DMOZ — The Open Directory Project that uses human editors to organize web sites — is closing. It marks the end of a time when humans, rather than machines, tried to organize the web. The announcement came via a notice that’s now showing on the home page of the DMOZ site, saying it will close as of March 14, 2017: Dmoz was born in June 1998 as first at “GnuHoo” then quickly changed to “NewHoo,” a rival to the Yahoo Directory at the time. Yahoo had faced criticism as being too powerful and too difficult for sites to be listed in. It was soon acquired by Netscape in November 1998 and renamed the Netscape Open Directory. Later that month, AOL acquired Netscape, giving AOL control of The Open Directory. Also born that year was Google, which was the start of the end of human curation of web sites. Google bought both the power of being able to search every page on the web with the relevancy that was a hallmark of human-powered directories. Yahoo eventually shifted to preferring machine-generated results over human power, pushing its directory further and further behind-the-scenes until its closure was announced in September 2014. The actual closure came in December 2014, with the old site these days entirely unresponsive. Dmoz continued on, although for marketers and searchers, it had also long been mostly forgotten as a resource. About the only surprise in today’s news is that it took so long. DMOZ will live on in one unique way — the NOODP meta tag. This was a way for publishers to tell Google and other search engines not to describe their pages using Open Directory descriptions. While the tag will become redundant, it will also remain lurking within web pages that continue to use it for years to come. The post RIP Dmoz: The Open Directory Project is closing appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2l8S7Mk
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The post Life Lessons From Inside A Cave appeared first on Matt Morris. via Matt Morris http://ift.tt/2m4LV7h Are you struggling to keep pace with rapidly changing customer needs and market demands? Are you slowed down by organizational silos, hierarchies and processes? It may be time to get agile. More than 90 percent of marketers who have adopted agile marketing say it has improved their speed to market for ideas, products and campaigns. Join agile marketing expert Andrea Fryrear, and Workfront Creative Director David Lesué, as they explore what it means to be an agile marketer and provide practical tips on how your organization can make the transition. Register today for “Intro to Agile Marketing: Work faster and smarter by changing how you work,” produced by Digital Marketing Depot and sponsored by Workfront. The post Intro to Agile Marketing: Work faster and smarter by changing how you work appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2maiDEL Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land:
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The post SearchCap: Google site closed, penalty recovery & shopping ads appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2ma9HPu Click share is a key way to gauge the success of your Shopping campaigns. The metric shows you the percentage of total possible clicks you are receiving with your Shopping ads. If you aren’t reviewing this metric on a regular basis, 2017 is officially the time to start the habit. Incorporate click share into your daily optimizationsClick share can be an incredibly useful metric because it delivers the type of insight that you’re used to receiving from average position in your Search campaigns. Shopping ads can take a lot of different forms, which means that we can’t calculate an average position in the same way as we can for Search ads. Enter click share for Shopping. By regularly reviewing this metric on your product group tab, you can see how well you’re doing at driving traffic to your site for high-value shoppers. You should use it in concert with impression share. Impression share tells you how you’re doing at getting your items in front of shoppers looking for your products, while click share tells you how effective you are in winning those shoppers that see your products. A 100 percent impression share, while great, might not reveal anything about your true potential. Here’s one of my favorite sayings from business school: 30 percent of 40 percent is greater than 10 percent of 100 percent. It’s possible to underperform even with a 100 percent impression share because it doesn’t reflect whether those shoppers chose to visit your site. That’s why click share is such a crucial metric to monitor. And once you’ve started to monitor it, what can you do with it? Why, increase it. How to increase your click shareThere are a few ways to do this. It’s a similar process to Search ads. Exactly like you work to improve your average position, you can take steps to increase your click share for Shopping ads: 1. Increase your bids An increased bid is often the most effective way to be more competitive in the auction. Review your click share by individual product groups. If there are certain product groups that you want to drive more clicks, look at your bids and increase them where it makes sense. It’s always a tricky balance between volume and return to maximize profitability. Increasing bids to grow your click share will increase volume — just make sure never to bid beyond the point of profitability. Check out the Bid Simulator to see your potential. 2. Increase the quality and relevance of your ads (which means ‘product data’ in this case) Your product data is what we use to create your Shopping ad. Take a look through your search terms and see if your product title and description text aligns with the most common user searches. Put the most important details first in your product title, like size, color or brand. Increasing the relevance of your ads can help your ads get better placements and more clicks. It’s also crucial to use high-quality images for your products. With higher screen resolutions in current smartphones, a high-quality image can be the difference when showing up alongside other competing ads. 3. Opt into the different enhancements for your ads There are a couple of ways to make your ads even more appealing on the results page. For example, Merchant Promotions allows you to distribute your online promotions with your Shopping ads, including discounts, free gifts and “buy more save more” promotions. You can even add different codes for people to redeem. Product ratings can build trust right on the results page while qualifying customers as they click to your site. You can use each of these three methods to create better ads that have a better shot at driving interested customers to a purchase. Going beyond click shareClick share is super-important, and hopefully, now you have taken that to heart. It’s not the only way to take advantage of whatever search volume you’re seeing, though. Some holiday-friendly strategies still work in non-holiday months. Strategic, time-specific campaigns let you make more specific decisions about your bidding and budgeting. Custom labels can be great for product groups that have peak seasons. If you label them, the stuff that’s currently in season (or that’s about to be in season) can get the attention it deserves. And remember to keep an eye on product status insights to keep items approved. ConclusionClick and impression share are liable to change over time based on user search behavior and auction dynamics. Be sure that you aren’t losing click share to your competitors by checking in regularly. Make click share a part of your regimen for Shopping optimizations. By combining this metric with the insights you’re already getting from impression share, you can understand both how you’re doing in the auction and how you’re doing on the results page itself. The post Sharing is caring: Click share and post-holiday shopping success appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2mHUCkT Why are we so afraid of links? Back in the old days of SEO, we loved any link if it was free, even if it was from a spammy scraper site or the lowest-quality directory you’ve ever seen. If we did nothing to get that link, it was a great link. People assumed that all links were beneficial — and that even “bad” links were completely harmless, with no potential to cause damage. Then we started to get scared… and we nofollowed links. We performed loads of link analysis and reached out to sites that we thought were spammy and asked to have our links removed. Oh, and let’s not forget that time period where we were terrified of exact-match anchors and then built 50 links that all said “Click here.” I’m surely leaving out other critical changes, but the bottom line is that links freak most of us out, whether we’re building them or they’re being built for our site. Let’s break down five of the biggest fears and discuss how healthy or unhealthy they truly are. 1. Fear of actively pursuing linksI’m including begging and buying here. Some have the viewpoint that any link that was not editorially given is a bad link. In my opinion, if you waited to only get editorially given links, you’d be waiting a very long time to see any results. It’s an ideal, in my opinion. People can claim that a successful link-building campaign is not based on money, but in my opinion, it absolutely is. You cannot create an utterly amazing and far-reaching content campaign without a healthy budget unless you just happen to have talented people on your staff who can do it themselves. Even if you create this awesome content that will naturally attract links, you have to promote it — and I don’t just mean tweeting about it. Plenty of content gets pimped via email outreach, for example. Content is sent to parties who might find it valuable, along with a nice, gentle suggestion that you link. To me, that’s not much different from just asking for a link; but to those who preach that all you need is great content to attract links naturally, it’s a whole different ballgame. I kind of dump this approach into the begging category. You may consider it an editorially given link, though. Are they really that different? Not in my mind; at the end of the day, you saw content and you linked to it. Do you think Google can tell what your reasoning was for linking? Can they distinguish between whether you came across that content on Facebook and included a link to it in a new post, or whether the agency who created it emailed you about it and said that if you like it, link to it? Nope. So, is this fear healthy or not? I’d go with not healthy, but with a caveat: you have to really know what you’re doing. 2. Fear of the links you get naturallyThis one is also wise in my opinion, as so many people think they cannot possibly be hurt by free links that were just handed to them. However, this fear can go too far. People will see a link come in from a brand new site where the Domain Authority is 11, and they freak out. Is this going to hurt me? Should I disavow it? I may be crazy for saying this, but I don’t really worry much about those kinds of links unless they’re coming to me in great numbers and from some spammy niches. If some new blogger who is just starting out decides to link to my site in an article about link building, I’m not going to flip out and ask for the link to be removed, nor am I going to disavow it. Still, it’s good to audit your backlink profile and ensure that you are disavowing any spammy links. Even if you didn’t pay for them or ask for them, they could still be coming from low-quality sites that could ultimately harm your rankings if not dealt with. Healthy fear or not? Pretty healthy. 3. Fear of linking out to other sitesI’ve only really encountered this one when we do outreach for clients (and not all that often, luckily). Webmasters will say that linking out is illegal, or that Google will penalize them for it. Recently, while doing a link review for a client, I was looking at a page from which we secured a great link for a client last year. I remembered that page well because of all the great resources it linked to and how thorough it was. I’d been thrilled to secure a link there. Today, there are zero outgoing links on that article. Zero. All the info is still there, but you’d have to look up each site on your own. To me, that is absolutely dreadful to do to your users. Some of the most beneficial content out there links out to other resources. This is one fear that I think is completely unsubstantiated. Healthy? Not in my mind. 4. Fear of linking out without a nofollowThis one is tricky. In Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, they advise doing the following for links that may violate their guidelines:
Google has added many types of “manipulative” links to their guidelines over the years, though — and I suspect they will continue to add more. As a result, many webmasters now slap a nofollow on automatically. I have no problem with nofollowed links; if they’re good to send traffic, I’m happy. My main issue is that this sculpting of the web is being done by people who don’t really have much understanding of how the web works. Some of these people are nofollowing links that should not be nofollowed. How is that going to impact rankings when it becomes a common thing to do? Oh, right… we’ll just find another way to manipulate the web. With paid links and affiliate links, most webmasters do nofollow them. If you’re just editorially linking out to an article on someone else’s site to help make your content better, you don’t need a nofollow. Healthy fear? Not unless you really do have a good reason that is something other than “it’s the only legal option.” 5. Fear of Google in generalIs anyone terrified of Bing or Duck Duck Go? If so, I’ve never heard about it. They’re all scared of Google. Google will penalize me for building links. Someone will turn me in for building links. Google will take down my site and I will starve to death. People still say these things. Unfortunately, there’s a reason for that. I’ve seen too many sites get unfairly penalized to think it’s not a possibility, no matter how clean your backlink profile is. And hey, there are more than just link-related penalties! Healthy fear? YES. I mean, I think people need to do what is right for their own businesses. Maybe you wouldn’t lose your shirt if Google did penalize you. Maybe you really love risk. That’s fine with me. But I do think you have nothing to lose by being at least a tiny bit afraid — or, at minimum, aware — of their power. Some might take this all to mean that I don’t like Google or that I’m advocating violating their guidelines. My position is that they have their own rules and if you break them, they have the right to penalize you. My biggest problem is that by attempting to curb all the link spam, they’ve issued broad guidelines that can penalize sites for doing things that used to be okay, and they will probably add something new that might penalize sites for something that is currently all the rage. We all need to have some fear. What we don’t need is ignorant terror that makes us ruin the web needlessly. The post Link free or die appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2mH79ox
When I was a kid I remember how much influence my Dad had on our family. When he walked through the door at night things changed. The energy in the room changed immediately, we all stood a little taller, we paid close attention to his mood and behavior and we tried a little harder to … … Continue reading →
via Lawrence Tam http://ift.tt/2lkhrKl Abdul Sattar Edhi Google doodle celebrates Pakistani humanitarian who founded Edhi Foundation2/28/2017 Today’s Google doodle honors the Abdul Sattar Edhi, a man who dedicated his life to providing social services for those in need. Crediting Edhi with being a “global-reaching philanthropist and humanitarian,” Google says Edhi was born in India but moved to Pakistan soon after it became a nation, founding the Edhi foundation in 1951. From the Google Doodle blog:
Google reports that the Edhi foundation operates 24 hours a day and offers multiple social services, including homeless shelters and medical care. “Most notably, the foundation operates the world’s largest volunteer ambulance network in Pakistan,” says Google. Google didn’t share who designed the doodle, but it leads to a search for “Abdul Sattar Edhis.” Here is the full doodle image, highlighting Edhi’s ambulance services. The Abdul Sattar Edhi doodle is displayed on Google’s U.S. homepage, in addition to a limited number of other international homepages, including Pakistan, UK, Australia and Japan. The post Abdul Sattar Edhi Google doodle celebrates Pakistani humanitarian who founded Edhi Foundation appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2m8tlLN In a rare move by Google, Google confirmed that a publisher named Natural News was penalized and deindexed by the major search engine over Google webmaster guidelines violations. In fact, Google’s John Mueller specifically said the site was using sneaky mobile redirect and once that is “cleaned up, the site can submit a reconsideration request through Search Console.” It seems like they did clean it up and submitted a reconsideration request through Search Console because the site is now back in the Google index. A site command now returns the home page and 440,000 other pages from the site. It is incredibly rare for Google to confirm when a site is penalized to the press or public. But in this case, the site was claiming it was removed because it was pro-Trump. They started a White House petition against Google and they are still encouraging people to sign the petition even after they have been reincluded in Google’s index. The site said they would issue a statement at 11am central time today on Google reincluding the site. The post After rare confirmation from Google on site penalty, Natural News is back in Google’s index appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2m84pnR You had trouble sleeping again last night. Up until the time you got into bed, you were looking at their Twitter feed, their Facebook page, and their website. It’s your competitor. You’re completely preoccupied with everything they do … and for a seemingly good reason. Their customer base seems to keep growing and they keep expanding their offerings, while you’re just trying to keep your head above water. You constantly ask yourself:
While it’s natural for that question to arise in your mind, it may stifle your progress if you’re thinking in terms of duplicating their marketing efforts. Prospects don’t want to see a carbon copy of another business and you don’t want to obsess about competitors anymore, so I’m going to show you how you can immediately become energized about and sharply focused on your own marketing ideas instead. The heavy lifting content marketing can do for youBrian’s recent post about how to build trust and Sonia’s post about how to stop being boring are two sides of the same content marketing strategy coin. The benefits of creating not boring content are essentially everything you wish to achieve with content marketing.
They trust you because they know your personality. They know your sense of humor. They know your favorite analogies. Your word-choice preferences. What irritates you. What warms your heart. They want to hear from you. You’re their go-to resource. So, if a prospect chooses a competitor over your business, it’s likely because your competitor has revealed themselves to their audience in ways that you haven’t … yet. What’s editing got to do with it?The example we’re going to look at today comes from the service business world — specifically an editor who offers his services to clients — but you’ll be able to see how these ideas can be applied to any niche or product. There can be a difference between what you think your prospect needs to hear and what your prospect actually needs to hear. In order to explain why he is qualified to edit a prospect’s writing, an editor might write on his website that:
And in order to explain the benefits that prospect will receive from hiring him, the editor might state:
All of those statements sound informative and professional, but here’s a secret about writers:
If a writer is your prospect, you have to do something else to win her business. No one cares about how good you are until after they know they can trust youThose bullet points above don’t impress the prospect, and even if they did, the majority of other editors offering their services on the web make the exact same claims. When selecting an editor, the prospect is actually concerned about the intimate act of another person — a stranger — reviewing and revising her writing. She wants to know if she can trust the editor with her draft and if she’d like working with him. She’s less concerned about whether or not the editor knows the difference between “compliment” and “complement.” How do you get someone to trust you?Even though you may superficially provide the same product or service as your competitor, you choose to attract the exact right prospects for your business. When you decide to not be boring, you step into your power as a creative content marketer — an artist who reveals himself to his audience and builds trust. Like your favorite painter or musician. This is the fun part. When you create a variety of content that helps your prospects with the issues they struggle with, the most important thing to remember is:
If someone could find what you create on Wikipedia or your competitor’s blog, your content will not be the type that builds trust over time. The type that builds trust produces a valuable, entertaining experience for your audience member and has a clear, unique payoff. Your content is an opportunity for you to take knowledge you’ve acquired and supercharge it with your perspective. Then you’ll share your creations to reach the people who are attracted to your communication style. The complete packageNow, you do have to provide an outstanding product or service once a prospect accepts your offer. That’s why an editor should know the difference between “compliment” and “complement.” All that trust you’ve built won’t help if you don’t fulfill your promise.
You’ve become the only reasonable choice for that person and made the competition irrelevant. And when you nurture your existing customer base, you’ll get testimonials to display on your website that further demonstrate your trustworthiness. Those happy customers will also recommend you by word of mouth if someone they know needs a product or service like yours. It all starts with smart content. Consider that question from earlier again:
If your competitor’s business seems less interesting now … good. You’ll have a lot more free time to get to work. Image source: Gwen Weustink via Unsplash. The post Why a Prospect You Want Chooses Your Competitor appeared first on Copyblogger. via Copyblogger http://ift.tt/2mpaKvy |
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