This Week’s Industry Update
Compiled By Rocket Clicks Staff
Google’s Flimsy App Security Outed
If you own an Android smartphone and don’t have a malware issue, you’ve got the luck of the Irish. Multiple apps in the Android Market were infected, leading to around 260,000 downloads carrying a malicious smartphone software virus.
Apple and BlackBerry have not had these issues mainly because they employ people to comb through their apps searching for potential viruses before approving them for the store. Google does remove apps that violate their policies, but they rely on users to report anything malicious. If I were in Vegas, I’d bet that will be changing soon.
Source: Wall Street Journal
SERP Click Distributions Quantified By Percentages
To state the obvious: As you move up positions in Google organic search results, you increase your click-through chances. But what are those percentages exactly? This article answers that question by compiling three separate data collections about click distribution and the percentage of clicks that come with each first page position in a SERP.
Source: Agent SEO
Flash-To-HTML Conversion Available From Adobe
Adobe unveiled an experiment, codenamed Wallaby, that converts Flash animations to HTML5. Right now it’s only compatible with WebKit browsers, such as FireFox. For now, Wallaby can convert banner ads to HTML5, but can’t convert ActionScript, movies or sound. This will make Flash ads accessible on Apple devices but the long term impact is uncertain at this time.
Source: .Net
Product Listing Ads Now Have Negative Keywords Feature
Since launching Product Listing Ads last year, Google has added features over time to improve targeting and sorting items based on different specifications. The newest addition is Negative Keywords, which act in the same way as the ones used for text-based search ads.
Negative Keywords for Product Listing Ads prevent your ad from showing for searches of that term. This reduces the chances of your ad showing up in unwanted queries. An example of this is if you sell office chairs with massage headrests, and you don’t want the ad to display on a search for “massage chairs.”
Source: Google Inside AdWords Blog
AdGrok Makes Google AdWords More Usable For Everyone
AdGrok, a Y Combinator startup, provides a tool to make AdWords easier to use for even the least tech-savvy business. Depending on how much money a business is willing to spend, AdGrok can act as a hand holder or even a miniature ad agency (GrokMe can send you reports on a weekly basis).
Source: Fast Company
Bad Content Makes Google A Sad ‘Panda’
Google’s most recent algorithm update has been largely talked about as a deforestation effort to remove content farms from their search results. However, the change has been dubbed “Panda” inside Google, and also aims to punish “low quality” content all over the web.
“Low quality” is obviously a subjective measurement (in Charlie Sheen’s case, it means winning), but for the most part it is defined as content that breaks good English grammar, sentence structure, and spelling. This article details some of those criterion.
Source: Search Engine Journal
Hate Seeing A Certain Site In Your SERP? No More Shall You Suffer
Google now has a feature that allows you to block any given site you choose from showing up in your search results. You can also unblock any site you’ve blocked whenever you want. The option is shown below listed just to the right of the green URL for the site in question.
Source: The Official Google Blog
Overstock Reaches The Core Of Human Laziness
What’s the difference between 12 letters and three letters? Apparently for Overstock.com, an e-commerce web site that was recently punished by Google, it means more visitors. Overstock.com has aggressively been running ads for it’s simpler URL, O.co, in hopes of reaping the benefits brought on by people’s preference for typing less.
The .Co domain has not shown any quantitative data that proves it increases conversions, and Overstock is known enough that any improvement will probably be in small increments. It’ll be interesting to see if their marketing play towards one of the seven deadly sins (sloth) in virtual form pays off long term or catches on elsewhere.
Source: Business Insider
Notable Commentary
From Warlock Scribes With Tiger Blood
Who’s Watching You And What Do They Want
Does the fact that the internet knows way too much about your personal habits and hobbies freak you out? Take a look at this interesting Time article that explores the ins and outs of “data mining” and explains why there might be an ad for discounted Disney World admission above your inbox.
Analysis By: Joel Stein, Time
Who’s (Not) Looking At Paid Search Ads?
User Centric recently did an eye tracking survey to see what users of Google and Bing are looking at on their results pages and they found out some pretty interesting information about paid search ads. Take a look Search Engine Land’s brief write up about what they found.
Analysis By: Matt McGee, Search Engine Land
Matt Cutts Presents At TED On Trying New Things for 30 Days
Google’s top Spam hunter, Matt Cutts, gave an interesting presentation at TED about how trying something new every 30 days can lead to a much more interesting and introspective outlook on life.
Analysis By: Mark Frauenfelder, Boing Boing
Log Files, The Ian Lurie Way!
Ian Lurie’s presentation at PubCon is condensed into this piece that features his favorite tips and tricks for how to analyze log files.
Analysis By: Ian Lurie, Conversation Marketing
An SEO Best Practices Guide For Excel
This article from Distilled has a lot of information to sift through, but it does a great job of pointing out how useful Microsoft Excel can be for SEO pros.
Analysis By: Mike Pantoliano, Distilled
A Review Of The iPad 2 From A True Expert
The Wall Street Journal’s best tech writer, Walter Mossberg, has tested and review Apple’s new iPad 2, and provides a verdict that exposes a few necessary improvements for the next iPad generation.
Analysis By: Walter Mossberg, Wall Street Journal
