Google Facing U.S. Antitrust Probe Over Display Ad Sales

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is on the brink of launching a fresh antitrust probe into Google, over alleged misconduct over how it handles its display advertising business, Reuters reported.

An unnamed source confirmed the news to Reuters late last week, adding that the investigation is still in its early stages and that the FTC had not yet sent out civil investigative demands ordering Google to hand over data.

The probe will focus on the tools Google purchased from display ad company Doubleclick in 2007. The FTC reportedly began the investigation following demands from a number of unnamed competing display advertising companies, which accused Google of using its position in the display ads market to favor its own services.

The FTC has mounted antitrust probes against Google in the past. The FTC previously mounted an investigation into whether Google was using its search dominance to promote its own services more than those of its competitors. That antitrust probe ended in January, with Google only making a couple of minor changes.

Elsewhere on the antitrust front, Google's business in Canada is also about to face a formal inquiry from Canada's Competition Bureau, the Financial Post reported May 17. The agency has yet to reveal the scope of the investigation or asked for any documentation from Google.

4 Google AdWords Updates You Might Have Missed

Google AdWords has launched a series of new changes for advertisers, including updates to AdWords Editor, a new Display Benchmarks Tool, and improvements to enhanced campaigns with flexible bid strategies. Here's a recap of the latest AdWords updates.

1. Google AdWords Keyword Planner

The biggest news from AdWords for many webmasters is the introduction of a brand new keyword tool combined with a traffic estimator, called the Keyword Planner.

The new tool allows you to find new keywords related to a keyword or keyword list, URL, or category, which can be very helpful for those trying to do keyword research or expand their targeting keywords.

You can also use it to get performance and cost estimates, which can be helpful for planning out potential budgets before actually putting it in action.

Lastly, you can import the data and use it in your account without having to manually enter it from other research tools.

2. Advertising on Google Maps

We saw the preview of new advertising on Google Maps when they showed it off at I/O, and now AdWords is updating information for advertisers wanting to target Google Maps locations for advertising. The new ads will show right on the location for those with on-page location extensions, or in a box below the search box.

It is worth noting that advertisers will need to do two things to ensure their ads are showing up on Google Maps. First, you need to run search ads with location extensions and also include search partners in your campaign network settings, since Google Maps is considered a search partner for AdWords campaigns.

3. AdWords Editor Changes

If you use Google’s AdWords Editor, they have made some updates in the new 10.1 version of the editor to include tools for making bulk changes on enhanced campaigns and to include performance stats and metrics.

Some of the new features for advertisers are:

• Set bid adjustments for placements, topics, and audiences.
• Set mobile bid adjustments at the ad group level.
• Upgrade campaigns in bulk using CSV import or the add/update multiple campaigns tool.
• Use the new ValueTrack {ifmobile}, {ifnotmobile} parameters.

4. Flexible Bid Strategies for Enhanced Campaigns

Google AdWords included flexible bidding options for advertisers when they upgrade to enhanced campaigns. This allows advertisers to manage different parts of campaigns or even cross campaigns with specific bid strategies, which is very useful for those wanting to promote certain keywords while leaving other keywords to the current bidding setup.

Flexible bid strategies will be available to advertisers in the next few weeks once those campaigns are upgraded to enhanced campaigns.

Google Penguin 2013: How to Evolve Link Building into Real SEO

Google has just rolled out Penguin 2.0, a large algorithmic update promising to go “deeper” than the 2012 Penguin release, which put a hurting on websites with number of manipulative links in their profile.

This prospect creates fear for many small businesses who depend on search engine optimization (SEO) for their livelihoods. But there is also a sense of confusion as the line often shifts and the message from Google contradictory.

Sorting out Panda, Penguin, and Manual Actions

Google's Panda update is a different release than Penguin. Panda is geared toward duplicative, thin, or spun content on websites.

Google's Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts recently stated that Google is actually pulling back on Panda because of too many false positives. This is good for news aggregators and other sites that reuse content appropriately and have been hit hard by the Panda filter.

Penguin is much harder to understand, focusing on backlink patterns, anchor text, and manipulative linking tactics that provide little value to end users. To make matters worse, Google likes to take large manual actions just prior to major algorithm updates. In 2012 we saw the removal of BuildMyRank from the index just prior to Penguin.

Earlier this year we saw major manual action taken against advertorials. Last week Google announced the removal of thousands of link selling websites and we are hearing of a manual spam penalty against Sprint this week.

The proximity of these manual actions with major algorithmic updates is brilliant PR as it associates them together in our memories, discussions and debates - but they are very different things.

Is SEO Enough?

As small business owners move through the here we go again feelings to actually decide what to do in response to Penguin 2013, sorting out the truth is paramount. Google is clearly beating the familiar drum with the same core messages:

•     Build a great website.
•     Make awesome content with high end-user value.
•     Visitors will magically appear.

But the reality is that visitors don’t magically come, at least on any reasonable scale, without organized promotional activities. Many excellent websites have died a slow death due to lack of promotion. And this is where the contradictions emerge in SEO, which has demonstrated extremely high ROI compared to other marketing channels.

Long Live Online Marketing

While discussed many times, webmasters still struggle with shifting their link building activities to real SEO strategy. They fail to see that SEO in 2013 is now integral to online marketing and no longer a standalone activity.

Whereas SEO used to be about tuning a website for optimal consumption by spiders, today’s SEO is about earning recognition, social spread, and backlinks through excellent content marketing. This means SEO is now ongoing, integrated, and strategic – whereas it used to be one-time, isolated, and technical.

Real SEO

Real SEO is the prescription for those who fear Penguin 2013. Here are practical activities that need to be done every month to achieve real SEO:

    Continually Identify Audience Demand: Your SEO won't be successful if it isn't useful. To serve a need, webmasters must understand what the audience is seeking. Keyword research, as always, is critical. While doing keyword research don’t over-emphasize head terms or money keywords. Focusing on long-tail keywords renders more immediate results, increases the breadth of a website (remember Panda), and builds authority that will ultimately help the head term.
    Content marketing: In my opinion, content marketing is the new link building. Earn recognition, social spread, and backlinks by giving away valuable information for free. Excellent content has high audience value and points readers to other resources via cocitation. Video is an excellent form of content marketing that is still under-utilized by small businesses. And newsjacking is an emerging form of content marketing that specifically targets hot news topics for viral spread.
    Work on brand: There is increasing evidence that branded mentions are an important legitimacy signal to Google. Promoting the brand has traditional marketing benefits and also now helps SEO. But be careful not to turn SEO content marketing into an endorsement, as this crosses the line. Find traditional marketing tactics, such as press releases, to drive branding while announcing news-worthy events.
    Syndicate: The "build it and they will come" philosophy doesn't work on an Internet with more than 500 million active domain names. This is why even excellent content needs to be promoted. Email marketing, social media, community engagement in forums, and guest blog posting are efficient mechanisms for spreading the word about engaging content. Interviews, PPC ads, and local event sponsorship will also get your name and content noticed. Any activity that broadcasts your message, your brand, and builds real community discussion will ultimately support SEO, and should be considered part of the SEO process.

Conclusions

The arrival of Penguin 2013 has many small business owners scared and confused. But SEO remains one of the best online marketing channels.

Real SEO is the path forward for those who wish to make a long-term investment in online marketing. Forward-looking webmasters can prepare their sites for Penguin 2014, 2015, and beyond with well-researched, end-user focused content marketing that provides strong audience value.

Using modern syndication tactics, they can broadcast their message, gain audience mind-share and earn recognition. By spreading valuable content, small business can build their brands and earn bulletproof backlinks.

Google Penguin 2.0 Rolled Out

Webmasters have been watching for Penguin 2.0 to hit the Google search results since Google's Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts first announced that there would be the next generation of Penguin in March. Cutts officially announced that Penguin 2.0 is rolling out late Wednesday afternoon on "This Week in Google".

"It's gonna have a pretty big impact on web spam," Cutts said on the show. "It's a brand new generation of algorithms. The previous iteration of Penguin would essentinally only look at the home page of a site. The newer generation of Penguin goes much deeper and has a really big impact in certain small areas."

In a new blog post, Cutts added more details on Penguin 2.0, saying that the rollout is now complete and affects 2.3 percent of English-U.S. queries, and that it affects non-English queries as well. Cutts wrote:

    We started rolling out the next generation of the Penguin webspam algorithm this afternoon (May 22, 2013), and the rollout is now complete. About 2.3% of English-US queries are affected to the degree that a regular user might notice. The change has also finished rolling out for other languages world-wide. The scope of Penguin varies by language, e.g. languages with more webspam will see more impact.

    This is the fourth Penguin-related launch Google has done, but because this is an updated algorithm (not just a data refresh), we’ve been referring to this change as Penguin 2.0 internally. For more information on what SEOs should expect in the coming months, see the video that we recently released.

Webmasters first got a hint that the next generation of Penguin was imminent when back on May 10 Cutts said on Twitter, “we do expect to roll out Penguin 2.0 (next generation of Penguin) sometime in the next few weeks though.”

Then in a Google Webmaster Help video, Cutts went into more detail on what Penguin 2.0 would bring, along with what new changes webmasters can expect over the coming months with regards to Google search results.

He detailed that the new Penguin was specifically going to target black hat spam, but would be a significantly larger impact on spam than the original Penguin and subsequent Penguin updates have had.

Twitter is full of people commenting on the new Penguin 2.0, and there should be more information in the coming hours and days as webmasters compare SERPs that have been affected and what kinds of spam specifically got targeted by this new update.

Google Maps Gets a Brand New Look

Google has announced a revamping of Google Maps and it is much more than a few changes. It is a reworking of the entire Google Maps interface from the group up, designed to make Maps more intuitive for users.

One major change is users can now click on any area of a map, and Google will respond by showing you information about what is in the area that you could be interested in, such as restaurants, businesses, and hotels. This is designed to make it easy for visitors to see what is near a particular location, such as discovering what is located near a hotel when someone is visiting a city.

There is much more connection with Google+ and what they display on the map popups, meaning it is much more critical for businesses to make sure their Google+ page is active with correct information, including hours and photos, and user reviews of their business.

What businesses are displayed are also influenced by each user's Google+ network, highlighting specific businesses that Google+ connection have given positive reviews for. So that also makes it well worth it for businesses to promote their Google+ pages to engage users for more reviews, increasing the likelihood that their business shows up first for more people.

Google Maps search results are much more clearly added to the maps page.

For example, they included a screenshot highlighting a user searching for an Italian restaurant, it not only displays the first result as an overlay on the map, it also shows all related Italian restaurants in the area with restaurant names and short blurbs about each one.

They have also redesigned how advertisements are placed on Google Maps. Formerly, different colored pins on the map represented paid advertising versus non-paid, however, engagement wasn't that high as many users didn't understand what the different colors meant. Now, short snippets of ads are placed directly onto the map itself with the business name, alerting users to an advertisement or special deal for that business.

The new style of ads are in the testing phase and advertisers aren't being charged for ad clicks at this time. However, this ad style is for desktop only, not mobile.

The new version of Google Maps is by invite only. You can request an invite here.

On a related note, Google announced that Maps users will now be able to rate businesses on a scale of one to five stars, as opposed to the Zagat 30-point scale. Though Google noted Zagat reviews will still be available throughout Google.

Google To Soften The Panda Algorithm

As I covered yesterday, in very brief summary, Google's Matt Cutts told us ten SEO changes coming to Google by the end of this summer. One of those changes is softening the impact of the Panda algorithm for sites that are in the "gray area" or "border" of being impacted by the Panda algorithm.

Matt Cutts, Google's head of search spam, said 5 minutes and 3 seconds into the video that Google is adding additional signals to look for other quality metrics that may lessen the impact of the Panda algorithm for those sites in the gray area. This is with a caveat!

Here is the transcript:

We are looking at Panda and seeing if we can find some additional signals, and we think we've got some to help refine things for sites that are kind of in the border zone, the gray area a little bit, And so if we can soften the affect a little bit, for those sites, that we believe have got some additional signals of quality, that will help sites that were previously affected - to some degree.

The question is, what "degree" will these sites see a benefit in ranking after the Panda algorithm is softened for them? That is the big question.

So I screen captured Matt's facial expression when he said that and see what I mean? Will this have much of an impact or just a very soft impact on those who have been impacted by Panda? I am not sure.

But it will be interesting to follow and see what happens over the next few months.

Matt clearly said the Panda algorithm will be softened for some but the question is, how much so?

Matt Cutts Talks SEO for Google: 9 Things You Should Expect This Summer

The latest Google Webmaster video features Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts talking about what webmasters can expect to see in the next few months in terms of SEO for Google, particularly changes combating black hat web spam from many different angles in a variety of areas.

Here are nine search and SEO changes webmasters will likely see – although, as always, Cutts warns nothing is set in stone and it should be taken with a grain of salt.

1. Next Generation of Penguin – Penguin 2.0

This update is to try and target more black hat web spam. The new Penguin 2.0, which is the name Google uses internally for the next gen Penguin, will be much more comprehensive than Penguin 1.0 and it will go deeper and have a larger impact than the original.

2. Advertorials

Many advertorials (a.k.a., native advertising) violate Google's quality guidelines. More importantly, they should not flow PageRank.

Google is planning to be a lot stronger on their enforcement of these types of paid links and advertising, disguised as “advertorials”. Cutts did clarify there is nothing wrong with advertorials, simply that they don't want them to be abused for PageRank and linking reasons. If you use advertorials, Cutts suggested that they should be clearly marked and obvious that it is paid advertising.

3. “Payday Loans” in .co.uk

Cutts mentioned that this is a problematic search, and there are others like it, so they are tackling it a couple of different ways. For those that play in that space, however, you're out of luck since Cutts isn't revealing exactly how they are dealing with it, just that it will be happening.

He said that they are targeting specific areas (another example he included was porn queries) that have traditionally been more spammy.

4. Devaluing Upstream Linking

Again, Cutts isn't going into details about this, but they are working on making link buying less effective and have a couple ideas for detailed link analysis to tackle this issue.

5. Hacked Sites

They want to roll out a next generation of hacked detection, as well as being able to notify webmasters better. They would like to be able to point webmasters to more specific information, such as whether they are dealing with malware or a hacked site, and to hopefully clean it up.

6. Authority

If Google's algorithms believe you or your site is an authority in a particular area, they want to make sure those sites rank a little bit higher than other sites.

7. Panda

They are looking for some additional signals for sites that are in the "gray area" or "border zone", and looking for other signals that suggest the site truly is high quality, so it will help those sites who have been previously impacted by Panda.

8. Changes to Cluster of Results From the Same Site

If you're doing deep searches in Google, and going back 5, 6 or more results pages deep, you can see the same site popping up with a cluster of results on those deep pages.

Google is looking into a change where once you have seen a cluster of results from the same site, you will be less likely to see more and more from that same site as you go deeper. Cutts mentioned this as being something that came specifically from user feedback.

9. More Information for Webmasters

Cutts said they want to be able to keep giving webmasters more specific and detailed information via webmaster tools. He mentions specifically example URLs to help webmasters diagnose problems on their site.

He believes that the changes will really make a difference with the quality of the search results, as well as impact the amount of spam that is showing up.
Bottom Line

Cutts says if you are focused on high quality content, you don't have much to worry about. But if you're dabbling in the black hat arts, you might have a busy summer.

How To Recover From Panda And Be Safe From Future Updates

As of date there has been thousands of blog posts totally dedicated to this topic but right now I am going to say that, the methods I am going to tell you (which are already discussed by top blogs) are the ones that if you follow them, you would not have to spend sleepless nights day dreaming about the next Google Panda update. So stick this list somewhere you do your blogging and you will be PANDA SAFE.

1. Separate Away Inferior Quality Website content

Google hates short and low quality Articles. So review each and every content on your blog and separate out all the auto-generated content. Don’t let Google to index and crawl your not so good (inferior quality content) areas of your blog because if it does then it wont spare you even a little bit as low value content will cause the algorithm to get hold of and it will slap you with a heavy penalty which will take you months and years to recover from even if you have majority of the cont as genuine and high quality.

2. Concentrate On Unique Website Content

The Panda is penalizing each and every stealer and duplicator. It has not even spared the famously known and huge content farms like ehow and article base. So try to concentrate on your own expertise and write genuine articles and stop copying and chopping articles from other online resources, because remember THE PANDA is watching every content of your.

3. Focus on being an Authoritative Figure

Google is now trusting and awarding those sites with high serps who have the trust of the readers and an authoritative command over its readers and followers. Trust can be measured by any parameter, the tweets you throw out, the links pointing towards your articles, the comments and how many those are on your articles, you social buzz and your authoritative clout you have on your readers and loyals. Write a post which people would want to bookmark, or share on their social networks and most important of all it should be solving a problem and should not be a mere shallow article on a particular topic. Focus on creating articles with these points as your eligibility criteria and you will definitely be making THE PANDA happy.

4. Always maintain Online advertising Ratio Healthy

Do you fill your site with lots of cheap earning ads. Don’t do that because google sees that as an inferior quality of web page. 3-4 ads to the max are good enough and should not hinder with the overall visual and user experience and page loading speed. Keep the advertisements to the minimum and your reader will always recommend your site to others for having a uncluttered web design and site structure and also be good in the eyes of THE PANDA.

5. Keep your Backlinks Healthy and High Quality

Do you like a filthy and dirty neighborhood? I guess no or is it? but the point I want to put forward is that Google does not haapily agree to a site linked by or getting linked to another inferior quality site so what do they do? GOOGLE PENALIZES THEM FOR HAVING A BAD FRIEND. So guys stop paid link selling service because you are harming yourself and even if you have to do it do it a nofollow and not a dofollow ones. And try to build links naturally and at a steady pace because  something fishy with link building and Google notices an abrupt change in your monthly link building efforts, you are sure to get penalized. Another important factor after backlinking comes your internal linking efforts. By internal linking you make the Google robots very happy because they get to index you site faster and go through your whole site like a breeze and in turn Google will award with high serps as their robots were happy after site inspection.

So after implementing these best practices, comes the waiting and the recovery period which should last from around 2 months to 8 months as per industry experts to attain the traffic levels before THE PANDA penalized you. Keep practicing these methods on a regular basis and on Google analytics of your site, you will definitely reap the fruits of your hardwork.