IndustryWeekly Rundown: Google Penalizes Mozilla, Enhanced Campaign Updates & More

Weekly Rundown: Google Penalizes Mozilla, Enhanced Campaign Updates & More

One page out gives Mozilla trouble with Google. Enhanced campaigns get Google+ annotations and an upgrade center. And it sure was hard not to see Eric Schmidt. Here's a quick recap of search and social marketing news and tips from the past week.

One page out of millions gives Mozilla trouble with Google. Enhanced campaigns get Google+ annotations and an upgrade center. And it sure was hard not to see Eric Schmidt. Here’s a quick recap of search and social marketing news and tips from the past week.

INDUSTRY

Microsoft beats Google in patent ruling over Xbox technology – the Inquirer
Microsoft has won a $1.8 million ruling in the first of two patent lawsuits against Google’s Motorola Mobility over the use of its technology in the Xbox console. Another patent trial is set for this summer.

Apple did not violate Google patent, trade panel rules – Reuters
With victory, iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches won’t face a U.S. import ban. Google acquired the six patents at issue when it bought Motorola Mobility.

SEO

Matt Cutts, Google’s Distinguished Engineer, posted answers to a couple of questions on the YouTube GoogleWebmasterHelp channel:

What is being done to detect and remove results from larger sites when they don’t have unique content that is relevant to a query (e.g. yelp.com results with no reviews, Facebook “business” pages that weren’t actually created by the business)?

Suppose I have a site that covers fishing overall (A) & I make another fishing site that solely focuses on lure fishing (B). Does linking to A from B violate guidelines? I’ll make sure both have high quality content & I disclose that they’re both owned by me.

Google To Mozilla: You Had 12 Megabytes Of User Generated Spam On One Page – Search Engine Roundtable
Only one page penalized due to 12 megabytes of spam from 21,169 comments.

Google Authorship Snippet Drops More By… Link – Search Engine Roundtable

Announcing Malware Re-Evaluation and Geo-Targeting in Webmaster Tools – Bing Webmaster Blog
New malware tool in Reports & Data section lets you submit and track requests; Geo-Targeting tool in Configure my Site section lets you tell Bing the audience of a specific country you’re targeting for your site or a section of your site.

PPC

Enhanced campaigns improvements for Google+ and mobile apps – Inside AdWords
Enhanced campaigns now automatically include social annotation (number of Google+ followers) “when they can improve ad performance”, if you have recent “high-quality” posts, and if you have a “significant number of followers” (at least 100). Also added: in-app ad targeting by time of day, location, device, demographics, interests, topics, and remarketing.

Upgrade to enhanced campaigns more easily with the new AdWords upgrade center – Inside AdWords
Lets you do bulk upgrades or merge campaigns in a few clicks.

Easier planning, better reporting: New tools for display ads – Inside AdWords
Now available: Google Display Planner and two new reports, Demographic Performance and Placement Performance.

Google Screensharing – AdWords Community
AdWords associates can now invite you to share your screen.

Bing Ads and You: Keyword Distribution Graph Coming Soon – Bing Ads Blog
Now in testing, this will give you a big picture view of the performance of thousands of keywords and identify opportunities. It will look like this:

bing-ads-keyword-distribution-graph

PPC for B2B on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook – ClickZ
As we move into social media, the additional targeting options available within LinkedIn and Facebook can provide benefits that search marketing alone can’t deliver.

ANALYTICS

Google Tag Manager grows nearly 300% since January, boosts enterprise performance – Google Analytics Blog
With nearly 300 percent growth in traffic and 120 percent growth in enterprise customers, Google adds a Success Stories page.

SOCIAL

Facebook replaces ‘brand resource center’ with new website and assets – Inside Facebook
The new Facebookbrand.com provides dos and don’ts and FAQ for anyone who intends to use the company’s name, logos, or images in their work.

Facebook makes it easier for advertisers to run ads on feature phones only – InsideFacebook
“Feature phones only” now an option in the “creative ad placements” section of Power Editor and Ads API.

Facebook Removes Gun Sweepstakes – Fast Company
Giving away AR-15s in exchange for Likes is indeed a violation of Facebook’s advertising restrictions.

Facebook usage data reveals just how ‘depressingly stereotypical’ your life probably is – VentureBeat
Wolfram|Alpha studies people on Facebook, apparently finds them boring and stereotypical.

Study: Facebook Activity Correlates To TV Viewership (Social TV’s Not Just For Twitter) – Marketing Land
Actions people take leading up to broadcast and cable TV show can indicate whether viewers will actually tune in, according to an analysis by CitizenNet.

AP Twitter Hacking Highlights Need for Increased Online Security Measures – ClickZ
Time for two-factor authentication.

Improvements to the New Look Pinterest Blog
Pinterest brings back See it now, Pinned from, Mentions, Find friends; adds More notifications, search suggestions, New pins.

Social Marketing Platforms Will Allow Brands To ‘Buy Into Moment’ – ClickZ
How close can a marketer get to real time? Social marketing platforms, including Salesforce and Adobe, aim to help brands insert themselves into social media conversations sooner and in more sophisticated ways.

Bringing people together in Drive – Google Enterprise Blog
Google Drive gets social features: Google+ profile pictures and chat button.

LOCAL

Bing Business Portal is Now Bing Places for Business – Bing Webmaster Blog
Your business data should be migrated over automatically. Bing is retiring features: “creating deals, coupons, QR codes and mobile sites as well as removing the ability to create and print collateral for your business.”

Bing Offers– Discover Deals from Across the Web in One Place – Bing Search Blog
It’s pretty much Bing Deals (R.I.P.), but with a new name and a bit more of a local focus. U.S. only.

Twitter Testing New Local Discovery Features — And It’s About Time – AllThingsD
“Twitter is in the process of testing a new feature that lets you discover tweets from people within a certain distance of your location. The idea is to surface relevant activity based on where you are in the world, serving up tweets from others around you — whether you follow them or not,” multiple sources tell ATD.

We gave foursquare.com a facelift — now it’s even easier to learn about places nearby – Foursquare Blog
Nice redesign for its 50 million+ monthly users makes better use of space for business listings.

Celebrating the 50th country on Street View – Google Lat Long
You can now explore Hungary and Lesotho, plus updated images of 350,000 miles of roads in 14 countries. Thailand and Indonesia also got an update.

MOBILE

Google Crashes Facebook Home’s Easy Updating Party, Now Requires All Play Apps To Be Updated Through The Play Store – TechCrunch
“An app downloaded from Google Play may not modify, replace or update its own APK binary code using any method other than Google Play’s update mechanism.”

Google Places For Business Gets Its Own iPhone App For Managing Listings [Update: Google Removed App] – Search Engine Land
The app was accidentally released early, no word on when/if it will actually be available again.

Facebook rolls out new action-oriented mobile Pages, making it easier for users and brands to interact – The Next Web
Highlights key information (e.g., Like, Check In, Call) right below the cover photo.

What do shoppers actually want from a mobile experience? – Econsultancy
Simple, functional, attractive homepages that have clear navigational links, helpful search functions, promotional images, barcode scanners, simple forms, and helpful product information.

VIDEO

It’s Getting Harder to Make Money on YouTube – Bloomberg Businessweek
Revenue-sharing program has more than a million creators, but ad rates are falling (from $9.35 per 1,000 views in June 2012 to $6.33 in March 2013).

Psy breaks world record for YouTube views with Gentleman – The Inquirer
38 million views in 24 hours.

YouTube is testing a new auto-generated playlist feature called YouTube Mix to aid in video discovery – The Next Web
Service lets you watch 50 videos continuously.

YouTube Finally Lets Go of the ‘301’ View Count…Sort Of – ReelSEO
Now your videos are stuck at “301+ views”.

Report: Top 500 YouTube Brands Average 884,000 Monthly Views – Mashable
Top brands generate 442 million views per month. Google Chrome (1), Google (3), Google Play (6), Google Chrome UK (8) and Google Nexus (10) all in the top 10.

Optimizing Videos for YouTube Search – ClickZ
Tips and insights on optimizing videos for maximum YouTube visibility, strong brand impression, engagement, and viral social sharing.

COMPANIES

With the release of “The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business”, Eric Schmidt was quite busy.

Former Google CEO shares vision in tech treatise (AP) provides a look at Schmidt’s “exploration into the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead as the lines blur between the physical world around us and the virtual realm of the Internet.”

Schmidt and co-author Jared Cohen were also interviewed by Steven Levy at Wired.

Google’s Executive Chairman was also on “The Colbert Report” this week. Here’s the video:

 

He was on CBS news yesterday (here’s a recap by CNET).

And finally, he also made headlines by saying of Google Glass that talking to glasses is “the weirdest thing” and can be inappropriate.

Google pays CEO a buck, 4 other execs get $124 million – AP
Nikesh Arora, head of Google’s business operations, gets $467 million, others not mentioned.

Google Now for Google’s Homepage in Testing – Google Operating System
Does code reveal Google has plans to add personal assistant Google Now to its desktop homepage?

Google Tests New Interface for Related Image Searches – Google Operating System
Collage replaces thumbnails above the results:

google-images-related-searches-collage-test

No More Quick View in Google Search – Google Operating System
Google removes the ability to see PDF or Microsoft Office files from the search results.

Google accelerates push to replace passwords by joining FIDO Alliance – The Verge
Google joins board of directors of group aiming to get rid of passwords with identity authentication.

How Ray Kurzweil Will Help Google Make the Ultimate AI Brain – Wired
What he’s working on at Google: “…[Developing] natural language understanding… Search has moved beyond just finding keywords, but it still doesn’t read all these billions of web pages and book pages for semantic content. If you write a blog post, you’ve got something to say, you’re not just creating words and synonyms. We’d like the computers to actually pick up on that semantic meaning.”

Google and Cisco Have Best 2013 Energy Records, Says Greenpeace – AllThingsD
Google earns praise for investing $1 billion in clean energy since 2010 and its legislative advocacy.

Two Googlers elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences – Official Google Blog
Congratulations to Peter Norvig, director of research, and Arun Majumdar, vice president for energy. They join Eric Schmidt, Vint Cerf, Alfred Spector, Hal Varian, Ray Kurzweil, Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

Inside the Cycleplex: The Weird, Wild World of Google Bikes – Wired
An inside look Google’s bike culture.

Google searches predict market moves – BBC
Analysis shows there is potential big profit to be made by tracking search volume for certain terms.

Microsoft’s Bing stops working for some users, spits out useless error message (Update: Fixed) – The Next Web
Brief technical difficulties.

Microsoft Debuts New Commercials on Privacy, With Google in the Crosshairs – Advertising Age
Launches “Your Privacy Is Our Priority,” campaign in Washington, D.C., and Kansas City, Mo., to “raise awareness about privacy”.

Yandex revenue continues to slow in Q1 2013 – up 36% to $257m – but profit rises 79% to $72m – The Next Web
Has 61.6 percent of Russia’s search market (up 2.2 percent vs. 2012); 226,000 advertising partners (up 26 percent vs. 2012).

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg get big payouts – Los Angeles Times
COO Sheryl Sandberg received $26.2 million in compensation; CEO Mark Zuckerberg received nearly $2.3 billion last year. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg will take a $1 salary this year, Mashable reported.

Twitter eyes TV, lands major advertising deal in run-up to IPO – Los Angeles Times
Citing a Financial Times report, Twitter has partnered with Publicis’ Starcom MediaVest Group in a multi-year deal worth millions of dollars that will provide the company “special access” to advertising slots, research, and data.

Twitter Settles Firehose Access Dispute With PeopleBrowsr – AllThingsD
Company will have direct access to all tweets until end of this year, then transition to a Twitter Certified Partner data reseller to buy access to the data.

Baidu falls short of expectations in Q1 2013 with $961M in revenue, $1.00 EPS as growth slows – The Next Web
Baidu’s net income was $328.9 million (up 8.5 percent year-over-year) as sales and marketing costs jump 77 percent and research and development costs jump 83 percent. Baidu now has 100 million daily mobile search users.

Chinese Internet giant Qihoo 360′s three-fold plan to challenge Tencent and Baidu [Interview] – The Next Web
Baidu challenger Qihoo has captured 10 percent of the search market share in China, aiming for 40 percent by 2015.

Ten Highlights From Acquisio’s Ten Years – Acquisio
Congrats on 10 years!

TECHNOLOGY

Forrester says workplace browser diversity is robust: IE at 40%, Chrome at 28%, Firefox at 25% – VentureBeat

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