This Week’s Industry News
Compiled by the Rocket Clicks Team
Top Stories
SEO Gets 37 Months in Federal Prison for Extorting Clients
An SEO named William Stanley was recently sentenced to 37 months in federal prison and ordered to pay almost $175,000 in restitution for attempting to extort money from a business in Dallas. Stanley threatened his clients by saying he would post “fraudulent comments and create negative reviews online, if the victim did not pay him a certain sum of money.” Stanley was eventually charged with extortion after trying to force GE to pay him $80,000 to stop him from attempting to damage their online reputation. Source: Search Engine Land
New Annotation Test for Bing Ads
Bing has recently begun testing a new annotation below some ad displaying how many times you have visited a certain website. The annotation says “You have visited X times in the last 30 days” and is in likeness to a similar feature in Google, although Google’s version is only for organic results and not paid ads. Although it’s a useful annotation for organic results, experts are intrigued as to how this feature will pay off for paid search. Source: The SEM Post
Google Can Change Your Desktop Search Results Based on Your Phone’s Location History
Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable recently noticed that Google has at least been testing a feature that shows when Google has localized your search results based on your mobile device’s location history. There is no word yet from Google about whether or not this will be a permanent feature, but users outside of the US have been reporting that they’ve noticed this feature over the last few months. Source: Search Engine Roundtable
New Home Service Ads Tested by Google
Google has been testing a new form-like home service ad that allows users to submit a zip code and select a type of service. When this specific type of ad appears, no other AdWords ads appear above the search results, they only appear on the right side of the search results page. This is another ongoing test for home service ads, which will expand as the New Year continues. Source: The SEM Post
Google Testing the Option for Webmasters to Use Schema for Their Knowledge Panels
Google recently announced via Google Location Page Guidelines that they are “piloting” the use of structured data markup to help local businesses better control what information shows up in their local knowledge panel. If this markup is eventually made available to all business owners it will allow them to add markup to information like menu URLs and operating hours for all of their locations. Source: Search Engine Roundtable
AOL Search Results Now Powered by Bing
As of the beginning of the New Year, AOL has officially switched their search engine to Bing. Now, when searching through AOL, you will find the same search results as what you would find on Bing although AOL isn’t using several search result feature that are in Bing. This addition will allow advertisers to increase impression volume on their ads with an extra 1% overall market share from AOL on top of Bing’s 20.9% market share. Source: The SEM Post
Additional Commentary
10 Predictions for 2016 in SEO & Web Marketing
After assigning himself a positive grade for the predictions he made last year, Rand Fishkin decides to give it another go and list his predictions for SEO in 2016. Of the most notable predictions, Fishkin foresees Twitter finding a way to get back on track and thinks that data will show that organic search results in Google will have less than a 70% click through rate. He also predicts that the supposed tech trends for 2016 like virtual reality and wearables will have a negligible impact on the world of internet marketing. Source: Rand Fishkin, Moz
Paid Search Strategies for 2016
With the start of 2016, Diane Pease shares paid search resolutions for the New Year to continue to improve your campaign. Pease first recommends you take full advantage of ad extensions, including the newest addition to the family, the structured snippet extension. She also recommends a campaign cleanup by pausing any keywords, ad groups, or campaigns that just aren’t working. Pease finally recommends pushing mobile search. With more than $100 billion in mobile ad spend for 2015, 2016 may end up being the year of mobile advertising. Source: Diane Pease, Search Engine Watch
