There are two frames of mind amongst search marketing professionals when it comes to major updates such as the Google Penguin update last year and the upcoming Penguin 2.0 algorithm update. Some start to panic as they’ve seen these algorithm updates force companies to make major changes. In some cases, companies have had to close down because adjusting was just too much to bare. The other perspective is that these changes bring the game of optimization more in line with quality over quantity, strategy over brute force, and perhaps most importantly, art over science. That’s what’s expected with…

There’s a saying in online marketing that has been around for a while. “Content is king.” The truth is this – before the last year, it really wasn’t. Content has always been important, but it wasn’t until recent updates in Google and Facebook that content took a huge leap from being a portion of search and social marketing to become the actual hub through which search and social marketing flow. Today, marketing starts from content and works its way down versus recent years where content was simply a tool in the marketing strategy. Google, Facebook, Bing, and Twitter are getting smarter every day….

Back in the days when Yahoo was fighting against Alta Vista, when Bing was still called Microsoft Live, and when Google was trying to get the big Y to buy them, onsite content and meta tags were search. It was a day of keyword stuff, of hidden text, and of content scraping that helped porn sites rank for the term “toys” while male enhancement drugs could be found on searches for “big fun”. Google emerged as the leader in part because of their pure design, but also because they started looking offsite for signals about search rankings. The days before Google’s innovation were the peak of onsite SEO. Google…

Last year, SXSW was relatively laid back. We had a couple of executives there, but for the most part it was our search and social team that was in attendance, catching tidbits of information here or there but really we were there to meet with some people outside of our core business in the automotive industry. Then, something happened. Matt Cutts from Google and Duane Forrester of Bing dropped a bombshell on the audience. They both declared that quality was moving up in he search algorithms, that quantity was going to be a bad thing, and that spammers would be roughed up in the coming weeks. The result…

Facebook graph search has the potential to be a great thing for Facebook and its users. Perhaps more importantly, this is the first major play that Facebook has made in a long time that has not been attacked as another attempt by Facebook to attack our user privacy. That didn’t stop the folks at Geek Culture from creating a comic about it.  …

Imagine a search engine that truly knew you. No, not in the way that Google or Bing personalize their search results based upon your history and preferences – what if a search engine could take the information that you give about yourself as well as the information that your friends and family put in and cater your search results around your most likely goals and desires from the search? Would you use it? If Marissa Mayer, CEO at Yahoo, has her way, that may be exactly what we see in the future. The plot for the social media giant to work very closely with the former search giant is a combination that should…

Dear Microsoft: You’ve lost the search war so far in dramatic fashion. Not only were you not able to make a dent in Google’s domination of search, you did so without much of a fight. Sure, you put out some television ads in a nice blitz around launch, you integrated Facebook into the mix, and you improved your search results to the point that many would argue that Bing is better than Google. However, you didn’t truly “blitz” the airwaves like you said you would, Google added G+ into the mix and made it search-functionally better than your integration with Facebook, and they continued to improve their…

Why do we wait for search engines like Google or Bing to crawl our sites? There are so many websites and blogs out there that we could easily get lost in the shuffle without the appropriate keywords to help them find us. You don’t need to wait, quickly and easily submit your sites to give them a heads up of your existence and possibly increase traffic. …

It’s something that we totally take for granted thanks to the continuously-advancing wonders of the internet. We don’t go to libraries. We open phone books. We don’t dial information and we don’t own an encyclopedia. We search. We go to Google (or Bing or Yahoo) and start typing in what it is that we need to know. Before we’re done typing, we’re often presented with results for the terms. It knows! It knows what we’re about to type before we’re done typing it. Search engines have become a little too powerful. Some wonder how they work. This infographic from Mashable comes to us via Austin Honda and explores…

It looks like Pinterest. It acts like Digg. The newest player in the social media sphere adds some features from Stumbleupon and Twitter to the mix to form Thruzt, now entering into public beta. Unlike many of its predecessors, Thruzt encourages networks to be formed within the community to draw attention to submissions. Users select content on the web that they find valuable or write up their own stories on their blogs and submit it to Thruzt. Then, the “game” is on to get it enough votes to get popular. The first thing people will notice when visiting is that the layout is very similar to Pinterest….