This Week’s Industry News

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