This Week’s Industry News

Compiled By Rocket Clicks

Google Ranking Patent Aims To Trap Spammers

A recent Google patent has gotten many people in and out of the SEO world talking about its implications and (as always) potentially misinterpreting the patent’s language. Essentially, Google would use a detection process to identify “rank modifying” techniques (keyword stuffing, most notably), manipulate the webmaster’s expectations by keeping the rank stagnant, and observe how they react.

That may sound scary to people convinced of the Mayan Apocalypse and Google’s quest to destroy all SEO, but it’s really just a way for Google to better understand spamming patterns and adjust its ranking algorithm to recognize these techniques quicker.

Source: Search Engine Land

Most Technology Blogs Don’t Use The Authorship Tag Correctly

According to a Conductor study, just 9% of tech blogs fully utilize the rel=author tag properly. Considering these are blogs that often have an advanced understanding of algorithms, html, coding, programming, etc., that’s a fairly surprising number. Only 3% of these blogs use the tag, but didn’t link to the Google+ author account.

Source: Search Engine Land

Facebook Ads Will Soon Feature Email, Phone Number Targeting

Amidst their stock problems, Facebook is announcing it will roll out email and phone targeting features for its advertising platform. The data will be taken from contact information that has already been collected by those businesses. This doesn’t just include Facebook details, but the information someone may give in a physical store. From there, the targeting can be broken down into specific demographics.

Source: TechCrunch

Google Reminds Webmasters About The Danger Of Selling Links

Google gave webmasters a friendly reminder that selling links could land them with a PageRank penalty. Google has been transparent about the negative impact selling links can have on PageRank since 2007. Pages containing sponsored links that pass PageRank have an outside spam report about their site sent to Google. Once the site cleans up these paid links or ensures they don’t pass PageRank their manual penalty can be revoked via a “reconsideration request.”

Source: Search Engine Land

Google Sees Dramatic Rise In URL Removal Requests

Google received nearly 6 million URL search removal requests over the last month, a hefty increase from previous months. The significant spike in requests is the result of copyright holders’ continued battle against sites offering copyrighted content for download. Weekly removal requests peaked at 1.49 million the week of August 13, up from around the 400,000 per week Google hovered around consistently as recently as early May. Recording Industry Association of America led the way with 841,177 removal requests followed by Microsoft (681,227) and NBCUniversal (254, 527). The data doesn’t include the percentage of requests that were honored, but Google complied with 97 percent of takedown requests received from July through December of last year.

Source: Search Engine Watch

Lead Generation Is Not A PPC Strong Suit, According To Industry Survey

WebMarketing123’s sophomore survey, entitled the “State of Digital Marketing,” has yielded some interesting trends from its respondents. Most notably, SEO is an increasingly better investment for lead generation than PPC. According to the survey, 59% of B2B marketers and 49% of B2C marketers consider SEO as their biggest cash cow for lead gen. PPC comes in at 26% and 20%, respectively.

Source: Search Engine Land

Zappos Program Takes Stab At Monetizing Pinteresting Pins

Zappos hasn’t seen much revenue coming in from Pinterest despite the immense number of pins it gets there. In response, it’s rolled out Pinpoints.com, which is a pretty cool little tool to check out what Zappo’s style algorithm recommends for various pinners.

Source: Marketing Land

Yeah, Business.txt Files? Google Doesn’t Want You To Use Them

Google is the Judge Dredd of best website optimization practices. Business.txt is the latest rage among all the hip, cool webmasters looking to add schema.org-like data to their website. However, acting as judge, jury and executioner, a Googler implored people to avoid this tactic and just get better at making their address, business name, and phone number more accessible on their website. Basically, he said it’s not worth the effort for the minimal gain you would receive.

Source: Search Engine Roundtable

UCLA ‘Stuns’ Oregon In Game That Hasn’t Occurred Yet, According To Media Reports

College football kicked off Thursday night, and UCLA apparently stunned Oregon with a 21-20 victory, at least according to most newspapers around the country. The only problem is that neither team is scheduled to play each other this year, and the story was published before Thursday night.

The Associated Press accidentally put a placeholder story out on the wire, many newspapers and TV stations picked it up automatically, and the story began percolating around the Internet. If anything, this humorous mishap says even more about the unfortunate state of local media, increasingly reliant on wire stories to fill their pages.

Source: Deadspin

Ivy League Scientists Could Use Online Brain Games For Research

Thanks to crowd-sourced data gleaned from online brain puzzle games, Ivy League researchers will soon better understand how people learn. Researchers will look at how people solve these puzzles, which opens the door to further comprehension of how the brain functions when presented with a known/unknown task.

Source: Wall Street Journal