This Week’s Industry News Compiled By Rocket Clicks Staff

Operation Payback Takes Down Visa, Mastercard And PayPal

In what is being labeled a cyber war, hackers in support of “freedom of information” have started attacking ecommerce organizations that have severed their ties with WikiLeaks. A hacker collective known as Anonymous Operations, recently took to twitter, releasing a hacking tool and asking their followers to aid in attacks on websites of organizations that were once involved with the ‘whistle blower’ site. So far, the hackers planned and then ceased an attack on Amazon.com, WikiLeaks former hosting site, but successfully slowed down traffic to PayPal, the organization that used to handle donations to WikiLeaks. Attacks have also been made on the websites of Mastercard and Visa for refusing to process payments for WikiLeaks and possibly on Sarah Pailin’s political action website in retaliation towards her negative comments made about WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange. Currently, only websites are being targeted but with more attacks threatened, it will be interesting to see just how far these hackers will go in support of “freedom of information.” Source: CNN

Google Falls To Third Place In China

China and Google have had a shaky relationship for quite some time now. Just a few months ago, Google ended contracts with the seven ad resellers, thus helping search engine Baidu’s share of ad revenue completely topple Google. Google had held strong in the number two position, but their market share continues to dissolve as they are now in third place behind internet giant, Alidaba. And now, they’re almost in jeopardy of falling to fourth. Keep your eyes peeled, as it’ll be very interesting to see if and how Google will react to this in the first quarter of next year. Source: The Wall Street Journal

Improvements Made To Keyword Tool

There are three new ways to filter and refine your keyword list. With our new updates, you can:

1. Choose specific terms to include or exclude from your keyword list.
2. Use the ‘More like these’ button to search for terms that are similar to the specific keyword ideas you’ve selected from the table.
3. Get only results that include the exact words or phrases (and their close synonyms) you’ve typed in the search box.

Adding Stars To Keywords

Add stars to keywords that you’d like to save while you’re still searching for new keyword ideas. You can review your starred keywords in the “Stars” panel on the left side of the tool. View your selected keywords in text form, so that you can easily edit them and paste them in a spreadsheet or AdWords Editor. Source: Inside AdWords

Changes Made To AdWords Campaign Experiments Allow You To Test Ads

Google AdWords recently rolled out a free tool, AdWords Campaign Experiments (ACE), that made it easier to test your “keywords, bids, ad groups, and placements” and new changes now allow you to test your ads themselves. ACE now allows you “to decide the percentage of traffic on which you want your experiment to run – giving you more control over which ads show when. Within each split, ACE will respect the “optimize” or “rotate” ad rotation settings you’ve set in your campaign settings tab” Below is a graphic of what you can test and link to the official page that hosts an informative video outlining the uses of the tool. You can run ad experiments on both text and display ads. Here are some of the components you can test with each: Text Ads Display Ads:

• Ad text
• Headlines
• Display URLs
• Calls to action
• Images
• Display URLs
• Calls to action

You can test text ads against other text ads and display ads against other display ads, but ACE allows you to do more. If your ads are opted into the Google Display Network, you can also compare the performance of your text ads to that of your display ads on Display Network sites. If you don’t already have display ads in your account, they’re easy to create with the display ad builder located within AdWords. Source: Inside AdWords

Google Maps On Android Go 3D

Google Maps has made some very interesting changes for its use on the Android OS. Once conceived as “flat and north,” modifications have been made to Google Maps that now allow users to view their locations in 3D and also use it without a persistent data connection. So, instead of staying in a consistently straight line, like the compass normally does, it will now rotate and shift as you move through the city much like it does with Google Navigation. Buildings, now in richer 3D, will match more closely to your actual physical surroundings. The new version, that will initially include maps for 70 US cities and 100 worldwide, is set to roll out in the next couple days for the Android OS. At this time it has yet to be disclosed if it will be made available to iPhone users. Source: Search Engine Land

Google Adds Global Market Finder To Help Find New Markets Overseas

Ever wonder if you have potential customers overseas? Want to know who they are and how you can turn your business from local to global? Google just announced two new resources, Global Market Finder and Google Ads for Global Advertisers, that are designed to help you with those exact tasks. To use Global Market Finder, simply enter the keywords that describe your business or service and select a region you would like to explore opportunities in. The tool will then automatically translate your keywords into languages that are used in your selected markets. “It then ranks each location by market opportunity by combining search volume, suggested bid price, and competition for each translated keyword. With this tool, businesses can answer questions like “how competitive is this market?”, “how does demand in one location compare to demand elsewhere in the world?”, and “how much would it cost to start advertising in this new market?” Google Ads for Global Advertisers is designed to help you expand your business from the local level to the global. This resource will enrich your knowledge of foreign markets and will be beneficial to your efforts by “finding the right markets to expand your business, to localizing your website and campaigns into another language, to running ads in a foreign market, and finally, to monitoring your global ad spend.” Check out these two new resources to see just how far your business can expand. Source: Inside AdWords

Twitter And Facebook Important To Rankings In Google And Bing

SEOs have long presumed that social sharing on Twitter and Facebook has an impact on search rankings. One could easily surmise that if a Facebook post has x amount of “likes,” or, if something has been “retweeted” by the amount of people, y, that those articles will have a significant amount of weight in the search results. Danny Sullivan, editor of searchengineland.com, conducted a six question interview with officials at both Google and Bing that put an end to the speculation and confirmed that sharing on Twitter and Facebook does have a direct impact on where articles and pages land in search. Both search engines stated that person/entity hold priority in rank, with Google citing “Author Authority” and Bing uses the term “Social Authority.” Check out the Q&A on searchengineland.com and click the source link to read Rand Fishkin’s analysis of the news. Source: SEOmoz

Mark Zuckerberg Offering Part Of His Fortune To The “Giving Pledge”

Joining 15 other billionaires, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has agreed to give away a large portion of his wealth to the “Giving Pledge” an organization founded by Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. The “Giving Pledge,” based on steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie’s belief that “fortunes are often wasted by heirs and thus should be put to charitable use” was started by Gates and Buffet to influence the wealthy to boost their giving. Source: The Wall Street Journal

Notable Commentary

From Really Smart People

Ian Lurie’s 9-Step SEO Checkup Using Google Webmaster Tools

Check out this informative and extremely useful article by Ian Lurie, President of Portent Interactive, that outlines how to setup your SEO goals when using Google Webmaster Tools. Read and learn. Analysis By: Ian Lurie, Search Engine Land

An Interesting Look At Analyzing Site Traffic

Ever have questions regarding the types of behavior that leads consumers to purchase from your site. If so, take a look at this interesting study done by the Kellogg School of Management that found that analyzing click behavior will be beneficial to your sales efforts. Analysis By: Tingliang Huang and Jan A. Van Mieghem, Kellogg Insight

Groupon Tells Google, “We Don’t Want Your Money”

Groupon turned down $6 billion offer from Google. Check out this article to find out if Groupon thinks they’re worth more, or if there was a bigger concern that led to them staying put. Analysis By: Nicholas Carlson, Business Insider

Details Of Microsoft’s Attempted Facebook Takeover Have Been Released

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is one of the youngest billionaires in the world. Check out this article about Microsoft’s attempted buyout of Facebook that gives a bit of insight as to why he is. Analysis By: Josh Lowensohn, CNet

Eric Ward Likes the Quix App. Do You?

Click the source link to see a demo and the specs of an app that allows you to have all of your bookmarks and bookmarklets in one place. The tagline, “Your Bookmarklets, On Steroids,” makes it worth checking out alone. Analysis By: Quixapp.com