has put together a bookmarklet to let you auto‘magic’ally check page traffic for sites you monitor. Pretty flippin’ sweet.

Source: Distilled

Notable Commentary

Void Of Google Penalties

The Best And Worst Of Bing’s New Keyword Research Tool

Bing Webmaster Tools now features a keyword research tool, among other things. As with any keyword tool, there are pros (based on organic search, actual numbers) and cons (single-phrase search limitations, inconsistent results). At the very least, another keyword tool from a major search engine is a good thing.

Analysis By: Greg Habermann, Search Engine Watch

SEO And The New Age Of Reading And Writing

Bloggers have been the scourge of professional writers since the Clinton administration. However, the purveyance of search engine optimized content written with some influence from software programs is a much bigger influence over how people are reading and writing themselves.

Analysis By: Annalee Newitz, io9

Now’s The Perfect Time To Audit Your Backlink Profile

With Google executing “Order 66” on blog syndication networks everywhere, it’s only pertinent that SEOs and their clients evaluate their own link profiles. Modesto Siotos has a few tips and tricks for spotting some of your site’s least desirable links.

Analysis By: Modesto Siotos, SEOmoz

Google’s Semantic Search And How To Adapt Before It Hits

Google is moving ever closer to serving up semantic-based results for broad queries that now carry ambiguous intentions. Neil Patel has some advice for how SEOs can tailor their strategies to the growing influence of search results based on intent.

Analysis By: Neil Patel, SEOmoz

How To Avoid Sounding Like A ‘Marketer’ When Pitching A Guest Blog Post

Erin Everhart explains the roadblocks she’s found when representing herself as a marketer, and how she overcomes them when pursuing guest posting opportunities.

Analysis By: Erin Everhart, Search Engine Land

Weekly Production Is More Important That Weekly Work Hours

Pete Cashmore (of Mashable fame) writes a brief article about how it’s about output and productivity, not number of hours, which should be the indicator of success at work.

Analysis By: Pete Cashmore, CNN

Watch The Coolest TV Network Commercial Ever

This 106-second advertisement for TNT, aired in Belgium, is what every video advertiser strives for. Seriously.

Analysis By: YouTube

Does ANYONE like Google+?

Google+ has just never been on the same level as Twitter or Facebook, and it never will be, according to Sujan Patel. Patel says that with people’s general lack of interest in participating in a new social media platform, lack of interest in personalized results, and the lack of interest in constant Google integrations, will eventually make Google+ completely obsolete.

Analysis By: Sujan Patel, Search Engine Journal

Are Personalized Searches Too Personal? [INFOGRAPHIC]

While personalized searches are helpful, sometimes they can even become a privacy issue. Users constantly ask for fair and trustworthy search results. However, the more personally catered search results become too an individual, they are not as well received by the general public.

Analysis: Melissa Fach, Search Engine Journal

Predicting The Internet’s Next Big Innovation

Alexis Madrigal says we have finally reached the ultimate social/local/mobile dream. He says visionaries from the 90’s imagined a world in which communications was constant, high speed internet was prevalent, and we all had phones in our pockets; little did visionaries know that they could only imagine the tip of the iceberg. Our technologically advanced online world is much more than anything we could have imagined. So the big question now is, “What’s next?”

Analysis By: Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic

He Is…The World’s Most Downloaded Man

Did you ever think that someone could show up in more places than the Olympic torch? Meet Jesper Bruun, the most downloaded man in the world. Famous in the advertising world, he has been in ads from Australia to France to Bolivia and more.

Analysis By: Neetzan Zimmerman, Gawker

Compiled By Rocket Clicks

Target Customers By ZIP Code, Specific City Location In AdWords

Google AdWords location targeting just got granular. AdWords now allows you to target upwards of 30,000 U.S. zip codes and create ad test that changes based on where the searcher is located. This feature is called “Location Insertion,” and allows you to set parameters so a single ad is displayed with a rotating location that changes depending on where the search occurs.

Source: Search Engine Land

Google+ Is Now 27% Richer…With Users!

Google+ is showing signs of life. According to an Experian Hitwise study, total usage of the social network grew to 61 million people in March. That’s a 27% increase over February, and one of the first signs of substantial growth since its hard launch last September.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Google rolled out a Google+ profile signup mandate if you happened to sign up for another Google service. This has netted about 80 million default Google+ users that happen to have a Gmail, YouTube, or Offers account.

Source: Mashable

Google Stocks Boom, Move On Up To That Deluxe Stock Class In The Sky

Google collected $10.65 billion in 2012 first quarter revenue, which is a 24% increase over quarter one of 2011. As such, the board of directors and CEO Larry Page plan to create a new class of stock that would effectively be distributed to shareholders as a dividend. These stocks would be non-voting.

The jump in revenue mostly came from increased clicks (39% higher compared to 2011 Q1), despite a 12% reduction in cost-per-clicks. Part of the cause for this discrepancy can be pinpointed in the rise of tablet and smartphone users (higher click-throughs, lower conversions).

Source: Search Engine Land

The 2012 Larry Page/Google Manifesto

Larry Page recently penned a “State of Google” address, entitled “2012 Update from the CEO.” In it, he addresses some of the biggest developments in 2011 (Google+ integration and its use in improving search), indirectly responds to critic backlash over personalized search, and discusses where he sees Google heading in the future.

There’s no word on whether he gave the address in a speech, and whether that speech featured a sharp partisan split among spurned innovators and bottom line-focused Googlers.

Source: Search Engine Land

YouTube Live Gets A Birthday Makeover

The YouTube Live engineers celebrated its first birthday by giving back to YouTube Partners, opening three new advertising analytical features. These include:

• Produce and broadcast live streaming.
• Up-to-the-second analytics.
• Sell ad space on live streams.

Also, The YouTube Partners program is now open to everyone. Hooray!

Source: Search Engine Watch

Google+ Plus Gets A Real Home Makeover

Someone broke in to our Google+ accounts and surprised us with a redesigned living room! It kind of looks familiar:

Source: Search Engine Watch

Freedom Isn’t Free, And Neither Is Bing’s Search API Apparently

The SEO world rejoiced when Bing announced it would make its search API available for web developers and programmers everywhere. But in the next five to six months, Bing announced it will begin charging $40 to users interested in running up to 20,000 queries per month. If that limit is exceeded, the price will adjust accordingly.

Source: Search Engine Land

Twitter Takes Legal Action Against Spam Tweeps

Twitter is great for numerous reasons; receiving spam tweets after mentioning a popular product is not one of them. Thankfully, the social network is taking action with a lawsuit that could give them the power to police these companies and any others that pop up in the future. Twitter has primarily targeted five services that bombard tweeters with fake profile follows and annoying @ replies.

Source: Wired Epicenter

And The Most Loved Technology Company Is…

The one that has had some of the biggest problems with privacy! According to an ABC News/Washington Post poll, Google is the top tech company in user favorability (82%). Apple finished second (74%), Facebook finished third (58%), and Twitter brought up the rear (34%).

The most interesting piece of information came via Twitter, which elicited more unfavorable opinions (36%) than favorable. This includes seniors (36% vs. 34%) and young adults (43% vs. 42%).

Source: Search Engine Watch

Facebook Pays $1 InstaBillion For Instagram

Instagram is one of the most popular sepia-happy photo sharing applications. Facebook is the world’s most popular social network. Naturally, they’re now a $1 billion match made in heaven. Facebook claims the acquisition will lead to ‘Instagration’ into the Facebook platform, while still allowing the app room to grow independent of the social network.

Source: Mashable

Pinterest Just Won The Bronze Medal In The Social MediOlympics

According to the 2012 Digital Marketer report from Experian Hitwise, Pinterest has just become the third most frequented social media site on the web, usurping LinkedIn thanks to a skyrocketing user base. The report also reveals high conversion rates for advertisements on Facebook in 2011 (50%).

Source: Search Engine Watch

Five Publishers, Apple In Deep Doo-Doo For Price Fixing Scheme

The U.S. Department Of Justice has accused Apple and five publishing companies of fixing the prices on new and bestselling e-books. The scheme, allegedly orchestrated in part by Steve Jobs, added $3-$5 to the price of many popular e-books, sending Apple a 30% cut in the process.

Three publishers (Hachette, Simon & Schuster, Harper Collins) have already settled, while Apple (surprise!), Macmillan and Penguin are fighting the lawsuit. The entire case is expected to reduce the price of e-books on Amazon’s Kindle and the Barnes & Noble Nook for the next two years. I doubt this story shows up in Steve Jobs’ autobiography.

Source: Los Angeles Times

Google Upgrades Agency Land To Agency Edge

Big G is updating the feel and looks of things all over the place. First Google+, now Agency Land have undergone major makeovers. Google claims the new Agency Edge is improved in a number of ways, including:

• Fresh course content on Search, Display, Mobile, and YouTube (Social and Analytics coming shortly!)
• New sales collateral including case studies, vertical research, and infographics.
• A new look that’s faster and easier to use.

Source: Google Agency Edge

Rich Snippet Markup Spam Ranking in Organic Search

Google’s algorithm bias toward rich snippets and schema markups is already causing snippet spam to make a plethora of appearances in organic search. Cyrus Shepard (formerly of SEOmoz fame) digs into the issue a bit. In the comments, AJ Kohn notes how you can report snippet spam.

Source: Google+

Don’t Want Your Employer/Interviewer To Access Your Facebook? Move To Maryland

There has been much hoopla about, but little action against, the rising trend of companies asking for the Facebook passwords of prospective and current employees. The Old Line State is about to change all of that.

Believing this practice violates basic personal privacy guaranteed under the Constitution, Maryland lawmakers have drafted and passed a bill that bans businesses from demanding this personal information. All it takes is one precedential law to trigger a wave of similar regulations among the other 49 states.

Source: Search Engine Journal

Notable Commentary

That Won’t Ask For Your Facebook Password

Long Tail Keywords: Tips For Capturing SEO’s White Whale

Like the agile green basilisk lizard, long tail keywords are extremely hard to catch…unless you know what you’re looking for. Ray Comstock has four easy-to-remember recommendations for researching long tail search trends and turning that traffic into dollar signs.

Analysis By: Ray “Catfish” Comstock, Search Engine Watch

Read How A Company Fought Back From A Hacking

The Next Web gives a first hand account of how they dealt with getting hacked, how they discovered it, and how they are safeguarding against similar exploits in the future.

Analysis By: The Next Web

Pinterest Is Not The Mary Poppins Of SEO

It was only a matter of time before Google began treating Pinterest like it treats Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media websites. That’s the crux of Jordan Kasteler’s recent post on Search Engine Land. He argues that Pinterest’s value as an SEO “tool” is really the same as all other social networks (difference in platform notwithstanding).

Analysis By: Jordan Kasteler, Search Engine Land

Why Did Facebook Buy Instagram?

Just what was it about Instagram, a company with only a few employees and no clear revenue source, that made Facebook want to buy the photo sharing service in the first place? Quora has an interesting discussion on the topic.

Analysis By: Quora

Watch A 9-Year-Old Build His Own Arcade

Kony 2012 isn’t the only short documentary to get the viral treatment. A Los Angeles filmmaker took a journey through the story of a kid that built and runs his own “arcade.” The 10 minute film demonstrates the remarkably effective influence of a viral video, and the impact it can have on the people involved.

Analysis By: Mark Frauenfelder, BoingBoing

Presidential Campaigns In The Internet Marketing World

In 2008, the technological savvy of the Barack Obama campaign played a notable part in his victory. The Washington Post has a write up on how the 2012 Obama campaign is utilizing social media and traditional Internet marketing to solicit votes.

Analysis By: T.W. Farnam, Washington Post

Want To Know Who Lived In Your House In 1940?

A few weeks ago, the 1940 U.S. Census was posted online, and if you have the time to comb through handwritten pages in PDF format, it’s an amazing waste of time. Soon enough, someone will have it distilled to a more 21^st Century-friendly format, but it’s an incredibly interesting way to see who lived around your current residence and what they did with their lives.

Analysis By: Gary Price, Search Engine Land

Want To Know Why We Measure Distance In Time?

This minute and a half animated video investigates why people often refer to measurements of distance as a measurement of time. For example, a question of, “How far away is the restaurant?” is often met with an answer of, “About 10 minutes,” rather than the literal distance it is from your house.

Analysis By: Andrew Liszewski, Gizmodo

Compiled By Rocket Clicks Staff

Google’s 50 Pack Of Search Updates For March

As per (recent) tradition, Google has released a list of search algorithm tweaks that were tested and approved throughout the month of March. Some of these changes include alterations to anchor text, image search, autocomplete for math symbols, and “navigational queries,” or searches that involve a particular website or brand.

Source: Google Inside Search Blog

The Display Campaign Optimizer Is No Longer In Beta

The Google AdWords Display Campaign Optimizer entered the limited beta phase in 2010, and has grown in popularity over the past two years. On Wednesday, Google announced the program would be available for all advertisers, regardless of your campaign’s total spend and size.

Source: Google Inside AdWords Blog

Google Ads Joins Google+ Pages

Google launched Google+ Pages last November and now are also including Google Ads to the Google+ pages mix. Google+ Pages provided a way that updates and news could be included in business dialogue and client conversation as messages were tailored to specific customers. Now, Google Ads as an extra bonus will include the latest Google advertising product news, tips, training opportunities and other ways to grow business.

Source: Google Inside AdWords

Social Media Report Reveals Bias Towards SEO Rather Than PPC

Social Media Examiner has released their 2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, chock full of interesting tidbits about the growing social marketplace. Some of the findings include a preference for SEO over PPC among social media marketers (65% vs. 38% usage), Facebook finished first in overall use (91%), and Google+ finished a distant sixth, although most surveyed professionals plan to use it more in the future.

Source: Social Media Examiner

Just A Google FYI: Your Links Look Artificial

Google is more open to webmasters about potentially suspect links. The search engine has sent an increasing amount of Webmaster Tool notifications letting users know they are detecting a disturbance in the link Force. Google says they aren’t ramping up crack downs, but rather vocalizing their red flags on a more consistent basis.

Source: Search Engine Land

Fast Is Faster: HTTP Edition

Google and Microsoft are just two of many technology companies and engineers that are discussing ways to reformat Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to essentially make the Internet faster. A faster web is good for Google, Microsoft, and anyone with an Ethernet cable or wireless router.

Source: Search Engine Watch

The Possible Google Third Party Commenting System, And Its User Influence Over Rankings

Google has introduced a patent for a Facebook-like third party commenting system that could become a ranking factor based on author reputation. Bill Slawski outlines some of the most important parts of this patent, and speculates how Google might integrate it into Google+ and their algorithm to boost the ranking power of a given author/post.

Source: SEO By The Sea

Yahoo Lays Off 2,000 More Employees

The technological job market just got more saturated. Yahoo has officially confirmed layoff rumors numbering around 2,000 employees, and in doing so, saves $375 million on its increasingly red bottom line. The layoffs will hit every department in the company, but most notably its product division, local businesses, and marketing and research divisions.

Source: Search Engine Land

Google Makes A Bigger Profit On Apple Devices Than On Androids

Google is making a lot of money in the smartphone market, but revenue is coming from an unexpected place. Reports indicate Google is monetarily benefitting from being the default search engine on iOS devices, and is actually experiencing a drop in profits from its own Android smartphones and tablets. Google only makes $1.70 per device sold in the U.S.

This does make some sense. Google is responsible for every aspect of building the Android brand, whereas a simple signature is required to make it rain as Apple’s default search engine.

Source: Tuaw

Arthur C. Clarke Forecasts The Future Of Technology

Someone should’ve taken Arthur C. Clarke to Las Vegas while he was still alive. Clarke has a startlingly accurate track record of predicting future technology, starting with his speculation about GPS and satellite television … in 1956. In this video, you can see Clarke explain how, by 2001, every house will have a personal computer and be connected to everyone through technology. Oh, and the video was recorded in 1974.

Source: Gizmodo

HuffPost Vs. Unpaid Bloggers Lawsuit Is Taken Out Back, Ol’ Yeller Style

Last Friday, a U.S. District Judge tossed a lawsuit pitting around 9,000 bloggers against AOL Inc. and the Huffington Post. A year ago, AOL purchased the blog website for $315 million, and many bloggers on the Huffington Post felt they were entitled to at least some of the profits.

However, the judge dismissed the suit on the grounds that the writers knew they were not getting paid, and willingly remained contributors to the website for free. Basically, bloggers knew the risk when they put on the uniform, and can’t claim any share of profit because that was not an expectation in the first place.

Source: Reuters

Look Incredibly Awkward With Google’s Siri-Like Glasses

Project Glass is the official name of Google’s foray into “augmented reality” eyeglasses. The glasses, as previously discussed, would provide users with information about surrounding businesses, directions to a chosen restaurant, calendar reminders, and taking phone calls. Search Engine Land has a pretty good demo video.

Source: Search Engine Land

InstaGrAndroid (See What We Did There?)

Instagram is now available as a free app on Android devices. It’s one of the web’s most popular photo sharing sites, and the app will automatically upload images to Instagram’s sharable service.

Source: Digital Photography Review

Notable Commentary

That Aint’ Afraid Of No Panda

The Pinnacle Of Google Analytics Dashboards

Google Analytics Dashboards are incredibly useful for easing the access to any given metric. Portent has a useful blog post outlining what should be included in the best dashboards, and how to go about crafting it to your client’s liking.

Analysis By: Michael Wiegand, Portent

Want To See What A Google Search Quality Meeting Looks Like?

Google has an incredibly interesting video posted on YouTube of its search quality team solving a spelling problem in long queries. They offer helpful pop up notes, and although it may look like a C-SPAN clone, any Internet marketer should take eight minutes out of their day to watch it. On a side note, it’s funny that almost every person in the meeting has a MacBook.

Analysis By: YouTube

I Don’t Want To Close My Eyes, Don’t Want To Kill These Links…

Jeff Beford says that Google has announced that there has been a de-indexing of all blog networks. This change will leave SEOs in the dust as they attempt to recover some of their heavy blog and syndication network skills. With broken link building, this pushes SEOs to work with forums and blogs and other forms of mechanical turk.

Analysis By: Jeff Bedford, Search Engine Journal

No Money For Link Building? No Problem.

Link building can take a lot of time, and more importantly, money, depending on your chosen industry. However, “passive” link building can be a cheap, hyper-effective way to gather links directing an increased number of eyeballs to your page. The process mostly involves following the Golden Rule: Link to others as you would like to be linked.

Analysis By: Craig Bradford, SEOmoz

What If We Told You Facebook Tracked Everything You Did On Its Site?

Doug Antkowiak breaks down a recent post on Reddit that uncovers Facebook’s apparent tracking code that follows users to every page they visit on the site. While it’s very likely Facebook uses the snippet to return relevant in-site searches, the question to ask here is: How much information is too much information?

Analysis By: Doug Antkowiak, Portent

Think ‘Inside’ The Link Profile Box

When I say “link building” you very likely say “external!” It’s natural to constantly evaluating nofollowed, followed, paid, and non-paid links; after all, Google will always determine website authority and relevance based on links pointing to a given page.

However, the attention paid to external linking often comes at the price of improving your internal linking structure. Josh McCoy runs down an easy-to-read guide to optimizing internal links, and why it’s beneficial to your users and search engines alike.

Analysis By: Josh McCoy, Search Engine Watch

Symptoms Of Over-SEO Disease

Obviously, SEO is an important and profitable part of any Internet marketing strategy. However, there are definite ways to over-saturate yourself with SEO, resulting in missed opportunities and insight elsewhere. Daniel Burstein has a WebMD list of these problematic signs, and how to not lose sight of the reasons behind SEO tactics.

Analysis By: Daniel Burstein, Marketing Sherpa

Celebrate 404 Day With The Internet’s Most Creative Error Pages

As you already know, April 4^th was National 404 Day for the Internet community. Mashable has appropriately compiled a list of the web’s best 404 messages, which converse to the standard 404 page, can reap major benefits for your website traffic and notoriety.

Analysis By: Sam Laird, Mashable

The 8 Pinterest Personas…Which Are You?

Every person fits into a general personality type and psychological profile. In the case of Pinterest, David Israel has narrowed down the eight types of Pinterest users, and how to figure out which bucket you fit into.

Analysis By: David Israel, Mental Floss

If You’re Considering Investments In Groupon, You Should Probably Look Elsewhere

Uncertainty over Groupon’s viability as a sustainable business has run rampant for the past few years. Felix Salmon discusses why it’s right to be skeptical of their profitability, and exposes some of the accounting tricks and policy issues that have the SEC bearing down with an investigation.

Analysis By: Felix Salmon, Wired Epicenter

Compiled By Rocket Clicks Staff

Google Gets Granular With Paid/Organic Click-Through Study

A few weeks ago, Google released a study on how paid and organic search impact each other. Feeling those results were too broad, Google dove further into the findings and discovered some interesting pieces of data.

Among them:

• 81% of the time, paid ads show up on page one without an accompanying organic result.
• A paid ad with the #1 organic ranking occurs, on average, 9% of the time.
• Even if your site ranks #1, a paid ad can increase clicks by as much as 50%.

Source: Search Engine Land

Google Consumer Surveys Makes Customized Market Research Easy

Google has just released “Consumer Surveys,” a program that allows companies big and small to customize and distribute online surveys. The program costs $.10 per response, which comes when someone answers your survey’s question before entering a website.

The program’s goal is to make market research cheap, accurate, and quick, which obviously appeals to all businesses and Internet marketing companies alike.

Source: Google Consumer Surveys

Google Panda 3.4 Is Rolling, Soon People Will Start Hating

Google used Twitter to announce its official release of Panda Update 3.4, claiming less than 1.6% of searches will be significantly altered. That’s a pretty loaded collection of 140 characters.

Source: Search Engine Land

Microsoft Set To Open Source ASP.NET MVC

Microsoft is peeling back the “Wizard’s” curtain concealing its ASP.NET technology, and will encourage users to submit patches and code for inclusion in future versions of the product. Considering Microsoft’s historical aversion to open source coding, this is a monumental shift for the better for web developers everywhere.

Source: Weblogs.asp.net

Facebook Pushes Back Against Employer Requests For Employee Passwords

Facebook warns it’s users not to administer their Facebook login information to employers or potential employers. While social networks could be a useful way to screen employees, administering this information is a violation of Facebook’s terms of use. Companies that choose to access their employees accounts could encounter a discrimination charges.

Source: Search Engine Watch

The New AdWords Display Interface Has Arrived!

Google has changed its display interface in AdWords so that it is is easier to buy and track display advertising. It will also include a Display network tab so that advertisers can target, bid and optimize on display campaigns.

Source: Search Engine Watch

Japan Asks Google To Turn Off Autocomplete Feature

Japan has asked Google to turn off the autocomplete feature in the search engine bar. A Japanese man was finding himself rejected for new jobs because of the auto-complete suggestions connecting him with a previous criminal act. Google is refusing to turn off the feature stating that they are an American company and shouldn’t have to adhere to Japanese law.

Source: Search Engine Land

‘Account Activity’ Allows You To Track Your Own Google Account’s Analytics

Interested in figuring out how much you use email on a monthly basis? What about how much you search on Google? The search engine is making all of this personal data available in “Account Activity,” a new Google Account feature that sends you monthly reports on search engine usage, top queries, email interactions, and more.

Source: Google Official Blog

Google 86’s Blog Network BuildMyRank.Com

The blog network hammer has fallen…on BuildMyRank.com, at least. As of March 19, Google had deindexed pretty much all of the blog network, which is known for syndicating content across multiple low-authority, low-relevancy blogs in exchange for a fee.

This is the first, but definitely not the last casualty in Google’s war on bad link strategies and awful content.

Source: Search Engine Land

Social Media Has Fewer Friends Than Email

Social media studies are all the rage these days, given Facebook and Twitter’s efforts to monetize their large, hyper-targeted user bases. However, email remains the Paas of the digital communication world; a still-untouchable dynasty of Internet messaging.

According to a recent study from Ipsos that spanned 24 countries, 85% of Internet users utilize email, while 62% use the Internet for social networking purposes. The study also contains some interesting information parsed out by country.

Source: Mashable

A Google Public Service Announcement About JavaScript, CSS

Matt Cutts wants you…to let Googlebot crawl your website’s JavaScript and CSS. In a recent YouTube video, Cutts implores you, the webmaster, to remove these scripts from your robots.txt file, reasoning that it allows Google to better understand what’s on that page.

People have been reluctant to let Googlebot to crawl JavaScript and CSS coding in part because it sometimes makes erroneous choices when encountering these scripts.

Source: Search Engine Roundtable

A Quarter Of All PPC Traffic Will Be Mobile Based By The End Of 2012

Year Of The Mobile strikes again! According to a recent Marin Software study, 25% of all paid-search clicks will come from smartphones or tablets by December. Their data also revealed advertising benefits on mobile devices (lower CPCs, higher CTRs), and a drawback (lower conversion rates). It should be noted that mobile search often leads to in-store purchases.

Source: Search Engine Land

Study Reveals Trends In Anchor Text Usage Across The Web

Although its impact is reduced compared to a few previous versions of Google’s algorithm, anchor text remains an important signal for relevancy. Through analysis of more than 4.2 million links and 650 domains, Conductor discovered some interesting trends in anchor text use. Around 53% of anchor text contains 1-3 keywords, while 21% of those links contain useless text (“click here”).

Source: Search Engine Watch

Facebook Timeline Layout Boosts Brand Engagement

Switching your Facebook brand page to the Timeline layout gives you a higher chance of user engagement. That according to a study from Simply Measured, which looked at 15 Facebook brand pages (admittedly a small sample) and determined those with Timeline have an average engagement boost of 46%.

The researchers also justified their small sample size by counting engagement on a granular, post-by-post level. This isn’t the first, or last, study of Facebook brand interactions on Timeline, but they all will probably say something similar.

Source: Mashable

Wag The Dog: Amazon-Style

While you were fretting the search engine dominance of Wikipedia, Amazon has been robbing the SERPs blind. According to recent findings, Amazon shows up on page one 40% of the time, compared to 30% for Wikipedia. This makes sense given Amazon’s vast collection of products.

This is a bit more concerning, in part because the searches that bring people to Amazon (purchase-based) directly involve monetary decisions, compared to SERPs flooded with Wikipedia (knowledge-based).

Source: Search Engine Land

CSI: Facebook (Cue The Who Music)

Facebook unearthed a ton forensic evidence to prove Paul Ceglia is not a part owner of Facebook. As part of debunking Ceglia’s lawsuit, Facebook hired forensic experts to prove Ceglia forged emails and faked numerous other documents.

Ceglia, a former wood pellet distributor, claims Mark Zuckerberg gave him a stake in Facebook in 2003 in a Work For Hire contract. His argument is clouded by Zuckerberg’s claim that he didn’t start on Facebook until the end of that year.

Source: Business Insider

Remember, Remember The 31^st Of March

Come Saturday, March 31, Anonymous will shut down the Internet. That’s, at least, according to one of their manifestos. It seems farfetched, but it’s hard not to take this group seriously, given their history of keeping their word.

Source: PasteBin.Com

Notable Commentary

With A Cup Of JavaScript

No Nefarious Link Goes Unpunished

Sooner or later, the Google police will come knocking at your homepage. That’s the general lesson from Eric Ward in this Search Engine Watch post. Ward tells a cautionary tale of a client unwilling to stop his dirty linking tactics … until Google blew his sites up.

Analysis By: Eric Ward, Search Engine Watch

The Best Transferred Sites Of Developers And Men Can Go Awry

Sometimes the most flawless of site transfers can go wrong. Everett Sizemore explains his solution to FreeShipping.org’s problem of a relaunch that went too well. Sounds pretty strange, right?

Analysis By: Everett Sizemore, SEOmoz

There’s A Problem With Your Infographic…

On Twitter, Facebook, email, blogs, even the Rocket Clicks weekly update: Infographics are everywhere. As the market becomes more saturated, there’s a much higher chance for error and ugly visualizations that don’t reflect the theme being discussed. Outspoken Media has a four-line list of reasons why an infographic would fail in the open marketplace.

Analysis By: Lisa Barone, Outspoken Media

Social Sharing Broken Down Into Actionable Numbers

David Kirkpatrick at Marketing Sherpa interviews Extole’s vice president of marketing and discusses the marketing effectiveness of social media platforms. One of the big takeaways: Twitter has the highest amplification rate, email has the highest conversion rate.

Analysis By: David Kirkpatrick, Marketing Sherpa

Don’t Let Business Get In The Way Of ‘Humanizing’ Your Website

Chuck Longanecker explores the concept of “emotionally intelligent interactions,” and explains how they can be integrated into websites without sacrificing SEO and CRO performance.

Analysis By: Chuck Longanecker, UX Design

A Trio Of Recommendations For Social MediOptimized Content

Social media is commonly seen as the third arm of your public relations team. Social sharing can be a massive time-saver during a content roll out because the readers do the work for you. Here are a few tips for ensuring your content is social-friendly.

Analysis By: Kerry Jones, Blueglass

Video Content In Building Links

Research shows that SEO benefits from the use of video content in building links. Giving your users resources to obtain more information gives them reason to link your video. Jacob Klein also suggests different medias to project your video and how different platforms can be useful.

Analysis By: Jacob Klein, SEO Moz

Why Cold Coffee Costs More, In Case You Were Wondering

Ever wonder why iced coffee costs more than hot coffee? Isn’t it the same stuff? Yes, but not for the seller. Coffee shops sweat the small stuff more than the average person does on a 90 degree day in Milwaukee. Consumers are unaware of the extra costs associated with cold drinks: clear plastic cups, straws, icemakers for ice, etc. Who knew?

Analysis By: Kurt Soller, Grubstreet

Pinterest: Boost Your CTRs And Conversions!

Sherice Jacob offers four ways to utilize and maximize the advantages of Pinterest in Paid Search. With advice like when and how to re-pin, and evaluating your repining options, Jacob helps aid action steps for increasing followers. By becoming a ‘person of Pinterest’, she says your CTR and Conversions will benefit.

Analysis By: Sherice Jacob, Unbounce

Guest Blogging—Definitely A Good Thing

Oli Gardner thinks that guest blogging has developed a bad rap over the years. While, yes, it is writing ‘for free’ it is also a beneficial ‘free advertising’ for you!  Guest blogging can create more links for readers and it keeps them interested in what content you think is important; it gives you a chance to control the topic. Guest blogging is also a great way to keep a large network and maintain it with online relationships.

Analysis By: Oli Gardner, Unbounce

Compiled By Rocket Clicks Staff

Google Analytics Social Reports Gather Info From Over 400 Social Websites

Google Analytics is utilizing the power of 400+ social media websites in their recently rolled out Social Reports. As long as the interaction is legally made public on the web (sorry, most of Facebook and private Google+ Circles), Google can compile the tracking data into actionable information for marketers.

Source: Search Engine Watch

Insight Icon Makes Denied Ad Diagnosis Easy

Google AdWords is making it easier to comprehend why an ad has been rejected or approved by Google. Available in the Ads tab under the Status column, hover over the insight icon speech bubble to diagnose the reasons why the ad is not showing up publicly.

Source: Google Inside AdWords Blog

Mozilla Firefox To Soon Join Google Chrome’s (Not Provided) Party

Mozilla’s Firefox browser already uses Google as its default search engine, but will soon be including the Secure Search feature by default. This means that any search on Google, while using Firefox, will lead to a direct increase in (not provided) keywords in Google Analytics. However, the same “pay to play” rule applies; as long as you use AdWords, these keywords will become transparent.

Source: Search Engine Land

Email Is Down! Repeat, Email Is Down!

For the first time ever, email deliverability has dipped. In the second half of 2011, only 76.5% of all emails were successfully transferred to people’s inboxes. This was a decline from the steady 80% that held over the past three years, and it’s a direct result of stricter Spam filters and stronger firewalls. Another interesting nugget: 93% of Gmail users enable the Priority inbox feature.

Source: Marketing Land

Referral + Search = Referrch Traffic?

A change in Google’s reporting system for Chrome users may result in an incidental merger of search and referral traffic in some analytics programs. If someone clicks through a Google search results on a secure Internet connection, while signed into their Google Chrome/Google profile, the URL string will remove the query term, which signifies to analytics programs that a search brought that person to the website.

It should be noted that most larger, heavily used analytics programs likely won’t be affected, but Google’s stated initiative to make searching more personal continues to produce collateral damage.

Source: Search Engine Land

Geo-Centric Domains Help Rank For Local Searches

An independent study, published on Search Engine Watch, revealed some interesting ranking factors for local search results. Beyond the expected local citations, site relevance, and proximity to a search location, the study found that a domain name with a specific city holds some local search weight in the eyes of Google.

Source: Search Engine Watch

Wikipedia Isn’t As Search Engine Dominant As You Think

According to a recent study from Conductor, Wikipedia shows up in Google’s search results less than 50% of the time (46%, specifically). The study involved analysis of 2,000 unique keywords, ranging in scope across all types of searches. Unlike the previous Wikipedia study that sent the SEO world into fits of South Parkian rage, this one offers a much more realistic view of the world’s most interactive, and informative, encyclopedia.

In other Wikipedia news, another study has found that Bing displays the editable encyclopedia website on a much more frequent basis. Of course, Bing does a lot of things that Google often gets flack for, so this shouldn’t be too surprising.

Source: Search Engine Land

News Websites Have Yet To Receive The Social Media ‘Bump’

Just because an article is shared many times on Facebook and Twitter does not mean that news site is reaping the benefits. According to Pew’s State of the Media 2012 research, the potential for social media-driven news consumption is huge, but it has yet to manifest into rock solid traffic numbers.

Just 9% of online news consumption comes from social networks, with most Facebook users reading stories from friends and family, while Twitterers click on stories directly posted from journalists and organizations. Comparatively, 36% of news consumers go directly to a website or through an app, 32% use search engines, and 29% use a news aggregator website or app.

Source: Mashable

Google Says You Can ‘Over-Optimize’

Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team, announced that Google is creating a new penalty for those sites that have too much search engine optimization. Cutts says that he is trying to ‘level the playing field’ and give sites with better content a better shot than those who just have superb SEO tagging.

Source: Search Engine Land

Microsoft Re-Introduces Some Old Tactics

Microsoft Advertising is reintroducing Yahoo Rich Ads In Search (RAIS). RAIS could be the counter balance to Google site link ads and product listing ads. With five new layouts and keywords being subject to approval, RAIS is coming back stronger than ever. Microsoft has also slightly changed the way they track negative keywords. They also are coming out with a special way to use landing pages for each keyword type that can be bid on.

Source: Search Engine Land

Apple Bites Into The Search Engine World

Apple has recently spent $50 million to acquire a start-up company known as ‘Chomp’. Chomp is a search engine for apps where you can find an app you’re looking for without a keyword search. It also works for iPhones, iPads, and Androids. Apple is still deciding if Chomp should continue to support Android systems.

Source: Search Engine Land

Women Trust Pinterest More Than Facebook And Twitter…For Now

Pinterest is still new enough for users to feel secure using it. Despite reports of skimming affiliate revenue from Pins and murky language in their privacy policy, a recent study found that women trust Pinterest for advice, as compared to their older social media brethren. Those numbers fall at 81% for Pinterest, 73% from Twitter, and 67% from Facebook.

One thing this study highlights that doesn’t make a decent headline is Facebook’s continued problems turning their website into something more than an outlet for time wasting (17% of users use  Facebook for product information and assistance with purchasing decisions).

Source: Marketing Land

Self-Learners Rejoice At MIT’s Open CourseWare Programs

MIT’s Open CourseWare will soon include a program called Scholar, which caters to the educational needs of strong self-learners. MIT offers a rundown of the currently available courses, should you ever show interest in self-teaching yourself physics, mathematics, economics, or computer science.

Source: BoingBoing

Notable Commentary

That Doesn’t Run In Place At Stoplights

The Hidden Conversion Killer In Sitelinks

The headline may cause you to do a few double takes, but Phil Sharp recently stumbled on an interesting development with his website’s Google rankings. Specifically, searches within his home city of San Francisco were producing a main link to the “team” page, rather than the more powerful homepage. Sharp runs down his discovery process, and offers a few easy to implement solutions to fix this problem before people bounce…literally.

Analysis By: Phil Sharp, SEOmoz

‘Doing’ Is The New ‘Liking,’ And SEOs Should Take Note

Aaron Friedman eloquently explains why the increasing meld of social and search requires SEOs to evolve more radically than ever, and why this requires adapting with strategies that emphasize how people do things “socially.”

Analysis By: Aaron Friedman, Search Engine Land

Eight Social SEO Strategies

Jordan Kasteler says that Google has opened up a door to a new realm of SEO possibilities with Google Social Search. Kasteler says this new media can be best optimized by ramping up your Google+ perspective, focusing on shareable content, involving Pinterest exploration, and more.

Analysis By: Jordan Kasteler, Search Engine Land

Search Retargeting Feels Alien To SEOs

Search retargeting is a strategy that aligns the closest with PPC marketing. However, Dax Hamman argues that SEO-specialized marketers are losing out on this opportunity to expand their skill set, often because search retargeting is too much like paid advertising.

Analysis By: Dax Hamman, Search Engine Land

Boost CTR And Conversions With 8 Ad Optimization Tips

All PPC advertisers try to find the perfect combination of components for their paid search campaigns. Miranda Miller offers eight helpful tips to create this perfect Paid Search combination. Some of these tips include testing stronger calls to action, setting up goal bidding, and more.

Analysis By: Miranda Miller, Search Engine Watch

There Can Be Only One…Mobile URL

This article is worth your time simply because if it’s Lord Of The Rings-inspired headline. However, the content itself discusses the preference for a homogenous URL strategy when building a mobile SEO campaign.

Analysis By: Michael Martin, Search Engine Land

Lots O’ INFOGRAPHICS: Interest In Pinterest?

Melissa Fach is quite aware of Pinterests booming presence and businesses looking to get involved. However, she also makes a point to say that Pinterest is not for every business. She includes an infographic that helps determine if your business is Pinterest worthy. Stephanie Buck also points out that Pinterest has become a booming presence in social media. She claims Pinterest is ‘addicting’; her infograhic proves it.

Analysis By: Melissa Fach, Search Engine Journal

Analysis By: Stephanie Buck, Mashable

A Guide Through The Virality Of Pinterest

Did you know Pinterest is the new Digg, in terms of sending a piece of content or media viral? Colby Almond explores the rise of Digg, the need for understanding Pinterest users, and how creativity (as always) can all lead your idea down a road paved by Internet memes before it.

Analysis By: Colby Almond, SEOmoz

Compiled By Rocket Clicks Staff

Google Now Features Google+ Instead Of PPC Ads, Depending On The Query

Google is testing a new look for its sidebar, featuring Google+ content and widgets based on certain search results. Google gave their usual “We’re testing everything” answer when asked about it, but given their massive push towards getting people onto their static social network, it’s a plausible guess that this will become permanent.

Source: Search Engine Journal

People, Businesses Still Diminish The Value Of Organic Search

Most businesses look at marketing from a first/last-touch attribution perspective, meaning they place almost all of the emphasis on the single referral source for a given conversion. However, a study from SlingshotSEO has determined those companies often severely undervalue search marketing.

According to the study, which focused on multi-touch attribution, organic search is 77.25% undervalued in most cases, paid ads and referrals are slightly undervalued, and direct visits are overvalued 81.59% of the time. If ever there were a better time to reference MoneyBall, undervalued assets, and search marketing, this would be the time.

Source: Search Engine Watch

AdWords Raises Campaign Limit To 10,000, Kills Demographic Bidding

Google AdWords has increased the number of campaigns available to a single account from 500 to 10,000. This includes 20,000 ad groups per campaign, 5,000 keywords per ad group, 300 display ads per group, and 4 million active and/or pauses ads in each account.

Additionally, Google has eliminated demographic bidding, going into full effect sometime around March 21. Data gleaned from Demographics targeting is still live, however.

Source: Search Engine Watch

Google Drastically Changes Webmaster Tools Crawl Errors, For Better Or Worse

Google Webmaster Tools Crawl Errors have long been essential to determining where to focus your Googlebot troubleshooting issues. However, the search engine recently changed the way crawl errors are accessed, reported, and displayed. Vanessa Fox does an excellent job of describing everything that has been removed or added, so we’ll yield to her handy work on this one.

Source: Search Engine Land

In Opinion Oxymoron News, People Love And Hate Personalized Search

According to a recent Pew Report, people feel personalized search raises major privacy red flags, and will eventually lead to more homogenous searches that limit the display of the most relevant information.

However, an overwhelming majority (86%) have learned something new from searching on Google, and 55% of searchers claim results are getting better over time.

Source: Search Engine Watch

Paid Search Ads Give A Major Boost To Traffic, According To The Company Trying To Get You To Buy Ad Space

In a self-serving, yet validating study, Google confirmed the assumptions that paid advertisements will boost traffic to a website. Specifically, Google determined PPC advertising sends roughly 85% more traffic to websites, relative to their traffic before using paid ads.

Source: Search Engine Land

Online Reviews Are Totally Legit, According To 72% Of People

The 2012 Local Consumer Review Survey has been released, and tidings of great joy for good local businesses. According to the report, a whopping 72% of consumers put as much trust into online reviews as they do into personal recommendations.

On a similar note, the study found that most people read between 2-10 reviews (65%). They also tend to put more trust in a fewer amount of reviews than in the past (15% read 11+ reviews, compared to 22% in 2010).

Source: Search Engine Land

PPC Ad Spend Drops 6.4% In 2011 Fourth Quarter

Fourth quarter spending on search and display advertisements in 2011 dipped 6.4% compared to the third quarter. Most of the search reduction occurred in the financial, local, and insurance industries, while telecom providers, auto manufacturers, and travel companies scaled back their display ad spending.

Source: Search Engine Watch

Facebook ‘Interest Lists’ Is Sort Of Like Google Reader

Facebook introduced “Interest Lists” last week, a new menu feature that helps users filter and sort their favorite Pages for businesses, food, sports teams, musicians, etc. Facebook views the organizing system, soon to be found in the bottom left sidebar menu, as a self-optimized online newspaper.

Source: Search Engine Watch

President Obama Conducts Cyberattack Simulation To Promote Legislation

On Wednesday, the White House demonstrated a hypothetical cyberattack that disabled New York City’s power grid. The motive for this faux enactment was to promote a current Congressional bill that would approve more governmental control over private systems.

That same day, AT&T and Comcast testified against the legislation, arguing it would stifle innovation and the current consensual policy was better for business.

Source: Search Engine Journal

America’s Most Wanted: Facebook Edition

The FBI is seeking out potential tipsters on Facebook and Twitter in the hopes that a comment or two may lead them to a 22-year-old Pittsburgh man on the run. Kenneth John Konia is wanted for allegedly hijacking his employer’s armored car, shooting a fellow employee, and making off with $2.3 million.

Given the reach and sharability of content on Facebook and Twitter, especially on mobile devices, it’s an interesting and fairly cheap way for authorities to seek out tips for catching criminals.

Source: Mashable

Yahoo Takes Facebook To Court For Patent Infringement

It’s official: Facebook has been served with a lawsuit courtesy of Yahoo. The floundering search engine/media company is alleging an infringement on 10 patents that boost in the functionality of social media websites. Yahoo claims some of Facebook’s most notable features, including the News Feed and video content ads, are based on Yahoo’s patents.

Update: The Internet hates Yahoo.

Source: Search Engine Watch

CNN Allegedly Thinks Mashable Is Worth $200 Million

According to a recent report, CNN is on the verge of acquiring Mashable for a cool $200 million. In seven years time, the social media news-based website has growth to an average monthly viewership of around 50 million.

Source: Search Engine Journal

Scientists Are Developing Human-Aware Robots

Research at the Georgia Institute of Technology has unearthed a startling prediction for those of us that shiver upon hearing the words, “self-aware.” Some scientists believe a real-life Rosie The Robot (or Bender, who knows) will be a staple of every home within the next decade.

The institute’s newest study, out of Georgia Tech, has discovered ways to make robots more responsive and understanding of human speech and behavior. The common phrasing of human questions helped the scientists produce results that could help programmers accelerate their innovations in robotics.

Source: Mashable

The Android Screen-Lock Feature Is FBI-Proof

Android phone security is so tight that an agency with expert code breakers and access to every piece of forensic technology couldn’t crack its code. The FBI ultimately failed to unlock a Samsung Exhibit II mobile phone after multiple attempts, according to federal court documents.

The FBI came into this predicament while trying to unlock a San Diego-area prostitution pimp’s phone during a trial. Google has been served a warrant to assist in the case. The phone requires a user to submit their email and a password after too many unsuccessful finger-swipes.

Source: Wired

Germany Wants To Tax Search Engines, Aggregators

The U.S. isn’t the only country with a rapidly declining print media. Germany has a similar issue with plummeting media revenue, and the government is proposing a tax on news and information aggregators, such as Google, Digg, and Drudge Report. Somewhat ironically, many of these floundering media organizations receive substantial referral traffic from these one-stop news shops.

Source: The Washington Times

Kony 2012 Has One Very Notable Critic: The Ugandan People

The virality of Invisible Children’s Kony 2012 mini-documentary is unquestionably impressive. However, while the video has achieved its goal to many Joseph Kony a household name in the Western world, many Ugandans affected by his brutality are not happy about the coverage.

Source: Mashable

Energy Monitoring App Exposes Teen’s Party

Who needs police or secret cameras when you have the Fluksometer and an Android app? An Australian man busted his daughter’s New Year’s Party while sitting at a restaurant 500 miles away, thanks to a device and app that monitor energy use in his home. The man saw a large spike in energy consumption, coincidentally on New Year’s Eve, and was able to put two and two together.

Source: Gizmodo

Notable Commentary

Compiled 10,000 Feet In The Air

A Guide To Comprehending And Conquering Google’s Venice Update

Local search is a major money maker for businesses, and Google is smart enough to know focusing on improving those results will help everyone. Mike Ramsey runs through this largely under-the-radar change, and how marketers should tweak their local SEO strategies.

Analysis By: Mike Ramsey, SEOmoz

INFOGRAPHIC: Google Algorithm Alterations In Timeline Form

If you ever feel like catching up on a cliff notes history of Google’s algorithm updates and changes, Search Engine Watch has a cool infographic that starts at 1998 and ends at “To Be Continued…”. It definitely puts their past, present, and future algorithm tweak into historical context.

Analysis By: Melissa Fach, Search Engine Watch

Comparing, Utilizing Bing And Google’s Treatments For Breaking News

According to a recent study, Google and Bing view the process for ranking “breaking news” stories in slightly different ways. Miranda Miller compares some of these interesting differences, and offers 10 pieces of advice to help marketers appear above the fold on both search engines.

Analysis By: Miranda Miller, Search Engine Watch

The Importance Of Rich Snippets, In Visual Form

Rich snippets display small bits of information in the SERPs that help searchers determine whether your site is most relevant to their query. Selena Narayanasamy has a cool visual run through of all of the important details relevant to the growing influence of snippets.

Analysis By: Selena Narayanasamy, SEOmoz Blog

Bing Offers People-Centric Insight Into Social Search

Paul Yiu, Bing’s Principal Group Program Manager for Bing Social Search, stopped by Stone Temple Consulting to answer a few burning questions. Specifically, he discusses how Bing uses “people power” to fuel its social search, and how Facebook and Twitter are crucial to its development.

Analysis By: Greg Finn, Search Engine Land

Optimizing For Twitter’s Inevitable Growth

Twitter is no longer the social media new kid on the block. More and more people are joining the real-time social network, further reducing the immediate visibility of any one account. Lisa Buyer offers some tips for optimizing your Twitter marketing strategy in these days of tweet gluttony.

Analysis By: Lisa Buyer, Search Engine Watch

Ten Overlooked Ways To Attract Mobile Facebook Traffic

Despite Facebook’s best worst efforts with apps, 50% of their traffic comes from mobile devices. Coupled with the skyrocketing usage of smartphones and tablets, that number won’t be declining anytime soon. Brian Klais explores 10 secret methods for enticing that traffic to your site.

Analysis By: Brian Klais, Search Engine Land

The Wall Street Journal Joins The Official “We Don’t Know What Google Does” Club

The Wall Street Journal recently published a story detailing an impending major change to Google’s algorithm. The funny part is most of the changes they cover are well-known among Internet marketers, and have been in place, for quite some time. Danny Sullivan systematically takes down each of these “new” updates in a very professional way (seriously).

Analysis By: Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land

Kony 2012 Teaches Video Marketers A Few Lessons

Kony 2012 was just released on March 5, and has registered over 70 million views and countless coverage on national news programs. The point of this article isn’t to glorify or vilify the video, but point out the process by which it became so popular, with the help of an academic study.

Analysis By: Greg Jarboe, Search Engine Watch

The Association Of Tennis Professionals 404 Page Will Make You Want To Watch Tennis

The Internet marketing world has never shied away from a good groan-inducing pun. The ATP’s 404 error page is a perfect eye-rolling combination of sports and website puns. Click and enjoy.

Analysis By: Erik Malinowski, Deadspin

Compiled By Rocket Clicks Staff

Google ‘Highlights’ By A Bing Name: ‘Insights’

While Google’s Search Quality Highlights were created as a thinly-veiled counterpoint to anti-privacy concerns, Bing has launched a similar blog series (Search Quality Insights) in an attempt to become more visible to search engine users and optimizers. Perhaps the funniest thing about this announcement comes at the end, where Bing essentially admits to the program nepotism that has caused Google so much trouble over the past year.

Source: Search Engine Land

Approved Third Parties Can Now Officially Access Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools recently added a User Administration feature that allows third parties to access your data through their own username and password. Similar to Google Analytics, there are three levels of access (Owner, Full, Restricted) limiting what and how a third party can interact with the account.

Source: Search Engine Land

Pinterest Gets Its First Official Scam-troversy

It was only a matter of time before Internet scammers exploited Pinterest’s rapidly increasing user base. The scam comes in the form of a “gift card for survey completion” offer, where scammers offer Pinterest users a gift card or swag for a re-pin and “survey” participation. The survey is designed to phish out personal information, and is really just an evolved version of phishing scams seen on other social networks.

Source: Search Engine Journal

Bing Tests Re-Designed Local, Organic Search Results

Bing is rolling out a few test layouts new to their local search listings and organic search results. This isn’t the first test alteration to Bing’s SERPs, but some changed features include “Suggested Searches” below the search box, a right sidebar, smaller navigation elements, prominent user controls, and a local listing box in the middle of the SERPs.

Organic changes:

Local changes:

Source: Search Engine Watch

+1 A Page, Get A Thank You Note…In The SERPs

Google is currently testing a blended search feature that allows you to “thank” a user that +1’s your page, website, or other medium. This is accessible through the note shown below, and is posted privately to the user’s Google+ page. If this change remains permanent, it will be interesting to see how this affects engagement and customer/reader retention.

Source: Search Engine Land

Google Street View Has Problems With Patents, Urination Pictures

Google and Apple are the subject of a legal complaint from PanoMap Technologies, who claims they have the rights to a patent featured in Google Maps Street View on iPad and iPhone devices. Additionally, Google is facing a lawsuit over a French man caught by Google’s car cameras “relieving himself” in his driveway. The man is claiming the photo has ruined his neighborhood image.

Source: Search Engine Watch

Figure Out Who’s Tracking You Online On Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla has released its Collusion plugin, which allows you to visualize who is tracking your movements online. The program works through monitoring the third party cookies that follow you as you navigate around the web. Simply visit the link below to try it out on the Firefox browser.

Source: Mozilla Collusion

U.S. Government Can Take Whatever .Com Site It Wants, Thank You Very Little

Despite the Canadian-registration for Bodog.com, the U.S. government took down the sports betting website, much to the behest of a few Internet infrastructure companies. However, the U.S. authorities insist they have the right to go after any website if its administrating company resides on U.S. soil. The government mainly targets sites selling counterfeit goods, streaming sports illegally, and illegal movies and music file sharing.

Source: Wired

Twitter’s Blowing Up! All The Dead Bodies Showing Up…

While Facebook’s growth plateaus, Twitter is exploding more than ever. While Facebook’s global audience is currently over 1 billion, Twitter is fast approaching that mark with over 383 million current users with growth of 20% in the past nine months.

Source: Mashable

Yahoo Loses Staffer To Google

Prahbhakar Raghavan, Yahoo’s Head of Labs, is leaving Yahoo for a position at Google. Raghavan’s occupational decision most likely has to do with Yahoo’s major restructuring, as it is on the verge of making large cuts to its labs unit and laying off thousands of employees. Due to this restructuring, many leading directors, including founder Jerry Yang and Roy Bostock, are also leaving.

Source: Search Engine Watch

Notable Commentary

Without A QR Code

Linking For A Business First, SEO Second

Eric Ward tells a frustrating tale about a company spending tons of energy acquiring links in order to break onto Google’s front page for their desired term. They hit their rank ceiling on page two, so the company decided to find link-driven business elsewhere with mutual marketing partnerships with local businesses. The end result is fairly astonishing, and is a great example of linking “for people” and not allowing Google’s enticing front page to hold your strategies hostage.

Analysis By: Eric Ward, Search Engine Watch

Discover Keywords That Convert And Put Them To Use

Analytics, patterns, and extra love: These are the three pillars on which to build a marketing strategy geared towards your highest converting keywords. The strategy may sound simple, but acting on it is always the hard part.

Analysis By: Elisa Gabbert, Search Engine Journal

Advice For Non-Profits Looking To Utilize Pinterest For Their Cause

Matt Petronzio has an interesting collection of 10 Pinterest strategies common among non-profits that are using the fledgling social network successfully. He also talks to some of these non-profits to get a first-hand understanding of what has, and hasn’t worked for them.

Analysis By: Matt Petronzio, Mashable

Enterprise SEO Is Rarely Understood Among Big Companies

Despite brand recognition carrying a solid amount of weight in the eyes of Google’s algorithm, many companies have leaking holes rampant throughout their SEO ships. Marshall Simmonds explains why many companies don’t actively compete in non-branded spaces, and why they often fail to keep up with the constantly shifting world of SEO.

Analysis By: Marshall Simmonds, Search Engine Land

As Facebook Changes, So Should Your Social Media Strategy

The Facebook Timeline for business pages are sweeping across the social network, coaxing businesses to update their Facebook strategies. Andrea Vahl offers seven things about the new Facebook Timeline that will influence user interactions with businesses.

Analysis By: Andrea Vahl, Social Media Examiner

Ryan Healy Criticizes Ad Copy, Company Responds In A Smart Way

In a recent blog post, Ryan Healy critiqued a piece of ad copy for a young pants company. He was very direct in his advice for improvement, going so far as to re-write the ad. The company, Bonobos, responded in a very respectful way, welcoming the criticism and thanking him for offering useful advice. It was a great example of how to respond when someone you respect offers constructive criticism.

Analysis By: Ryan Healy, RyanHealy.com

The Best Laid Plans Of QR Codes Go Awry

WTF QR Codes is a collection of QR Codes in places that should elicit the reaction bore in the website’s name. Some of the best QR Code fails happen on a car, stalk of broccoli, cows (seriously), and more.

Analysis By: WTF QR Codes

SEO Will Live Forever

Ray Cornstock believes SEO is the most important aspect of Internet marketing. As SEO continues to make money, bridge gaps, communicate with customers and prospects, and benefit users, its value stays indispensible.

Analysis By: Ray ‘Catfish’ Cornstock

Don’t Blame The Site Links!

Julie Joyce believes we need to stop blaming rankings on bad site links. Many people overlook problems with redirects, robots.txt files, duplicate content, and Google Webmaster Tools.