Today In SEO & Search News: March 17, 2017

It’s that day again – time for the update that will take us into the weekend with some great reading (and listening).  So let’s dive in so we can all pretend we won’t be working for a couple days.

Webcology
Yesterday’s Webcology episode is available for download (at the link above) or you can listen to it right here below.  In yesterday’s episode my co-host Jim Hedger and I covered the stats behind searcher behavior (some are quite surprising), Google Allo privacy issues (they’re major), Google challenging PayPal in the payment processing world and a lot more.

Larry Kim Leaving Wordstream
Larry Kim, the well-known, well-liked founder of Wordstream has announced he is leaving the company to pursue other interests.  As Matt Southern mentioned on the Search Engine Journal blog – there isn’t a lot of detail about what his plans are yet but we do know that it’s an early-stage startup with an eye on mobile and AI. We’ll all be watching closely.

Google Adds Location Extensions
Google announced today the launch of new location extensions on the Google Display Network.  Ads will automatically include images, hours, location info, etc. to users who show an interest in such detail.  To me this is an added effort to shove organic further down the page but on the up side it does add some added visibility on the paid search side and more information to draw the eye and overall not a horrible thing for marketer – just not great for purely organic SEOs.

One Domain, Two Domain, Three Domain, more
The debate as to whether to use one domain or multiples to rank highly for one or perhaps lower but for more positions has been an ongoing debate I know I’ve had with many clients.  Well today Rand Fishkin put his spin on the question on his Whiteboard Friday.  He gives a solid analysis and if you’ve ever asked yourself the question is a highly recommended watch.  And for your viewing pleasure …

Pinterest Expanded Text Ads
Natalie Hoben wrote and interesting piece on Search Engine Journal on how to leverage Pinterest’s expanded test ads.  Basically the latest update on Pinterest turns it into a bit of a search engine from the context of paid advertising and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that that can lead to big dollars for advertisers.  The bids are cheaper than on AdWords and while the user intent might be a bit different, for some products this could well be a gold mine.  I know I have clients I’m talking to about it and it’s worth the read and consideration.

SEO Quickly

Stoney deGeyter wrote an excellent article for Search Engine Journal on a core approach to SEO. In the article he discusses a principle that I personally follow and that’s summarized well in the title of the piece, “SEO Quickly — Then SEO Correctly.”  The foundation of the article is that there are core areas that can provide for maximum and ongoing impact and that those areas should be done prior to nit-picking the smaller details.  It’s a good piece that provides some valuable advice and if you’re just starting a campaign can provide for some excellent direction on prioritization.

YouTube Discontinues Annotations Editor
Danny Goodwin over on Search Engine Journal covered the announcement that YouTube is going to be removing the ability to add annotations to existing YouTube videos or even edit them after May 2.  It seems it’s a result of use dropping by 70% and viewers not caring for them.

<sarcasm>They also might distract from the ads but I’m sure that’s not a consideration.</sarcasm>

Google Gets Warrant (That’s Far Too Broad)
Google has received a warrant by police in suburban Minnesota requiring Google to give up identities of anyone who search for the victim of a crime’s name (the crime was financial fraud). The information is to include their name, home addresses where available, telephone numbers, date of birth, SSN, emails, payment information and IP and MAC addresses.  This is obviously a huge breach of privacy and far too broad a warrant and the issues around it regarding warrants and surveillance are far-reaching.  As the article points out, Google is likely looking to greatly reduce the scope of the warrant.

Google Further Dilutes Exact Match Definition
Google has announced that they are once again blurring the definition of “exact match” in AdWords.  Where it was previously a situation where you could hyper-control what “exact match” meant (in that it used to mean “it exactly matches something” Google has expanded on the previous change which added plurals and close variants and have just announce that they’re further reducing the control to ignore word order and function words. So now “reading for fun” is the same as “fun reading” as far as exact match is concern.

DMOZ Closes It’s Doors

We reported back on March 1st that DMOZ was closing up shop.  Well today is that day what what you can see above is the DMOZ homepage.  Veteran SEOs will remember DMOZ as one of the first and best directories in it’s day.  Free to submit to (all you needed was a decent site) it’s was one of the core links you wanted passing on to Google that a human has rated and approved the site. Today it changed it’s homepage from the directory to their closed sign.  It’s kind of sad to be honest thought I can’t remember the last time I was there (or the last time a site I know got approved).  Still – in it’s glory days it was one of the greats and every site older than a decade just lost a link.

Google Working On Three New Phones
Over on BRG.com they covered the story that the 2 Pixel phones (Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL) might have been an understatement and rumors out of the Googleplex are that there’s a third in the works.  The third phone (codenamed “taimen”) make not be part of the Pixel family.  There’s not much knows about it but it’s likely that creating a new family is an effort to avoid the stock issues they had with the first release and most certainly displays that Google is really and truly in the phone game.

On that we at Beanstalk bid you a good weekend and look forward to keep you (and ourselves) updated on all that’s going on the the SEO and search world next week.